Pills, Pot, and the Nihilistic Psychosis Behind the July 4th Shooting with Dr. Naomi Wolf
In the wake of another tragic shooting event, this time in Highland Park, Illinois—just miles from Charlie's hometown in the suburbs of Chicago—Charlie walks through everything we know publicly about the shooter and exposes the deeper implications behind some of the seemingly small details the mainstream media is actively glossing over. He goes into his past and unpacks the dangerous levels of marijuana use that have reportedly plagued the perpetrator for years as well as the compounding effects that decades of antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications seemingly had on his psyche and how it all could have contributed to the tragically end we saw on Monday. He's joined by Dr. Naomi Wolf, Author of the new book, 'The Bodies of Others,' to build out the ways substance-induced psychosis could have triggered such a violent tragedy and why we shouldn't expect this to be an isolated incident, given the societal damage COVID Lockdowns have had on the mental health of an entire, already-fragile, generation of American kids. And throughout the length of this episode, Charlie references the concepts of nihilism and subjectivism, all while tying everything together with quotes and commentary from 'The Abolition of Man,' — the seminal work of author and Christian Apologist, C.S. Lewis — laying out what we as a society can learn from Lewis' words, arguably more applicable today than when they were written nearly nine decades ago. Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Nihilism and the Highland Park Shooting00:11:29
Hello, everybody.
Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, we talk about the Highland Park shooting, but we go deeper than that.
We talk about antidepressants, psychiatric drugs towards young children, and it's a judgment-free zone.
I'm not attacking anybody or criticizing anyone that takes those drugs or prescribes them.
I'm merely making a societal observation and asking some questions about it.
We're also joined by Dr. Naomi Wolf to help unpack this very controversial topic.
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Hello, everybody.
Hope you had a wonderful Independence Day weekend.
It feels like a Monday, but it is not a Monday.
Honored to be with all of you.
You can email us your thoughts as alwaysfreedom at CharlieKirk.com.
That is freedom at CharlieKirk.com.
We're going to lead this program today with some unfortunate news out of Highland Park, Illinois, right down the street where I grew up, by the way.
Terrible shooting yesterday in Highland Park.
It seems as if six people are dead and over 30 people are injured.
Highland Park is in the north shore of Chicago.
I grew up in Wheeling, Illinois, not far from there at all.
It was at a July 4th parade where this individual, we're not going to use his name, gets on a rooftop and starts shooting into the crowd.
Now, that's a tragedy, and it should be considered a tragedy.
Inexplicably, we're not going to politicize it.
The other side is trying to politicize it.
They're trying to say, oh, this guy was a Trump supporter.
There's no evidence of that.
There's also no evidence that he's a far-left-wing activist.
There's evidence that he was very deeply disturbed and used visuals from both sides of the political aisle.
For what reason, we really don't know.
But it's important that we add context that we remember all deaths that happened in Illinois this weekend.
We're going to talk about the parade shooting.
We're going to talk about what I believe is actually pushing young men towards these sort of violent acts.
But also, 71 people were shot and eight fatally in the 4th of July holiday weekend in shootings across the city, Chicago police said.
Last year, 19 people were killed and more than 100 people were shot over the long 4th of July weekend.
The toll was lower than last year when 19 people were killed and more than 100 people were shot.
Nine of the wounded were shot in two attacks on the west and south side, four people in the west and Garfield Park Friday evening, and five men in Parkway Gardens on the south side on early Monday.
So Chicago.
Highland Park is a suburb of Chicago.
Six dead in a parade.
Terrible.
But in downtown Chicago, 71 shot and eight killed.
A second woman was taken to the University of Chicago Medical Center with a gunshot wound to her hand.
She was listed in good condition.
A woman was killed and a gunman was among two others wounded in a shootout Friday night in Chinatown.
At least 16 people were shot two fatally in a violent eight-hour span late Saturday into early Sunday in the city, according to Chicago police.
And so, when we look at this idea of violence in Chicago, we must not keep it limited to just what happened in Highland Park, the suburbs of Chicago, but also in downtown Chicago with widespread murder, reckless carnage.
What is driving all of this?
Well, it's very clear: the weaker we raise our men, the more violent they become, the more nihilistic they become as they get older.
What is nihilism?
Nihilism is something I want to explore with many of you.
Nihilism is more than the belief in nothing, it's the belief that there is no harmony, there is no synchronicity, there is no design to the entire universe.
Nihilism is a very easy conclusion to come to when you are raised in a secular public government school system.
Nihilism is basically the belief, it's even deeper than cynicism, that there is nothing but pleasure and pain, and the darkness that you might be feeling, any happiness that people outside of you might be experiencing is nothing more than an aberration and a mirage.
Some of the worst acts of violence have happened in our country under the false and the misleading, dangerous, sinister, and evil belief of nihilism.
Now, this is a very important point.
When you actually look at what these people believed, many of these shooters, Uvalde, Buffalo, very few of them have articulate doctrines or dogmas.
