Camille Paglia: On Trump, Democrats, Transgenderism, and Islamist Terror

In a wide-ranging interview Paglia talks about Donald Trump’s successes, how Chuck Schumer emboldened the “resistance,” why the left can’t condemn Islamist terrorism, and “the cold biological truth that sex changes are impossible.”
..Camille Paglia: Some background is necessary. First of all, I must make my political affiliations crystal clear. I am a registered Democrat who voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary and for Jill Stein in the general election. Since last Fall, I’ve had my eye on Kamala Harris, the new senator from California, and I hope to vote for her in the next presidential primary.
.. What seems forgotten is that everyone, including the Hillary Clinton campaign, thought that Marco Rubio would be the Republican nominee. The moment was ideal for a Latino candidate with national appeal who could challenge the Democratic hold on Florida.
.. Trump’s frankly arrogant self-confidence spooked and crushed Rubio—it was a total fiasco.
.. My position continues to be that Hillary, with her supercilious, Marie Antoinette-style entitlement, was a disastrously wrong candidate for 2016 and that she secured the nomination only through overt chicanery by the Democratic National Committee, assisted by a corrupt national media who, for over a year, imposed a virtual blackout on potential primary rivals.
.. Bernie Sanders had the populist passion, economic message, government record, and personal warmth to counter Trump.
..Despite his history of embarrassing gaffes, the affable, plain-spoken Joe Biden, in my view, could also have defeated Trump, but he was blocked from running at literally the last moment by President Barack Obama, for reasons that the major media refused to explore.
.. the election results plainly demonstrated that Trump was speaking to vital concerns (jobs, immigration, and terrorism among them) for which the Democrats had few concrete solutions.
.. How do Democrats imagine they can ever expand their electoral support if they go on and on in this self-destructive way, impugning half the nation as vile racists and homophobes?
.. I see no more chaos than was abundantly present during the first six months of both the Clinton and Obama administrations.
.. Trump seems to be methodically trying to fulfill his campaign promises, notably regarding the economy and deregulation
.. Many highly educated, upper-middle-class Democrats regard themselves as exemplars of “compassion” (which they have elevated into a supreme political principle) and yet they routinely assail Trump voters as ignorant, callous hate-mongers.
.. The laborers who build and maintain these marvels are recognized only if they can be shoehorned into victim status.
.. Liberalism of the 1950s and ’60s exalted civil liberties, individualism, and dissident thought and speech. “Question authority” was our generational rubric when I was in college. But today’s liberalism has become grotesquely mechanistic and authoritarian: It’s all about reducing individuals to a group identity, defining that group in permanent victim terms, and denying others their democratic right to challenge that group and its ideology. Political correctness represents the fossilized institutionalization of once-vital revolutionary ideas, which have become mere rote formulas. It is repressively Stalinist, dependent on a labyrinthine, parasitic bureaucracy to enforce its empty dictates.
.. Knowledge of the great world religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Judeo-Christianity, Islam—is the true multiculturalism. Everyone should have a general familiarity with the beliefs, texts, rituals, art, and shrines of all the major religions. Only via a direct encounter with the Qu’ran and Hadith, for example, can anyone know what they say about jihad and how those strikingly numerous passages have been interpreted in different ways over time.
.. she argues among other things, that the pharmaceutical industry, having lost income when routine estrogen therapy for menopausal women was abandoned because of its health risks, has been promoting the relatively new idea of transgenderism in order to create a permanent class of customers who will need to take prescribed hormones for life.
.. The cold biological truth is that sex changes are impossible. Every single cell of the human body remains coded with one’s birth gender for life. Intersex ambiguities can occur, but they are developmental anomalies that represent a tiny proportion of all human births.

Democrats Elect Tom Perez as Party Chairman

Former Labor secretary, backed by party establishment, defeated Keith Ellison from the party’s populist wing

To help heal the division, Mr. Perez in declaring victory immediately appointed Mr. Ellison as the party’s vice chairman. Mr. Ellison practically begged his supporters to remain in the party and back Mr. Perez.

.. “It is imperative that Tom understands that the same-old, same-old is not working and that we must open the doors of the party to working people and young people in a way that has never been done before,” Mr. Sanders said.

..Keith Ellison was uniquely qualified to transform that anger and fear into political power and organization.”
.. Despite Mr. Ellison’s grass-roots support, large segments of the DNC remained mistrustful of Mr. Sanders, a registered independent whose supporters are aiming to transform the party by installing his acolytes in party posts.
.. The Perez victory ends a four-month campaign to lead the party that few Democrats had expected. Had Mrs. Clinton been elected president, as virtually all DNC members here thought would happen, she would have served as the head of the party and named the new leadership.
.. Mr. Perez has a résumé long on government experience and short on political campaigning.
.. Mr. Perez worked in the Justice Department’s civil-rights division under President Bill Clinton and during President Barack Obama’s first term. In 2013, Mr. Obama named Mr. Perez to lead the Labor Department, a post that made him a favorite of labor unions and liberal activists. But as a member of the Obama cabinet, Mr. Perez backed the Trans Pacific Partnership and other trade deals opposed by the party’s base.
.. He entered the DNC race weeks after Mr. Ellison with the encouragement of Obama allies
.. Haim Saban, an Israeli-American donor who funded the construction of the DNC’s Washington headquarters, in December publicly called Mr. Ellison “clearly an anti-Semite.”
.. Mr. Perez’s association with Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton was a liability for him with liberals and new voters brought to the party by Mr. Sanders’s presidential campaign. These voters are looking for a revamp of a party structure they see as too beholden to corporate interests.
.. Mr. Perez adopted much of the rhetoric of the Sanders movement and other critics of the Obama-era DNC, calling for a return to an emphasis on grass roots organizing, and a 50-state strategy that does more to channel money to state parties. Behind the scenes, though, Mr. Perez drew on the strength of the Obama network. He was endorsed by former Vice President Joe Biden and former Attorney General Eric Holder. Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett made phone calls to wavering DNC members.

