Camille Paglia’s Defense of Jordan Peterson, Excerpted from a Longer Statement Sent in Response to Queries from a Brazilian Journalist
Posted: March 29, 2018 Filed under: Censorship, Mediasphere, Think Tank | Tags: Activism, Advocacy journalism, Anthropology, Biology, Brazil, Camile Paglia, Epoca, Jordan Peterson, journalism, Media bias, Nature, New York Review of Books, propaganda Leave a commentFrom Camille Paglia: excerpted from a longer statement sent in response to queries from a Brazilian journalist writing a profile of me for a major Brazilian magazine, Epoca.
Camille Paglia on Hugh Hefner’s Legacy, Trump’s Masculinity & Feminism’s Sex Phobia
Posted: October 3, 2017 Filed under: Education, Entertainment, Health and Social Issues, Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Camille Paglia, Hugh Hefner, Playboy Leave a comment
Jeanie Pyun writes: With the death of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner on Sept. 27, cultural historian and contrarian feminist Camille Paglia spoke to The Hollywood Reporter in an exclusive interview on topics ranging from what Hef’s choice of the bunny costume revealed about him to the current “dreary” state of relationships between the sexes.
Have you ever been to a party at the Playboy Mansion?
No, I’m not a partygoer! [laughs]
So let me just ask: Was Hugh Hefner a misogynist?
Absolutely not! The central theme of my wing of pro-sex feminism is that all celebrations of the sexual human body are positive. Second-wave feminism went off the rails when it was totally unable to deal with erotic imagery, which has been a central feature of the entire history of Western art ever since Greek nudes.
So let’s dig in a little — what would you say was Playboy’s cultural impact?
Hugh Hefner absolutely revolutionized the persona of the American male. In the post World War II era, men’s magazines were about hunting and fishing or the military, or they were like Esquire, erotic magazines with a kind of European flair.
Hefner re-imagined the American male as a connoisseur in the continental manner, a man who enjoyed all the fine pleasures of life, including sex. Hefner brilliantly put sex into a continuum of appreciative response to jazz, to art, to ideas, to fine food. This was something brand new. Enjoying fine cuisine had always been considered unmanly in America. Hefner updated and revitalized the image of the British gentleman, a man of leisure who is deft at conversation — in which American men have never distinguished themselves — and with the art of seduction, which was a sport refined by the French.
Hefner’s new vision of American masculinity was part of his desperate revision of his own Puritan heritage. On his father’s side, he descended directly from William Bradford, who came over on the Mayflower and was governor of Plymouth Colony, the major settlement of New England Puritans.
But Hefner’s worldview was already dated by the explosion of the psychedelic 1960s. The anything-goes, free-love atmosphere — illustrated by all that hedonistic rolling around in the mud at Woodstock in 1969 — made the suave Hefner style seem old-fashioned and buttoned up. Nevertheless, I have always taken the position that the men’s magazines — from the glossiest and most sophisticated to the rawest and raunchiest — represent the brute reality of sexuality. Pornography is not a distortion. It is not a sexist twisting of the facts of life but a kind of peephole into the roiling, primitive animal energies that are at the heart of sexual attraction and desire.
What could today’s media learn from what Hef did at Playboy?
It must be remembered that Hefner was a gifted editor who knew how to produce a magazine that had great visual style and that was a riveting combination of pictorial with print design. Everything about Playboy as a visual object, whether you liked the magazine or not, was lively and often ravishing.
In the early 1990s, you said that Hugh Hefner “ushered in a revolution in American sexual consciousness. Some say that the women in Playboy come across as commodities, like a stereo, but I think Playboy is more an appreciation of pleasure of all kinds.” What would you add to his legacy today, if anything?
I would hope that people could see the positives in the Playboy sexual landscape — the foregrounding of pleasure and fun and humor. Sex is not a tragedy, it’s a comedy! [laughs]
What do you think about the fact that Trump’s childhood hero and model of sophisticated American masculinity was Hefner?
Before the election, I kept pointing out that the mainstream media based in Manhattan, particularly The New York Times, was hopelessly off in the way it was simplistically viewing Trump as a classic troglodyte misogynist. I certainly saw in Trump the entire Playboy aesthetic, including the glitzy world of casinos and beauty pageants. It’s a long passé world of confident male privilege that preceded the birth of second-wave feminism. There is no doubt that Trump strongly identified with it as he was growing up. It seems to be truly his worldview.
[Read the full story here, at Hollywood Reporter]
But it is categorically not a world of unwilling women. Nor is it driven by masculine abuse. It’s a world of show girls, of flamboyant femaleness, a certain kind of strutting style that has its own intoxicating sexual allure — which most young people attending elite colleges today have had no contact with whatever.
I instantly recognized and understood it in Trump because I had always been an admirer of Hefner’s sexual cosmos. I can certainly see how retrograde and nostalgic it is, but at the same time I maintain that even in the photos that The New York Times posted in trying to convict Trump of sexism, you can feel leaping from these pictures the intense sizzle of sexual polarization — in that long-ago time when men were men and women were women!
My 1960s generation was the gender-bending generation — we were all about blending the genders in fashion and attitude. But it has to be said that in terms of world history, the taste for and interest in androgyny is usually relatively brief. And it comes at late and decadent phases of culture! [laughs] World civilizations predictably return again and again to sexual polarization, where there is a tremendous electric charge between men and women. Read the rest of this entry »
Camille Paglia: Feminism, Free Women and Free Speech
Posted: March 22, 2017 Filed under: Education, Reading Room, Think Tank | Tags: American Revolution, Camile Paglia, Date Rape, Free speech, Free Women Free Men, French Revolution, Men, Netflix, Political Correctness, Women Leave a comment
The ‘dissident feminist’ on the intersection between feminism and debate.
Camile Paglia writes: History moves in cycles. The plague of political correctness and assaults on free speech that erupted in the 1980s and were beaten back in the 1990s have returned with a vengeance. In the United States, the universities as well as the mainstream media are currently patrolled by well-meaning but ruthless thought police, as dogmatic in their views as agents of the Spanish Inquisition
. We are plunged once again into an ethical chaos where intolerance masquerades as tolerance and where individual liberty is crushed by the tyranny of the group.
[Order Paglia’s book “Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism” from Amazon.com]
The premier principles of my new book, Free Women, Free Men, are free thought and free speech—open, mobile, and unconstrained by either liberal or conservative ideology. The liberal versus conservative dichotomy, dating from the split between Left and Right following the French Revolution, is hopelessly outmoded for our far more complex era of expansive technology and global politics. A bitter polarization of liberal and conservative has become so extreme and strident in both the Americas and Europe that it sometimes resembles mental illness, severed from the common sense realities of everyday life.
[Read the full excerpt here, at Time.com]
My dissident brand of feminism is grounded in my own childhood experience as a fractious rebel against the suffocating conformism of the 1950s, when Americans, exhausted by two decades of economic instability and war, reverted to a Victorian cult of domesticity that limited young girls’ aspirations and confined them (in my jaundiced view) to a simpering, saccharine femininity. Read the rest of this entry »
Camille Paglia: Feminism ‘Bogged Down’ By Democrat Identity
Posted: March 18, 2017 Filed under: Health and Social Issues, Mediasphere, Politics, Reading Room, Think Tank Leave a comment
‘I want feminism to include women who are conservative’.
Caroline May reports: Feminism should embrace a more diverse range of women and avoid being associated with a single political party, according to feminist and social critic Camille Paglia.
“I don’t like the way feminism has gotten bogged down by being identified with one party: my party, the Democratic Party.”
“I don’t like the way feminism has gotten bogged down by being identified with one party: my party, the Democratic Party,” 
Paglia said Friday during an appearance on Sean Hannity’s radio show.
[Order Paglia’s book “Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism” from Amazon.com]
Paglia, the author of “Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism,” said she does not like the current direction of the feminist movement and would prefer to see it include a larger swath of women.
“I want feminism to include women who are conservative, women who are church-going, women who are into home-schooling and so on. As well as women like me, who favor total abortion rights.”
“I want feminism to include women who are conservative, women who are church-going, women who are into home-schooling and so on. As well as women like me, who favor total abortion rights,” she said. Read the rest of this entry »
Camille Paglia: How to Age Disgracefully in Hollywood
Posted: January 8, 2017 Filed under: Art & Culture, Entertainment, History, Mediasphere, Think Tank | Tags: A Foreign Affair, Alisa Ganieva, Anthony Marra, Antonino Faà di Bruno, Berlin, Billboard Music Award, Billy Wilder, Bing Crosby, Camille Paglia, Casino Royale (1967 film), City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940's, Gloria Estefan, Hollywood, Mariah Carey Leave a comment
The social critic and academic blames 1960s disruptions of gender roles (and not the entertainment industry) for Madonna’s and J. Lo’s difficulty letting go of their youth as she chastises them to “stop cannibalizing the young.”
Camille Paglia writes: In December, at the Billboard Women in Music Awards in New York City, Madonna was given the trophy for Woman of the Year. In a rambling, tearful acceptance speech that ran more than 16 minutes, she claimed to be a victim of “blatant misogyny, sexism, constant bullying and relentless abuse.”
It was a startling appropriation of stereotypical feminist rhetoric by a superstar whose major achievement in cultural history was to overthrow the puritanical old guard of second-wave feminism and to liberate the long-silenced pro-sex, pro-beauty wing of feminism, which (thanks to her) swept to victory in the 1990s.
Madonna’s opening line at the awards gala was edited out of the shortened official video: “I stand before you as a doormat — oh, I mean a female entertainer.” Merciful Minerva! Can there be any woman on Earth less like a doormat than Madonna Louise Ciccone? Madonna sped on with shaky assertions (“There are no rules if you’re a boy”) and bafflingly portrayed the huge commercial success of her 1992 book, Sex, as a chapter of the Spanish Inquisition, in which she was persecuted as “a whore and a witch.”
[Read the full story here, at Hollywood Reporter]
I was singled out by name as having accused her of “objectifying” herself sexually (prudish feminist jargon that I always have rejected), when in fact I was Madonna’s first major defender, celebrating her revival of pagan eroticism and prophesying in a highly controversial 1990 New York Times op-ed that she was “the future of feminism.”
Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, in which her character “has gone bonkers and thinks she’s the sexy Salome of her youth.” Getty Images
Crawford exhibits “crazed willpower and misery in her facial muscles,” says Paglia. Getty Images
But I want to focus here on the charge of ageism that Madonna, now 58, leveled against the entertainment industry and that received heavy, sympathetic coverage in the mainstream media. Her grievances about the treatment of women performers climaxed with this: “And finally, do not age, because to age is a sin. You will be criticized, you will be vilified and you will definitely not be played on the radio.”
