Podcast appearances and mentions of Camille Paglia

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.comClaire Lehmann is a journalist and publisher. In 2015, after leaving academia, she founded the online magazine Quillette, where she is still editor-in-chief. She's also a newspaper columnist for The Australian.For two clips of our convo — on how journalists shouldn't be too friendly with one another, and how postmodernism takes the joy out of literature — pop over to our YouTube page.Other topics: a modest upbringing in Adelaide; her hippie parents; their small-c conservatism; her many working-class jobs; ADHD; aspiring to be a Shakespeare scholar; enjoying Foucault … at first; her “great disillusionment” with pomo theory; the impenetrable prose of Butler; the great Germaine Greer; praising Camille Paglia; evolutionary psychology; Wright's The Moral Animal and Pinker's The Blank Slate; Claire switching to forensic psychology after an abusive relationship; the TV show Adolescence; getting hired by the Sydney Morning Herald to write op-eds — her first on marriage equality; Bush's federal amendment; competition among women; tribalism and mass migration; soaring housing costs in Australia; rising populism in the West; creating Quillette; the IDW; being anti-anti-Trump; audience capture; Islamism and Charlie Hebdo; Covid; critical Trump theory; tariffs; reflexive anti-elitism; Joe Rogan; Almost Famous; Orwell; Spinoza; Oakeshott; Fukuyama and boredom; tech billionaires on Inauguration Day; the sycophants of Trump 2.0; and X as a state propaganda platform.Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Next week: David Graham on Project 2025. After that: Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson on the Biden years, Sam Tanenhaus on Bill Buckley, Robert Merry on President McKinley, Walter Isaacson on Ben Franklin, and Paul Elie on his book The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

In this inspiring and deep-dive episode of The Neil Haley Show, Neil and Greg Hanna sit down with acclaimed author Michael Walsh, who joins the show to discuss his 20th book, Rage to Conquer. A celebrated writer, journalist, classical music critic, and screenwriter, Walsh brings decades of global experience and a razor-sharp mind to the mic.Together, they explore the military themes in his work, including the influence of his father—a U.S. Marine and Korean War hero who survived the legendary Chosin Reservoir battle. Walsh opens up about his disciplined writing process, his unique career trajectory from Time Magazine to Hollywood, and why he's dedicated to preserving stories of masculinity, legacy, and courage.[00:00:00] Introduction to Michael Walsh and the release of his 20th book, Rage to Conquer[00:00:45] Growing up in the Marine Corps and how his father's wartime survival inspired his work[00:01:30] Transition from Last Stands to Rage to Conquer and how both books connect[00:02:30] The Chosin Reservoir, survivor stories, and why military history matters[00:03:30] On researching historical battles and the power (and limits) of AI in nonfiction writing[00:04:15] Learning to write through reading—and why technique is key for every serious writer[00:05:00] Walsh's background as a concert pianist and foreign correspondent during the Cold War[00:06:00] The Hollywood journey: what really happens behind the scenes of spec scripts and casting[00:07:30] Why Netflix is both a blessing and a curse for screenwriters[00:08:30] The demise of “spec script culture” and how writers are undervalued in modern Hollywood[00:10:00] Reflections on Cadet Kelly, Disney's evolving culture, and the new creative climate[00:12:00] Why rage, resilience, and leadership are central themes for young men in his books[00:14:00] Walsh's admiration for author James Ellroy and what separates great writers from the rest[00:15:30] The value of rejection and why perseverance is the writer's greatest asset[00:16:30] What it means to “just go to work”—how his father's survival mindset shaped his own[00:17:30] A critique of woke culture, the suppression of masculinity, and the historical importance of men at war[00:19:00] The influence of Camille Paglia and the need for unapologetic male role models today[00:21:00] Final reflection: “Don't give up”—how Walsh has faced death, illness, and rejection without ever quitting

