Yesterday's obnoxious Nazi Barbie is 2023's Person of the Year

 

Time.

2015 here:

Camille Paglia has written a scathing critique of Taylor Swift, referring to the singer as an “obnoxious Nazi Barbie” whose “twinkly persona is such a scary flashback to the fascist blondes who ruled the social scene during my youth”.

Land of the sooty, home of the knave

 In those countries that pretend to freedom, princes are subject to those laws which their people have chosen.

-- Jonathan Swift

LOL, Camille Paglia said in 1991 that Naomi Wolf can't do historical analysis, and Wolf has proven it, again

LISTEN: Clinton, Gore Advisor Naomi Wolf's New Book Exposed For Inaccuracies :

Speaking with interviewer Matthew Street about her new book, “Outrages,” ... Street pointed out she had completely misunderstood a legal term. Wolf had decided that there were several dozen executions of men for sodomy but did not understand that that fact was incorrect because she didn’t understand the legal term “death recorded.”

Oops.

Paglia in 1991:

Crisis In The American Universities:

And beauty, according to, um, Miss, um, Naomi Wolf, is a heterosexist conspiracy by men in a room to keep feminism back--and all that crap that's going on. I call her, by the way, "Little Miss Pravda." She and I are head to head on MTV this week, in case you want to know! But I won't appear with her. Oprah's tried to get me on with her: I won't go on with her. A talk show in Italy wanted to fly me over to appear with her. No. I always say, "Would Caruso appear with Tiny Tim?" If you want to see what's wrong with Ivy League education, look at The Beauty Myth, that book by Naomi Wolf. This is a woman who graduated from Yale magna cum laude, is a Rhodes scholar, and cannot write a coherent paragraph. This is a woman who cannot do historical analysis, and she is a Rhodes scholar? If you want to see the damage done to intelligent women today in the Ivy League, look at that book. It's a scandal. Naomi Wolf is an intelligent woman. She has been ill-served by her education. But if you read Lacan, this is the result. Your brain turns to pudding! She has a case to make. She cannot make it. She's full of paranoid fantasies about the world. Her education was completely removed from reality.

 

 

Camille Paglia: So far the Democrats have no one to run against Trump

Camille Paglia: ‘Hillary wants Trump to win again’:

Kamala Harris = ruthless inquistor without crossover appeal

Elizabeth Warren = screechy representative only to the upper middle class 

Kirsten Gillibrand = a wobbly mediocrity

Cory Booker = has all the gravitas of a cork

Andrew Cuomo = yapping puppy with a muddy tail

Bernie Sanders = old and creaky

Joe Biden = creaky and old

Hillary = damaged goods, stumbling, hacking and shop-worn

Camille Paglia's Nazi Barbie endorses Tennessee Democrats . . . as her newest performance props

Hey, when your momentum is flagging, hoist a flag!

Story here.

Paglia in 2015:

Swift herself should retire that obnoxious Nazi Barbie routine of wheeling out friends and celebrities as performance props, an exhibitionistic overkill that Lara Marie Schoenhals brilliantly parodied . . ..

Camille Paglia: Treating women as more credible than men is reactionary

From the essay here:

Modern democracy is predicated on principles of due process and the presumption of innocence. ... For all its idealistic good intentions, today’s #MeToo movement, with its indiscriminate catalog of victims, is taking us back to the Victorian archetypes of early silent film, where mustache-twirling villains tied damsels in distress to railroad tracks.

Author finds cost of housing and daycare to be the main drivers of the middle class "squeeze"

From the transcript of the podcast here:

Middle-class life is 30% more expensive than it was 20 years ago. ... The main problem is the cost of housing. ... The second problem was the cost of daycare. A lot of it had to do with wages that were just not keeping up with other kinds of expenses. ...  [R]eal estate is no longer a place to live, but it’s an investment vehicle. That has driven up the cost of housing for ordinary people or the precarious middle class, as I call them. 

Unstated here is the new necessity of two incomes once women entered the labor force in quantity after the 1960s under the influence of feminist ideology. For the first twenty years of the post-war this was not so. When you dramatically increase the size of the labor force, the cost of the labor naturally comes down. The result was that women entering the workforce increased their average real income, but only just enough over time to pay for the cost of daycare, a wash. Meanwhile real male incomes stagnated.

Women working in large numbers naturally put pressure on the future growth of the labor force as well. Because they were not having the children who would become the country's next workers, a future labor shortage was inevitable as the post-war 4-child families transformed into 2-child families.