[Read the full story here, at Hollywood Reporter]
First of all, lack of radio airplay may indeed hamper new or indie groups, but in this digital age, when songs go viral in a flash, rich and famous performers of Madonna’s level fail to get airplay not because of their age, but because their current music no longer is attracting a broad audience. When was the last time Madonna released hit songs of the brilliant quality of her golden era of the 1980s and ’90s? Lavish, lucrative touring rather than sustained creative work in the studio has been her priority for decades. Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] Christina Hoff Sommers & Camille Paglia on Intersectional Feminism and ‘Safe Spaces’
Posted: June 28, 2016 Filed under: Education, Mediasphere, Think Tank | Tags: Academia, Camille Paglia, Christina Hoff Sommers, Feminism, Safe Spaces Leave a comment
Christina Hoff Sommers and Camille Paglia examine the origins of intersectional feminism and “safe spaces”, and discuss Paglia’s own interpretations of feminism—what she labeled over the years as “amazon feminism”, “drag queen feminism”, and “street smart feminism.”
This is part three of a nine part series featuring Christina Hoff Sommers and Camille Paglia. The other videos in the series can be found here:
Part 1 – The state of contemporary feminism: https://goo.gl/nRJ0ss
Part 2 – The fight for student liberties: https://goo.gl/dS1QKF
Part 3 – Intersectional feminism and safe spaces: https://goo.gl/cmbj8g
Part 4 – Based Mom and Based Goddess on #Gamergate: https://goo.gl/ZFfuzh
Part 5 – Trigger warnings and the danger of overprotecting students: https://goo.gl/WE29Yc
Part 6 – The “male gaze”: https://goo.gl/hRWfhi
Part 7 – Fixing a broken university curriculum: https://goo.gl/pWmpwh
Part 8 – The absence of biology in gender studies: https://goo.gl/QrZQEU
Part 9 – The danger of looking at history through a contemporary political lens: https://goo.gl/D82LYB
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OH YES HE DID: Clinton IT Guy Bryan Pagliano Invokes 5th More than 125 Times in Deposition
Posted: June 22, 2016 Filed under: Censorship, Crime & Corruption, Law & Justice, Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: Bryan Pagliano, Hillary Clinton, Pantsuit Report Leave a comment
Hillary Clinton IT specialist Bryan Pagliano invoked the Fifth more than 125 times during a 90-minute, closed-door deposition Wednesday with the conservative watchdog Judicial Watch, a source with the group told Fox News.
The official said Pagliano was working off an index card and read the same crafted statement each time.
“It was a sad day for government transparency,” the Judicial Watch official said, adding they asked all their questions and Pagliano invoked the Fifth Amendment right not to answer them.
Pagliano was a central figure in the set-up and management of Clinton’s personal server she used exclusively for government business while secretary of state. The State Department inspector general found Clinton violated government rules with that arrangement.
He was deposed as part of Judicial Watch’s lawsuit seeking Clinton emails and other records. A federal judge granted discovery, in turn allowing the depositions, which is highly unusual in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The judge cited “reasonable suspicion” Clinton and her aides were trying to avoid federal records law.
Pagliano’s deposition before Judicial Watch is one of several interviews with high-profile Clinton aides, taking place as the FBI separately is continuing its federal criminal investigation.
A federal court agreed to keep sealed Pagliano’s immunity deal struck with the Justice Department in December, citing the sensitivity of the FBI probe and calling it a “criminal” matter.
The next Clinton aide to testify is Huma Abedin. In an earlier deposition, lawyers for senior Clinton aide Cheryl Mills, during a nearly five-hour deposition in Washington, repeatedly objected to questions about Pagliano’s role in setting up the former secretary of state’s private server.
According to a transcript of that deposition which Judicial Watch released, Mills attorney Beth Wilkinson – as well as Obama administration lawyers – objected to the line of questioning about Magliano….(read more)
Source: Fox News
BREAKING: Clinton Tech Aide Bryan Pagliano Plans to Take the Fifth at Deposition
Posted: June 1, 2016 Filed under: Breaking News, Crime & Corruption, Law & Justice, White House | Tags: Associated Press, Bill Clinton, Cheryl Mills, Democratic National Convention, Emmet G. Sullivan, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin, Judicial Watch, United States Department of State Leave a comment
“Mr. Pagliano will invoke his right under the Fifth Amendment and decline to testify at the deposition. Given the constitutional implications, the absence of any proper purpose for video recording the deposition, and the considerable risk of abuse, the Court should preclude Judicial Watch, Inc. … from creating an audiovisual recording of Mr. Pagliano’s deposition.”
Josh Gerstein reports: A former information technology adviser to Hillary Clinton plans to exercise his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination at a deposition next week and wants to prevent any video recording being made of the session. Lawyers for former State Department tech specialist Bryan Pagliano said in a court filing Wednesday that there’s no valid reason to make an audio or video recording of the session since Pagliano doesn’t plan to answer any of the questions he’s asked by the conservative group Judicial Watch, which is pursuing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit related to Clinton’s private email server. The group is scheduled to take Pagliano’s deposition on Monday.
“Judicial Watch may move to unseal the materials at any time. Furthermore, in the event of a leak or data breach at the court reporting company, Mr. Pagliano would be hard-pressed to prevent further dissemination and republication of the video.”
“Mr. Pagliano will invoke his right under the Fifth Amendment and decline to testify at the deposition,” Pagliano’s lawyers Mark MacDougall and Connor Mullin wrote. “Given the constitutional implications, the absence of any proper purpose for video recording the deposition, and the considerable risk of abuse, the Court should preclude Judicial Watch, Inc. … from creating an audiovisual recording of Mr. Pagliano’s deposition.”
“Given that there is no proper purpose for videotaping the deposition in the first place, Judicial Watch’s preference should yield to the significant constitutional interests at stake.”
[Read the full story here, at POLITICO]
Acting on a request from another former aide to Clinton, Cheryl Mills, U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan already ruled that videos of the sessions should be put under seal. However, Pagliano’s lawyers say there’s still a chance the video could emerge later either with or without permission from the court. Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] Navel-Gazing About Gender While the World Burns: Camille Paglia on the Unreal World of America’s Youth
Posted: April 25, 2016 Filed under: Art & Culture, Health and Social Issues, Politics, Think Tank | Tags: Baghch-e-Simsim, Belgians, Caitlin Moran, Camille Paglia, Democratic Party (United States), Feminism, Feminist movement, Gender, Islam, Republican Party (United States), Sexuality, Woman, Women's rights 7 Comments
“They have no sense of the great patterns of world history, the rise and fall of civilisations like Babylon and Rome that became very sexually tolerant, and then fell.”
Carolyn Moynihan writes: Camille Paglia, an American college professor and social critic, is one of a kind: a feminist who objects to almost every form of feminism known to womankind; a sexual radical who believes in complete freedom of sexual expression, yet a realist who insists that women have to take full responsibility for the sexual choices they make; and a lesbian who objects to the current censorship of any discussion about the causes of homosexuality.
“This hyper-self-consciousness about ‘Who am I? Where exactly am I on the gender spectrum?’ is mere navel-gazing, while in the Middle East ISIS is beheading people. It is a kind of madness of self-absorption.”
Paglia is, in fact, a notorious contrarian on practically every social issue. And for all her radicalism the 69-year-old often sounds more like an Italian grandmother of yesteryear (she is the child of Italian immigrants) than the political progressive and sexual radical she claims to be. At least, that is the impression left by the very interesting and entertaining interview with Ella Whelan of Spiked (the home of UK contrarianism) about feminism, recorded in the video above.
The video is half an hour long, but here is a taste of Paglia’s views on the issues flourishing in the American hothouse.
Today’s college students
“They have no sense of the great patterns of world history, the rise and fall of civilisations like Babylon and Rome that became very sexually tolerant, and then fell. If you’ve had no exposure to that, you can honestly believe that ‘There is progress all around us and we are moving to an ideal state of culture, where we all hold hands and everyone is accepted for what they are … and the 
environment will be pure…’ – a magical utopian view that we are marching to perfection. And the sign of this progress is toleration – of the educated class – for homosexuality, or for changing gender, or whatever.
[Check out the books and essays of Camille Puglia at Amazon.com]
“To me it’s a sign of the opposite, it’s symptomatic of a civilisation just before it falls: ‘we’ are very tolerant, not passionate, but there are bands of vandals and destroyers circling around the edge of our civilisation who will bring it down.”
On homosexuality
“There is censorship of discussion about the causes of various gender issues – for at least 25 years, now, in the case of homosexuality itself. In the 1980s there was talk of finding a gay gene, but when that was not found, silence [became the rule]. To even raise the question of how homosexuality is 
caused is considered homophobic. But I think it is imperative for everyone to ask questions about matters of development of the personality and sexual orientation.
[Read the full story here, at MercatorNet]
“I’m waiting for some brave young gays to protest against the censorship.
On identity politics and transgenderism
“This hyper-self-consciousness about ‘Who am I? Where exactly am I on the gender spectrum?’ is mere navel-gazing, while in the Middle East ISIS is beheading people. It is a kind of madness of self-absorption.”
“I think there are authentic transgender people who had a genetic issue from the start, but they are a tiny, tiny minority of the population, and medical science is still developing to help these people.”
Noting that Hillary Clinton gave transgenders specific mention at the beginning and end of a rally speech last week, the interviewer asks why this issue gets so much attention in the news. Read the rest of this entry »
Camille Paglia: ‘Transgender Mania’ is a Symptom of West’s Cultural Collapse
Posted: November 4, 2015 Filed under: Art & Culture, Health and Social Issues, Mediasphere, Think Tank | Tags: Al Jazeera America, American Airlines, B. J. Novak, Bankable star, Camille Paglia, Orlando International Airport, Reality television, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, Trans man, Trans woman, Transgender Leave a comment
“I think that the transgender propagandists make wildly inflated claims about the multiplicity of gender.”
(CNSNews.com)– Sam Dorman reports: Best-selling feminist author, social critic and self-described “transgender being” Camille Paglia said in an interview last month that the rise of 
transgenderism in the West is a symptom of decadence and cultural collapse.
[Check out the books and essays of Camille Puglia at Amazon.com]
“Nothing… better defines the decadence of the West to the jihadists than our toleration of open homosexuality and this transgender mania now,” Paglia said during an October 22 interview on the Brazilian television program Roda Viva.
“Sex reassignment surgery, even today with all of its advances, cannot in fact change anyone’s sex, okay. You can define yourself as a trans man, or a trans woman, as one of these new gradations along the scale.”
