#empathyisnotweakness

In moments of cultural rupture, satire steps aside. This is one of those moments. The murder of Charlie Kirk—polarizing, symbolic, and deeply American—demands not mockery, but clarity. Empathy, guns, and tribalism: three forces braided into the DNA of our democracy, now fraying at the edges. This edition is not numbered. It is not part of the rhythm. It is an interruption. A dispatch from the edge of civic coherence.

Empathy is not agreement. It is the first act of listening before language arrives. Democracy, in its purest form, is not consensus—it is coexistence. And coexistence without empathy is proximity without peace. Charlie Kirk denied empathy. Mocked it. Weaponized its absence. But we are not absolved of offering it. To extend empathy is not to excuse, nor to surrender. It is to remember what makes us salvageable. It is to remember that the arc bends only when we remain willing to witness those we do not understand. Empathy is not weakness. It is the last civic muscle we have left before the body politic seizes.

Tribalism is humanity's original software. Democracy is the glitch. Liberal democracy doesn't erase tribe — it interrupts it. It is a spell we cast daily, one that says: "I will not kill you, even if I can." But spells fade. Rituals decay when not renewed. Charlie Kirk belonged to a tribe. So do we. But liberalism is the only tribe that defends your right to leave it. That is its magic — and its fragility. When the spell breaks, we return to bone and blood. To the law of the fang. To the comfort of the known enemy. And the algorithm knows how to summon that faster than any scripture.

The right to bear arms is often framed as a partisan wound. But beneath the blood lies an evolutionary truth: survival demands defense. Animals grow claws. We forged triggers. Autonomy, when absolute, demands the means to defend the body that houses it. But when liberty outpaces compassion, the body becomes a battlefield — and the child in the classroom, collateral.

Kirk's death was not a punctuation. It was part of a pattern. A day later, a student opened fire at Evergreen High School in Colorado. Two classmates were shot. The shooter turned the gun on himself. Evergreen is twenty miles from Columbine. These events are not metaphors. They are coordinates. These moments don’t rhyme in poetry. They rhyme in blood.  Violence is no longer exceptional. It is ambient. Radicalization is no longer fringe. It is predictive. Empathy is no longer optional. It is endangered.

In the hours after Kirk's death, the right blamed the left — before the facts arrived. Jesse Watters declared, "They are at war with us." Laura Loomer called for Trump to "crack down on the Left with the full force of the government." Trump blamed "leftist rhetoric" for the violence. But the facts say otherwise: Right-wing extremists have committed over six times more politically motivated murders than left-wing extremists since 1975. 

• The January 6th riot

• The hammer attack on Paul Pelosi

• The kidnapping plot against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer

• The assassination of Minnesota State Rep. Melissa Hortman

This is not just hypocrisy. It is projection. The rhetoric that fuels violence is used to condemn it. The ideology most associated with political terror blames the one most committed to civic restraint.

Right-wing militias are organized, armed, and aligned with power. Oath Keepers and Three Percenters boast over 80-200 active members. They are responsible for nearly 57% of political violence. Left-wing formations like the Socialist Rifle Association are scattered, defensive, and marginalized, with fewer than 10 active members. They account for a quarter of political violence. This is not a war. It is a mirror. What we fear from others is often what we refuse to see in ourselves.

Elon Musk called the left "the party of murder." His own AI, Grok, disagreed—citing ADL data that shows right-wing extremists commit the overwhelming majority of political killings. Trump blames "radical rhetoric" while his own rallies echo with threats. The conservative base is not just being misled. It is being weaponized — through fear, inversion, and narrative laundering. This is not confusion. It is choreography. McCarthyism with memes. The Southern Strategy, rebooted for the For You Page. This is governance by distortion. And we deserve better than a puppet show.

The President invited Nick Fuentes to dinner. He praises Charlie Kirk in public. One is a white nationalist. The other, a populist firebrand. But to him, they are the same: loud, loyal, and useful. This isn't about belief. It's about utility. He doesn't care about the difference. Because his base doesn't know the difference. And when violence erupts, he blames the left. Not because it's true. But because it works.

The shooter was a 22-year-old white man from a conservative family. He wasn't trans. He wasn't Left. He didn't like Charlie Kirk's rhetoric. That was the motive. But the narrative was already written — before the facts arrived. This is not leadership. This is narrative engineering. This is gaslighting at scale. This is the fragile spell breaking in real time.

Some now call for Charlie Kirk's legacy to continue. That is not mourning. That is myth-making. Kirk's work was not neutral. It was tribal, polarizing, hostile to pluralism. To canonize his politics is to codify fracture. We don't need more characters. We need clarity. We don't need more scripts. We need mirrors.

This edition is not satire. It is not myth. It is a dispatch from the edge of civic coherence. Empathy is the weapon we forgot we had. Liberalism is the only tribe that defends your right to leave it. Democracy is not self-sustaining. It is a ritual. And rituals must be kept.

The murder of Charlie Kirk is a tragedy. But it is also a test. A crucible in which we will decide, once again, who we are and who we intend to be. In this moment of fracture, we are called to bear witness. To extend empathy even to those who denied it. To uphold the rituals of democracy against the pull of tribalism. To remember that coexistence is not a state of being, but an act of will.

We are not passive observers of this moment. We are its authors. The story of American democracy is still being written, in real time, with every choice we make. To succumb to tribalism is to erase ourselves from that story. To choose empathy is to write ourselves back in.

Charlie Kirk is gone. But the forces that shaped him, and that he shaped in turn, remain. The guns. The tribes. The spells we cast and the ones we break. These are our inheritance. And it is our responsibility to decide what we will do with them.

Will we use them to write a new story? Or will we let them write us out of the one we've already begun?

The choice is ours. The pen is in our hands. The page is not yet dry.

What will we write next?

This is Little Morsel: Special Edition — The Fragile Spell. It does not belong to the rhythm. It interrupts it. It is a fracture in the canon, a record of rupture. When satire bows its head, clarity must take its place.

That is the little morsel for today. Make sure you check out our other Editions: alittlemorsel