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.comMike White is a writer, director, and actor. Among his many films, he wrote and starred in Chuck & Buck and wrote the screenplay for School of Rock. In television, he co-created and starred in Enlightened, and he's the brilliant auteur of The White Lotus, currently in its third season. In reality TV, he competed on Survivor: David vs. Goliath and two seasons of The Amazing Race, alongside his gay evangelical father, Mel White, whom I knew well before I came to admire his son's work.For three clips of our convo — on the humanism of The White Lotus, Mike finding Buddhism, and his courageous gay dad — pop over to our YouTube page.Other topics: growing up in the boring suburbs of Pasadena; attending a private school of rich kids; his mom a teacher and homemaker; Mel the minister and ghostwriter for famous televangelists; the productive pain of adolescence; Mike studying postmodernists like Judith Butler at Wesleyan; Mel coming out of the closet right after his kids left college; Soul Force; Mike's power of observation; his love of Camille Paglia; Sexual Personae; the subtle psychological warfare in White Lotus; how its characters aren't didactic; how identity politics is bad for art; the golden age of reality TV; Mel joining Falwell's church with his partner; the pressure to be the model gay; the gay characters of South Park; Mike's nervous breakdown; the humor and lightness in Buddhism; meditation; Oakeshott and the ordeal of consciousness; Orwell and the clarity of nonfiction; Jennifer Coolidge and the evil gays; Parker Posey; Sam Rockwell's autogynephilic role; bro-cest; the mysteries of desire; Freud; how iPhones kill imagination; Mike's veganism; how class gets eclipsed in wokeness; and the redeemable qualities in all the White Lotus characters.Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Nick Denton on China's inevitable world domination, Evan Wolfson on the history of marriage equality, Francis Collins on faith and science, and Douglas Murray on Israel and Gaza. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Atlas Shrugged seems to be everywhere today. Randian villains are in the news. Rand remains influential on the right, from the Reagan era to the modern libertarian movement. Perhaps most significantly, entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen who are moving into government with DOGE, have been influenced by Rand, and, fascinatingly, Andreessen only read the novel four years ago. Hollis Robbins (@Anecdotal) and I talked about how Atlas Shrugged is in conversation with the great novels of the past, Rand's greats skills of plotting, drama, and character, and what makes Atlas Shrugged a serious novel, not just a vehicle for ideology. Love it or loathe it, Atlas Shrugged is having a moment. Everyone brings a preconception of Ayn Rand, but she has been opposed by the right and the left ever since she first published. Other than Jennifer Burns' biography, academic study has largely declined to notice Rand. But Rand deserves our serious attention, both as a novelist, and as an influence on the modern world. Here are a couple of excerpts.We talk a lot these days about, “how can I be my best self?” That's what Rand is saying. She's saying, actually, it's not about earning money, it's not about being rich. It is about the perfection of the moral life. It's about the pursuit of excellence. It's about the cultivation of virtue. These are the important things. This is what Dagny is doing. When all the entrepreneurs at the end, they're in the happy valley, actually, between them, they have not that much money, right?Also this.What would Ayn Rand think about the influencer economy? Oh, she'd despise it. She would despise it… all these little girls wanting to grow up to be influencers, they're caught in some algorithm, which is awful. Why would you want to spend your life influencing others? Go create something. It's a hard medicine.And.Her aesthetic is very classical, draped. She doesn't wear flowery patterns. She wears draped, clearly close-fitting gowns and gray tailored suits and a minimum of jewelry, though she does have this bracelet chain made of Rearden metal. You don't know when she possibly has time to go shopping, but she's perfectly dressed all the time in the fashion that we would understand as feminist. She wears trousers, she wears suits, but when she goes out, this black velvet cape. I think it's important to see her as that, even though nobody talks about that in terms of this novel, what a heroine she is. I know that when I was reading her as a teenage girl, that's it.TranscriptHenry: Today, I am talking with Hollis Robbins, former dean of the humanities at Utah University and special advisor on the humanities and AI. We are talking about Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Hollis, hello.Hollis Robbins: Hello. I'm really glad to have this conversation with you. We've known each other for some years and follow each other's work. I was trained as a scholar of 19th-century American, Victorian, and African-American literature, mostly novels, and love having conversations with you about big, deep novels. When I suggested that we read this book, I was hoping you would be enthusiastic about it, so I'm really happy to be having this conversation. It's hard to know who's interviewing you or what conversation this is, but for you coming at this middle-aged. Not quite middle-aged, what are you?Henry: I'm middle enough. No. This is not going to be an interview as such. We are going to have a conversation about Atlas Shrugged, and we're going to, as you say, talk about it as a novel. It always gets talked about as an ideology. We are very interested in it as a novel and as two people who love the great novels of the 19th century. I've been excited to do this as well. I think that's why it's going to be good. Why don't we start with, why are we doing this?Hollis: I wanted to gesture to that. You are one of the leading public voices on the importance of reading literature and the importance of reading novels particularly, though I saw today, Matt Yglesias had a blog post about Middlemarch, which I think he just recently read. I can credit you with that, or us, or those of us who are telling people read the big novels.My life trajectory was that I read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead before I read Dickens, before I read Jane Austen, before I read Harriet Beecher Stowe or Melville or the Brontës. For me, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead were foundational novels as novels. I wondered what it would be like to talk to somebody whose experience was flipped.Henry: Right, I'm 38 and I'd never read this book. I was coming at it partly having read all those other books, but partly for my whole life, people have said, "Oh, that's really a bad book. That's so badly written. That book is no good." The number one thing I can say to people is this book is fun.Hollis: It's really fun. I was going to say usually what I forget to do in talking about books is give the summary. I'm going to hold up my copy, which is my dog-eared copy from high school, which is hilarious. It's got the tiniest print, which I couldn't possibly read now. No underlining, which is interesting. I read this book before I understood that you were supposed to underline when you liked passages in the book.It was interesting to me. I'd probably read it five or six times in my youth and didn't underline anything. The story is--- You can help me fill in the blanks. For readers who haven't read it, there's this young woman, Dagny Taggart, who's the heiress of the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad fortune. She's a woman. This takes place in about, I think, the '40s, '50s. Her older brother, Jim Taggart, is CEO. She's COO, so she's the operations person. It is in some ways the story of her-- It's not quite a bildungsroman. This is the way I tell the story. It's the story of her coming to the realization of how the world works. There's many ways to come at this story. She has multiple boyfriends, which is excellent. Her first boyfriend, his name is Francisco d'Anconia. He's the head of d'Anconia Copper. He too is an heir of this longstanding copper fortune. Her second is a metals magnate, Hank Rearden, who invents this great metal, Rearden metal.Really, it's also the story of the decline of America, and the ways that, in this Randian universe, these villainous group of people who run the country are always taking and extracting from producers. As she's creating and building this great railroad and doing wonderful things and using Rearden metal to do it, something is pulling all the producers out of society, and she's like, "What is going on?"It turns out there's this person, John Galt, who is saying, "I don't like the way the country is run. I don't like this extractive philosophy. I am going to take all the producers and lure them voluntarily to a--" It's a hero's lair. It's not like a James Bond villain lair. It's a hero lair in Colorado called Galt's Gulch. He is John Galt. It ends up being a battle between who is right in a wrong world. Is it the ethical person, Dagny Taggart, who continues to strive and try to be a producer and hold on to her ethics in this corrupt world, or is it somebody saying, "To hell with this. I am going on strike. You guys come with me and let the world collapse." How's that for summary?Henry: No, I think that's great. I couldn't have done a better job. One thing that we can say is that the role of reason, of being a rational person, of making reason the sole arbiter of how you make choices, be they practical, ethical, financial, whatever, that's at the heart of the book, right?Hollis: That's the philosophy. We could go there in a second. I think the plot of the book is that she demonstrates this.Henry: What she has to learn, like what is the big lesson for Dagny, is at the beginning, she hasn't fully understood that the good guys use reason and the bad guys do not, as it were.Hollis: Right. I think that's right. I like thinking about this as a bildungsroman. You said that the book is fun. Her part of the book is fun, but not really fun. The fun part of the book, and you can tell me because every time you kept texting me, "Oh my God, Jim Taggart. Oh my God, Jim Taggart. Oh my God, Jim Taggart."--Henry: These guys are so awful. [laughs]Hollis: They're so awful. The fun parts of the book, the Rand villains are the government entities and the cabals of business leaders who she calls looters and second-handers who run the country and all they do is extract value. Marc Andreessen was on a podcast recently and was all about these Rand villains and these looters. I think, again, to get back to why are we doing this and why are we doing this now, Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged is in the air with the second Trump administration.Henry: Yes. In a way, we're doing this because the question is, is this the novel of the future? Right? What we're seeing is it's very influential on the right. Rand's ideas have long been a libertarian inspiration. Elon Musk's read her. You mentioned Andreessen, Peter Thiel, all these people. It goes back to the Reagan days. People in the Republican Party have been quoting Ayn Rand. Then more broadly, we see all these worries about social collapse today. What happens in the plot of Atlas Shrugged is that society does slowly collapse.Dagny has to realize it's because of these people who are not using their reason and they're nationalizing things and taking resource away from proficient entrepreneurs and stuff. It's all about infrastructure, energy, people doing exploitation in the name of the common good, ineffective political leaders, people covering up lies and misdemeanors, people being accepting of what is obviously criminal behavior because it's in the cause of the greater good. We have free speech, all these topics, energy production. We're seeing this in the headlines. When I was reading this book, I was like, "Oh my God, how did she know?"Hollis: How did she know?Henry: How did she know.Hollis: I think the bildungsroman aspect of this as a novel. It's hard to read it as a novel. I think it's hard. By the way, I have to really I applaud you for not, until you got almost to the end of the book, texting me about this person or that person, or how it's political. I admire you for looking at the book and coming to the book as an expert in novels.What she comes to terms with, and it's a real slowly-- It's not even scales falling from her eyes. She doesn't sit and say, "Oh my God, the world is corrupt." She just is like, "That person's corrupt. I'm not going to deal with them. That person's corrupt. I'm not going to deal with them." She just keeps going, but she doesn't ever accept with a fatalism that she's living in this world where every single person who's in charge is going to let her down.Henry: It's also interesting to me that she doesn't complain.Hollis: No.Henry: Now, that reminded me of I wrote about Margaret Thatcher in my book. She was another big one for however hard it was, however difficult it was, why would you complain? Let's just go to work. A lot of people found her difficult for that reason. When I was reading this, I was like, "Ayn Rand clearly has the same idea. You can nationalize every last inch of the economy. I'm going to get up and go to work and try and beat you. I'm not going to sit around and complain." It's a very stern attitude in a way. She's very strict with herself. I found the book to be-- I know Rand is very atheist, but a very Protestant book.Hollis: Yes, it really is.Henry: Intensely Protestant, yes.Hollis: That's a nice way to think about it. A certain kind of Protestant, a Weberian Protestant.Henry: Sure.Hollis: Not a Southern Baptist Protestant who believes in the absence of reason. I was thinking I was teaching in Mississippi years ago. I was teaching a course on Wordsworth and had to do a unit on Voltaire because you can't really understand Wordsworth unless you understand Voltaire. There was a woman in my class. She was a version of Presbyterian who doesn't believe in reason, believes that in the fall, man lost their reason.Therefore, she asked if she could be excused from class because I was talking about Voltaire and the importance of reason. She said, "This is against my religion. If you believe that man has reason, you are actually going about it wrong, so may I be excused?" Which in all the years I've had people ask for excuses to miss class, that was a memorable one.Henry: That's unique. [laughs]Hollis: It's interesting because, again, I should get back to the novel, the opposition from Rand is as strong on the religious right as it is on the left. In fact, very strong. When Atlas Shrugged came out, William F. Buckley famously had Whittaker Chambers write the review. He hated her. He despised her. He despised the fact that she put reason first.Henry: Yes. I think that's worth emphasizing that some people listening will think, "I'm Rand. These nasty ideas, she's on the right." She's been ideologically described in that way so many times. Deirdre McCloskey in the Literary Review has just in the most recent edition written an absolutely scathing article about Rand. That's libertarian opposition to Rand.McCloskey is saying Hayek is the real thing here and Rand would have hated everything that Hayek did. She got everything wrong. I think the opposition to her, as you say, it's on both sides. One thing that's interesting about this novel is that because she created her own philosophy, which people will have different views on how well that went, but there isn't anyone else like this. All the other people like this are her followers.Hollis: Exactly.Henry: She's outside of the other systems of thought in a way.Hollis: We should talk about Rand. I'm going to quote a little bit from this book on feminist interpretation of Ayn Rand. Let's talk a little bit, if we can, about Dagny as the heroine of a novel, or a hero, because one of the really interesting things about reading Rand at this moment is that she's got one pronoun, he, him, man. She is in this era where man means man and women. That there isn't men and women, he and she, and now it's he, she, and them. She is like, "There's one pronoun." Even she talks about the rights of man or man believes. She means everybody, but she only means man too. It's interesting.I was very much part of the first pronoun wars in the 1980s when women scholars were like, "He and she." Now we're thrown out the window with that binary. Again, we don't need to talk about pronouns, but it's really important to understanding Rand and reading this novel, how much she embraces men and the male pronoun, even while she is using it both ways, and even while her story is led by this woman. She's beautiful. She's beautiful in a very specific way. She's tall, she's slender, she's got great cheekbones, she's got great shoulders, she's got long legs.Her aesthetic is very classical, draped. She doesn't wear flowery patterns. She wears draped, clearly close-fitting gowns and gray tailored suits and a minimum of jewelry, though she does have this bracelet chain made of Rearden metal. You don't know when she possibly has time to go shopping, but she's perfectly dressed all the time in the fashion that we would understand as feminist. She wears trousers, she wears suits, but when she goes out, this black velvet cape. I think it's important to see her as that, even though nobody talks about that in terms of this novel, what a heroine she is. I know that when I was reading her as a teenage girl, that's it.Henry: I want to be Dagny.Hollis: I want to be Dagny. I want to have capes, right?Henry: There's a very important scene, it's not too much of a plot spoiler, where Hank Rearden has invented this new metal. It's very exciting because it's much more efficient and it's much stronger and you can build new bridges for the trains and everything. He makes a bracelet of his new metal. It's a new steel alloy, I think, and gives it to his wife. His wife basically doesn't care.She's not really interested in what it takes to earn the money, she just wants to have the money. You get the strong impression throughout the book that some of the people that Rand is most scathingly disapproving of are wives who don't work. None of those people come out well. When Dagny goes to a party at the Rearden house and she is romantically involved with Hank Rearden, she sees the bracelet.Hollis: She isn't then, right? Isn't she not then?Henry: No, but they have feelings for each otherHollis: Right. Reasonable feelings for each other.Henry: That's right, reasonable feelings, but they're not currently acting on those feelings. She sees the bracelet and she exchanges her, I think, diamonds-Hollis: Diamond bracelet.Henry: -for the Rearden metal bracelet with the wife. It's this wonderful moment where these two opposite ideals of womanhood that Rand is presenting. It's a great moment of heroism for Dagny because she is saying, "Who cares about glittering diamonds when you have a new steel alloy that can make this incredible bridge?" It sounds crazy, but this is 1957. Dagny is very much what you might call one of the new women.Hollis: Right.Henry: I think in some ways, Rand-- I don't like the phrase she's ahead of her time. I've read a lot of 1950s fiction. This is not the typical woman.Hollis: No, this is not Cheever. This is not a bored suburban housewife at a time when the way the '50s are taught, certainly in America, it's like women could work during the war, then they were suburban housewives, there was bored, there were key parties and all sorts of Cheever sorts of things. This is not that. I read this first. I was only 15 years after it was published, I think, in the '60s, early '70s reading it.This, to me, seemed perfectly normal and everything else seemed regressive and strange and whiny. There's a lot to be said for reading this novel first. I think if we can talk a little bit about these set pieces because I think for me reading it as a novel and hearing you talk about it as a novel, that novels, whether we're thinking about-- I want to see if you want to compare her to Dorothea or just to any other Victorian women novel that you can think of. That's the closest, right? Is there anybody that's closest to Dorothea from Middlemarch? Is that there are these set pieces. People think that Rand-- the idea is that she's not a great writer. She is a great writer. She started in Hollywood. Her first book, The Fountainhead, was made into a movie. She understands plotting and keeping the reader's attention. We go forward, we go backwards. There's her relationship with Francisco d'Anconia that we see her now, years after, then we have flashbacks to growing up and how they became lovers.There are big meeting set pieces where everybody's in the room, and we have all the backstories of the people in the room, what is going to happen. There are these big party scenes, as you say. For example, this big, glorious, glamorous party at the Rearden house, Francisco is there. Francisco and Hank Rearden get in a conversation, and she's like, "I want to go see what my old boyfriend is talking to the guy I like about."There are these moments where you're not supposed to come at the book that way in this serious philosophical way. Then later on when there's this wonderful scene where Francisco comes to see Dagny. This is much later. Hank and Dagny are lovers, so he has a key to her apartment. He walks in and everybody sees immediately what's going on. It's as good as any other farce moment of somebody hiding behind a curtain, right?Henry: Yes.Hollis: Everything is revealed all at once. She's very good at scenes like that.Henry: Yes, very good. She's very good at high drama. One of the phrases that kept coming back to me was that this book is a melodrama of ideas.Hollis: Yes.Henry: Right? It's not a novel of ideas as such, it's a melodrama of ideas. I think one thing that people who think she's a bad writer will say is it's melodrama, the characters are flat, the prose is not lyrical, all these different things. Whereas when I read it, I was like, "She's so good at melodrama." I feel like, in some ways, it does not feel like a 1950s novel because there's so much excitement about technology, so much feminism, just so many things that I do not associate--Maybe I'm being too English, but I don't read John Cheever, for example, and think, "Oh, he loves the train." Whereas this book is very, very exciting as a story about inventing a new kind of train that goes really fast," which sounds silly, but that's a really Dickensian theme, that's in Middlemarch. Actually, that's what Matt Yglesias was talking about in his excellent piece today. What does feel very 1950s is you've got the Hollywood influence. The dialogue, I think, is not always great, but it is often great.I often would read pages and think, "This would actually be really good in, not an A++ movie, but in a decent crime movie or something. This would be quite good dialogue." There's a comic book aesthetic to it in the way that the scenes play out. Just a lot of these '50s aesthetics actually are present in the book. I'm going to read one paragraph. It's from part one. I think we should read out loud a few bits to give people a sense.Hollis: Yes.Henry: This is when Dagny has built a new train line using grid and metal to make the bridge so that it can go over a valley. I think that's right. The train can do 100 miles an hour. It's this very, very exciting new development. It means that energy can be supplied to factories, and so it's a huge, big deal. This is when she's on the train going at 100 miles an hour and she just can't believe it's happening."Things streaked past a water tank, a tree, a shanty, a grain silo. They had a windshield wiper motion. They were rising, describing a curve, and dropping back. The telegraph wires ran a race with the train, rising and falling from pole to pole, in an even rhythm like the cardiograph record of a steady heartbeat written across the sky. She looked ahead at the haze that melted rail and distance, a haze that could rip apart at any moment to some shape of disaster.""She wondered why she felt safer than she had ever felt in a car behind the engine. Safer here where it seemed as if should an obstacle rise, her breast and the glass shield would be the first to smash against it. She smiled, grasping the answer. It was the security of being first with full sight and full knowledge of one's own course, not the blind sense of being pulled into the unknown by some unknown power ahead."That's not MFA prose or whatever, but it turns the pages. I think she's very good at relating we're on the train and it's going very fast to how Dagny is thinking through the philosophical conundrum that is basically going to drive the whole plot forwards. I was reminded again and again of what Virginia Woolf said about Walter Scott, where she compared Scott to Robert Louis Stevenson. She said that Stevenson had beautiful sentences and dapper little adjectives. It was all jeweled and carefully done. You could marvel over each sentence.She said, "Whereas Scott, it's just page after page and no sentence is beautiful," but she says, "He writes at the level of the page. He's not like Stevenson. He's not writing at the level of the sentence. You have to step into the world." You can say, 'Oh, that wasn't a very good sentence,' but my goodness, the pages keep turning and you're there in the world, right?Hollis: Exactly.Henry: I think she made a really important point there and we just undervalue that so much when we say, oh, so-and-so is not a good writer. What we mean is they're not a Robert Louis Stevenson, they're a Walter Scott. It's like, sure, but Walter Scott was great at what he did. Ayn Rand is in the Walter Scott inheritance in the sense that it's a romance, it's not strictly realistic novel. You have to step into the world. You can't spend your whole time going, "Was that a great sentence? Do I really agree with what she just--" It's like, no, you have to go into this utopian sci-fi universe and you have to keep turning the pages. You get caught up and you go, "Wow, this is this is working for me."Hollis: Let me push back on that-Henry: Yes, good.Hollis: -because I think that was a beautiful passage, one of my favorite passages in this book, which is hard to say because it's a really, really big book. It's a memorable passage because here she is in a place at this moment. She is questioning herself. Isn't she questioning why? Why do I feel safe? Then it strikes her. In this moment, all interior while all this stuff is happening. This whole Rearden metal train bridge set piece is one of the highlights of at least the first half of the book. You come away, even if we've had our entire life up to her, understanding her as a philosophical this woman. How is that different from Dorothea or from Elizabeth Bennet? Yes, Elizabeth Bennet, right?Henry: Oh, no, I agree. My point was purely about prose style, which was to say if you say, "Oh, she writes like a Walter Scott, not like a Robert Louis Stevenson," you're going to deny yourself seeing what you've just said, which is that actually, yes, she has the ability to write philosophical characters.Hollis: When I first read Pride and Prejudice, I read it through the lens of Rand. Now, clearly, these heroines had fewer choices. Dorothea marries Casaubon, I don't know how you pronounce it, because she thinks he's a Randian expert, somebody who's got this grand idea. She's like, "Whoa, I want to be part of this endeavor, the key to all mythologies." Then she's so let down. In the Randian sense, you can see why she would have wanted him.Henry: That's right. I think George Eliot would have strongly disagreed with Rand philosophically. The heroines, as you say, what they're doing in the novel is having to realize that there are social conventions I have to understand and there are things I have to learn how to do, but actually, the key to working all that out is more at the moral philosophical level. This is what happens to Dagny. I think it's on the next page from what I just read. There's another passage where it says that she's in the train and she's enjoying. It's working and she's thrilled that her train is working. She was trying not to think, but she couldn't help herself.She said, "Who made the train. Is it the brute force of muscle? Who can make all the dials and the levers? How is it possible that this thing has even been put together?" Then she starts thinking to herself, "We've got a government who's saying it's wrong to do this, you're taking resources, you're not doing it for the common good." She says, "How can they regard this as evil? How can they believe that this is ignoble to have created this incredible thing?"She says she wants to be able to toss the subject out of the window and let it get shattered somewhere along the track. She wants the thoughts to go past like the telegraph poles, but obviously, she can't. She has this moment of realization that this can't be wrong. This type of human accomplishment can't be against the common good. It can't be considered to be ignoble. I think that is like the Victorian heroines.To me, it was more like Fanny Price, which is that someone turns up into a relatively closed system of ideas and keeps their own counsel for a long time, and has to admit sometimes when they haven't got it right or whatever. Basically, in the end, they are vindicated on fairly straightforward grounds. Dagny comes to realize that, "I was right. I was using my reason. I was working hard. I was being productive. Yes, I was right about that." Fanny, it's more like a Christian insight into good behavior, but I felt the pattern was the same.Hollis: Sure. I'll also bring up Jane Eyre here, right?Henry: Yes.Hollis: Jane Eyre, her relationship, there's a lot to be said of both Mr. Darcy and Mr. Rochester with Hank Rearden because Hank Rearden has to come to his sense. He's married. He doesn't like his wife. He doesn't like this whole system that he's in. He wants to be with a woman that's a meeting of the mind, but he's got all this social convention he has to deal with. Rochester has to struggle, and of course, Bertha Mason has to die in that book. He ends up leaving his wife, but too late. If we're going to look at this novel as a novel, we can see that there are these moments that I think have some resonance. I know you don't seem to want to go to the Mr. Darcy part of it.Henry: No. I had also thought about Jane Eyre. My thought was that, obviously, other than being secular because Jane Eyre is very Christian, the difference is that Hank Rearden and Dagny basically agree that we can't conduct our relationship in a way that would be morally compromising to her. They go through this very difficult process of reasoning like, "How can we do this in a good way?"They're a little bit self-sacrificing about it because they don't want to upset the moral balance. Whereas Mr. Rochester, at least for the first part of the book, has an attitude that's more like, "Yes, but she's in the attic. Why does it matter if we get married?" He doesn't really see the problem of morally compromising Jane, and so Jane has to run away.Hollis: Right.Henry: One of the interesting things about Rand, what is different from like Austen and the Brontës and whatever, is that Dagny and Hank are not in opposition before they get together. They have actually this unusual thing in romance and literature, which is that they have a meeting of minds. What gets in the way is that the way their minds agree is contra mundum and the world has made this problem for them.Hollis: I think in a way, that's the central relationship in--Henry: Yes. That was how I read it, yes.Hollis: Yes. The fact as we think about what the complications are in reading this novel as a novel is that here is this great central romance and they've got obstacles. She's got an old boyfriend, he's married. They've got all these things that are classic obstacles to a love story. Rand understands that enough to build it, that that will keep a lot of readers' interest, but then it's like, "That's actually not the point of my book," which is how the second half or the last third of the novel just gets really wiggy." Again, spoiler alert, but Hank is blackmailed to be, as the society is collapsing, as things are collapsing--Henry: We should say that the government has taken over in a nationalizing program by this point.Hollis: Right, because as John Galt is pulling all the thought leaders and the industrialists and all the movers of the world into his lair, things are getting harder and harder and harder, things are getting nationalized. Some of these big meetings in Washington where these horrible people are deciding how to redistribute wealth, again, which is part of the reason somebody like Congressman Paul Ryan would give out copies of Atlas Shrugged to all of his staffers. He's like, "You've got to read this book because we can't go to Washington and be like this. The Trumpian idea is we've got to get rid of people who are covering up and not doing the right thing."They've blackmailed Hank Rearden into giving up Rearden Metal by saying, "We know you've been sleeping with Dagny Taggart." It's a very dramatic point. How is this going to go down?Henry: Right. I think that's interesting. What I loved about the way she handled that romance was that romance is clearly part of what she sees as important