Very few of them are like the psychopath Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who wrote a long dissertation and treatise on the downfalls of technology.
Very few people are like that.
No, this is something different.
These are not people that are committing acts of violence for a reason.
It seems they're doing it for no reason at all.
Yesterday was a terrible day, and that's bad to say when it's Independence Day.
You want it to be a wonderful uplifting day.
But what happened in Highland Park, Illinois, certainly hit home for me.
I grew up right down the street from Highland Park.
I drove down the street many times of where the parade shooting happened in an explicable act of violence.
A shooter, whose name we are not going to use, seemed to have gone on a rooftop, started firing indiscriminately into the parade, and murdering six people and injuring 30 others.
Now, we're not going to politicize this.
In fact, I think that the symptoms of what we are seeing in Highland Park, or I should say, the root cause of what we've seen that actually created what happened in Highland Park, is much deeper and worthy of examination than just right versus left.
I think that's very dangerous.
I think it's sloppy.
I think it's wrong.
People are saying that, oh, this guy was a right-winger.
This guy was a left-winger.
There's evidence of both, actually.
He had socialist tattoos, and he also had some right-wing statements and beliefs on his social media.
There were some things that showed that he was very pro-CDC and pro-vaccine.
And then some people are saying he went to Trump rallies.
Very messed up, disturbed person.
We're not going to politicize it.
But instead, I want to talk to you about nihilism.
It's very clear that this young man, this young monster, I should say, was a nihilist.
Now, what is nihilist?
What is a nihilist?
What is nihilism, I should say?
A nihilist is someone who rejects and does not approve of anything in the established social order.
Rejection of all religion, rejection of right and wrong.
Now, there have been many different sort of nihilist thinkers.
I call them philosophical arsonists.
One of the most popular and famous is a man by the name of Friedrich Nietzsche.
He wrote the book Beyond Good and Evil, as well as I think it was called the Zamathutra or something.
Yeah, something similar to that.
Now, Nietzsche gets a bad rap in some sense because some of what Nietzsche actually predicted came true.
The destruction and the devolution of Western values.
He famously wrote, God is dead, but he did not write it in a celebratory fashion.
He wrote it instead as almost lamenting that since God is dead, the West will basically disintegrate upon itself.
What I meant to say is the left will do it for us.
Basically, as the West loses its faith in God and its central morality, the social order that has tied it all together, we are going to see the disintegration of the entire country as we know it.
And so this person yesterday that shot at the parade in Highland Park, it's very clear, based on just an overview analysis of his life, that he was a heavy medicated, heavily medicated individual.
Pharmacologically, he was doing weed quite often.
He was dealing from a mass psychosis event, probably on benzodiazepans, Prozac, or a mixture of all of SSRIs or serotonin-type boosting drug inhibitors.
And so we're seeing a pattern that has emerged all across the country, which is medicate our children.
Do you know millions of young people across America are on some form of psychiatric drugs, antidepressants?
I'm talking about seven, eight, and nine-year-olds.
They're on some form of psychiatric drugs.
Isolate them, lock them up, put masks on them, demonize them, then wind them up into a fury, and don't be shocked at what you get.
Now, this is not a justification for the horror and the tragedy and the murder and the suffering, what we saw in Highland Park yesterday.
Not at all.
But if we're not serious about root causes, this is going to continue to happen.
Now, the national news media is going to be very focused on the weapon.
Here's what we know about the gun.
We know that it was legally obtained.
We know that law enforcement knew of him and about him.
That's all we know.
Now, we'll find out in recent days and hopefully recent in the next couple of days, the next couple weeks, to what extent was law enforcement actually involved or engaged in monitoring him?
What sort of red flags, to use a term they like to put forward, might have been submitted.
We don't know.
We do know is this person was a deeply disturbed and sick individual.
Now, from a strictly chemical perspective, these kids have become eroded shells of a human being, torn from within with no purpose, direction, or meaning.
Now, when we see these kind of mass acts of terror, sometimes you'll see kind of a religious or a political doctrine or dogma that is pushing them forward.
For example, the Unibomber, the monster that sent all the bombs across the country in the mail, was an anti-technology activist.
Creating Men Without Chests00:08:30
He had a reason for what he was doing.
It was a sick and perverted reason, hard to even wrap your head around it, but Ted Kaczynski was doing it for a reason.
The same could be said for Eric Rudolph, who was the Centennial Park bomber who hid out in the woods and the forests of North Carolina for nearly a year and a half before law enforcement was able to find him.
This is different.
What we are seeing is the emergence of widespread nihilistic murder, destruction, and tragedy.
Nihilism is a very tricky thing.
Now, it's very interesting.
Over the weekend, on Saturday and Sunday, before this tragedy, I happened to be reading Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis.
Just happened to pop it back open.
I just felt it was relevant.
And boy, was it an apt thing to read right ahead of this tragedy.
Abolition of Man is a very interesting and short book, by the way.
It's a series of, it's basically three chapters.
It's 30 pages, if that.
Everyone should read it.
Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis, C.S. Lewis being the greatest Christian apologist, in my opinion, of the 20th century, who has brought millions of people to the Lord and has effectively pushed back against atheism, cynicism, nihilism, and secular humanism.
What C.S. Lewis was basically doing is actually responding to a children's book.
What C.S. Lewis was doing was responding to a children's book in the 1930s, prior to World War II, if I'm not mistaken.
I think it was published in 1938, the children's book.
That was all around really one sentence that C.S. Lewis was pushing back against.
It was one sentence he zeroed in on, where someone comes up to a waterfall and someone says, wow, that waterfall is sublime.
And the other person says, oh yeah, I think it makes me feel good.
And essentially, C.S. Lewis, based on this one sentence in The Abolition of Man, oversimplifying it, but the essence is that he said, society is going to disintegrate into a dystopian future, creating men without chests if you are not able to call a waterfall beautiful and sublime through objective standards.
You see, what C.S. Lewis was warning about in the 1930s and 40s, through all of his writings, screw tape letters, mere Christianity, abolition of man, miracles, chronicles of Narni, one of the most prolific writers in the 20th century, what C.S. Lewis was trying to warn us is that if you teach children that there is not a truth, if you teach children that truth is subjective, you're going to be raising a generation of men without chests.
In fact, you're going to have the abolition of man itself.
He goes on into the third chapter, the third kind of response to literature in the 1930s and 40s by saying the final act of technology will be the abolition of man.
You see, C.S. Lewis goes straight against nihilism, and he warns that nihilism, the belief in nothing, to deconstruct the established social order, what are you going to replace it with exactly?
And what you saw in Highland Park is unfortunately just the latest chapter in the long, seemingly endless, voluminous book of acts of abstract nihilism.
What's the purpose?
What difference does it make?
More damage and destruction will be done in our lifetime with one sentence.
What difference does it make?
It makes a big difference.
And I want to keep on exploring this topic with you because deeper than guns and deeper than even benzodiazepans or antidepressants, there is a philosophical thread here that actually stems from our universities and our schools.
And that young man who committed that act of violence was probably taught somewhere, well, how do you feel about it?
What is your truth?
C.S. Lewis wrote in Abolition of Man, we make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise.
We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man.
Now, some of you might say, Oh, my kid is not exposed to this sort of nihilism or this sort of belief.
It is widespread in our public and government school system.
You see, when I visited University of California, Berkeley, and I sat down for about an hour and a half and spoke to students, and then I did a speech that evening, I realized and recognized that nihilism had cast a shadow over the entire campus, University of California, Berkeley.
You see, I visited Cal Berkeley multiple times.
I visited in 2018 with Candace Owens.
I visited in 2019.
I visited multiple times, trying to think.
I think I've been there four times in total.
And when I visited in 18 and 19, oh, the left there, they were fired up.
They were angry and they were bitter, but they also felt as if if you gave them enough political power, they could create heaven on earth.
They believed that they could usher in a new utopia.
When I visited in 2022, just a couple months ago, it was a completely different vibe.
It was a categorically different energy.
Instead of students believing that they could create something better, it was widespread nihilism, cynicism.
What's the Charlie?
Why are you on campus, man?
There's nothing that's true.
There's nothing that's real.
These are deeply unhappy people that are coming to me and saying everything is subjective.
Now, what's interesting is the moment that somebody says, hey, everything's subjective, say, well, how do you know that statement to be true?
They say, nothing is true.
Well, then, how do you know that statement is true?
At some point, you must deduct down to something being true.
Now, a true subjectivist, a legitimate subjectivist, will just say, it's my feeling that everything is true.
But they won't do that because they want to be taken seriously.
They want to be authored.
They want to have their books published.
You see, a lot of these ideas were pushed forward in the 1960s by Jacques Derrida and Michelle Foucault and the postmodernists that have infiltrated our entire school system.
You see, if you deal with a college student, which I deal with a lot of college kids, so I speak from a place of authority here, they don't know what is real.
You see, from the basis of where education needs to start and the disservice of what education does today is they create young people that are not anchored in anything that is real, good, true, or beautiful.
It creates manic people.
It creates a mad generation, is what it does.
And they have to gravitate towards antidepressants.
They have to gravitate towards pharmacological interventions like marijuana, ecstasy, and cocaine.
They have to gravitate towards alcohol because there's no other way they could process it.
So all they can do is try to go towards the pain and pleasure matrix.
But instead, true education is talking about, as C.S. Lewis wrote in Abolition of Man, the Tao, the way, that there is a way that you must live.
There's a path that you should be on.
We as Christians believe that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.
But C.S. Lewis writes beautifully in The Abolition of Man that it's not just Christianity that came up with this concept, that almost every form of civilization that was able to function and flourish had a way that people should live, a transcendent moral order, or otherwise in Catholic social teaching, would be called a natural law, as Thomas Aquinas would put it.
Nihilism destroys all of that.
