A Flash of Light

Some Thoughts in the Wake of an Assassination

The line in my head recurs: “It was in an empty house.”

It was in an empty house that I once spoke to Charlie Kirk — to my knowledge, it was the only time we did ever speak. It was in April of 2022; an interview for his podcast The Charlie Kirk Show: “Pfizer and a Multi-Generational Fertility Crisis with Dr. Naomi Wolf”.

It had been less than a year after my own deplatforming, and my subsequent ejection from the world of legacy and leftwing media, for the crime of having accurately reported on damage to women’s reproductive lives from the mRNA injection. So I was still pretty new to conversations with prominent members of the conservative movement.

While I was grateful that they wished to speak with me — my only focus was to raise the alarm as much as I could about the dangers to women and babies from that toxic intervention -- I still had the residue in me, of a lifetime of misconceptions and preconceptions about the conservative movement as a whole.

I recall, in those months, in podcast after podcast, being continually surprised by the decency, courtesy and maturity of those on the Right who were seeking out my information — especially of the men.

Our subject was a delicate one; we were talking about sexuality and reproduction; about menstrual damage, damage to placentas and to ovaries; damage to sperm and to hormones; about death to women in childbirth.

I was used to liberal men who would have been condescendingly patient with my difficult, messy subject, or who would have assumed a “right-on male feminist” tone, overly “concerned” and “comfortable” with the grisly details, performatively “cool with it all”; or who would have revealed themselves to have been slightly grossed out, no matter how hard they would have sought to keep a sophisticated poker face. Mostly, I think I would not have had much of a hearing from liberal men at all. Indeed I haven’t had a hearing, from legacy media run by liberal men, to this day.

So I did not expect - -I had never encountered — the affect that I met again and again in conservative men, when we dealt with these awkward, intimate female subjects: these men were respectful, patient, attentive, compassionate; they were grown-ups. They did not ever show aversion. They were not repulsed, or salacious, or crude.

Rather, they showed great empathy for the details of what women went through, in the best of times, but certainly if made unnaturally ill by this intervention, in order to menstruate, to be intimate sexually with men, to get pregnant, to carry babies, to deliver them, and to nurse them.

Just as I’ve written that I decided that God really, literally exists because I saw the demonstration of Satan’s existence that has been so florid from the years 2020-2025, so I realized slowly that liberal men by and large (certainly there were exceptions) had been so coarsened by their culture’s trivialization of women into merely sexual beings, and for that matter, into almost interchangeably sexual beings, with no primary value placed on women’s importance in a context of marriage and family and motherhood, that liberal men (as a whole) really didn’t collectively like women (as a whole) deeply, or admire them profoundly, or care about them much at all.

They could, certainly, as individual men, like, admire or care about women; but I realized via the dramatic contrast of my experience in speaking with conservative men, that liberal culture as a whole made reverence toward women and their bodies, utterly optional for liberal men; even turned it into a personal quirk.

I realized slowly that conservative men’s very different affect to all this, as we discussed awful details about women’s suffering reproductive bodies, derived from a deep well of respect for the feminine, including, perhaps in a paramount way, for women’s roles as mothers. In dialogue with conservative men, but never in discussion with liberal men, I saw the masculine understanding that if there were to be people at all in the future, women as a whole would have to be okay; would, indeed, have to be well.

I saw in these conservative men a profound acceptance of the fact that the genders were in partnership in bringing the future into manifestation; and that women, thus, even in intimate, awkward, difficult-to-discuss ways, mattered.

I bring all this up because I was in an empty house when I prepared to have the discussion that I did about dangers to women’s reproductive lives, with Charlie Kirk. I knew very little about Kirk at that time; indeed what I “knew,” from my lifetime being bathed in liberal media propaganda, was negative. But by then I also was realizing that most of what I had been told by those sources was not based in fact. My press manager had told me that Kirk had huge reach and that he was greatly respected, especially by college audiences; so I was very willing to have the discussion slated for that day.