“But ultimately, every single cell in the human body, the DNA in that cell, remains coded for your biological birth… So there are a lot of lies being propagated at the present moment, which I think is not in anyone’s best interest.”
Paglia also said during the interview that “transgender propagandists” are overstating their case.
“I think that the transgender propagandists make wildly inflated claims about the multiplicity of gender,” she said.
“I found in my study that history is cyclic, and everywhere in the world you find this pattern in ancient times: that as a culture begins to decline, you have an efflorescence of transgender phenomena. That is a symptom of cultural collapse.”
“Sex reassignment surgery, even today with all of its advances, cannot in fact change anyone’s sex, okay. You can define yourself as a trans man, or a trans woman, as one of
these new gradations along the scale. But ultimately, every single cell in the human body, the DNA in that 
cell, remains coded for your biological birth.
“Now what I’m concerned about is the popularity and the availability of sex reassignment surgery, so that someone who doesn’t feel that he or she belongs to the biological birth, gender. People are being encouraged to intervene in the process.”
“So there are a lot of lies being propagated at the present moment, which I think is not in anyone’s best interest.
“Now what I’m concerned about is the popularity and the availability of sex reassignment surgery, so that someone who doesn’t feel that he or she belongs to the biological birth, gender. People are being encouraged to intervene in the process.
“Parents are now encouraged to subject the child to procedures that I think are a form of child abuse. The hormones to slow puberty, actual surgical manipulations, etcetera. I think that this is wrong, that people should wait until they are of an informed age of consent.”
“Parents should not be doing this to their children and I think that even in the teenage years is too soon to be making this leap. People change, people grow, and people adapt.” Read the rest of this entry »
HQ: Paglia on ‘Snark Atheism’ and How Jon Stewart Has Debased Political Discourse
Posted: July 29, 2015 Filed under: Censorship, Mediasphere, Politics, Religion, Think Tank | Tags: Abortion, Authoritarianism, Bernie Sanders, Camille Paglia, Christianity, Christopher Hitchens, Jon Stewart, Liberalism, media, New Atheism, news, Planned Parenthood, Reactionary Left, Richard Dawkins, Salon, The Daily Show, United States 2 Comments
“Suppressing information based upon what politics the information might help or hurt — is of course as illiberal and authoritarian an idea as you can have.”
— Ace
[Segments of the Camille Paglia Salon interview via @rdbrewer4, Ace of Spades. Go here for additional commentary at the HQ]
‘All the great world religions contain a complex system of beliefs regarding the nature of the universe and human life that is far more profound than anything that liberalism has produced.’
SALON: You’re an atheist, and yet I don’t ever see you sneer at religion in the way that the very aggressive atheist class right now often will. What do you make of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and the religion critics who seem not to have respect for religions for faith?
PAGLIA: I regard them as adolescents. I say in the introduction to my last book, “Glittering Images”, that “Sneering at religion is juvenile, symptomatic of a stunted imagination.” It exposes a state of perpetual adolescence that has something to do with their parents– they’re still sneering at dad in some way….
“I think Stewart’s show demonstrated the decline and vacuity of contemporary comedy. I cannot stand that smug, snarky, superior tone. I hated the fact that young people were getting their news through that filter of sophomoric snark.“
I’m speaking here as an atheist. I don’t believe there is a God, but I respect every religion deeply. All the great world religions contain a complex system of beliefs regarding the nature of the universe and human life that is far more profound than anything that liberalism has produced.
“Now let me give you a recent example of the persisting insularity of liberal thought in the media…”
We have a whole generation of young people who are clinging to politics and to politicized visions of sexuality for their belief system.
“When the first secret Planned Parenthood video was released in mid-July, anyone who looks only at liberal media was kept totally in the dark about it, even after the second video was released…”
They see nothing but politics, but politics is tiny….But this sneering thing! I despise snark. Snark is a disease that started with David Letterman and jumped to Jon Stewart and has proliferated since.
“It was a huge and disturbing story, but there was total silence in the liberal media. That kind of censorship was shockingly unprofessional.”
I think it’s horrible for young people! And this kind of snark atheism–let’s just invent that term right now–is stupid, and people who act like that are stupid….
“The resistance of liberals in the media to new ideas was enormous. Liberals think of themselves as very open-minded, but that’s simply not true!”
I think Stewart’s show demonstrated the decline and vacuity of contemporary comedy. I cannot stand that smug, snarky, superior tone. I hated the fact that young people were getting their news through that filter of sophomoric snark….
“Liberalism has sadly become a knee-jerk ideology, with people barricaded in their comfortable little cells. They think that their views are the only rational ones, and everyone else is not only evil but financed by the Koch brothers.”
As for his influence, if he helped produce the hackneyed polarization of moral liberals versus evil conservatives, then he’s partly at fault for the political stalemate in the United States….
[Read more at Ace of Spades HQ]
The resistance of liberals in the media to new ideas was enormous. Liberals think of themselves as very open-minded, but that’s simply not true! Liberalism has sadly become a knee-jerk ideology, with people barricaded in their comfortable little cells. They think that their views are the only rational ones, and everyone else is not only evil but financed by the Koch brothers. It’s so simplistic! Read the rest of this entry »
Camille Paglia: Bill Clinton = Bill Cosby
Posted: July 28, 2015 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Health and Social Issues, Mediasphere, Politics, White House | Tags: Bill Clinton, Bill Cosby, Camille Paglia, Racism, Rape, Sexual assault Leave a comment
Next Up: how race-baiting Salon.com is worse than both…
Camille Paglia: What a Woman President Should Be Like
Posted: July 15, 2015 Filed under: Politics, Think Tank, White House | Tags: Argentina, Bolivia, Buenos Aires, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Democracy, Democrats, Economic warfare, Election, Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars, GOP, Hillary Clinton, President of Argentina, South America, Women Leave a comment
“Most of the American electorate has probably been ready for a woman president for some time. But that woman must have the right array of qualities and ideally have risen to prominence through her own talents and not (like Hillary Clinton or Argentina’s President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner) through her marriage to a powerful man.”
Camille Paglia writes: Why has the U.S., the cradle of modern democracy, never had a woman president?
Incredulous young feminists, watching female heads of state multiply from Brazil and Norway to Namibia and Bangladesh, denounce this glaring omission as blatant sexism. But there are systemic factors, arising from the Constitution, popular tradition, and our electoral process, that have inhibited American women from attaining the highest office in the land.
The U.S. president is not just chief executive but commander-in-chief of the armed forces, an anomaly that requires manifest personal authority, particularly during periods of global instability. Women politicians, 
routinely focused on social welfare needs, must demonstrate greater involvement with international and military affairs.
“The protracted and ruthlessly gladiatorial U.S. electoral process drives talented women politicians away from the fray. What has kept women from winning the White House is not simple sexism but their own reluctance to subject themselves to the harsh scrutiny and ritual abuse of the presidential sweepstakes.”
Second, the president has a ceremonial function, like that of the British royal family, in symbolically representing the history and prestige of the nation. Hence voters subliminally look for gravitas, an ancient term describing the laconic dignity of Roman senators. The president must project steadiness, sober reserve, and deliberative judgment. Many women, who tend to talk faster and smile more than men, have trouble with gravitas as performance art.
[Order Paglia’s book “Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars” from Amazon]
Third, the complex, coast-to-coast primary system in the U.S. forces presidential candidates into well over a year of brutal competition for funding and grass-roots support. Their lives are usurped by family-disrupting travel, stroking of rich donors, and tutelage by professional consultants and p.r. flacks. This exhausting, venal marathon requires enormous physical stamina and perhaps ethical desensitization to survive it.
[Read the full text here, at TIME]
In contrast, many heads of state elsewhere ascend through their internal party structure. They are automatically elevated to prime minister when their party wins a national election. This parliamentary system of government has been far more favorable for the steady rise of women to the top. Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] REASON: Nick Gillespie & Todd Krainin’s Epic Interview with Camille Paglia
Posted: March 20, 2015 Filed under: Art & Culture, Mediasphere, Politics, Think Tank | Tags: B'nai Jeshurun (Manhattan), Baby boomer, Beauty pageant, Camille Paglia, Feminism, Feminist movement, Gender, Gloria Steinem, International Women’s Day, Nick Gillespie, Reason.tv, Second Wave Feminism, Women's rights 1 CommentEverything’s Awesome and Camille Paglia is Unhappy!
I nearly bypassed this interview, having enjoyed Paglia’s memorable social and cultural critiques over the last 15 years or so, I expected it to be good, but easy to put off for later viewing. Boy was I wrong. A potent, and revealing conversation. Free Range Big Thinkers like Paglia, in culture 
and media — especially ones who identify as Democrats but talk like libertarians — are few and far between. It makes the rare good ones even more valuable. We’ve not seen Camille’s familiar Madonna-loving, pop-culture-riddled smart commentary as much as we did in the 1990s, at the now-diminished pioneering Salon magazine, where she was a regular. Fast-forward to 2015: Paglia represents a senior figure, as a public intellectual. A long way from those early days at Yale in the 1960s. She’s older, crankier, controversial, and impossible to categorize, but that’s how we like it.
I’d seen other references and links to this new Paglia interview, but it was the Twitter feed of noted media critic Mollie Z. Hemingway than finally got my attention. Yesterday, she’d collected a string of individual excerpts (well chosen clips, too, a few samples below) Thanks to MZH, otherwise I might have missed this. Included here is the hour-long video, and just a fraction of the transcript. If you don’t see anything else this weekend — or this year — don’t miss this. Brilliant work by REASON‘s Nick Gillespie & Todd Krainin. Go get the whole transcript. And tune into Mollie Z. Hemingway’s articles here, and tweets here.
“gender identity has become really almost fascist” —Paglia http://t.co/ZrvHhCGhLs
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) March 20, 2015
Paglia’s counterintuitive defense of reading comments (that I’ve found to be true as well): pic.twitter.com/5trxLOoAIE
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) March 20, 2015
Why grad students are stupider than “southern evangelicals” who dropped out of high school. — Paglia pic.twitter.com/FGMYcfFfWr
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) March 20, 2015
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT: This is a rush transcript. Check against video for accuracy.
reason: Let’s talk about the state of contemporary feminism. You have been in a public life or in an intellectual life since the late 1960s, a proud feminist, often reviled by other feminists. Gloria Steinem most famously said you were an anti-feminist and that when you denied that, she said that would be like a Nazi saying they’re not anti-Semitic. You’re mixing it up. What is going on with the state of “professional feminism” in this country. It seems if you look at from, say, the early ’70s, things have gotten better for women. Men are less uptight about gender roles. Women are more in the workforce, they get paid equally, sexual assaults and sexual violence are down. In so many ways, things are going better than ever, and yet from sites like Jezebel or Feministing, all you hear is that things have never been worse.