And when you start to see these senseless shootings, when you start to see these mass outbursts of violence, when you see the most suicidal, alcohol-addicted, and drug-addicted generation in history, we must understand the philosophical underpinnings that is driving this.
And yes, if you're a parent or a grandparent and you send your kid to a government school, you should be a lot more worried that they're going to catch the contagion of nihilism than the virus of COVID.
Cash Back to Fight Inflation00:02:42
The contagion of nihilism can turn an otherwise happy and joyful young person into an endless tornado of misery and despair.
It makes them believe there's nothing else than a will to power, not a will to meaning or a will to beauty.
Entire civilizations fall apart on this.
The Russian Revolution was built on a kind of rejection of the pre-existing social order.
And then you fill them up with chemicals, you overindulge them in pleasure, video games, rap, music that is not good for them at all.
An overstimulation of dopamine, the baseline starts to lower.
And we wonder why all of a sudden our nation's young men are killing themselves and killing others.
It's because the man is being abolished.
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In C.S. Lewis's Abolition of Man, he talks about when you raise a generation that is not able to understand what is real and what is true, and they are not on the DAO or the way, they have no teleological purpose for existence.
Teleological basically means purpose, and it's overly complex wording.
We actually get the word from the word telescope, which means far out in the distance, telos, which means something to aim for.
When a generation has nothing to aim for, no reason for existence, they could kill themselves.
The Risks of Youth Antidepressants00:16:19
There's a lot of young people doing that.
Certain epidemic of suicide in our country in a way we've never seen before.
They can self-medicate.
We're seeing a lot of that.
Higher rates of marijuana, higher rates of antidepressants, higher rates of alcohol, higher rates of cocaine, higher rates of amphetamines.
And by the way, almost every other conservative show is going to talk about guns and all that.
We did that a couple weeks ago.
You guys can, our thoughts are very well articulated, in my opinion, and very well known.
Okay?
You guys can go back there.
Why don't we talk about the philosophical contagion, the virus, the mind virus that is stemming out of our public schools that are being taught to five, six, and seven-year-olds saying, so what do you believe is true?
How do you feel about that?
Feelings are very deceiving.
Your imagination can run wild, and you could believe or feel something that is not true.
Education should be anchoring young people towards what is real.
What is the real gender that you have?
What is the truth?
What is real in material reality, in sensory reality, in metaphysical reality?
I'm wondering what your thoughts are, by the way.
You should email us freedom at charliekirk.com.
Do you start to see this kind of disease of nihilism seeping into our country?
Are you starting to feel as if young people are more depressed and less likely to have an optimistic viewpoint?
Well, maybe this is one of the reasons why.
PsychologyToday.com.
Before I say this, what percentage of children do you think are on psychiatric drugs?
What percentage of children?
According to psychology today, one in 12 children are on psychiatric drugs.
One in 12 children.
12.9% of 12 to 17 year olds.
The use of psychiatric drugs in children has been steadily increasing for many years in several countries.
In the United States, 8.5% of children under the age of 18 are on medication for ADD, ADHD, autism, ASD, or difficulties with emotion, concentration, or behavior, according to a national survey.
Psychiatric drug use in youth is increasing in many countries.
But we don't even know what impact this has on the developing brain.
And to Psychology Today, to their credit, they wrote this, quote, these trends are of concern because very little is known about the effects of these drugs taken alone or in combination on the developing brain.
Not to mention with alcohol, high stress, low sleep, bright screens all the time in front of their eyes, marijuana.
What happens when you mix benzodiazepans or Prozac or Zoloft with marijuana?
That's probably not a good combination for a developing brain.
For example, a review of 26 studies on antidepressants and children concluded that, quote, findings suggest that most newer antidepressants may reduce depression symptoms in a small and unimportant way compared with placebo.
Suicide-related thinking and behavior may be increased in those taking these medications.
What if actually all these antidepressants that are plaguing our land are having an adverse effect?
How much of this could actually be solved through healthy living and understanding a developing brain and having just a little bit, an elementary, an introductory understanding of how dopamine works, just like a little bit.
How does serotonin work?
How does dopamine work?
How does adrenaline work?
And I'm like far from an expert.
In fact, I wouldn't even call myself fluent or literate in this category.
But just reading a little bit of the literature and exposing yourself to some of what the experts have to say about this.
People like Andrew Huberman and Ann Lempke that have done a lot of research on this.
All of a sudden, it's not hard to start to piece together all of the empirical evidence where you start to see a generation that is so burned out.
So for example, just a very simple thing, when you look at dopamine, for every increase of dopamine from the baseline, you have to have an inverse decrease.
Meaning if you go two and a half times above baseline, you're going to have to go below baseline two and a half times.
Now, many of you know this probably when you say, man, after something where I really enjoyed a sports game, an event, or a night with friends, sometimes a couple days later, I'm feeling a little bit down.
Why is that?
It's because dopamine is the reward or incentive chemical in your brain.
It literally keeps you going.
It is what feels good when you accomplish something.
