“I have been trying to process the assassination of Charlie Kirk… what it means for our whole country and for the soul of our country.” (Full transcript below the video)

Watch Now:

Outspoken with Dr Naomi Wolf is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Full Transcript:

Hey everyone, it's Naomi Wolf. I haven't been streaming for a few days. Like everyone, I have been trying to process the assassination of Charlie Kirk and not just what it means, which I can't possibly know for that real human being and his real young family, but what it means for our whole country and for the soul of our country. I feel like this for our country has almost been like a Rorschach. I try never to treat real people as kind of archetypes or symbols. And this was an extraordinary young man. I didn't know him personally in any kind of friend way. I just was interviewed by him or interviewed him once or twice as I recall. But I remember so vividly what it was like to have that conversation with him. And it was actually about the Pfizer papers. And I remember we talked for an hour, and I remember being all alone in this house, just kind of in this virtual space, talking to this young man, and I really didn't know anything about him at that time. I was new to the world of conservatives, and I hadn't followed his work. I knew he was very highly regarded. I knew he was popular, but I remember having this conversation with him in which kind of time and space didn't really matter because in our identities, like a woman of another generation and a young man from a completely different background and different educations or different worldviews or whatever, didn't matter because he was deeply, deeply, deeply focused on finding the truth of what I was saying and assessing the truth and seeking the truth and expressing the truth. And it was just this very pure, I don't want to say pure intellectual quest because that sounds pretentious, and it's even more than that, but this very pure moral living in the space of truth and dedication to manifesting the pursuit of truth and in a not ideological way, there was no baggage. It was almost the way children ask questions, but with all of the kind of training and sophistication and intellectual heft of an adult, highly educated young adult, but with that open-mindedness and that open-heartedness.

But apart from that, and apart from the obvious horror of this horrific tragedy, I feel like as I was starting to say a few beats ago, this very public symbolic or symbolism-laden execution, right? Because what it was, we don't know all the details. I'm quite sure. My instinct is one guy's been apprehended, but I don't think one guy is the whole story. We just don't know. But things are happening it seems at this time in history, in both a personal way with personal real human beings and in an archetypal, metaphysical, spiritual way. And I feel like in addition to, and I'm not trying to kind of turn a human tragedy that affects so horribly one young family and family of families and friends of families into a metaphor, but kind of beyond that immediate personal situation, which I can't speak to because I wasn't part of that friend circle. I'm not going to presume to know, I can't even imagine what it would be like to lose your young husband if you've got three small children. In addition to, I want to say that horrific personal tragedy. I feel like this experience has happened to the whole country, maybe the whole world in a kind of blazing photographic exposure or x-ray almost, in which people are illuminated and their souls are illuminated and their evil and good is illuminated, and you can't hide. The light is so blinding from this experience. And the other thing that's extraordinary about it is with most horrible deaths, as horrible as they may be, they kind of lose momentum over time. But I feel like over time, just in the couple of days since this happened, two days that the impact on our nation or our nation's soul has grown and grown and grown, and the poison that it's brought out has festered and brought itself to the surface and the heroism and good intentions and morality that we're trying to hold onto. And it's not as simple as left and right, but good people and bad people. It's really down to that is also coming to the surface and there's no hiding. And I read someone posted that passage from the gospel, I forget which gospel I'll be separating the sheep from the goats. And I'm not trying to go right to end times because that's a cliche, but it definitely feels like there's a separation taking place that's even more profound than the separation of the pandemic. Even more profound than would you help the Nazis? Did you side with the tyrants restricting liberty even more profound than 2020 to 2024?

And I'm just seeing online, and maybe I shouldn't even go via this because the algorithm creates its own sick echo chamber, but it's not just my algorithm. There's liberals and leftists online who are celebrating. And this is a thing, and it's so much of a thing that the legacy media is covering it as a thing and covering the reaction of conservatives to the celebration of Charlie Kirk's assassination by the reaction of the right wing as a thing. But as a liberal, I still think of myself as a classical liberal. I'm not letting go of that. I mean, I feel like a lot of things that Charlie Kirk sought to do were kind of liberal minded in the classic 19th century sense of that word, the European meaning of that word, of open-minded, seeking the truth, seeking civil debate, seeking civil society, building civil society. I mean, he was a conservative, but he was going about it with liberality in the 19th century term, right?

There is no way to hide from this tsunami of horrific, evil, ugly, demonic sentiments that are being expressed on the left. And that's shaking me to the core, and it's shaking my community, my friends, we're looking at this and it's like a dam has burst and all this bile and toxicity has just erupted out of humans who look like people, but are acting like demons, literally celebrating. And I don't even get how this works, but using the same language, the same, the same. How do you put it? The same talking points to repeat the same horrible phrases. I have no empathy. That's a talking point, right? I have no empathy for this man who was fill in the blanks, transphobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, homophobic, all the phobics. My empathy is for his kids, and I hope that they grow up in a better society than the one he was building. I'm seeing iterations of that over and over and over in the posts of many, many different people who don't know each other, who are differently situated in different professions. I don't even get that unless Soros is sending out talking points. Seriously, I don't get how that's possible or unless the propaganda, unless the talking points are coming from other influencers that I don't know or that I don't follow, or coming from NPR in a way that I don't listen to. I can't imagine they're coming from NPR, such brutal talking points. You may hear cooking sounds or wandering around sounds.

Just doing this stream in the middle of my family life in a visit from my mom and looking after the dog, and I decided not to be formal about it and just turn on the stream. So please forgive the family sounds of cooking and so on in the background. But I'm also seeing, I don't even get how this happens, but these clips of leftists celebrating the assassination of a young father, I'm seeing the same demonic presence or entity, this very specific kind of laughing, mocking. And I've read this phrase, mocking in exorcism literature going back like 500 years, this mocking entity, laughing gleefully with this kind of crazy, crazy eyed look laughing and laughing and laughing in a kind of almost inhuman way. Why would say in inhuman way, and it's the same demon, but it's the same demon in a little blonde suburban 21-year-old girl or a gay trucker or a upper middle class woman walking her dog in a fancy suburb. It's the same demon, a very specific demon, a very specific gleeful, mocking, laughing, demonic presence, which is different from other demonic type personas that took possession of people who were urging people to vaccinate their pregnant selves during some of the other demonic possessions of our nation and world in the recent past. But I don't even get how that works. I don't get how all these people with all these different backgrounds, different geographies, different jobs, different educations, different personalities, are manifesting the same demonic glee in the same way with almost the same expressions and the same mannerisms. And honestly, it's scaring me to death. And I also, as a public figure, I am definitely thinking about the fact that all these crazy people or all these people who are employed in very senior ways in many situations, who are like college counselors or deans of universities or departments or civil servants at a high level or just distinguished people or are expressing sociopathy, and specifically the pride in having no empathy that's just repeated and repeated.

Well, the definition of a sociopath maybe. Is it a sociopath or a psychopath that has no empathy? Sociopath. Sociopath. So the definition of a sociopath is lack of empathy, right? I mean, that's not the definition, but that's a major attribute. So my husband who's taking a nap next to me or about to says that the lack, and he has a criminology degree, says that the lack of empathy is a major attribute of a sociopath. So my point is the fact that before this outpouring of crazy bile, if you're a public figure or a controversial public figure, or you criticize Islam or you criticize Israel, you criticize men a