I keep mentioning that I was in an empty house because that empty house keeps haunting me, in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

I had bought it after I saw in February of 2022 that the truckers in Canada had been debanked. I too was afraid of being “debanked”, so I thought it sensible to put the last of my savings in something that would be more difficult to take away from me and my family.

But I also had dreams for that house. It was — it is — on five acres of hillside, in a rural part of the Hudson Valley; the couple who had built it, in the 1990s, both of them now deceased, had planted what had been a raw hilltop with graceful Japanese maples that turn bright red in fall; with towering oak trees and with blueberry bushes; with a grove of evergreens. The late wife had set out a back patio that is a spacious half-circle — perfect for outdoor gatherings — in herringbone red brick, and had placed a small wrought iron bench under a pine tree; she had set rosebushes with their red rosehips in autumn, around the patio, and had planted sage and lavender bushes in another half-circle at the side of the house, where you can wander in little pathways. The late wife (we know her family, from whom we bought the house) put small stone statues — one is a maiden bearing an urn, and one is a low white broken pillar with an angel seated upon it, pensive — here and there in her garden; evoking another century and a romantic, thoughtful mood.

When I saw this house for the first time, I imagined its future as a classroom; as a small fragment of a university, indeed. I felt that the colleges and universities, even the great, the storied ones, had lost their intellectual authority and had groveled before unscientific nonsense in “the pandemic”. I also felt, even apart from that travesty, that the universities and colleges had largely ceased to teach writing rigorously, or to instruct young journalists in journalism with old-fashioned editorial ethics; or to provide real histories or biographies in their library stacks, unmediated with contemporary spin and propaganda.

I felt that young people were in such polarized camps, and so fearful of being “cancelled,” that civil debate was dying out; and I knew from our team of doctors and scientists working on The Pfizer Papers that many of them felt that real medicine was no longer being taught in medical schools; that the scientific method was being laid aside.

I dreamt of a living, continually enlivened classroom — retreats at which we could convene people from all walks of life, and certainly devote activities just to young adults; to teach these old beautiful skills of civilization and to make sure the light of open inquiry, and of rigorous exploration of arts and letters, healing and sciences, journalism and commentary, and passionate but civil debate, even civil disputation, could here survive into the future.

I looked at the house and grounds and imagined outdoor lectures on the red brick patio; debates in the living room; young people deep in discussion, sitting under the trees.

Of course, it all never came to pass.

I did hold a few retreats there; weekends at which I welcomed leaders of what was then, in 2022 and 2023, a marginal, beleaguered liberty and health freedom movement. Those were times and memories that I cherish.

But I was not able to build for the future; or for the kids.

My neighbors, many of them on the political left, organized to oppose the formation of that little cultural destination, and perhaps I cannot blame them. I saw on that hillside a little piece of classical Athens, or a new Left Bank, perhaps, of artists and writers, and healers and leaders, and the next generation of commentators; they, it seemed, feared a possible partisan destination, or at the least, a disruption that they did not wish of their bucolic setting; they also, perhaps understandably, saw parking and sanitation questions.

The little cultural center was voted down, never to take shape — at least not there.

I respect local governance, and I would never build anything opposed by my neighbors; but their decision broke my heart a little bit.

The shimmering shadows of future students, the quick imagined movement of the young writers and leaders of the next generation, the young healers and scientists talking intently to one another, or reading on the benches under the trees; the civil impassioned debates; slowly faded away in my imagination; and, like wisps of smoke, they finally dispersed.

So that house is empty now — that is, it is empty of mission. Of course, we Airbnb it when we can.

But no one learns there.

No young people are changed there.

I was in that empty house — Brian was away; even Loki was away with him — when I connected at last to Charlie Kirk. It was on audio only, as I recall.