So chocolate, for example, is an immediate boost of dopamine levels.
Cocaine, amphetamine, sex, and there's other things as well, such as connection with people around you.
Now, there can be good and healthy boosts in dopamine, and then there's unhealthy interventions.
But let's just take video games, for example.
I'm not here to bash video games, a judgment-free zone.
I play video games growing up.
I know a lot of people do as well.
But if you look at the reward structure behind video games, they know exactly what they're doing.
They make them competitive.
They make them intentionally try to keep on escalating your engagement, your screen time, where you are literally having your child burn out their brain and their dopamine reward structure.
By the time they get in the real world, they said, There's no beauty, there's no truth, no goodness.
What they need is really a 60-day dopamine fast.
Now, another thing that destroys young people's brains that no one wants to talk about, again, judgment-free zone, I'm not here to moralize, is pornography.
What porn does to teen brains and how to keep it off their devices?
Most parents have no understanding and no comprehension of the damage of what pornography can do to a young person.
So, when you start to see these outbursts of mass violence, they are all downstream.
They're all tributaries of chemical imbalances that could be attributed to, I think, the over-prescription of antidepressants.
And for once, if the Republican Party, I think, wanted to really represent the interest of their voters, how many Republicans running for office say, hey, we're medicating our children too much.
And by the way, this ties into our parents' party idea.
Why are we vaccinating six-month-year-old?
Why are we having young kids be exposed to drag queen events?
Why are these are good questions, by the way?
And what the response from the nihilists would be: well, what difference does it make?
What difference does it make?
And from my experience with talking to other people, far too many psychiatrists are just pushing pills on people.
They're not actually doing CBT counseling, they're not actually doing deep and constructive therapy.
They could just be pushing pills on people, especially, I mean, if you are prescribing psychiatric drugs to preschoolers, according to the data, there's hundreds of thousands of preschoolers that are on Riddlin.
What is the long-term impact of that?
Does that make a child more or less likely to have social or antisocial tendencies?
So, don't be surprised when all of a sudden you mix all these together, you have this philosophical contagion, you have a massive reservoir of interventions.
We don't even know what it does to children.
It says here: quote, the psychiatric drugging of our children, a development, a developing international crisis.
Are you even allowed to say this out loud?
No.
One of the reasons why is the very same reason why we couldn't question the gene therapy called a vaccine.
It's the pharmaceutical companies.
Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna, and Johnson Johnson.
When's the last time you saw a cable television program do a deep dive on antidepressants and their role potentially on harming and damaging people?
Now, mind you, some people take antidepressants and they talk very favorably about it.
They say, Charlie, it's a wonderful thing.
Other people take them and it intensifies their problem.
But how much of that very well could have been solved with healthy living, understanding how dopamine works, maybe regulating your serotonin levels, finding other natural interventions, turmeric, such as trying to lower your inflammation.
By the way, inflammation is now shown to be tied to depression, according to some studies.
Again, a lot of this stuff is debated.
That's fine.
Again, I'm far from an expert.
I'm not trying to proclaim to be one, but just read the literature of people that do know what they're talking about, of other neuroscientists.
And the takeaway that is now overwhelming in kind of the dissident neuroscientist community is these drugs might be doing more harm than good.
That is the big takeaway.
The reflex is medicate, isolate, put them in front of a screen, and don't interrupt them despite how much pornography they're watching, video games they're playing, or substance they're putting in their body.
That removes you from the richness of life.
That is the perfect incubator.
It is a petri dish for nihilism, what we've created.
You see, don't be shocked when a young person says, I don't know what's real, because all they've been looking at is fantasy.
They've been looking at fantasy when it comes to sexual interactions, fantasy when it comes to physical interactions, fantasy when it comes to intimacy.
And then if they have a problem, like, well, got to intervene with SSRIs or benzodiazepans or Prozac or Zoloft, and then they go down on the curve and they do more of it, and the cycle continues.
It's easy to blame the guns, but I think there's a deeper structural problem with the over-medication of children, the isolation of them, the lack of parenting that is correcting these incredibly damaging technological influences that I've mentioned previously.
You want to get your voters' attention?
You want to actually solve people's problems?
Talk about these things.
I'd love your thoughts.
Freedom at CharlieKirk.com.
That's freedom at charliekirk.com.
And of course, all of this, all of that pales in comparison with the spiritual dimension and our spiritual crisis, the spiritual famine that we're living through right now.
Malcolm emailed us, some, a good percentage of kids today quite literally use bad mental health as a way to become popular.
I graduated high school, so I was around it all the time.
Depression has become so hugely popular within this generation that, quote, depressed people have seemingly created a click.
Granted, I can't say all of them are faking it, but it's clear a chunk are.
It sucks to see a genuine mental problem be used for popularity's sake.
I can't comment on that, but interesting take.
You're on the right track, Charlie.
Don't stop short.
There's an unwillingness to yield to conviction of the Holy Spirit.
We have to be willing to stand on the truth, but even more, we have to know the truth for ourselves.
The heart matter.