to a flourishing life. She has to constantly yoke it to this idea that reason is everything, so human passion has to be conducted on the basis that it's logically reasonable, but that it therefore becomes self-sacrificing. There is something really sad and a little bit tragic about Hank being blackmailed like that, right?Hollis: Yes. I have to say their first road trip together, it's like, "Let's just get out of here and go have a road trip and stay in hotels and have sex and it'll be awesome." That their road trip is like, "Let's go also see some abandoned factories and see what treasures we might find there." To turn this love road trip into also the plot twist that gets them closer to John Galt is a magnificent piece of plot.Henry: Yes. I loved that. I know you want to talk about the big John Galt speech later, but I'm going to quote one line because this all relates to what I think is one of the most central lines of the book. "The damned and the guiltiest among you are the men who had the capacity to know yet chose to blank out reality." A lot of the time, like in Brontë or whatever, there are characters like Rochester's like that. The center of their romance is that they will never do that to each other because that's what they believe philosophically, ethically. It's how they conduct themselves at business. It's how they expect other people to conduct themselves. They will never sacrifice that for each other.That for them is a really high form of love and it's what enables huge mutual respect. Again, it's one of those things I'm amazed-- I used to work in Westminster. I knew I was a bit of a libertarian. I knew lots of Rand adjacent or just very, very Randian people. I thought they were all insane, but that's because no one would ever say this. No one would ever say she took an idea like that and turned it into a huge romance across hundreds of pages. Who else has done that in the novel? I think that's great.Hollis: It really is hard. It really is a hard book. The thing that people say about the book, as you say, and the reason you hadn't read it up until now, is it's like, "Oh, yes, I toyed with Rand as a teenager and then I put that aside." I put away my childish things, right? That's what everybody says on the left, on the right. You have to think about it's actually really hard. My theory would be that people put it away because it's really, really hard, what she tried is hard. Whether she succeeded or not is also hard. As we were just, before we jumped on, talking about Rand's appearance on Johnny Carson, a full half hour segment of him taking her very seriously, this is a woman who clearly succeeded. I recently read Jennifer Burn's biography of her, which is great. Shout out to Jennifer.What I came away with is this is a woman who made her living as a writer, which is hard to do. That is a hard thing to do, is to make your living as a writer, as a woman in the time difference between 1942, The Fountainhead, which was huge, and 57, Atlas Shrugged. She was blogging, she had newsletters, she had a media operation that's really, really impressive. This whole package doesn't really get looked at, she as a novelist. Again, let me also say it was later on when I came to Harriet Beecher Stowe, who is another extraordinary woman novelist in America who wrote this groundbreaking book, which is filled--I particularly want to shout out to George Harris, the slave inventor who carried himself like a Rand hero as a minor character and escapes. His wife is Eliza, who famously runs across the ice flows in a brave Randian heroine escape to freedom where nobody's going to tell them what to do. These women who changed literature in many ways who have a really vexed relationship or a vexed place in academia. Certainly Stowe is studied.Some 20 years ago, I was at an event with the great Elaine Showalter, who was coming out with an anthology of American women writers. I was in the audience and I raised my hand, I said, "Where's Ayn Rand?" She was like, "Ha, ha, ha." Of course, what a question is that? There is no good reason that Ayn Rand should not be studied in academia. There is no good reason. These are influential novels that actually, as we've talked about here, can be talked about in the context of other novels.Henry: I think one relevant comparison is let's say you study English 19th-century literature on a course, a state-of-the-nation novel or the novel of ideas would be included as routine, I think very few people would say, "Oh, those novels are aesthetically excellent. We read them because they're beautifully written, and they're as fun as Dickens." No one's saying that. Some of them are good, some of them are not good. They're important because of what they are and the barrier to saying why Rand is important for what she is because, I think, people believe her ideas are evil, basically.One central idea is she thinks selfishness is good, but I think we've slightly dealt with the fact that Dagny and Hank actually aren't selfish some of the time, and that they are forced by their ethical system into not being selfish. The other thing that people say is that it's all free-market billionaire stuff, basically. I'm going to read out a passage from-- It's a speech by Francisco in the second part. It's a long speech, so I'm not going to read all eight pages. I'm going to read this speech because I think this theme that I'm about to read out, it's a motif, it's again and again and again.Hollis: Is this where he's speaking to Hank or to Dagny?Henry: I think when he's speaking to Dagny and he says this."Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he want. Money will not give him a code of values if he has evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose if he has evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent."The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him with his money replacing his judgment ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered, that no man may be smaller than his money."Hollis: That's a good--Henry: Right? It's a great paragraph. I feel like she says that in dozens of ways throughout the book, and she wants you to be very clear when you leave that this book is not a creed in the name of just make money and have free market capitalism so you can be rich. That paragraph and so many others, it's almost biblical in the way she writes it. She's really hammering the rhythms, and the tones, and the parallels. She's also, I think, trying to appropriate some of the way the Bible talks about money and turn it into her own secular pseudo-Aristotelian idea, right?Hollis: Yes.Henry: We talk a lot these days about, how can I be my best self? That's what Rand is saying. She's saying, actually, it's not about earning money, it's not about being rich. It is about the perfection of the moral life. It's about the pursuit of excellence. It's about the cultivation of virtue. These are the important things. This is what Dagny is doing. When all the entrepreneurs at the end, they're in the happy valley, actually, between them, they have not that much money, right?Hollis: Right.Henry: The book does not end in a rich utopia, it's important to say.Hollis: It's interesting. A couple of things. I want to get this back since we're still in the novel. Let me say when we get to Galt's great speech, which is bizarre. He says a similar thing that I'll bring in now. He says, "The mother who buys milk for her baby instead of a hat is not sacrificing because her values are feeding the baby. The woman who sacrifices the hat to feed her baby, but really wants the hat and is only feeding the baby out of duty is sacrificing." That's bad. She's saying get your values in order. Understand what it is you want and do that thing, but don't do it because somebody says you have to. She says this over and over in many ways, or the book says this.Henry: We should say, that example of the mother is incidental. The point she's always making is you must think this through for yourself, you must not do it because you've been told to do it.Hollis: Right, exactly. To get back to the love story aspects of the book because they don't sit and say they love each other, even all the great romances. It's not like, "I love you. I love you." It's straight to sex or looks and meetings of the minds. It's interesting. We should deal with the fact that from The Fountainhead and a little bit in this book, the sex is a little rapey. It's a difficult thing to talk about. It's certainly one of the reasons that feminists, women writers don't approve of her. In the book, it's consensual. Whatever one wants to think about the ways that people have sex, it is consensual in the book. Also in The Fountainhead.I'm sure I'll get hate mail for even saying that, but in her universe, that's where it is. What's interesting, Francisco as a character is so interesting. He's conflicted, he's charming, he's her first lover. He's utterly good in every way. He ends up without her. Hank is good. Hank goes through his struggles and learning curve about women prioritizing. If you don't like your wife, don't be married to your wife. It's like he goes through his own what are my values and how do I live them.I know you think that this is bizarre, but there's a lot of writing about the relationship of Hank and Francisco because they find themselves in the same room a lot. They happen to have both been Dagny's lovers or ex-lovers, and they really, really like each other. There's a way that that bonding-- Homosexuality does not exist in her novels, whatever, but that's a relationship of two people that really are hot for one another. There is a lot of writing. There are queer readings of Rand that make a lot of that relationship.Again, this isn't my particular lens of criticism, but I do see that the energy, which is why I asked you which speech you were reading because some of Francisco's best speeches are for Hank because he's trying to woo Hank to happy valley. Toward the end when they're all hanging out together in Galt's Gulch, there's clearly a relationship there.Henry: Oh, yes. No, once you pointed out to me, I was like, "That makes sense of so many passages." That's clearly there. What I don't understand is why she did that. I feel like, and this is quite an accomplishment because it's a big novel with a lot of moving parts, everything else is resolved both in terms of the plot, but also in terms of how it fits her philosophical idea. That, I think, is pretty much the only thing where you're left wondering, "Why was that in there? She hasn't made a point about it. They haven't done anything about it." This I don't understand. That's my query.Hollis: Getting ready to have this conversation, I spent a lot of time on some Reddit threads. I ran Atlas Shrugged Reddit threads where there's some fantastic conversations.Henry: Yes, there is.Hollis: One of them is about, how come Francisco didn't end up with anybody? That's just too bad. He's such a great character and he ends up alone. I would say he doesn't end up alone, he ends up with his boyfriend Hank, whatever that looks like. Two guys that believe in the same things, they can have whatever life they want. Go on.Henry: Are you saying that now that they're in the valley, they will be more free to pursue that relationship?Hollis: There's a lot of things that she has said about men's and women's bodies. She said in other places, "I don't think there'll ever be a woman president because why would a woman want to be president? What a woman really wants is a great man, and we can't have a president who's looking for a great man. She has to be a president." She's got a lot of lunacy about women. Whatever. I don't understand. Someplace I've read that she understands male homosexuality, but not female homosexuality. Again, I am not a Rand scholar. Having read and seen some of that in the ether, I see it in the book, and I can see how her novel would invite that analysis.I do want to say, let's spend a few seconds on some of the minor characters. There are some really wonderful minor characters. One of them is Cherryl Taggart, this shop girl that evil Jim Taggart meets one night in a rainstorm, and she's like, "Oh, you're so awesome," and they get married. It's like he's got all this praise for marrying the shop girl. It's a funny Eliza Doolittle situation because she is brought into this very wealthy society, which we have been told and we have been shown is corrupt, is evil, everybody's lying all the time, it's pretentious, Dagny hates it.Here's the Cherryl Taggart who's brought into this. In the beginning, she hates Dagny because she's told by everybody, "Hate Dagny, she's horrible." Then she comes to her own mini understanding of the corruption that we understand because Dagny's shown it in the novel, has shown it to us this entire time. She comes to it and she's like, "Oh my God," and she goes to Dagny. Dagny's so wonderful to her like, "Yes. You had to come to this on your own, I wasn't going to tell you, but you were 100% right." That's the end of her.Henry: Right. When she meets Taggart, there's this really interesting speech she has where she says, "I want to make something of myself and get somewhere." He's like, "What? What do you want to do?" Red flag. "What? Where?" She says, "I don't know, but people do things in this world. I've seen pictures of New York," and she's pointing at like the skyscrapers, right? Whatever. "I know that someone's built that. They didn't sit around and whine, but like the kitchen was filthy and the roof was leaking." She gets very emotional at this point. She says to him, "We were stinking poor and we didn't give a damn. I've dragged myself here, and I'm going to do something."Her story is very sad because she then gets mired in the corruption of Taggart's. He's basically bit lazy and a bit of a thief, and he will throw anyone under the bus for his own self-advancement. He is revealed to be a really sinister guy. I was absolutely hissing about him most of the time. Then, let's just do the plot spoiler and say what happens to Cherryl, right? Because it's important. When she has this realization and Taggart turns on her and reveals himself as this snake, and he's like, "Well, what did you expect, you idiot? This is the way the world is."Hollis: Oh, it's a horrible fight. It's the worst fight.Henry: Right? This is where the melodrama is so good. She goes running out into the streets, and it's the night and there are shadows. She's in the alleyway. Rand, I don't have the page marked, but it's like a noir film. She's so good at that atmosphere. Then it gets a little bit gothic as well. She's running through the street, and she's like, "I've got to go somewhere, anywhere. I'll work. I'll pick up trash. I'll work in a shop. I'll do anything. I've just got to get out of this."Hollis: Go work at the Panda Express. Henry: Yes. She's like, "I've got to get out of this system," because she's realized how morally corrupting it is. By this time, this is very late. Society is in a-- it's like Great Depression style economic collapse by this point. There really isn't a lot that she could do. She literally runs into a social worker and the social-- Rand makes this leering dramatic moment where the social worker reaches out to grab her and Cherryl thinks, "Oh, my God, I'm going to be taken prisoner in. I'm going back into the system," so she jumps off the bridge.This was the moment when I was like, I've had this lurking feeling about how Russian this novel is. At this point, I was like, "That could be a short story by Gogol," right? The way she set that up. That is very often the trap that a Gogol character or maybe a Dostoevsky character finds themselves in, right? That you suddenly see that the world is against you. Maybe you're crazy and paranoid. Maybe you're not. Depends which story we're reading. You run around trying to get out and you realize, "Oh, my God, I'm more trapped than I thought. Actually, maybe there is no way out." Cherryl does not get a lot of pages. She is, as you say, quite a minor character, but she illustrates the whole story so, so well, so dramatically.Hollis: Oh, wow.Henry: When it happens, you just, "Oh, Cherryl, oh, my goodness."Hollis: Thank you for reading that. Yes, you could tell from the very beginning that the seeds of what could have been a really good person were there. Thank you for reading that.Henry: When she died, I went back and I was like, "Oh, my God, I knew it."Hollis: How can you say Rand is a bad writer, right? That is careful, careful plotting, because she's just a shop girl in the rain. You've got this, the gun on the wall in that act. You know she's going to end up being good. Is she going to be rewarded for it? Let me just say, as an aside, I know we don't have time to talk about it here. My field, as I said, is 19th century African American novels, primarily now.This, usually, a woman, enslaved woman, the character who's like, "I can't deal with this," and jumps off a bridge and drowns herself is a fairly common and character. That is the only thing to do. One also sees Rand heroes. Stowe's Dred, for example, is very much, "I would rather live in the woods with a knife and then, be on the plantation and be a slave." When you think about, even the sort of into the 20th century, the Malcolm X figure, that, "I'm going to throw out all of this and be on my own," is very Randian, which I will also say very Byronic, too, Rand didn't invent this figure, but she put it front and center in these novels, and so when you think about how Atlas Shrugged could be brought into a curriculum in a network of other novels, how many of we've discussed so far, she's there, she's influenced by and continues to influence. Let's talk about your favorite minor character, the Wet Nurse.Henry: This is another great death scene.Hollis: Let's say who he is, so the government sends this young man to work at the Rearden Mills to keep an eye on Hank Rearden.Henry: Once they nationalize him, he's the bureaucrat reporting back, and Rearden calls him the Wet Nurse as an insult.Hollis: Right, and his job, he's the Communist Party person that's in every factory to make sure that everything is--Henry: That's right, he's the petty bureaucrat reporting back and making sure everyone's complying.Hollis: He's a young recent college graduate that, Hank, I think, early on, if it's possible even to find the Wet Nurse early scene, you could tell in the beginning, too, he's bright and sparkly right out of college, and this is, it seems like a good job for him. He's like, "Woohoo, I get to be here, and I get to be--" Yes, go ahead.Henry: What happens to him is, similarly to Cherryl, he has a conversion, but his conversion is not away from the corruption of the system he's been in, he is converted by what he sees in the Rearden plant, the hard work, the dedication, the idealism, the deep focus on making the metal, and he starts to see that if we don't make stuff, then all the other arguments downstream of that about how to appropriate, how to redistribute, whatever, are secondary, and so he becomes, he goes native, as it were. He becomes a Reardenite, and then at the end, when there's a crowd storming the place, and this crowd has been sent by the government, it's a fake thing to sort of--Hollis: Also, a very good scene, very dramatic.Henry: She's very good at mobs, very good at mobs, and they kill, they kill the Wet Nurse, they throw him over. He has a couple of speeches in dialogue with Rearden while he's dying, and he says--Hollis: You have to say, they throw him, they leave him on this pile of slag. He crawls up to the street where Rearden happens to be driving by, and car stops, and so that finding the Wet Nurse there and carrying him in his arms, yes.Henry: That's right, it's very dramatic, and then they have this dialogue, and he says, "I'd like to live, Mr. Rearden, God, how I'd like to, not because I'm dying, but because I've just discovered tonight what it means to be alive, and it's funny, do when I discovered it? In the office, when I stuck my neck out, when I told the bastards to go to hell, there's so many things I wish I'd known sooner, but it's no use crying over spilt milk," and then Rearden, he goes, "Listen, kid, said Rearden sternly, I want you to do me a favor." "Now, Mr. Rearden?" "Yes, now." "Of course, Mr. Rearden, if I can," and Rearden says, "You were willing to die to save my mills, will you try and live for me?"I think this is one of those great moments where, okay, maybe this isn't like George Eliot style dialogue, but you could put that straight in a movie, that would work really well, that would be great, right? I can hear Humphrey Bogart saying these things. It would work, wouldn't it?She knows that, and that's why she's doing that, she's got that technique. He's another minor character, and Rand is saying, the system is eating people up. We are setting people up for a spiritual destruction that then leads to physical destruction. This point, again, about it's not just about the material world. It's about your inner life and your own mind.I find it very moving.Hollis: These minor characters are fantastic. Then let's talk a little bit about Eddie Willers, because I think a lot about Eddie Willers. Eddie Willers, the childhood three, there were three young people, we keep going back to this childhood. We have Dagny, Francisco, because their parents were friends, and then Eddie Willers, who's like a neighborhood kid, right?Henry: He's down the street.Hollis: He lives down the street. He's like the neighborhood kid. I don't know about you. We had a neighborhood kid. There's always neighborhood kids, right? You end up spending time with this-- Eddie's just sort of always there. Then when they turn 15, 16, 17, and when there's clearly something going on between Dagny and Francisco, Eddie does take a step back, and he doesn't want to see.There's the class issues, the status issues aren't really-- they're present but not discussed by Rand. Here we have these two children heirs, and they don't say like, "You're not one of us, Eddie, because you're not an heir or an heiress." He's there, and he's got a pretty good position as Dagny's right-hand man in Taggart Transcontinental. We don't know where he went to college. We don't know what he does, but we know that he's super loyal, right?Then when she goes and takes a break for a bit, he steps in to be COO. James is like, "Eddie Willers, how can Eddie Willers be a COO?" She's like, "It's really going to be me, but he's going to be fine." We're not really supposed to identify with Eddie, but Eddie's there. Eddie has, all through the novel, all through the big old novel, Eddie eats lunch in the cafeteria. There's always this one guy he's having lunch with. This is, I don't know, like a Greek chorus thing, I don't quite know, but there's Eddie's conversations with this unknown person in the cafeteria give us a sense, maybe it's a narrator voice, like, "Meanwhile, this is going on in the world." We have these conversations. This guy he's having lunch with asks a lot of questions and starts asking a lot of personal questions about Dagny. Then we have to talk to-- I know we've gone for over an hour and 15 minutes, we've got to talk about Galt's Speech, right? When John Galt, toward the end, takes over the airwaves and gives this big three-hour speech, the big three-hour podcast as I tweeted the other day, Eddie is with Dagny.Henry: He's in the radio studio.Hollis: He's in the studio along with one of John Galt's former professors. We hear this voice. Rand says, or the narrator says, three people in the room recognize that voice. I don't know about you, did you guess that it was Galt before that moment that Eddie was having lunch with in the cafeteria?Henry: No, no, no, I didn't.Hollis: Okay, so you knew at that moment.Henry: That was when I was like, "Oh, Eddie was talking, right?" It took me a minute.Hollis: Okay, were you excited? Was that like a moment? Was that a big reveal?Henry: It was a reveal, but it made me-- Eddie's whole character puzzles me because, to me, he feels like a Watson.Hollis: Yes, that's nice, that's good.Henry: He's met Galt, who's been under their noses the whole time. He's been going through an almost Socratic method with Galt, right? If only he could have paid a little bit more attention, he would have realized what was going on. He doesn't, why is this guy so interested in Dagny, like all these things. Even after Galt's big speech, I don't think Eddie quite takes the lesson. He also comes to a more ambiguous but a bad end.Hollis: Eddie's been right there, the most loyal person. The Reddit threads on Eddie Willers, if anybody's interested, are really interesting.Henry: Yes, they are, they're so good.Hollis: Clearly, Eddie recognizes greatness, and he recognizes production, and he recognizes that Dagny is better than Jim. He recognizes Galt. They've been having these conversations for 12 years in the cafeteria. Every time he goes to the cafeteria, he's like, "Where's my friend, where's my friend?" When his friend disappears, but he also tells Galt a few things about Dagny that are personal and private. When everybody in the world, all the great people in the world, this is a big spoiler, go to Galt's Gulch at the end.Henry: He's not there.Hollis: He doesn't get to go. Is it because of the compromises he made along the way? Rand had the power to reward everybody. Hank's secretary gets to go, right?Henry: Yes.Hollis: She's gone throughout the whole thing.Henry: Eddie never thinks for himself. I think that's the-- He's a very, I think, maybe one of the more tragic victims of the whole thing because-- sorry. In a way, because, Cherryl and the Wet Nurse, they try and do the right thing and they end up dying. That's like a more normal tragedy in the sense that they made a mistake. At the moment of realization, they got toppled.Eddie, in a way, is more upsetting because he never makes a mistake and he never has a moment of realization. Rand is, I think this is maybe one of the cruelest parts of the book where she's almost saying, "This guy's never going to think for himself, and he hasn't got a hope." In a novel, if this was like a realistic novel, and she was saying, "Such is the cruelty of the world, what can we do for this person?" That would be one thing. In a novel that's like ending in a utopia or in a sort of utopia, it's one of the points where she's really harsh.Hollis: She's really harsh. I'd love to go and look at her notes at some point in time when I have an idle hour, which I won't, to say like, did she sit around? It's like, "What should I do with Eddie?" To have him die, probably, in the desert with a broken down Taggart transcontinental engine, screaming in terror and crying.Henry: Even at that stage, he can't think for himself and see that the system isn't worth supporting.Hollis: Right. He's just going to be a company man to the end.Henry: It's as cruel as those fables we tell children, like the grasshopper and the ants. He will freeze to death in the winter. There's nothing you can do about it. There are times when she gets really, really tough. I think is why people hate her.Hollis: We were talking about this, about Dickens and minor characters and coming to redemption and Dickens, except Jo. Jo and Jo All Alones, there are people who have redemption and die. Again, I don't know.Henry: There's Cherryl and the Wet Nurse are like Jo. They're tragic victims of the system. She's doing it to say, "Look how bad this is. Look how bad things are." To me, Eddie is more like Mr. Micawber. He's hopeless. It's a little bit comic. It's not a bad thing. Whereas Dickens, at the end, will just say, "Oh, screw the integrity of the plot and the morals. Let's just let Mr. Micawber-- let's find a way out for him." Everyone wants this guy to do well. Rand is like, "No, I'm sticking to my principles. He's dead in the desert, man. He's going to he's going to burn to death." He's like, "Wow, that's okay."Hollis: The funny thing is poor John Galt doesn't even care about him. John Galt has been a bad guy. John Galt is a complicated figure. Let's spend a bit on him.Henry: Before we do that, I actually want to do a very short segment contextualizing her in the 50s because then what you say about Galt will be against this background of what are some of the other ideas in the 50s, right?Hollis: Got it.Henry: I think sometimes the Galt stuff is held up as what's wrong with this novel. When you abstract it and just say it, maybe that's an easier case to make. I think once you understand that this is 1957, she's been writing the book for what, 12 years, I think, or 15 years, the Galt speech takes her 3 years to write, I think. This is, I think the most important label we can give the novel is it's a Cold War novel. She's Russian. What she's doing, in some ways, is saying to America, "This is what will happen to us if we adopt the system of our Cold War enemies." It's like, "This is animal farm, but in America with real people with trains and energy plants and industry, no pigs. This is real life." We've had books like that in our own time. The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver said, that book said, "If the 2008 crash had actually gone really badly wrong and society collapsed, how would it go?" I think that's what she's reacting to. The year before it was published, there was a sociology book called The Organization Man.Hollis: Oh, yes. William Whyte.Henry: A great book. Everyone should read that book. He is worrying, the whole book is basically him saying, "I've surveyed all these people in corporate America. They're losing the Protestant work ethic. They're losing the entrepreneurial spirit. They're losing their individual drive. Instead of wanting to make a name for themselves and invent something and do great things," he says, "they've all got this managerial spirit. All the young men coming from college, they're like, 'Everything's been done. We just need to manage it now.'" He's like, "America is collapsing." Yes, he thinks it's this awful. Obviously, that problem got solved.That, I think, that gives some sense of why, at that moment, is Ayn Rand writing the Galt speech? Because this is the background. We're in the Cold War, and there's this looming sense of the cold, dead hand of bureaucracy and managerialism is. Other people are saying, "Actually, this might be a serious problem."Hollis: I think that's right. Thank you for bringing up Whyte. I think there's so much in the background. There's so much that she's in conversation with. There's so much about this speech, so that when you ask somebody on the street-- Again, let me say this, make the comparison again to Uncle Tom's Cabin, people go through life feeling like they know Uncle Tom's Cabin, Simon Legree, Eliza Crossing the Ice, without having ever read it.Not to name drop a bit, but when I did my annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin, this big, huge book, and it got reviewed by John Updike in The New Yorker, and I was like, "This is freaking John Updike." He's like, "I never read it. I never read it." Henry Louis Gates and then whoever this young grad student was, Hollis Robbins, are writing this book, I guess I'll read it. It was interesting to me, when I talk about Uncle Tom's Cabin, "I've never read it," because it's a book you know about without reading. A lot of people know about Atlas Shrugged without having read it. I think Marc Andreessen said-- didn't he say on this podcast that he only recently read it?Henry: I was fascinated by this. He read it four years ago.Hollis: Right, during COVID.Henry: In the bibliography for the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, and I assumed he was one of those people, he was like you, he'd read it as a teenager, it had been informative. No, he came to it very recently. Something's happening with this book, right?Hollis: Huge things are happening, but the people who know about it, there's certain things that you know, you know it's long, you know that the sex is perhaps not what you would have wanted. You know that there's this big, really long thing called John Galt's Speech, and that it's like the whaling chapters in Moby-Dick. People read Moby-Dick, you're like, "Oh, yes, but I skipped all the chapters on cetology." That's the thing that you say, right? The thing that you say is like, "Yes, but I skipped all the John Galt's Speech." I was very interested when we were texting over the last month or so, what you would say when you got to John Galt's Speech. As on cue, one day, I get this text and it's like, "Oh, my God, this speech is really long." I'm like, "Yes, you are the perfect reader."Henry: I was like, "Hollis, this might be where I drop out of the book."Hollis: I'm like, "Yes, you and the world, okay?" This is why you're an excellent reader of this book, because it is a frigging slog. Just because I'm having eye issues these days, I had decided instead of rereading my copy, and I do have a newer copy than this tiny print thing, I decided to listen on audiobook. It was 62 hours or whatever, it was 45 hours, because I listen at 1.4. The speech is awesome listening to it. It, at 1.4, it's not quite 3 hours. It's really good. In the last few days, I was listening to it again, okay? I really wanted to understand somebody who's such a good plotter, and somebody who really understands how to keep people's interest, why are you doing this, Rand? Why are you doing this, Ms. Rand? I love the fact that she's always called Miss. Rand, because Miss., that is a term that we