[Check out the books and essays of Camille Paglia
Paglia: Feminism has gone through many phases. Obviously the woman’s suffrage movement of the 19th century fizzled after women gained the right to vote through the Constitutional amendment in 1920. Then the movement revived in the late 1960s through Betty Freidan co-founding NOW in 1967. Now, I preceded all that. I’m on record with a letter in Newsweek, I was in high school in 1963, where I called for equal rights for American women and so on. I began thinking about gender, researching it, I loved the generation of Amelia Earhart and all those emancipated women of the ’20s and ’30s, and because I had started my process of thought about gender so much earlier, I was out of sync with the women’s movement when it suddenly burst forth.
[Read the full text here, at REASON]
reason: It became a huge kind of cultural moment in the late 60s—it had been percolating before…
Paglia: It was literally nothing. There was no political activism of any kind from women getting the right to vote in 1920… when Simone de Beauvoir wrote her great magnum opus, The Second Sex, published in the early 1950s, she was thought to be hopelessly retrograde. Nobody could possibly be interested again in gender issues.
reason: You were living in upstate New York. Did you already know what your sexuality was? What was it like to be a woman, a lesbian, in 1963?
Paglia: Well, the 1950s were a highly conformist period. Gender had repolarized after really great gains it seems to me in the ’20s and ’30s, and one must be more sympathetic to the situation of my parents’ generation. They had known nothing but depression and war throughout their entire lives. My father was a paratrooper, when he got out of the army, everyone married, and I’m the baby boom. They wanted normality. They just wanted to live like real people, man and wife in a home. I found the 1950s utterly suffocating. I was a gender nonconforming entity, and I was signaling my rebellion by these transgender Halloween costumes that were absolutely 
unheard of. I was five, six, seven, eight years old. My parents allowed me to do it because I was so intent on it.
reason: What were you dressing up as?
Paglia: A Roman solider, the matador from Carmen. My best was Napoleon. I was Hamlet from the Classics Comics book. Absolutely no one was doing stuff like this, and I’m happy that this talk about medical sex changes was not in the air, because I would have become obsessed with that and assumed that that was my entire identity and problem, so this is why I’m very concerned about the rush to surgical interventions today. At any rate, I was attracted to men—I dated men—but I just fell in love with women and always have. Yes, there’s absolutely no doubt. I was on the forefront of gay identification. When I arrived at graduate school at Yale 1968-1972, I was the only openly gay person, and I didn’t even have a sex life. To me, it was a badge of militance. And I was the only person doing a dissertation on a sexual topic. It’s hard to believe this now.
[Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
reason: What was the topic?
Paglia: Sexual Personae, which was the book finally published in 1990 after being rejected by seven publishers and five agents, and that was unheard of again. I’m delighted I had the sponsorship of Harold Bloom that pushed the topic through the English department, I think possibly that they allowed me to do such a thing on sex was actually kind of amazing.
My clashes with other feminists began immediately. Read the rest of this entry »
Camille Paglia: The Modern Campus Cannot Comprehend Evil
Posted: September 29, 2014 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Education, Mediasphere, Think Tank | Tags: Camile Paglia, Campus life, False Accusations, Police, Political Correctness, Rape, Sexuality, Universities, University of Virginia 1 Comment
Paglia: The Drinking Age Is Past Its Prime
Posted: April 23, 2014 Filed under: Art & Culture, Food & Drink, Law & Justice, Mediasphere | Tags: Alcoholic beverage, Carrie Nation, Kerry Kennedy, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, National Minimum Drinking Age Act, United Arab Emirates, United States, Virginia Woolf 1 CommentThe age 21 rule sets the United States apart from all advanced Western nations, and it has pushed kids toward pills and other anti-social behavior.
Neil Davies
The National Minimum Drinking Age Act, passed by Congress 30 years ago this July, is a gross violation of civil liberties and must be repealed. It is absurd and unjust that young Americans can vote, marry, enter contracts, and serve in the military at 18 but cannot buy an alcoholic drink in a bar or restaurant. The age 21 rule sets the United States apart from all advanced Western nations and lumps it with small or repressive countries like Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Indonesia, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates.
Congress was stampeded into this puritanical law by Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), who with all good intentions were wrongly intruding into an area of personal choice exactly as did the hymn-singing 19th-century Temperance crusaders, typified by Carrie Nation smashing beer barrels with her hatchet. Temperance fanaticism eventually triumphed and gave us 14 years of Prohibition. That in turn spawned the crime syndicates for booze smuggling, laying the groundwork for today’s global drug trade. Thanks a lot, Carrie!
Now that marijuana regulations have been liberalized in Colorado, it’s time to strike down this dictatorial national law. Government is not our nanny. The decrease in drunk-driving deaths in recent decades is at least partly attributable to more uniform seat-belt use and a strengthening of DWI penalties. Today, furthermore, there are many other causes of traffic accidents, such as the careless use of cell phones or prescription drugs like Ambien – implicated in the recent trial and acquittal of Kerry Kennedy for driving while impaired. Read the rest of this entry »
Camille Paglia Talks Birds & Bees
Posted: March 17, 2014 Filed under: Art & Culture, Health and Social Issues, Think Tank | Tags: boys and girls, C. Everett Koop, Camille Paglia, Education, Egypt, Fertility, National Education Association, Sex education 2 CommentsPaglia Tells Educators to Get Real. When public schools refuse to acknowledge gender differences, we betray boys and girls alike
Camille Paglia writes: Fertility is the missing chapter in sex education. Sobering facts about women’s declining fertility after their 20s are being withheld from ambitious young women, who are propelled along a career track devised for men.
“Too often, sex education defines pregnancy as a pathology, for which the cure is abortion.”
The refusal by public schools’ sex-education programs to acknowledge gender differences is betraying both boys and girls. The genders should be separated for sex counseling. It is absurd to avoid the harsh reality that boys have less to lose from casual serial sex than do girls, who risk pregnancy and whose future fertility can be compromised by disease. Boys need lessons in basic ethics and moral reasoning about sex (for example, not taking advantage of intoxicated dates), while girls must learn to distinguish sexual compliance from popularity.
[Download Paglia’s book “Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars” from Amazon]
Above all, girls need life-planning advice. Too often, sex education defines pregnancy as a pathology, for which the cure is abortion. Adolescent girls must think deeply about their ultimate aims and desires. If they want both children and a career, they should decide whether to have children early or late. There are pros, cons and trade-offs for each choice. Read the rest of this entry »
Interview With Camille Paglia: A Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues
Posted: December 28, 2013 Filed under: Art & Culture, Politics, Reading Room, Think Tank | Tags: Camille Paglia, Christina Hoff Sommers, CrossFit, Miley Cyrus, Oscar Wilde, Paglia, Rush Limbaugh, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (Yale Nota Bene S.), Yale University 4 CommentsThe cultural critic on why ignoring the biological differences between men and women risks undermining Western civilization itself
Neil Davies
Bari Weiss writes: ‘What you’re seeing is how a civilization commits suicide,” says Camille Paglia. This self-described “notorious Amazon feminist” isn’t telling anyone to Lean In or asking Why Women Still Can’t Have It All. No, her indictment may be as surprising as it is wide-ranging: The military is out of fashion, Americans undervalue manual labor, schools neuter male students, opinion makers deny the biological differences between men and women, and sexiness is dead. And that’s just 20 minutes of our three-hour conversation.
When Ms. Paglia, now 66, burst onto the national stage in 1990 with the publishing of “Sexual Personae,” she immediately established herself as a feminist who was the scourge of the movement’s establishment, a heretic to its orthodoxy. Pick up the 700-page tome, subtitled “Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, ” and it’s easy to see why. “If civilization had been left in female hands,” she wrote, “we would still be living in grass huts.”
The fact that the acclaimed book—the first of six; her latest, “Glittering Images,” is a survey of Western art—was rejected by seven publishers and five agents before being printed by Yale University Press only added to Ms. Paglia’s sense of herself as a provocateur in a class with Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern. But unlike those radio jocks, Ms. Paglia has scholarly chops: Her dissertation adviser at Yale was Harold Bloom, and she is as likely to discuss Freud, Oscar Wilde or early Native American art as to talk about Miley Cyrus.
Ms. Paglia relishes her outsider persona, having previously described herself as an egomaniac and “abrasive, strident and obnoxious.” Talking to her is like a mental CrossFit workout. One moment she’s praising pop star Rihanna (“a true artist”), then blasting ObamaCare (“a monstrosity,” though she voted for the president), global warming (“a religious dogma”), and the idea that all gay people are born gay (“the biggest canard,” yet she herself is a lesbian).
But no subject gets her going more than when I ask if she really sees a connection between society’s attempts to paper over the biological distinction between men and women and the collapse of Western civilization.
Camille Paglia: ‘It’s a Man’s World, And It Always Will Be’
Posted: December 16, 2013 Filed under: Art & Culture, Economics, Mediasphere, Think Tank | Tags: Brave New World, Brazil, Camille Paglia, Feminism, Hanna Rosin, Italy, Komodo dragon, Munk Debate, Young Women (organization) 2 Comments
Andrew Burton / Getty Images
The modern economy is a male epic, in which women have found a productive role—but women were not its author
Camille Paglia writes: If men are obsolete, then women will soon be extinct—unless we rush down that ominous Brave New World path where females will clone themselves by parthenogenesis, as famously do Komodo dragons, hammerhead sharks, and pit vipers.
A peevish, grudging rancor against men has been one of the most unpalatable and unjust features of second- and third-wave feminism. Men’s faults, failings and foibles have been seized on and magnified into gruesome bills of indictment. Ideologue professors at our leading universities indoctrinate impressionable undergraduates with carelessly fact-free theories alleging that gender is an arbitrary, oppressive fiction with no basis in biology.
Is it any wonder that so many high-achieving young women, despite all the happy talk about their academic success, find themselves in the early stages of their careers in chronic uncertainty or anxiety about their prospects for an emotionally fulfilled private life? When an educated culture routinely denigrates masculinity and manhood, then women will be perpetually stuck with boys, who have no incentive to mature or to honor their commitments. And without strong men as models to either embrace or (for dissident lesbians) to resist, women will never attain a centered and profound sense of themselves as women.