Enter the pressure to increase immigration, wink at low-labor-cost illegal immigration, and export jobs, a new era of which was inaugurated under George H. W. Bush in 1989, who doubled the level of legal immigration overnight, and under his son George W. Bush in 2001, who presided over the export of 3 million manufacturing jobs, a trend continued under Barack Obama who exported 3 million more. Manufacturing jobs had been the most important anchors and hubs for middle class jobs in American communities, the absence of which turned college from an option into a necessity in order to maintain what was formerly possible with only a high school diploma. Increase the demand for college, and you increase its price, and with it the pressure on stagnating pocketbooks.

Housing prices rose dramatically from the late 1990s in consequence of the fateful decision under Bill Clinton to unleash the savings hidden in the nation's housing stock for sixty years. Clinton signed in 1997 the libertarian Republican legislation rewriting the tax laws which had forced homeowners to stay in their homes or move up to avoid large capital gains tax hits. Large economic forces were behind this, not the least of which was the growing sense of the unsustainability of the middle class consumption culture without a new source of savings. 

The birth of the housing ATM under Reagan in the 1980s had no doubt prepared the way for these developments, who infamously did away with the tax deductibility of credit card interest while increasing the same for home equity lines of credit. The effect was to get the children of the Baby Boom to think of their homes as mere commodities which could be exploited to extract value. The liquidity unleashed by the Clinton legislation ten years later hit the economy like a tidal wave, driving prices higher and higher into the now infamous housing bubble as homes were churned by flippers and families alike. It took just ten years of that to drive the economy into the worst panic it had experienced since the Great Depression.

Reversing these horrible developments would require a civilizational transformation of values which in the past only Protestant Christianity seems to have been able to provide. Feminist ideology, like all ideology, has done nothing but take away. The revaluation of values necessary in our situation would have to begin with women insisting on fidelity and marriage once again. Women are biologically predisposed to the self-sacrifice needed. To get the men to go along they will need a Lysistrata, but she's probably not Camille Paglia.

Communism works in only one place.  

Camille Paglia has come a long way, but still transgresses with her own utopian good old days

From her remarks here:

We have to return to the authentic 1960s vision, which is about identity coming from consciousness, which transcends gender, which transcends all these divisions of race. Consciousness itself! Okay? In the 60s, we had this idea that there was a human sensibility that transcended individual and nation, and there was this cosmic consciousness. This sense of the universe as a whole. To see the human being in relationship to great eternal principles of life and death, mortality, and so on.

She doesn't get that the 1960s liberal vision was the unique and irreproducible product of late Christian civilization.

Camille Paglia crafts an anti-elitist zinger, aimed at our modern day Puritans, calls Comey an effete charlatan

From the interview here:

These elite Democrats occupy an amorphous meta-realm of subjective emotion, theoretical abstractions, and refined language. But Trump is by trade a builder who deals in the tangible, obdurate, objective world of physical materials, geometry, and construction projects, where communication often reverts to the brusque, coarse, high-impact level of pre-modern working-class life, whose daily locus was the barnyard. It's no accident that bourgeois Victorians of the industrial era tried to purge "barnyard language" out of English.

Feminists aren't just emotional, they're so emotional they're redundant

Jessica Valenti for The Grauniad, here:

When so many of us feel powerless, seeing the extraordinary power of one woman felt like a cathartic release. A reminder of what is possible, and of what our daughter – and ourselves – deserve.

So emotional are such feminists that saying "felt like a catharsis" isn't good enough. It has to be "a cathartic release".

And which catharsis isn't a release? And which catharsis isn't felt?

Where is Camille Paglia when we need her? Or is she so old now that she too succumbs to such nostalgia for emotion?

Powerlessness knows no sex. Just ask any old couple married for forty or fifty years. Or a baby, if it could talk.

Democrats are still light years away from recognizing Hillary lost because no one wanted to vote for a lying crook

Democrats here blame a litany of things . . .

• Bernie's challenge
• Comey's investigation
• The Russkies
• Clinton's centrism
• Clinton's campaign
• Clinton's failure to defend herself
• Clinton's messaging
• Democrats' inability to connect with the millions they failed

. . . but never the freight train of sooty baggage which defined Hillary Clinton.

Ya think? WaPo: "It's possible that Clinton supporters did not show up on Election Day"

The latest tally shows Hillary not getting 8.361 million votes in 2016 which Obama got in 2008. No matter what Trump's coalition was in 2016, its size shows little variation from 2008 and 2012. There was no sea change of support for his candidacy.