I sat at the empty dining table — one that I had intended to be the setting for endless meals of young people, elders, people of different disciplines, communing. I saw the benches outside in the sun that were empty, and the trees that swayed over empty lawns.

I spoke to Charlie Kirk through my computer’s microphone.

I don’t have any clear memory of the back and forth of our discussion; of course it lives on, online. But I do have a vivid memory of a feeling I had about ten minutes in: I remember being aware of the oddest sensation: that he and I were having an exchange in a kind of otherwordly/this-worldly dimension, an almost Socratic dimension, made up simply of truth; the search for truth, the assessment of truth, the exchange of truth. Nothing in it mattered but the truth.

I became aware of a kind of stillness, even though we were continually talking; almost an emotional stillness.

Usually with any host — any human for that matter — there is some ego rippling the exchange. What am I? What are you? How powerful? What status? Identities too ripple the discussion. Are you black, white, male, female, young, old? Conservative, liberal? And so on. Cross currents typically buffet against the underlying search for truth.

But with Mr Kirk, I was aware of an almost uncanny absence of any of that.

It did not matter that I was of another generation; that he was young enough to be my son; that I was a woman; that I was a former Liberal. His own age, gender, politics, did not matter either; his own personality almost did not matter; the potential awkwardness of the subject did not matter.

The only presence in the exchange was this intense focus on - this highly disciplined focus on — What is true? What is true here?

And: When we do find the truth, what do we most morally do with it?

That’s it.

That’s what I wanted to tell you.

But also I want to tell you this: I keep thinking about my having had that conversation with the now-late Mr Kirk, in that empty house - that forlorn house, shorn of its mission — because I don’t think that house, metaphorically speaking at least, is really empty any more.

Here is what I mean.

I feel — oh, I do feel that we are living in strange and awe-inspiring and terrible times.

I do not wish to talk about any abstract meanings around this young man’s murder, at the expense of remembering and honoring the fact that this was a real young man with a real grieving young family, really mourned by real friends and loved ones, many of whom are suffering around me and Brian right now.

I never want insensitively to treat someone’s real lost life, someone’s real murdered loved one, as a symbol.

But having said that, I do feel that this murder is also having national metaphysical consequences.

I do not understand how human events can happen on two such different planes but clearly they can and do. Some people are people and also take on an archetypal role in the life of a nation; Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy, of course; Dr Martin Luther King Jr. I do feel, many feel, that this young man’s death is both real and already archetypal.

I feel that his death, or rather his murder, so public, so brutal, so iconic, so traumatic to witness — as President Kennedy’s public murder was so traumatic to another generation to witness — has already changed us forever.

I feel that this young man’s murder acted as a kind of flash of light, revealing us in X Ray to the world; our souls, our moral health or illness.

They say of Pompeii that the flash of light from Vesuvius’ explosion was so intense that the shadows of people who were going about their business at the base of the volcano, were set into stone forever.

I feel that this death flashed that kind of photographic, revelatory light on all of us.

Some of us are grieving; half the country, half of much of the rest of the world, is grieving. We are not just grieving a lost life of someone that many feel was a special, remarkably gifted young leader; we are also grieving the world of civility for which Kirk advocated; the world of peaceful dissent in which we still thought we lived most of the time, in the West; in which no one is shot for his or her beliefs and no one celebrates publicly the murder of others for his or her beliefs.

But in the flash of the X Ray of Kirk’s murder, we saw that we are living in two worlds; as my friend Ora Nadrich has said, perhaps there are two dimensions already existing side by side on this single planet.

While half of us are grieving, we are also changing, fast, it seems.

Everyone I know — on the grieving side of America, anyway — has been having strange sleep disturbances. At first, after the assassination, we could not sleep; now we are exhausted, sleeping at every chance we can get.

But it also seems as if we are spinning — exhaustingly — upwards; closer to the Source of Light. Doesn’t it? Everything seems to be vibrating — for half the country anyway — at a higher vibration; the not-needed, the stupid, the silly, the distracting, is shedding; falling away.