From my long observation, which predates the sexual revolution, this remains a serious problem afflicting Anglo-American society, with its Puritan residue. InFrance, Italy, Spain, Latin America, and Brazil, in contrast, many ambitious professional women seem to have found a formula for asserting power and authority in the workplace while still projecting sexual allure and even glamor. This is the true feminine mystique, which cannot be taught but flows from an instinctive recognition of sexual differences. In today’s punitive atmosphere of sentimental propaganda about gender, the sexual imagination has understandably fled into the alternate world of online pornography, where the rude but exhilarating forces of primitive nature rollick unconstrained by religious or feminist moralism.
Camille Paglia: “It remains baffling how anyone would think that Hillary Clinton is our party’s best chance”
Posted: August 21, 2013 Filed under: Mediasphere | Tags: BDSM, Camille Paglia, Egypt, Lady Gaga, New York, Paglia, People, Salon Leave a comment
I can vividly remember the first time I read Camille Paglia. I was visiting New York with my mom during college and we happened across “Vamps and Tramps” at a bookstore near our hotel. Lying in neighboring twin beds, I read passages out loud to her. Explosive things like, “Patriarchy, routinely blamed for everything, produced the birth control pill, which did more to free contemporary women than feminism itself.” I didn’t always agree with Paglia, but I enjoyed her as a challenging provocateur.
I still have that copy of the book. There are asterisks in the margins, double-underlined sentences and circled paragraphs. Reading it was a satisfying rebellion against the line-toeing women’s studies classes I was taking at the time — and at a college with an infamously anti-porn professor, no less. Since then, I have moments of genuine outrage and fury over Paglia’s writing and public commentary (see: this, this and this, for examples of why) — but she is still compelling and occasionally brilliant. The truth is that many people still want to hear what she has to say — about everything from BDSM to Lady Gaga.
The paperback release last week of her book “Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art From Egypt to Star Wars” — which Salon interviewed her about last year, and which is an example of Paglia at her intellectual best and an antidote to her birther moments — is a great excuse to check back in with the so-called bete noire of feminism. I spoke with Paglia by email about contemporary feminism, Anthony Weiner and the “end of men.”
Undeniable: Hillary Clinton Committed Perjury
Posted: October 14, 2016 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Law & Justice, Politics, White House | Tags: Barack Obama, Colin Powell, Democratic National Committee, Democratic Party (United States), Donald Trump, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin, Justin Cooper (aide), United States Department of State 2 Comments
Hillary Clinton finally submitted her court-ordered written response to 25 questions posed by Judicial Watch regarding her private email practices. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned from the deposition it’s this: Clinton has absolutely committed perjury.
Why? Let’s break down the facts.
In Clinton’s sworn deposition to Judicial Watch she says she never got permission for her private, unsecure email server, and that she got the idea from former Secretary of State Colin Powell. But she told the FBI in July that she didn’t get the idea from Powell. She also told the House Select Committee on Benghazi she’d gotten permission for her server.
All three of those stories can’t be true.
Deductive reasoning says:
- If her Judicial Watch testimony is true, then she lied to the FBI about Powell. That’s a crime.
- If her Judicial Watch testimony is true, then she lied to the Benghazi Committee about the server. That’s a crime.
- If her FBI testimony is true, then she lied in a deposition. That’s a crime, and it’s what got Bill Clinton impeached and disbarred.
- If her Benghazi Committee testimony is true, then she lied in a deposition. That’s a crime, and it’s what got Bill Clinton impeached and disbarred.
Furthermore, the fact that she wasn’t under oath when speaking to the FBI is irrelevant. It is a crime to lie to the FBI in any interview setting.
The Judicial Watch press release is below, along with all of Clinton’s answers.
Judicial Watch Releases New Hillary Clinton Email Answers Given under Oath
(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released received responses under oath from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton concerning her email practices. Judicial Watch submitted twenty-five questions on August 30 to Clinton as ordered by U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan.
The new Clinton responses in the Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit before Judge Sullivan was first filed in September 2013 seeking records about the controversial employment status of Huma Abedin, former deputy chief of staff to Clinton. The lawsuit was reopened because of revelations about the clintonemail.com system (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:13-cv-01363)).
Judicial Watch has already taken the deposition testimony of seven Clinton aides and State Department officials.
Below is text from the document filed with the court today:
NON-PARTY HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON’S RESPONSE
TO PLAINTIFF’S INTERROGATORIES
Pursuant to the Court’s August 19, 2016 order and Rule 33 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Non-Party Hillary Rodham Clinton hereby responds to Plaintiff’s Interrogatories dated August 30, 2016. The General Objections and the Objections to the Definitions set forth below are incorporated into each of the specific responses that follow. Any specific objections are in addition to the General Objections and Objections to the Definitions, and failure to reiterate a General Objection or Objection to the Definitions does not constitute a waiver of that or any other objection.
GENERAL OBJECTIONS
- Secretary Clinton objects to the Interrogatories on the ground that any discovery of Secretary Clinton is unwarranted in this case, for the reasons set forth in Secretary Clinton’s Opposition to Plaintiff’s Motion to Depose Hillary Rodham Clinton, Clarence Finney, and John Bentel (Dkt. #102) and Surreply in Further Opposition to Plaintiff’s Motion to Depose Hillary Rodham Clinton, Clarence Finney, and John Bentel (Dkt. #109), and as stated by Secretary Clinton’s counsel during the Court hearing on July 18, 2016. Secretary Clinton will answer the Interrogatories notwithstanding this objection, subject to the other objections stated herein.
- Secretary Clinton objects to the Interrogatories insofar as they request information outside the scope of permitted discovery in this case. The Court permitted discovery of Secretary Clinton on the topics of “the purpose for the creation and operation of the clintonemail.com system for State Department business,” as well as “the State Department’s approach and practice for processing FOIA requests that potentially implicated former Secretary Clinton’s and Ms. Abedin’s e-mails and State’s processing of the FOIA request that is the subject of this action.” Dkt. #124, at 14, 19 (internal quotation marks omitted). Secretary Clinton will answer the Interrogatories insofar as they seek non-privileged information related to those topics.
- Secretary Clinton objects to the Interrogatories insofar as they request information relating to events that occurred, or actions taken by Secretary Clinton, after her tenure as Secretary of State. Such post-tenure actions or events are not within the scope of the permitted topics of discovery set forth in General Objection No. 2.
- Secretary Clinton objects to the Interrogatories insofar as they request information about Secretary Clinton’s use of her clintonemail.com account to send and receive e-mails that were personal in nature, as such use is not within the scope of the permitted topics set forth in General Objection No. 2. Secretary Clinton will construe the Interrogatories to ask only about her use of her clintonemail.com account to send and receive e-mails related to State Department business.
- Secretary Clinton objects to the Interrogatories insofar as they request information about management, retention, and/or preservation of federal records. This action arises under FOIA, which does not govern management, retention, or preservation of federal records. See Kissinger v. Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, 445 U.S. 136, 152 (1980). Accordingly, management, retention, and/or preservation of federal records are not within the scope of the permitted topics of discovery set forth in General Objection No. 2.
- Secretary Clinton objects to Instruction No. 1 insofar as it purports to require Secretary Clinton to provide information that is not within her personal knowledge. The purpose of the limited discovery permitted by the Court is to obtain Secretary Clinton’s “personal knowledge of her purpose in using the [clintonemail.com] system.” Dkt. #124, at 16; see also id. at (directing Plaintiff “to propound questions that are relevant to Secretary Clinton’s unique first-hand knowledge”). Secretary Clinton is answering these Interrogatories based on her direct personal knowledge. She is not undertaking to provide information known only to other persons, including but not limited to her attorneys, representatives, persons acting under, by, or through her, or subject to her control or supervision, or other persons acting on her behalf.
- Secretary Clinton objects to these Interrogatories to the extent that they call for the production of information that is privileged or otherwise protected from discovery by the attorney-client privilege, the work product doctrine, or any other applicable privilege, protection, or immunity. Secretary Clinton will respond only to the extent privileged or otherwise protected information is not required and to the extent that the Interrogatory is not otherwise objectionable.
- Secretary Clinton objects to Instruction No. 5 insofar as it purports to require Secretary Clinton to identify the factual and legal basis for a claim of privilege. Secretary Clinton is not providing herewith a privilege log.
OBJECTIONS TO DEFINITIONS
- Secretary Clinton objects to the definition of “Clintonemail.com email system” insofar as it refers to e-mail system(s), server(s), provider(s), and infrastructure used to host her clintonemail.com e-mail account after her tenure as Secretary of State. Information concerning the e-mail system(s), server(s), provider(s), and infrastructure used to host her clintonemail.com account after her tenure as Secretary of State is not relevant to the purpose for the creation and operation of the clintonemail.com account during her tenure as Secretary of State, and therefore is outside the scope of the permitted discovery. In answering these Interrogatories, Secretary Clinton will construe the term “Clintonemail.com email system” to refer to the e-mail system(s), server(s), provider(s), and infrastructure used to host her clintonemail.com e-mail account during her tenure as Secretary of State.
- Secretary Clinton objects to the definition of “Clintonemail.com account” insofar as it refers to e-mail addresses used by other individuals ending in the domain name “clintonemail.com.” In answering these Interrogatories, Secretary Clinton will construe the term “Clintonemail.com account” to refer to hdr22@clintonemail.com, which was the clintonemail.com account used by Secretary Clinton during her tenure.
RESPONSES TO INTERROGATORIES
- Describe the creation of the clintonemail.com system, including who decided to create the system, the date it was decided to create the system, why it was created, who set it up, and when it became operational.
Response: Secretary Clinton objects to Interrogatory No. 1 as outside the scope of permitted discovery. The clintonemail.com system, as that term is defined in the Instructions and subject to Secretary Clinton’s objection to that definition, consisted of equipment set up to host e-mail for President Clinton’s staff. Information regarding the creation of that system, including the reasons for its creation, is irrelevant to this lawsuit and outside the scope of permitted discovery. The Court permitted discovery in this case on the question of “the purpose for the creation and operation of the clintonemail.com system for State Department business.” Dkt. #124, at 17 (emphasis added). That question is the subject of Interrogatory No. 2, which is answered below.
- Describe the creation of your clintonemail.com email account, including who decided to create it, when it was created, why it was created, and, if you did not set up the account yourself, who set it up for you.
Response: In the Senate, when Secretary Clinton began using e-mail, she used a personal e-mail account for both work-related and personal e-mail. Secretary Clinton decided to transition from the account she used in her tenure at the Senate to the clintonemail.com account. She recalls that it was created in early 2009. Secretary Clinton did not set up the account. Although Secretary Clinton does not have specific knowledge of the details of the account’s creation, her best understanding is that one of President Clinton’s aides, Justin Cooper, set up the account. She decided to use a clintonemail.com account for the purpose of convenience.