Welcome to Twice 5 Miles Radio. I'm your host, James Navé. Today, I'm re-airing a special interview from the fall of 2016, recorded just before the U.S. presidential election. My guest was one of the most well-read, brilliant minds I've ever known—my mother, Bobbi Sue Nave. She left us a few years after this interview, at age 93, and her insights remain as timeless as ever. Bobbi Sue possessed what I call a "Jeffersonian mind." By the time she reached 90, she had devoured over 20,000 books, spanning authors from Robert Hughes to Camille Paglia. In this interview, she reflects on her early life, her first memories of the 1920s and 30s, attending her parents' voting for Herbert Hoover in 1928, and even witnessing the funeral of author Thomas Wolfe. Bobbi Sue also shares her thoughts on our current times, offering perspectives that transcend today's chaotic landscape. Her reflections on Donald Trump and our modern state of affairs demonstrate my mother's deep theological understanding of our world and all the people who live in it. This conversation mirrors countless discussions we shared for over 60 years, probing deeply into politics, culture, and faith. In 2024, as we navigate turbulent times, I invite you to hear my mother's lifetime commitment to thoughtful, independent reflection. Enjoy the show.

Hlustaðu í fullri lengd inni á www.patreon.com/skodanabraedur Hvernig menntum við okkur? Hvað er í gangi í háskólunum? Hugmyndir fræðikonunnar Camille Paglia ræddar hér í þessum þætti. Hún er róttæk og skemmtileg. Er munur á körlum og konum? Það fer eftir því hvern þú spyrð. Um lok þáttar er snert á hugvíkkandi efnum, hverjir eiga að nota þau og hverjir alls ekki. Guð blessi ykkur kæra bræðralag.