Thanks for all you're doing.
I totally agree.
Now, mind you, it is a heart matter, but even in the New Testament, it talks about how outside interventions, pharmacological interventions, otherwise known as pharmakia, could let's not destroy, but could harm your relationship with the divine.
That is one of the reasons why Paul explicitly warns against drunkenness and pharmakia, which could be called marijuana or hallucinogenics or psychedelic drugs.
37 school shooters and school-related violence committed by those under the influence of psychiatric drugs.
Now, I'm going to go through this, but I'm already going to give you the devil's advocate argument.
The devil's advocate argument is Charlie.
It's not the drugs causing it.
It's the fact that they are disturbed, therefore they're on drugs.
Okay, I think that's a fair argument.
So I just want to make sure that people know that the potential opposition out there, but I also don't think that's as strong as it could be.
You go through here, 37 school shooters under the influence of psychiatric drugs, according to CCHRINT.org.
It's the Citizen Commission on Human Rights International.
May 1st, 2017, Austin, Texas, Kendricks White stabbed four people.
He was on Zoloft.
It goes one after the other, after the other.
You guys could check it.
We should link this on charliekirk.com.
Again, I'm not saying that necessarily they cause it, but I'm also not dismissing it.
And also, certain studies show that there could be adverse events that happen when taking these antidepressants, such as violence, nihilism, and increased depression.
In fact, if you look at the black label on some of these drugs, in some of the trials, it showed anywhere between 3 to 5% of people that took some of these drugs potentially had those kind of adverse events.
This one right here, you could go 18-year-old Finnish gunman, Pekka Eric Avin, shot and killed eight people.
Finland shooting, killing nine students and a teacher.
He was on SSRI and Xanax.
He was also seeing a psychologist.
The list is pretty incredible.
When you see it for yourself, we'll link it on charliekirk.com.
And look, I'm not, this is a judgment-free zone.
If those of you guys are on antidepressants, depressants, and all that, I'm not here to say you're making a mistake.
I'm not here saying that you're a bad person.
No, I'm still making a broader societal point, which is, is it necessary to over-medicate our children on these brain-altering, potentially brain-altering psychiatric drugs?
I'm asking questions of how do drugs impact young people and self-harm and suicide.
I'm wondering if there are other homeopathic and naturopathic interventions that could help young people, such as not staring at a screen all day long, having relationships that matter.
This is the most depressed generation in history.
It's also the most medicated generation in history.
And I think a lot of parents are parenting out of fear.
I think a lot of parents are wondering, what do I do?
You see, a lot of these parents will send their kids to a psychiatrist.
And the psychiatrist will say, well, there's something wrong with your child.
They could potentially have suicidal tendencies.
Here's three drugs that they might need to make them feel better.
Now, mind you, we don't even know the other side effects.
Paranoia, insomnia, weight gain, all sorts of other side effects that can happen from these drugs outside of potentially violent tendencies and all this.
Now, am I saying that every single person that has these drugs that takes these drugs have terrible, terrible times?
No, of course not.
But also, if you have side effects to these drugs, the withdrawals from benzodiazepans could also kill you.
Just ask Jordan Peterson.
And so when we see this increase in mass violence and you see what happens when these people, I mean, you see this lunatic, this monster that is shooting in Highland Park, it makes you wonder what sort of, first of all, philosophical ideas were introduced that even make this idea to be entertained potentially in there in this world.
Medicate, isolate, demonize.
And then you have the spiritual desert, the spiritual famine, which also stem from nihilism.
C.S. Lewis hit it perfectly.
You must be on the Tao, the way.
We as Christians believe Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.
I know there's people that aren't Christians that listen to this program.
And you might believe there is another spiritual way.
At least there's some dimension.
At least you hold yourself to some natural law, some moral order.
But we've actually done the worst possible combination.
We've decided to tell young people that it's your truth, which puts an unbelievable amount of pressure, by the way, on them to try to figure this all out and navigate it.
Tell them that there is no truth themselves, that it's all just subjectivity, which immediately will result in deconstructionism, postmodernism, and nothing more than pleasure seeking.
And what we know from neurology and neuroscience is you'll become a deeply unhappy person very quickly.
And then we put all of these fake window dressing substances on top of it, acting as if everything's going to be fine.
Harbingers on American Soil00:02:15
Maybe we should get back to things that work.
Wisdom.
It's the knowledge of things that do not change.
Tell a young person that there is a truth and you have to go out on a journey to find it, a courageous journey to find it.
It's going to take work.
Comfort can literally kill you.
What we've done is the opposite.
Parenting and governing from a place of weakness and fear.
And now we're wondering, where did all this tragedy come from?
It's of our own creation.
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The over-medication of our children is one of the great issues of our time, and no one wants to talk about it.
But it starts even earlier than that.
It seems as if our children are no longer protected.
The innocence of our children is no longer protected.
From vaccine mandates to their spiritual innocence also being taken, from their sexual innocence also being taken.