The answer for Clinton's loss is in the disarray among Democrats because their candidate was so horrible, which is why the media have portrayed Trump that way. It's liberal projection syndrome all over again. Hillary Clinton was the worst candidate for president in at least a generation. "More sooty baggage than a 90-car freight train" was how Camille Paglia put it 3 years ago. Democrats should have listened to her.

WaPo, recognizing that the proper comparison is with 2008, not 2012:

Absent final turnout numbers, it is still too early to assess whether these shifting vote patterns are the result of differential turnout among Clinton and Trump supporters or the result of genuine voter conversion. It’s possible that a sizable chunk of Latino Clinton supporters, in addition to white women, African Americans, and Asian Americans, did not show up on Election Day. It’s also possible that a significant portion of these voters were willing to overlook Trump’s incendiary remarks and vote for him based on other factors, like the need to shake up “politics as usual.”

Camille Paglia likes Trump's swaggering retro machismo, is repelled by Cruz' weirdly womanish face

Here:

Cruz’s lugubrious, weirdly womanish face, with its prim, tight smile and mawkishly appealing puppy-dog eyebrows, is like a waxen mask, always on the verge of melting.

Carly Fiorina, call your office.

Democrats have got to shake off the Clinton albatross and find new blood

So says Camille Paglia, here.

Aging Lesbian Camille Paglia Still Longs For A Man

Reported here:

Politically correct, inadequate education, along with the decline of America's brawny industrial base, leaves many men with "no models of manhood," she says. "Masculinity is just becoming something that is imitated from the movies. There's nothing left. There's no room for anything manly right now." The only place you can hear what men really feel these days, she claims, is on sports radio. No surprise, she is an avid listener. The energy and enthusiasm "inspires me as a writer," she says, adding: "If we had to go to war," the callers "are the men that would save the nation."

Whether It's ObamaCare Or The Gay Mafia, Camille Paglia Detects Stalinism And Fascism

Lesbian Camille Paglia, quoted here:

“To express yourself in a magazine in an interview — this is the level of punitive PC, utterly fascist, utterly Stalinist, OK, that my liberal colleagues in the Democratic Party and on college campuses have supported and promoted over the last several decades. ... This is the whole legacy of free speech 1960’s that have [sic] been lost by my own party. ... I think that this intolerance by gay activists toward the full spectrum of human beliefs is a sign of immaturity, juvenility. ... This is not the mark of a true intellectual life. This is why there is no cultural life now in the U.S. Why nothing is of interest coming from the major media in terms of cultural criticism. Why the graduates of the Ivy League with their A, A, A+ grades are complete cultural illiterates, etc. is because they are not being educated in any way to give respect to opposing view points. There is a dialogue going on human civilization, for heaven sakes. It’s not just this monologue coming from fanatics who have displaced the religious beliefs of their parents into a political movement. ... And that is what happened to feminism, and that is what happened to gay activism, a fanaticism.”

Here's Paglia in October on ObamaCare:

"But the ObamaCare is, to me, a Stalinist intrusion--okay?--into American culture."

Hillary Has More Sooty Baggage Than A 90-Car Freight Train

So says Camille Paglia, here:

'It remains baffling how anyone would think that Hillary Clinton (born the same year as me) is our party’s best chance. She has more sooty baggage than a 90-car freight train. And what exactly has she ever accomplished — beyond bullishly covering for her philandering husband? She’s certainly busy, busy and ever on the move — with the tunnel-vision workaholism of someone trying to blot out uncomfortable private thoughts. I for one think it was a very big deal that our ambassador was murdered in Benghazi.'In saying “I take responsibility” for it as secretary of state, Hillary should have resigned immediately. The weak response by the Obama administration to that tragedy has given a huge opening to Republicans in the next presidential election. The impression has been amply given that Benghazi was treated as a public relations matter to massage rather than as the major and outrageous attack on the U.S. that it was. Throughout history, ambassadors have always been symbolic incarnations of the sovereignty of their nations and the dignity of their leaders. It’s even a key motif in “King Lear.” As far as I’m concerned, Hillary disqualified herself for the presidency in that fist-pounding moment at a congressional hearing when she said, “What difference does it make what we knew and when we knew it, Senator?” Democrats have got to shake off the Clinton albatross and find new blood.'

Camille Paglia Blames Obama's Libya Mistake On Women, ObamaCare On Stalinism

Both of which we have said.

The material is transcribed by Ann Althouse, here.