Dave Rubin of “The Rubin Report” talks about Elon Musk's vicious comeback to Gavin Newsom for making it illegal to post an AI-generated parody Kamala Harris campaign ad; “The View's” Sunny Hostin and Joy Behar appear to blame Donald Trump's rhetoric for the second assassination attempt while being oblivious to their own; White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre gets angry at Fox News' Peter Doocy for pointing out the dangerous rhetoric that Joe Biden continues to use about Donald Trump despite a second attempt on his life; Byron Donalds calling out CNN's Kate Bolduan for refusing to admit that Kamala Harris continued to push disproven hoaxes about Trump's “bloodbath” and “very fine people” comments; Benny Johnson trying to find out Kamala Harris supporters' favorite policies; Camille Paglia shocking Charlie Rose with her brutal takedown of multiculturalism; Florida putting an 11-year-old boy through a perp walk for his threats to commit a mass shooting; and much more. WATCH the MEMBER-EXCLUSIVE segment of the show here: https://rubinreport.locals.com/ Check out the NEW RUBIN REPORT MERCH here: https://daverubin.store/ ---------- Today's Sponsors: Gravity Defyer - Sick of knee pain? Get Gravity Defyer shoes. Minimize the shock waves that normal shoes absorb through your feet, knees and hips with every step. Use the promo code "RUBIN30" at checkout, to get an extra $30 off orders over $130 or more. Go to: http://gdefy.com and Use the promo code "RUBIN30" Home Title Lock - Ensure that your home title is safe from thieves. Sign up today and you'll get your first 30 days of triple lock protection for FREE – AND a complete title scan of your home's title. Go to: https://www.hometitlelock.com and USE promo code DAVE Lumen.Me - Lumen is the world's first handheld metabolic coach that measures your metabolism through your breath. It lets you know if you're burning fat or carbs, and gives you tailored guidance to improve your nutrition, workouts, and sleep. Go to: https://lumen.me/rubin to get 15% OFF! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week Nancy and Sarah riff on a fascinating essay in UnHerd by David Samuels, “The March of Kamala's Brides: Miserable young women are the Democrats' foot-soldiers.” The story lays out damning statistics on happiness and liberal women. They're childless, unmarried, on anti-depressants: Hey, Sarah ticks all the boxes!Nancy and Sarah try to diagnose how we got here. Their discussion covers vibrators and dating apps, Obamacare and social security, politics and the patriarchy, social justice and social media, pets vs. children, and the ocean of meaning that lies underneath the phrase, "I'm fine." Also discussed:* Nancy's new book Forty Bucks and a Dream now on presale!* Fifth Column live event tonight, WE SUPPORT OUR TROOPS.* When will Wikipedia acknowledge that Nancy dated Eddie Vedder?* Kneejerk Nancy asks, “Do I need to know everyone's effing feelings?”* Sarah asks, “If my cat is not a baby, why is he baby-shaped?”* The “compare and despair” trap of social media* Feminism and happiness: It's complicated!* Men on women's tears: It's annoying!* The whole SSRI thing* Fault vs. responsibility* WE MISS THE ‘90s* Camille Paglia, aka Sarah's fake Italian grandmother, brings us homeAlso: A (short) debate on Miranda July, how Andy Warhol turns out to be fascinating, Nancy drops a bomb about women's happiness and birth control — and MORE! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit smokeempodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Author, filmmaker and legendary drag performer Glenn Belverio joins the ladies to talk about the Trump assassination attempt, the fate of LGBT and drag, collabing with Camille Paglia, and the recent Glennda Orgasm renaissance.