- When did you decide to use a clintonemail.com email account to conduct official State Department business and whom did you consult in making this decision?
Response: Secretary Clinton recalls deciding to use a clintonemail.com e-mail account to conduct official State Department business in early 2009. She does not recall any specific consultations regarding the decision to use the clintonemail.com account for official State Department business.
- Identify all communications in which you participated concerning or relating to your decision to use a clintonemail.com email account to conduct official State Department business and, for each communication, identify the time, date, place, manner (e.g., in person, in writing, by telephone, or by electronic or other means), persons present or participating, and content of the communication.
Response: Secretary Clinton objects to Interrogatory No. 4 insofar as it purports to request information about communications after her tenure as Secretary of State, which communications would be irrelevant to the purpose for the creation and operation of her clintonemail.com account while she was Secretary of State. Subject to the foregoing objection, Secretary Clinton states that she does not recall participating in any communications before or during her tenure as Secretary of State concerning or relating to her decision to use a clintonemail.com account to conduct official State Department business. Read the rest of this entry »
James Comey’s Clinton Immunity Coverup
Posted: September 28, 2016 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Law & Justice, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Barack Obama, Breitbart News, Cheryl Mills, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton email controversy, Huma Abedin, James Comey, Message transfer agent, United States Department of State 1 Comment
More questions about the FBI’s special handling of the email case.
FBI Director James Comey appears Wednesday before the House Judiciary Committee, where he’ll get another chance to explain his agency’s double standard regarding Hillary Clinton. His probe of the former Secretary of State’s private email server is looking more like a kid-glove exercise with each new revelation.
House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz on Friday disclosed that the FBI granted immunity to Mrs. Clinton’s top aides as part of its probe into whether Mrs. Clinton mishandled classified information. According to Mr. Chaffetz, this “limited” immunity was extended to former chief of staff Cheryl Mills and senior adviser Heather Samuelson, in order to get them to surrender their laptops, which they’d used to sort through Mrs. Clinton’s work-versus-personal emails.
[Read the full story here, at WSJ]
Why the courtesy? “If the FBI wanted any other Americans’ laptops, they would just go get them—they wouldn’t get an immunity deal,” Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan told Politico. He’s right. The FBI merely had to seek a subpoena or search warrant. By offering immunity, the FBI exempted the laptops and their emails as potential evidence in a criminal case.
Beth Wilkinson, who represents Ms. Mills and Ms. Samuelson, says the immunity deals were designed to protect her clients against any related “classification” disputes. This is an admission that both women knew their unsecure laptops had been holding sensitive information for more than a year. Meanwhile, Mr. Comey also allowed Ms. Mills and Ms. Samuelson to serve as lawyers for Mrs. Clinton at her FBI interview—despite having been interviewed as witnesses and offered immunity. Read the rest of this entry »
Friday Night FBI Document Dump: Obama Used a Pseudonym in Emails with Clinton
Posted: September 23, 2016 Filed under: Breaking News, Censorship, Crime & Corruption, Mediasphere, Politics, White House | Tags: Anthony Weiner, attorney-client privilege, Clinton Foundation, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton email controversy, Huma Abedin, Muslim Brotherhood, Pay to play, United States Department of State 5 Comments
The disclosure came as the FBI released its second batch of documents on Clinton’s email investigation.
President Barack Obama used a pseudonym in email communications with Hillary Clinton and others, according to FBI records made public Friday.
The disclosure came as the FBI released its second batch of documents from its investigation into Clinton’s private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.
The 189 pages the bureau released includes interviews with some of Clinton’s closest aides, such as Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills; senior State Department officials; and even Marcel Lazar, better known as the Romanian hacker “Guccifer.”
In an April 5, 2016 interview with the FBI, Abedin was shown an email exchange between Clinton and Obama, but the longtime Clinton aide did not recognize the name of the sender.
“Once informed that the sender’s name is believed to be pseudonym used by the president, Abedin exclaimed: ‘How is this not classified?'” the report says. “Abedin then expressed her amazement at the president’s use of a pseudonym and asked if she could have a copy of the email.”
The State Department has refused to make public that and other emails Clinton exchanged with Obama. Lawyers have cited the “presidential communications privilege,” a variation of executive privilege, in order to withhold the messages under the Freedom of Information Act.
The report doesn’t provide more details on the contents of that particular email exchange, but says it took place on June 28, 2012, and had the subject line: “Re: Congratulations.” It may refer to the Supreme Court’s ruling that day upholding a key portion of the Obamacare law.
A report on the FBI’s June 7, 2016 interview with “Guccifer” confirms FBI Director James Comey‘s claim that Lazar falsely asserted that he’d surreptitiously accessed Clinton’s server.
“Lazar began by stating that he had never claimed to hack the Clinton server. [An FBI agent] then advised that Fix News had recently published an article which reported that Lazar had claimed to have to Clinton server. Read the rest of this entry »
‘Comey’s Agents Were Forgiving About Some Incriminating Evidence’
Posted: September 8, 2016 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Law & Justice, Politics | Tags: Bill Clinton, Cheryl Mills, Classified information, Clinton Foundation, CNN, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Emmet G. Sullivan, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Freedom of Information Act (United States), Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton email controversy, Huma Abedin, James Comey, Judicial Watch, United States Department of State 5 Comments
The FBI’s Blind Clinton Trust.
The closer we look at the FBI’s investigative file on Hillary Clinton’s emails, the more we wonder if Director James Comey always intended to let her off the hook. The calculated release before the long Labor Day weekend suggests political favoritism, and the report shows the FBI didn’t pursue evidence of potential false statements, obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence.
“The notes also show the G-men never did grill Mrs. Clinton on her “intent” in setting up her server. Instead they bought her explanation that it was for personal convenience. This helped Mr. Comey avoid concluding that her purpose was to evade statutes like the Federal Records Act. Mr. Comey also told Congress that indicting her without criminal intent would pose a constitutional problem.”
Mr. Comey’s concessions start with his decision not to interview Mrs. Clinton until the end of his investigation, a mere three days before he announced his conclusions. Regular FBI practice is to get a subject on the record early then see if his story meshes with what agents find. In this case they accepted Mrs. Clinton’s I-don’t-recall defenses after the fact.
“Ms. Mills has a particular reason for denying early knowledge of the server: She became Mrs. Clinton’s personal lawyer after they both left State. If Ms. Mills knew about the server while at State, she’d be subject to questions about the server. But if she didn’t know about the server until leaving State, she can argue that conversations with Mrs. Clinton are protected by attorney-client privilege. The FBI ignored all this, and it even allowed Ms. Mills to accompany Mrs. Clinton to her FBI interview as Mrs. Clinton’s lawyer.”
The notes also show the G-men never did grill Mrs. Clinton on her “intent” in setting up her server. Instead they bought her explanation that it was for personal convenience. This helped Mr. Comey avoid concluding that her purpose was to evade statutes like the Federal Records Act. Mr. Comey also told Congress that indicting her without criminal intent would pose a constitutional problem. But Congress has written many laws that don’t require criminal intent, and negligent homicide (for example) has never been unconstitutional.
The FBI notes also blow past evidence that Clinton advisers may have engaged in a cover-up. Consider page 10 of the FBI report: “Clinton’s immediate aides, to include [Huma] Abedin, [Cheryl] Mills, Jacob Sullivan, and [redacted] told the FBI they were unaware of the existence of the private server until after Clinton’s tenure at State or when it became public knowledge.”
[Read the full story here, at WSJ]
That’s amazing given that Ms. Abedin had her own email account on the private server. It is also contradicted by page 3: “At the recommendation of Huma Abedin, Clinton’s long-time aide and later Deputy Chief of Staff at State, in or around fall 2008, [ Bill Clinton aide Justin] Cooper contacted Bryan Pagliano . . . to build the new server system and to assist Cooper with the administration of the new server system.”
The FBI must also have ignored two emails referred to by the State Inspector General showing Ms. Mills and Ms. Abedin discussing the server while they worked at State: “hrc email coming back—is server okay?” Ms. Mills asked Ms. Abedin and Mr. Cooper in a Feb. 27, 2010 email. Read the rest of this entry »
Hillary Stonewall Clinton Told FBI She (Cough) ‘Couldn’t Recall’ Key Details 26 Times
Posted: September 4, 2016 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Law & Justice, Politics, U.S. News, White House | Tags: Classified information, Clinton Foundation, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton email controversy, Huma Abedin, IPad Mini, Muslim Brotherhood, Special access program, United States Department of State 3 Comments
…Clinton could not even recall when she got her security clearance. She told FBI agents she wasn’t sure if she carried it over from the U.S. Senate or if she got it from State. But perhaps even worse, Clinton told FBI agents she couldn’t even remember any briefing or training by State “related to the retention of federal records or handling of classified information.”
That admission could raise the question if Clinton was ever trained at all in handling secret information.
Below is the list of things Clinton could not recall in the FBI interview:
- When she received security clearance
- Being briefed on how to handle classified material
- How many times she used her authority to designate items classified
- Any briefing on how to handle very top-secret “Special Access Program” material
- How to select a target for a drone strike
- How the data from her mobile devices was destroyed when she switched devices
- The number of times her staff was given a secure phone
- Why she didn’t get a secure Blackberry
- Receiving any emails she thought should not be on the private system
- Did not remember giving staff direction to create private email account
- Getting guidance from state on email policy
- Who had access to her Blackberry account
- The process for deleting her emails
- Ever getting a message that her storage was almost full
- Anyone besides Huma Abedin being offered an account on the private server
- Being sent information on state government private emails being hacked
- Receiving cable on State Dept personnel securing personal email accounts
- Receiving cable on Bryan Pagliano upgrading her server
- Using an iPad mini
- An Oct. 13, 2012, email on Egypt with Clinton pal Sidney Blumenthal
- Jacob Sullivan using personal email
- State Department protocol for confirming classified information in media reports
- Every briefing she received after suffering concussions
- Being notified of a FOIA request on Dec. 11, 2012
- Being read out of her clearance
- Any further access to her private email account from her State Department tenure after switching to her HRCoffice.com account
Martha Stewart wishes she’d thought of saying “I don’t recall” to FBI agents.
Oddly, No Emails Found for Hillary Clinton’s Senior IT Staffer at State Department
Posted: May 10, 2016 Filed under: Censorship, Crime & Corruption, Law & Justice, Politics | Tags: Apple Inc, Democratic Party (United States), Federal Bureau of Investigation, Fox News Channel, Hillary Clinton, iPhone, National Security Agency, New York, The Pantsuit Report, United States Department of Justice, United States Department of State 1 Comment
Justin Fishel reports: The State Department said today it can’t find Bryan Pagliano’s emails from the time he served as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s senior information technology staffer during her tenure there.