Absorbing the Impossible

She did not understand why the president discouraged Joe Biden — someone she could have supported — from running.

.. “Hillary was the status quo and one of the most flawed candidates in history,” he said. “This is a complete repudiation of President Obama, the man who pushed Hillary and deemed Trump a clown.”

.. It is unthinkable to imagine the most overtly racist candidate — and head of the offensive birther movement — driving in the limousine to the inauguration with the first African-American president. What would they discuss? How Trump plans to repeal Obamacare? How Trump will appoint Supreme Court justices that will transform America into a drastically more conservative landscape over the next 20 years? How Trump plans to undo the Iran deal? When will Trump begin deporting Hispanics? When will Attorney General Rudy Giuliani pardon Chris Christie and put Hillary in jail?

.. Hillary’s closing line in the campaign was that she was the only thing standing between her and the abyss. But to my conservative family, Hillary was the abyss while Donald was the baseball bat to smash Washington.

.. When Trump beat 16 seasoned pols in the Republican primary, Kevin wrote, that should have sent a clear message that the public was fed up with political insiders

.. “After months of chatter about the implosion of the Republican Party, we are instead witnessing the obviation of the Democratic Party.”

The Biden Doctrine

Former Defense Secretary Bob Gates wrote in his memoir, Duty, that Biden has been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

.. I haven’t always agreed with Biden’s positions, but those positions have tended to follow a pattern and demonstrate a consistency of approach, analysis, and engagement that stands out—particularly when compared with many other foreign-policy players who often don’t leave clear footprints.

.. decisions on whether to deploy America’s “enormous military capability,” he said in the interview, should depend on assessments of “(a) what is the strategic interest? And (b) what are the second, third, and fourth steps in this process?” His contention to me that “you do not commit force unless you can demonstrate that the use of that force is sustainable and will produce an outcome” sounds nearly identical to the views President Barack Obama expressed to Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlanticarticle “The Obama Doctrine.”

.. what makes his approach distinctive is that he may very well be the nation’s first “personality realist.” Unlike Obama—whose relationships with world leaders from Japan’s Shinzo Abe to Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu are famously chilly—Biden says of his doctrine that “it all gets down to the conduct of foreign policy being personal. … All [foreign policy] is, is a logical extension of personal relationships, with a lot less information to act on.”

 .. She supported the U.S. surge of forces into Afghanistan in 2009, at a time when Biden opposed it. In 2011, she supported both America’s Libya intervention and the raid to kill Osama bin Laden
.. Americans, he said, tend to over-respond to the “wolf at the door” without recognizing that there are other wolves out in the field.
.. The “wolves in the field,” then—the real existential threats facing the nation—he sees not as terrorism, even from ISIS, but rather the prospect of “loose nukes, and unintended nuclear conflict that erupts with another nuclear power” like Russia or China. Other big threats include “that not-stable figure in North Korea,” Kim Jong Un, and Pakistan, which, he reminded me, he dubbed the “most dangerous nation in the world” nine years ago.
.. “Terrorism is a real threat,” Biden said, “but it’s not an existential threat to the existence of the democratic country of the United States of America.

.. had seen Biden take his granddaughter Finnegan to China to help break open new terrain with the new Chinese leaderwhen Xi Jinping first took office, and do the same with his granddaughter Naomi*
.. “You’ve got to figure out what is the other guy’s [leader’s] bandwidth. … You have to figure out what is realistically possible
.. Netanyahu had enough trust in the vice president to ask him to help normalize his country’s relations with Turkey, which had ruptured in 2010. Biden took the mission, mediating between Netanyahu and Erdogan—himself not an uncomplicated leader. And it worked. The two countries signed a deal to normalize relations this summer. Netanyahu called the vice president thanking him for his role in making their rapprochement—and a potential natural-gas deal between the two countries—work.
.. Biden has tried to effect similar reconciliations between South Korean President Park Geun-hye and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
.. Biden is regularly handed the lemons in the foreign-policy sphere—the tough, unglamorous cases, the ones that have to be worked for a long time. It’s worth noting, as Goldberg has, that there are leaders Obama never really warmed up to. Biden tends these relationships
.. Biden would be the golden retriever of the administration.’
.. Biden Doctrine, then, has four key components. 1) Don’t use force unless it counts and is sustainable. 2) Shore up and strengthen alliances—and build common cause on common projects with other global stakeholders. The world is changing and fragile and America can’t do all that needs to be done alone. 3) Have a sense of perspective, and think about proportional responses to threats—terrorism is not existential but nuclear exchanges are. 4) Relationships and the personal side of foreign-policy making—with allies and with enemies—is a key part of successful foreign-policy execution. It’s this fourth dimension of “personality realism” that represents the vice president’s biggest contribution