*Announcements!  The first STARGIRL in-person event is happening! Details will be announced on my Instagram first @emmaglennbaker — can't wait to share more and see you there!* In this week's episode, I introduce a brand new segment to the public: STARGIRL Rants and Raves! I welcome all listeners to send in a Rant or Rave on a Stargirl, person/persona you fixate on, or cultural event/moment that you love or hate. This first round was open to Patrons only, and we listen to my favorite three submissions here today! Here's how it works: Record a 0:30 - 2:00 minute-long voice note Email the audio file to me at stargirldirect@gmail.com Subject line should read “Rant / Rave” on [your subject]” In the email, please not e how you'd like to be attributed (full name, first name only, IG handle, etc.) Show notes: This week we tackle a classic Stargirl: Dame Elizabeth Taylor. I talk about the many elements of her myth that I somehow inherited—her violet eyes, “married eight times to seven men,” her health issues, etc. I decide that although Liz Taylor is indeed beautiful, prolific, and messy, her real singularity lies in her Sturdiness: She is womanly, down-to-earth, and robust. We also discuss Camille Paglia's incredible fixation on Liz, and leaf through Liz's memoir/self-help/recipe book about her own weight gain and loss, Elizabeth Takes Off. Plus, I finally acknowledge the Chappell Roan phenomenon, praise Addison for her underwater Dhanurasana, and challenge myself to discuss the election head-on, rather than roll my eyes and look away. We got this y'all! Discussed: “Sabrina, Chappell, and Charli are suddenly stars. Why now?” Mikael Wood in the LA times  Azaelia Banks on Chappell Roan Addison's underwater amazingness “Love of Country and Aloha Spirit with Tulsi Gabbard,” Jocko Podcast Excerpt from “Elizabeth Taylor: Hollywood's Pagan Queen,” Camille Paglia, originally published in Penthouse magazine (1992) Interview with Paglia on Liz Taylor, Salon (2011) Elizabeth Takes Off: On Weight Gain, Weight Loss, Self-Image, and Self-Esteem, Elizabeth Taylor (1987)