Pagliano would have been required to turn over any official communications from his work account before he left the government. State Department officials say he had an official email account, but that they can’t find any of those records he would have turned over and continue to search for them.
“It’s hard to believe that an IT staffer who set up Hillary Clinton’s reckless email server never sent or received a single work-related email in the four years he worked at the State Department. Such records might shed light on his role in setting up Clinton’s server, and why he was granted immunity by the FBI. But it seems that his emails were either destroyed or never turned over, adding yet another layer to the secrecy surrounding his role.”
— Raj Shah, RNC’s Deputy Communications Director
“The Department has searched for Mr. Pagliano’s email pst file and has not located one that covers the time period of Secretary Clinton’s tenure,” State Department spokesman Elizabeth Trudeau said today, referencing a file format that holds
email.
“To be clear, the Department does have records related to Mr. Pagliano and we are working with Congress and [Freedom of Information Act] requesters to provide relevant material. The Department has located a pst from Mr. Pagliano’s recent work at the Department as a contractor, but the files are from after Secretary Clinton left the Department,” Trudeau added.
After this story was posted, Trudeau reached out to ABC News, amending her previous statement to say that despite the absence of his original pst file, some small amount of Pagliano’s email has been recovered, suggesting they were gleaned from other email accounts. Read the rest of this entry »
OH YES HE DID: Romanian Hacker Guccifer Breached Clinton Server, ‘It Was Easy’
Posted: May 4, 2016 Filed under: Global, Mediasphere, Politics, Science & Technology, U.S. News | Tags: Barack Obama, Catherine Herridge, Chris Wallace, Classified information, Colin Powell, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Democratic National Committee, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Guccifer, Hillary Clinton, Marcel Lehel Lazar, Mike Pompeo, The Pantsuit Report, United States Department of Justice Leave a comment
The hacker spoke freely with Fox News from the detention center in Alexandria, Va., where he’s been held since his extradition to the U.S. on federal charges relating to other alleged cyber-crimes. Wearing a green jumpsuit, Lazar was relaxed and polite in the monitored secure visitor center, separated by thick security glass.
Catherine Herridge, Pamela K. Browne report: The infamous Romanian hacker known as “Guccifer,” speaking exclusively with Fox News, claimed he easily – and repeatedly – breached former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s personal email server in early 2013.
“For me, it was easy … easy for me, for everybody,” Marcel Lehel Lazar, who goes by the moniker “Guccifer,” told Fox News from a Virginia jail where he is being held.
“I was not paying attention. For me, it was not like the Hillary Clinton server, it was like an email server she and others were using with political voting stuff.”
— Marcel Lehel Lazar
Guccifer’s potential role in the Clinton email investigation was first reported by Fox News last month. The hacker subsequently claimed he was able to access the server – and provided extensive details about how he did it and what he found – over the course of a half-hour jailhouse interview and a series of recorded phone calls with Fox News. Fox News could not independently confirm Lazar’s claims.
[Read the full story here, at Fox News]
The former secretary of state’s server held nearly 2,200 emails containing information now deemed classified, and another 22 at the “Top Secret” level.
The 44-year-old Lazar said he first compromised Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal‘s AOL account, in March 2013, and used that as a stepping stone to the Clinton server. He said he accessed Clinton’s server “like twice,” though he described the contents as “not interest[ing]” to him at the time.
“I was not paying attention. For me, it was not like the Hillary Clinton server, it was like an email server she and others were
using with political voting stuff,” Guccifer said.
The hacker spoke freely with Fox News from the detention center in Alexandria, Va., where he’s been held since his extradition to
the U.S. on federal charges relating to other alleged cyber-crimes. Wearing a green jumpsuit, Lazar was relaxed and polite in the monitored secure visitor center, separated
by thick security glass.
“For example, when Sidney Blumenthal got an email, I checked the email pattern from Hillary Clinton, from Colin Powell from anyone else to find out the originating IP. … When they send a letter, the email header is the originating IP usually. Then I scanned with an IP scanner.”
— Marcel Lehel Lazar
In describing the process, Lazar said he did extensive research on the web and then guessed Blumenthal’s security question. Once inside Blumenthal’s account, Lazar said he saw dozens of messages from the Clinton email address.
Asked if he was curious about the address, Lazar merely smiled. Asked if he used the same security question approach to access the Clinton emails, he said no – then described how he allegedly got inside.
“For example, when Sidney Blumenthal got an email, I checked the email pattern from Hillary Clinton, from Colin Powell from anyone else to find out the originating IP. … When they send a letter, the email header is the originating IP usually,” Lazar explained.
[Read the full text here, at Fox News]
He said, “then I scanned with an IP scanner.”
Lazar emphasized that he used readily available web programs to see if the server was “alive” and which ports were open. Lazar identified programs like netscan, Netmap, Wireshark and Angry IP, though it was not possible to confirm independently which, if any, he used.
In the process of mining data from the Blumenthal account, Lazar said he came across evidence that others were on the Clinton server.
“As far as I remember, yes, there were … up to 10, like, IPs from other parts of the world,” he said.
With no formal computer training, he did most of his hacking from a small Romanian village.
Lazar said he chose to use “proxy servers in Russia,” describing them as the best, providing anonymity.
Cyber experts who spoke with Fox News said the process Lazar described is plausible. The federal indictment Lazar faces in the U.S. for cyber-crimes specifically alleges he used “a proxy server located in Russia” for the Blumenthal compromise. Read the rest of this entry »
Woah, Hold On There, Buddy: No indication that Clinton’s E-Mail Server was ‘Wiped’?
Posted: September 12, 2015 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Mediasphere, Politics, White House | Tags: Bill Clinton, Carol D. Leonnig, Classified information, CNN, Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, Huma Abedin, Nicholas Merrill, Pantsuit Report, The Washington Post, United States Department of State, United States Secretary of State Leave a comment
report: The company that managed Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private e-mail server said it has “no knowledge of the server being wiped,” the strongest indication to date that tens of thousands of e-mails that Clinton has said were deleted could be recovered.
“Platte River has no knowledge of the server being wiped. All the information we have is that the server wasn’t wiped.”
Clinton and her advisers have said for months that she deleted her personal correspondence from her time as secretary of state, creating the impression that 31,000 e-mails were gone forever. There is a distinction between e-mails being deleted and a server being wiped. If e-mails are deleted or moved from a server, they appear to no longer exist on the device. But experts say, depending on the condition of the server, underlying data can remain on the device and the e-mails can often be restored.
“There is a distinction between e-mails being deleted and a server being wiped. If e-mails are deleted or moved from a server, they appear to no longer exist on the device. But experts say, depending on the condition of the server, underlying data can remain on the device and the e-mails can often be restored.”
[Read the full text here, at The Washington Post]
“Platte River has no knowledge of the server being wiped,” company spokesman Andy Boian told The Washington Post. “All the information we have is that the server wasn’t wiped.”
Clinton and her staff have avoided directly answering whether the server was ever wiped.
In a memorable exchange at a campaign event in Las Vegas last month, Clinton turned aside a question about whether the server had been wiped with a joke: “Like what, with a cloth?” she said, adding, “I don’t know how it works digitally at all.”
Campaign spokesman Brian Fallon gave a similar answer this month, telling CNN: “I don’t know what wiped means. Literally the e-mails were deleted off of the server, that’s true.”
Read the rest of this entry »
Says He’ll Invoke Fifth: Staffer Who Worked on Clinton’s Private E-Mail Server Faces Subpoena
Posted: September 2, 2015 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Law & Justice, Mediasphere, Politics, White House | Tags: Al Jazeera, Classified information, Denver, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Hillary Clinton, Message transfer agent, Republican Party (United States), The Washington Post, United States Department of Justice, United States Department of State 2 Comments
The former State Department IT staffer says he will invoke his Fifth Amendment rights.
Carol D. Leonnig and Tom Hamburger report: A former State Department staffer who worked on Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private e-mail server tried this week to fend off a subpoena to testify before Congress, saying he would assert his constitutional right not to answer questions to avoid incriminating himself.
“While we understand that Mr. Pagliano’s response to this subpoena may be controversial in the current political environment, we hope that the members of the Select Committee will respect our client’s right to invoke the protections of the Constitution.”
The move by Bryan Pagliano, who had worked on Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign before setting up the server in her New York home in 2009, came in a Monday letter from his lawyer to the House panel investigating the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
[Also see – Staffer who handled Hillary Clinton’s private email to plead the Fifth Amendment – twitchy.com]
The letter cited the ongoing FBI inquiry into the security of Clinton’s e-mail system, and it quoted a Supreme Court ruling in which justices described the Fifth Amendment as protecting “innocent men . . . ‘who otherwise might be ensnared by ambiguous circumstances.’ ”
The FBI is investigating whether Clinton’s system — in which she exclusively used private e-mail for her work as secretary of state — may have jeopardized sensitive national security information.
Thousands of e-mails that have been released by the State Department as part of a public records lawsuit show Clinton herself writing at least six e-mails containing information that has since been deemed classified. Large portions of those e-mails were redacted before their release, on the argument that their publication could harm national security. Read the rest of this entry »
SPEECH CODE SLAYER AWARD: George Mason University Given Highest Rating
Posted: April 21, 2015 Filed under: Censorship, Education | Tags: Academic freedom, American Constitution Society, Bradley A. Smith, Charlottesville, Federalist Society, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, George Mason University, Greg Lukianoff, University of Virginia, Virginia Leave a comment
George Mason University also becomes the third green light institution in the state of Virginia, joining the University of Virginia and The College of William & Mary
WASHINGTON, April 21, 2015—George Mason University (GMU) has eliminated all of its speech codes, earning the highest, “green light” rating from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). After working with FIRE to ensure its policies comply with the First Amendment, the Virginia university has joined a select group of colleges and universities nationwide to earn FIRE’s most favorable rating for free speech on campus.
“Freedom of speech and academic freedom are core values of a university’s mission. I’m delighted that George Mason has joined the ranks of universities that have committed themselves to the full protection of free speech. Thank you to our administration for their dedicated work in providing a context where students and faculty can express controversial ideas freely, and even inartfully, without fear of reprisal.”
“We commend George Mason University for improving its policies and fully upholding the First Amendment rights of its students and faculty members,” said Azhar Majeed, Director of FIRE’s Individual Rights Education Program. “GMU is now a national leader in terms of respecting free speech in higher education, and the university’s actions should serve as a positive example for other institutions to follow.”