But what I really want to focus on is the idea here of the over-prescription of antidepressants and these other interventions.
And to help us unpack that, someone who I really enjoy having on, the author of The Bodies of Others, The New Authoritarians, COVID-19, and The War Against the Human, the author of which is Dr. Naomi Wolf.
Dr. Welcome back to the program.
Thank you so much, Charlie.
It's really great to talk to you.
Please call me Naomi.
Naomi, thank you for joining us again.
Dr. Naomi Wolf Returns00:13:42
So give us your thoughts here.
Nihilism mixed with these incredibly, let's say, powerful pharmacological compounds such as SSRIs and benzodiazepines, Zoloft, and Xanax, and how we are over-prescribing them to our nation's youth.
The latest study shows that 12 to 13% of our nation's young people are on some form of psychiatric drugs.
What is the potential downside of that?
What are your thoughts?
Yeah, well, just, you know, I have to always start conversations like this by warning that I'm not a medical doctor.
That said, I've written three, you know, big nonfiction books about health issues, about the pharmaceutical industry.
And I'm a mom and a stepmom.
And I really agree with you about your concerns.
First, what I would say is we've imposed on children and teenagers and young adults in the last two years, circumstances that the bodies of others point out are guaranteed to cause mental illness,
to cause anxiety, to cause depression, and to cause other kinds of stresses that young adults have never been subjected to, really in the history of human beings, you know, outside of places like North Korea or the Warsaw Ghetto.
And what I mean is this, just in the last two years, we isolated young adults.
We isolated teenagers.
We kept them at home, you know, chained to computers.
We didn't let them go to school.
We sent them home from university.
Even now, and the bodies of others starts with, and I've written about this a lot, you know, starting with my book in 2008, The End of America, which looked at the effect of isolation on political prisoners.
You're not allowed to keep political prisoners isolated.
You're not allowed to keep prisoners isolated or in solitary confinement for long.
Even one day of isolation causes permanent changes in the brain and can cause mental illness and psychosis.
So we, to my astonishment, at places like Ivy League universities, major state universities, kids who test, young adults who test positive for COVID, and these PCR tests are full of problems, as I point out as well, they're isolated for up to a week alone in their rooms with nothing, you know, not allowed to be, you know, outside with other young adults.
They're, you know, driven to attend classes online and not allowed even to be in outside classrooms with young adults.
So we've done this for two years and totally predictably, it's had an effect on young adults' mental health and on teenagers and children's mental health.
Early on in the pandemic, I was hearing from doctors, dissident doctors, because they were facing and still are facing backlash for even talking about this, that the phrase child suicidality was up as never before.
Teenagers are expressing suicidal ideation.
Well, this isn't all going to just go away because we've been allowed out.
We've still given them a completely psychotic reality in which human touch is supposed to be, you know, lethal, in which you can kill someone by just walking past them and breathing, in which they can't be sure of the future.
And, you know, I'm just an employer of young adults now, and I hear this despair all the time.
Like, what are you going to be in five years?
I ask people when I interview them for a job.
And if they're in their early 20s, they can't answer that question because the last two years have ripped up all the social contracts.
So yes, and so to just end this riff, you know, bring it back to psychiatric drugs, having given them a mental illness causing social contract and reality, of course, the same doctors who stood by for all this nonsense and harm are doling out SSRIs like there's no tomorrow instead of treating or encouraging them to actually treat the things that are generating mental illness.
You said something super interesting.
I want you to elaborate on it briefly, which is that even in political prisoners, solitary confinement is not allowed for periods of time.
Yet that's precisely what we did with tens of millions of our nation's young people, where we really told them that you're not allowed to see any of your peers, any of your friends, creating antisocial tendencies.
Pornography consumption went up, drug consumption went up, video game consumption went up, streaming services went up, all of these things that are, by definition, nothing more than photons hitting a screen.
It's not reality.
And you have to wonder the damage that does to a 12, 13, or 14-year-old that is still trying to distinguish between reality and their imagination.
Can you elaborate more on how we treat our own nation's children more cruel than even what we would a prisoner of war?
Absolutely.
And this would never be like the Geneva Conventions don't allow, you know, Guantanamo to treat political prisoners the way we've treated children, teenagers, and young 20-somethings in the last two years.
So what you just said is really profound.
And in the bodies of others, I also have a chapter that shows exactly, you know, why these tech companies supported the lockdowns and supported a reality in which people whose brains, as you say rightly, are just developing, you know, to switch them off of IRL, you know, real life school, real life sports with their friends, real life hanging out at the playground.
And then if you're a late older teenager, young adult, real life dating, real life relationships, and switch them onto what you just described, addiction to video games, addiction to meta, before meta has even been rolled out, and a lack of ability to relate to other human beings.
It's a generating of Asperger's type personalities, even in children and young adults who are perfectly normal in terms of their actual brain development.
And the result is Nintendo, which was a dying brand, is up 20 to 25% net revenue over the last two years.
Microsoft is up 20-25% net revenue.
Amazon is up.