Camille Paglia Tried To Warn Us About Woke UniversitiesYouTube Channel Rumble ChannelBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/radio-baloney-the-richie-baloney-show--4036781/support.

Dave Rubin of “The Rubin Report” talks about Douglas Murray's fiery debate performance at the Munk Debates debate on anti-zionism where he and co-debater Natasha Hausdorff destroyed Mehdi Hasan's falsehoods and veiled anti-semitism; Camille Paglia's prescient warning to Charlie Rose in 1995 about how higher education was already becoming an anti-western civilization indoctrination factory; Michael Richards, better known as “Seinfeld's” Kramer, doing his first ever live interview on “The Today Show” to explain how he has changed since his controversial racist remarks at the Laugh Factory in 2006; MSNBC's Joy Reid and Jemele Hill explaining why the attention that Caitlin Clark has brought to the WNBA is just more proof of the audience's racism and homophobia; “Firing Line's” Margaret Hoover looking a little confused as Democrat Cori Bush explains how she used spiritual healing to cure a homeless woman's tumors; “The View's” Joy Behar and Rachel Maddow openly discussing their paranoid delusions of how Donald Trump will target them for his revenge if he wins the 2024 election; and much more. WATCH the MEMBER-EXCLUSIVE segment of the show here: https://rubinreport.locals.com/ Check out the NEW RUBIN REPORT MERCH here: https://daverubin.store/ ---------- Today's Sponsors: Base Spike Detox Trio - Fight the negative effects of the AstraZeneca vaccin with Dr. McCullough's protocol. Save 15% and get free shipping. Go to: https://TWC.health/RUBIN and use CODE: RUBIN Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Uma conversa com Victória Carvalho sobre como é ser mulher não-feminista e não-religiosa. Tópicos abordados incluem o desprezo da biologia pelo feminismo, a ideia da equidade entre homens e mulheres, o conceito de patriarcado, diferenças cognitivas entre os sexos, entre outros. Link para o vídeo da Cristina Hoff Sommers e Camille Paglia mencionado no vídeo. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/raciocinioaberto/message

read by Kate Finning

Before they canceled him, Alfred Hitchcock made a movie about "the birds." Before they canceled her, Camille Paglia wrote an entire book about THE BIRDS. Here's why both are so prophetic of our henpecked times.    A gull session with Jack Mason of The Perfume Nationalist on two monumental figures in the Filthy Armenian landscape.    For the full 2.45 hour episode -- plus twice as many adventures overall, and regular exclusive "Smoke Break" mini eps on show, movies, and topics of the day -- subscribe to the show at patreon.com/filthyarmenian   Follow us on X/insta @filthyarmenian