I am getting texts from people — young people especially - saying that Kirk’s death has changed them forever; that they are becoming better men and women than they were.

I keep thinking of the old workers’ song “Joe Hill”: “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night/Alive as you or me. Said I, “But Joe, you’re ten years dead.” “I never died,” said he."‘

All around me I see and feel new resolve; to love one’s family; to be good; to make a difference. In this regard, I feel that Kirk’s physical death, never to trivialize it, did not in fact kill Kirk’s spirit but paradoxically amplified it greatly and permanently into history; and into the American present far beyond the limits of a single physical body; that this crisis in one life released a great energy, a wave of new dedication, new commitment, that has spread over us; half of us.

I want to be very careful in how I seek to say this because I never want to romanticize or trivialize a real human’s senseless, violent death; but something of great magnitude, something spiritual, in and over America, has been changed forever; something immense has been released. The call to be good has become more unequivocal.

Don’t you feel it? The time for vacillating has passed.

The sheep are separating from the goats.

We can live under this new sky in a state of blessing.

But also, there is the other world, on this planet; a negative, brutal world.

The other half of America, of the planet, is unmoved by this tragedy, or worse. Online it seems that a single demon - a mocking, laughing demon with darting, glowing eyes — has split into a thousand bodies and it is celebrating this young man’s death.

I don’t even understand how this is possible: the same ugly, distorted expression of glee, the same hideous grin, is manifesting in a twenty-one-year old blonde girl in a Southern town who posts online celebrating Kirk’s death; a gay man walking his dog on the Upper West Side of Manhattan; a suburban middle-class woman with a bob haircut on a sidewalk in Seattle; a grey-templed college professor in Michigan; and so on, and so on; all celebrating, in exactly the same tone, the same words. How is that possible? They repeat what sounds like a talking point: “I don’t care.” “I have no empathy.”

Is it a hex? Paid influencers? A script? It is utterly frightening, to see so many human-looking beings boast publicly of being, literally, sociopaths.

I think of the passages in the Gospels of Mark 5, Luke 8:26-39 and Matthew 8:28-34, in which Jesus encounters a demon-haunted man “in the region of the Gerasenes”; Jesus asks the demon its name and the reply is “My name is Legion, for we are many.” “Legion” is the Roman term for about 2000 solders. When Jesus cast out the demons, they entered a herd of pigs, who rushed into the sea and were drowned.

I recall as I scroll through these mocking faces, the descriptions from 400 years of exorcism literature of “mocking” demonic entities. I never knew what that really meant til now. But I am unnerved, terrified, really, seeing something I cannot explain rationally: the possession of many different people from completely different backgrounds across the country, by the same demon.

So we are peeling away from one another. What will emerge? I do not know, but there will be more clarity.

Maybe this is part of what Jesus meant when he said “The Kingdom of Heaven is near.” I’ve written about how “karov”, the word used for “near” in the one Hebrew gospel, the Gospel of Matthew of unknown dating — is both a verb and an adjective: the Kingdom of Heaven (in Hebrew, also “of the Sky”) is both drawing near (literally “nearing”) toward you continually, and is already in place: near to you.

Maybe this flash of light over America, that followed and is part of this horrific death, reveals where the Kingdom of Heaven is, after all.

It is available, inside us, right now.

Which is why I believe that even though my own house on a hill is empty of students, that thousands or millions of students inspired by this young man, will in the very near future build their own houses of learning and civil debate; and colleges and classrooms; that the shadowy house awaiting its young people, metaphorically at least, will everywhere be full.

Listening without violence, when we can manage it, takes place on this earth, and at the same time, it also takes place in the Kingdom of Heaven.

I also believe that that flash of light over America showed that you can stand outside the Kingdom of Heaven in this lifetime, on this planet; and walk deliberately away from it.

“I have no empathy”, is all you need to say.

“We are Legion,” is all you need to say.