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education Awards Highest Free Speech Rating to George Mason University
FIRE has been advocating for speech code reform at GMU for nearly a decade. In May 2014, Majeed and GMU Director of Special Diversity Projects Dennis Webster began working together to revise seven university policies, including a flyer posting policy, a sexual harassment policy, two provisions from the student conduct code, and a policy on leafleting. GMU Foundation Professor of Law Todd Zywicki also assisted in the effort.
“We commend George Mason University for improving its policies and fully upholding the First Amendment rights of its students and faculty members. GMU is now a national leader in terms of respecting free speech in higher education, and the university’s actions should serve as a positive example for other institutions to follow.”
— Azhar Majeed, Director of FIRE’s Individual Rights Education Program
“Freedom of speech and academic freedom are core values of a university’s mission,” said Zywicki. “I’m delighted that George Mason has joined the ranks of universities that have committed themselves to the full protection of free speech. Thank you to our administration for their dedicated work in providing a context where students and faculty can express controversial ideas freely, and even inartfully, without fear of reprisal.” Read the rest of this entry »
Forget the Doctor Shortage: America Facing Critical Nationwide Clown Shortage
Posted: February 18, 2014 Filed under: Art & Culture, Breaking News, Entertainment, U.S. News | Tags: Clown, Clowns of America International, Florida, Nuccia Focile, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, World Clown Association 1 Comment
MARTY SOHL/AP
As the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus returns to Brooklyn Thursday, membership at the country’s largest clown organizations has plunged over the past decade amid declining interest, old age and higher standards for the jokesters…
Natalie Musumeci reports: The tears of a clown may be because no one’s around to take the place of today’s performers. Here, Roberto Alagna (center) performing with Nuccia Focile in ‘Pagliacci’ during a dress rehearsal at the Metropolitan Opera.
Send in the clowns — please!
As the “Greatest Show on Earth” returns to Brooklyn Thursday, circus folk fear a national clown shortage is on the horizon.
“What happens is they go on to high school and college and clowning isn’t cool anymore,” he said. “Clowning is then put on the back burner until their late 40s and early 50s.”
Membership at the country’s largest trade organizations for the jokesters has plunged over the past decade as declining interest, old age and higher standards among employers align against Krusty, Bozo and their crimson-nosed colleagues.
A Conservative Writer’s “Freedom Feminism” Agenda is Short on Both Freedom and Feminism
Posted: January 13, 2014 Filed under: Reading Room, Think Tank | Tags: American Enterprise Institute, Christina Hoff Sommers, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Joan Kennedy Taylor, Lucifer the Lightbearer, Moses Harman, Roderick Long, Sharon Presley Leave a comment
Can Christina Hoff Sommers Save Feminism?
Freedom Feminism: Its Surprising History and Why It Matters Today, by Christina Hoff Sommers, AEI Press, 127 pages, $3.95.
Sharon Presley writes: Some libertarians look askance at feminism, seeing it only as a leftist push to use the state to benefit women. Many conservatives see it something as far worse. But Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute wants to change all that. In Freedom Feminism, Sommers sets out to provide a manifesto for moderate and conservative women (and, some say, for libertarians) because they “must be at the helm” if they are to raise broad support for the kind of feminism that she thinks is worthwhile. Sommers asserts that her “freedom feminism” is a synthesis of 19th century “radical egalitarianism” and a conservative “maternal school,” and that the results avoid the problems of leftist feminism.
This raises two questions for libertarians: Is feminism salvageable? And if so, is Sommers’ new blend the right mix?
In addressing the first question, it is useful to recognize that leftists didn’t invent feminism. Mary Wollstonecraft, the leading influence on First Wave feminism, was an individualist. So were such 19th-century American feminists as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who believed that “nothing adds such dignity to character as the recognition of one’s self-sovereignty; the right to an equal place, everywhere conceded—a place earned by personal merit.” In addition to working for the vote, 19th-century feminists struggled to undo unjust and unfair laws that made women the property of their husbands. They sought equal rights, not governmental privilege.
The Real Gender War is Against Boys
Posted: December 30, 2013 Filed under: Education, Health and Social Issues, Think Tank, U.S. News | Tags: High school, Labour economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mike Lee, Real wage, Single parent, United States, War on Women 4 Comments
It’s time to stop the grievance competition between the sexes and ensure all the nation’s children get what they need to grow into productive citizens. (Photo: Thinkstock)
Lost in all the noise about helping girls achieve their potential is a growing body of evidence that boys are in trouble. It’s the real “gender gap.” Consider this: A recent study by two MIT economists found that men, not women, are less likely to graduate from high school and finish college. As a result, the study said, “over the last three decades, the labor market trajectory of males in the U.S. has turned downward along four dimensions: skills acquisition, employment rates, occupational stature and real wage levels.”
The authors say the declining economic value of men and the rise in women’s achievement contributes to the breakdown of the American family by making marriage less valuable. Then, with more out-of-wedlock births and single-parent households headed by women, the lack of a male role model hurts boys in particular, both economically and academically.
This isn’t a new finding: Multiple studies over the past 40 years have shown that boys suffer more than girls from divorcebecause they tend to externalize their reactions and act in ways that make them more likely to cause trouble at school or get arrested. Simply put: Boys need fathers to learn how to become men. And too many of them don’t have one.
The social cost of this is not just the obvious burden from spiraling welfare and prison populations — a 2008 study estimated that family fragmentation cost taxpayers more than $112 billion a year — but in the lost potential as well.
What to do? The first step to solving a problem is recognizing that one exists. And in this case that means ignoring all the political nonsense about a “war on girls” and “war on women,” and taking a serious look at whether the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction. The research indicates this is so.
If You Think Being Ruled by Obama Is Bad, Try Being Ruled by the Chinese
Posted: December 28, 2013 Filed under: Global, History, Mediasphere, War Room | Tags: Camille Paglia, China, Chinese, National Security Agency, Paglia, United States, World War II, ZDNet 3 Comments
Hamilton writes: Camille Paglia, the liberal-conservative lesbian who adores men, observed recently that nations must never neglect their basic strengths and survival skills. As she put it, “The earth is littered with the ruins of empires that believed they were eternal.” Perhaps she was thinking of the United States; this is, after all, a time when the gap between our towering international presumption is being undermined by our crumbling domestic reality.
The same Paglia-esque thoughts of political mortality came into Hamilton’s mind when he read the news about the near collision, on December 5, of a US Navy ship and a Chinese Navy ship.
Hamilton is reminded that plenty of American conflicts–including the War of 1812, the Spanish-American War, World War One, World War Two, and Vietnam–started with naval incidents.
So suppose we did end up in a war with China–maybe not today, but in five or 10 years. Who would win? Let’s remember, this hypothetical war wouldn’t necessarily be anything like what we have seen before; it could be waged with little more than cyber-hacking, satellite-blinding,and a few long-range missiles–which could be enough to establish military dominance.
In the meantime, we can see plenty of signs that our ability to prevail is ebbing. In 2010, for example, the website ZDNet reported that 80 percent of the world’s communications have a Chinese “back door”–and that China is working on accessing the remaining 20 percent. In other words, America could pass a law preventing the US National Security Agency from snooping on us, but we would still not be able to stop the Chinese from snooping on us.
Does Bitchiness Serve Any Useful Scholarly Purpose?
Posted: November 12, 2013 Filed under: Education, Reading Room, Think Tank | Tags: Colin McGinn, Deborah Cameron, Middlesex University, Philosophical Review, Ted Honderich, University College London 3 Comments
PAUL BATEMAN
Scholars’ rude awakenings
“In the German context, a question is either an attempt to present one’s own view or an attack meant to question the authority of the speaker”
MATTHEW REISZ writes: It seems to me”, says Clive Bloom, emeritus professor of English and American studies at Middlesex University, “that academics are the rudest people on earth.”
Bloom’s first book, The Occult Experience and the New Criticism (1986), was greeted with a review claiming that it “mentions every orifice except the arsehole from whence [it] emerged”. Such “bitchiness”, he believes, comes from many reviewers thinking to themselves: “I wanted to write the book I’m reviewing” or “I’m the expert (but no one has noticed).”
And this, in Bloom’s cheerfully jaundiced view, is part of a wider sense of “resentment and defensiveness” resulting from the fact that most academics “don’t really produce anything that people want”. In extreme cases, this can lead to “hatred of the public and the world generally”. On one occasion, he recalls, his place of employment, at that time Middlesex Polytechnic, was visited by the mayor and mayoress of Haringey, “a small, olive-skinned Greek Cypriot couple, both in their chains of office. We gathered to meet them in the common room. As we stood in line with drinks and nibbles, one colleague turned to me and exclaimed rather too loudly: ‘Oh my God, they’ve invited the cast of EastEnders!’”
The History and Psychology of Clowns Being Scary
Posted: August 10, 2013 Filed under: Reading Room | Tags: Clown, Coulrophobia, Jean-Gaspard Deburau, John Wayne Gacy, Joseph Grimaldi, Pierrot, Smithsonian, Wikipedia Leave a commentYou aren’t alone in your fear of makeup-clad entertainers; people have been frightened by clowns for centuries
By Linda Rodriguez McRobbie via Smithsonian.com
There’s a word— albeit one not recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary or any psychology manual— for the excessive fear of clowns: Coulrophobia.
Not a lot of people actually suffer from a debilitating phobia of clowns; a lot more people, however, just don’t like them. Do a Google search for “I hate clowns” and the first hit is ihateclowns.com, a forum for clown-haters that also offers vanity @ihateclowns.com emails. One “I Hate Clowns” Facebook page has just under 480,000 likes. Some circuses have held workshops to help visitors get over their fear of clowns by letting them watch performers transform into their clown persona. In Sarasota, Florida, in 2006, communal loathing for clowns took a criminal turn when dozens of fiberglass clown statues—part of a public art exhibition called “Clowning Around Town” and a nod to the city’s history as a winter haven for traveling circuses—were defaced, their limbs broken, heads lopped off, spray-painted; two were abducted and we can only guess at their sad fates.
Even the people who are supposed to like clowns—children—supposedly don’t. In 2008, a widely reported University of Sheffield, England, survey of 250 children between the ages of four and 16 found that most of the children disliked and even feared images of clowns. The BBC’s report on the study featured a child psychologist who broadly declared, “Very few children like clowns. They are unfamiliar and come from a different era. They don’t look funny, they just look odd.”
But most clowns aren’t trying to be odd. They’re trying to be silly and sweet, fun personified. So the question is, when did the clown, supposedly a jolly figure of innocuous, kid-friendly entertainment, become so weighed down by fear and sadness? When did clowns become so dark?
Maybe they always have been…
pundit from another planet 