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"Edna St Vincent Millay: Dirge without Music; For the Late Charlie Kirk"
“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)
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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
Published on 3 weeks, 4 days ago