I'm sure porn sites are up.
I do off the charts, I have no doubt.
But what you get is this culture of children, teenagers and young adults who literally aren't socialized to go outside and connect with other human beings because they've been conditioned to have all of their needs met digitally.
And a lot of those policies are intended to foster this.
For example, I've been very irate about masks.
They don't make any difference.
The data are in in terms of COVID.
What they do, however, and the bodies of others talks about this a lot, is that they impair kids' abilities to acquire speech and to speak to each other, and they impair young adults' ability to do what young adults are supposed to do.
They're supposed to flirt.
You know, they're supposed to make friends.
They're supposed to bond.
They're supposed to have like rich, complex emotional lives.
They're supposed to want to talk all night, you know, and look at the stars.
You can't do any of that in a mask.
And my argument is this is what the masks are for.
This is what lockdowns are for.
They're to disable the human ability to be fascinated by another human face or to just be addicted to human communication, to be able to pick up human cues.
So I'm the stepmother of a recently turned 11-year-old.
And I was watching during the lockdowns as his peers' language degenerated, their ability to pick up facial cues and to express their emotions with facial expressions degenerated.
And then finally, he said, look, you know, Naomi, my friends and I run home after school and turn on our phones so we can see our friends' faces.
I'm okay as long as I can see my friends' faces on the screen.
Naomi, you have a book out the bodies of others, and I have not read the book, but we've talked about it a little bit.
Can you talk about the profit incentive here, though?
So generally, I think profits are wonderful and good and can motivate good behavior.
When you look at children, though, what if the profit motive is to try to fill them with vaccines they don't need, drugs that harm them, and then other interventions that solve for the things that those things caused?
Can you talk about how the profit motive can actually work against the well-being of our children?
Absolutely.
Well, that's essentially the core argument of the bodies of others that a handful of bad actors, including the Chinese Communist Party, the World Economic Forum, big tech companies, and bad nonprofits like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, all of whom are self-interested, use the pandemic in such a way as to crush human advantages over digital technologies,
to crush human civilization, crush in-person classrooms, in-person universities, in-person playtime, if we're talking specifically about kids, and re-engineer our society in such a way as to leave us always asking permission of drug companies and of digital technologies to be human, to engage in commerce.
And capitalism is awesome if you have free will.
But what we saw in the last two years is that our freedoms to choose have been stripped away from us and certainly stripped away from children who are not old enough to consent to injections that statistically don't have a risk-benefit ratio that serves them or to agree to having their schools shut down, having their universities shut down, and so on.
So the profit motive is massive.
And what you see is these bad actors are invested in both ends, right?
So Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is invested in the vaccines.
Zuckerberg Foundation is invested in the vaccines.
These same platforms deplatform people like me who raise concerns early on about menstrual dysregulation, for instance, with the vaccines, or doctors who warn about heart damage to young adult men, especially and teenage men with these mRNA vaccines.
And then on the other side, Microsoft and Salesforce and other digital platforms are manufacturing the vaccine passports.
And they've been trying to roll those out in the U.S.
We fought hard against them, but they successfully rolled them out in Europe, in Israel, in Australia, and around the world.
And those vaccine passports then generate more profits by our being under essentially a China-style social credit system because all of our data are being harvested and we can be stopped at any time from participating in society.
So these are 180 degree coercions and efforts to strip us of our free will in a way that drives the astronomical profits that I spell out in the bodies of others for these companies that are behind the messages and the censorship and the coercion and the vaccine mandates of the last two years.
And I just mentioned a couple of companies, but you could go on and on.
Zoom is up 20 to 25 percent last two years.
They have servers that run through China.
So it's a massive hack of our IP and our business meetings and so on, in addition to the profits generated.
You know, I mentioned Amazon.
If you crush, you know, High Street and Main Street and little shops and little boutiques and little bodegas, everyone has to order from Amazon up 20 to 25 percent.
Not to even mention the, you know, 23 billion or so generated by for Pfizer and Moderna, especially for rolling out these mRNA injections, which I have a team of 3,000 highly credentialed medical researchers, biostatisticians, physicians, RNs, lab scientists who are reading through the Pfizer documents released under court order and finding catastrophic harms.
Well, who is at statistically no risk is children from COVID, almost no risk is young adults.
But the harms to young adults, to children, to babies, to lactating women, to men's sperm production, the strokes, the clots, the heart attacks, the encephaly, it's catastrophic in the Pfizer documents.
And there's literally no reason young adults and children have to be coerced into taking these experimental injections.
Very good.
Well, Dr. Wolf, thank you so much for your commentary, Naomi, I should say.
And check out the bodies of others.
And this is a topic that I want to continue to explore, which is when you have a group of companies that work in collusion with one another, you cannot sue them, and there's not alternatives and competitors against them.
And their profit motive is to put substances into your children.
We should probably say timeout.
What the heck is going on here?
Very good.
Naomi, thank you so much for joining us as always.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for listening to everybody.
Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thanks so much for listening.
God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.