Dave Rubin of “The Rubin Report” talks about Joe Rogan's reaction to the crowd at UFC 297 erupting in a chant showcasing their anger at Justin Trudeau; MMA fighter Sean Strickland ripping a reporter to shreds who tried to depict him as a hateful bigot; UFC President Dana White shutting down a reporter who accused him of not controlling the speech of his UFC fighters enough; MSNBC's Joy Reid having her gotcha question for Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice turned against her; JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon delivering a fiery and unexpected defense of MAGA voters and Trump's policies; Camille Paglia warning Charlie Rose about educational institutions turning against western civilization in 1995; NYC's migrant crisis getting much worse as Tompkins Square Park becomes a giant toilet with migrants leaving cups of feces all over the public park; Democrat Max Frost suggesting that Republicans worried about the border crisis should vote to remove the Statue of Liberty; Novak Djokovic responding to a heckler demanding he get vaccinated at the Australian Open in the most perfect way possible; and much more. WATCH the MEMBER-EXCLUSIVE segment of the show here: https://rubinreport.locals.com/ Check out the NEW RUBIN REPORT MERCH here: https://daverubin.store/ ---------- Today's Sponsors: Truly Office - Secure your personal data and ditch mainstream office software providers like Microsoft and Google who misuse your data without your permission and switch to a safer alternative like Truly Office Software. Truly Office Software doesn't track or sell your data, giving you complete control over your personal information. Rubin Report viewers get a free trial of Truly Office Software for a limited time! Go to: https://trulyoffice.com/rumble Tax Network USA - If you owe back taxes or have unfiled returns, don't let the government take advantage of you. Whether you owe a few thousand or a few million, they can help you. Call 1-800-245-6000 or Go to: https://tnusa.com/dave Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.comNancy and Sarah get down (!) to the serious business of ethical non-monogamy, thanks to the cover story in this week's New York magazine. Is polyamory really a trend? Does opening your marriage ever work? Sarah finds this subject (professionally) fascinating; Nancy thinks it all ends in tears and grubbiness somewhere in Park Slope. Also discussed:* 2024: The Year of More Punching* Axl Rose was once an Indiana kid named William Bruce Rose* Nancy's squeaky little voice vs. Nancy's va-va-voom photos* Nancy's reasonable objections to sex writing* Sarah's reasonable arguments FOR sex writing* Stats, stats, we need stats* New lingo alert! “comet partner,” “metamour,” “one-penis policy”* Obviously Burning Man is involved* We design our perfect ethical polycules* Amazon employees are mad about moving to Austin?* Love for Israel during hard timesPlus, the many haircuts of Camille Paglia, our new Fight Club, and how a persimmon is like a penis.

Representatives want Lloyd Austin to testify about his hospitalization and lack of disclosure about his health problems. WWIII watch update. KNOW IT ALL: 1) Border problems. 2) Trump chimes in on presidential immunity during a Fox News town hall. 3) DOJ releases final report on Uvalde failures.  // Taylor Swift might make an appearance at this year's Super Bowl. // Bryan is going to try letting the grocery store pick his food items for him. Viral video shows cultural critic Camille Paglia in a video from 30 years ago talking about how terrible American universities were becoming. 

Samsara by Guerlain (1989) + Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia (1990) with Alec Mouhibian of Filthy Armenian Adventures and Jake 12/29/23 S6E5 To hear this episode and the complete continuing story of The Perfume Nationalist please subscribe on Patreon.

Sus maneras impertinentes y su indómita reticencia a cualquier tipo de norma, canon o consigna hacen Camille Paglia una de las voces más insolentes que acampa en tierra de nadie: ella misma se define como «desagradable, estridente y molesta».

Join us on censorship free Locals: TheRuthInstitute.Locals.com Professor Margaret McCarthy has been teaching at the John Paul II Institute since 1992. She received her doctoral degree in theology at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute at the Lateran University in Rome.   Since then, her teaching and writing has focused on various themes belonging to theological anthropology relative to the question of sexual difference, but also relative to the larger nature-grace question.  She is the editor of the book Torn Asunder – Children, The Myth of the Good Divorce and the Recovery of Origins (Eerdmans, 2016), and author of Recovering Origins (Catholic Univ Press, 2022). She is the Editor of Humanum: Issues in Family, Culture, and Science, serves on the editorial board of the English edition of Communio: International Catholic Review, is a member of the Academy of Catholic Theology, and is a consultant to the USCCB's Committee on Doctrine. Alex Wolfe grew up in western Pennsylvania and studied Theology at DeSales University. Through the experience of seeing his parents get divorced while he was in college, Alex decided to study at the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family in Washington, D.C. There, he completed the Master of Theological Studies degree and coursework for the Ph.D. Alex is now the Assistant Director of the Office of Marriage, Family, and Respect Life at the Diocese of Arlington, where he focuses on marriage preparation and healing for children of divorce. Beyond his duties in Arlington, he travels with Life-Giving Wounds to help other dioceses start up regional ministries for adult children of divorce. Alexander's e-address if you want to schedule a Life-Giving Wounds Retreat: alexander.wolfe@arlingtondiocese.org John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family Studies: https://www.johnpaulii.edu/ Diocese of Arlington Office of Marriage, Family & Respect Life: https://www.arlingtondiocese.org/marriageandfamily/ Life-Giving Wounds: https://www.lifegivingwounds.org/ The U.S. grants far more annulments than anywhere else: https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2011/04/28/annulment-nation/ Article, What Is An Annulment?: https://www.catholicherald.com/article/local/what-is-an-annulment/ Life-Giving Wounds retreat in September: www.arlingtondiocese.org/healingretreat Humanum Review: https://humanumreview.com/ Prof. McCarthy's articles on divorce: “The Baggage Adult Children of Divorce Carry.” The National Catholic Register. May 18, 2012: http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/adult-children-of-divorce-carry-wounds-to-their-own-families/   Prof. McCarthy's articles on feminism: “Gender Equity or Suppression?” May 29, 2015: http://www.osservatoreromano.va/en/news/gender-equity-or-suppression   “Still Unfinished?  A Review of Unfinished Business.”  Humanum 2017 Issue Two: http://humanumreview.com/articles/still-unfinished-further-questions-for-anne-marie-slaughter   “Camille Paglia's Sexual ‘Realism'.” Public Discourse. August 16, 2018: http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2018/08/22226/   Prof. McCarthy's articles on “Gender”:  “Overruling the Visible: The Emperor's New Gender.”  Public Discourse. October 6, 2019: https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2019/10/57542/   “The Abolition of Man and Woman,” The Wall Street Journal. June 24, 2020: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-abolition-of-man-and-woman-1159301750   “The Equality Act is at War with Reality.” The Wall Street Journal. March 20, 2021: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-equality-act-is-at-war-with-reality-11617143549?st=o8hdh2b7hylqjsc&reflink=article_email_share   “Say ‘No' to the New Binary.”  Public Discourse.  June 8, 2022: https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2022/06/82723/   “A Friendly Critique of Helen Joyce's Trans: Why Radical Feminists have to go Further, Public Discourse.  September 8, 2022: https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2022/09/84478/   “The Slavery of Radical Freedom.”  First Things. August 21, 2020: https://www.firstthings.com.web-exclusives/2020/08/the-slavery-of-radical-freedom   Prof. McCarthy's articles on Abortion:   “Torn Apart by Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, The Catholic Thing.  July 9, 2022: https://www.thecatholicthing.org/author/margaret-harper-mccarthy/ Dr. Dan & Bethany Meola on The Dr J Show: www.YouTube.com/watch?v=FiLl41APX8o Bai MacFarlane on The Dr J Show: www.YouTube.com/watch?v=w6561d3aWew NOTE: The picture in this episode of Bishop Byrne is of Bp. Peter Byrne, not the Bp. William Byrne our guests are referring to. We regret this mistake! This episode of The Dr J Show may also be seen on the following platforms: TheRuthInstitute.Locals.com https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSi2OoPf_APunkaLSv4jrKMB65x78U5MH https://www.bitchute.com/channel/MXkWgTk4Brwr/ https://rumble.com/c/TheRuthInstitute https://odysee.com/@TheRuthInstitute:7?view=content&order=new Sign up for our weekly newsletter here: https://ruthinstitute.org/newsletter +

Eric Doce aka @hamburger.helpless joins the pod to do a deep dive into Camille Paglia's magnum opus Sexual Personae, drawing out her Freudian themes. Subtopics include Eric's music (he's a harpist!), Mariah Carey, Spinoza, and commentary on the wildlife surrounding us on the Upper West Side. Eric will be performing at the cracks in pomo: the zine launch on 7/28 at the Catholic Worker Maryhouse. check out Eric's music page @hamburger.harpist and support his debut https://www.gofundme.com/f/nybased-alt-harpist-composer-complete-debut-lp?utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet&utm_content=undefined&utm_medium=social&utm_source=instagram_story&utm_term=undefined To order a copy of the cracks in pomo zine or to make a contribution, DM @cracksinpomo. $upport CracksInPomo by clicking on this link. And follow CracksInPomo on Substack, Instagram, and Twitter. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/stephen-adubato/support

Eric Doce aka @hamburger.helpless joins the pod to do a deep dive into Camille Paglia's magnum opus Sexual Personae, drawing out her Freudian themes. Subtopics include Eric's music (he's a harpist!), Mariah Carey, Spinoza, and commentary on the wildlife surrounding us on the Upper West Side. Eric will be performing at the cracks in pomo: the zine launch on 7/28 at the Catholic Worker Maryhouse. check out Eric's music page @hamburger.harpist and support his debut https://www.gofundme.com/f/nybased-alt-harpist-composer-complete-debut-lp?utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet&utm_content=undefined&utm_medium=social&utm_source=instagram_story&utm_term=undefined To order a copy of the cracks in pomo zine or to make a contribution, DM @cracksinpomo. $upport CracksInPomo by clicking on this link. And follow CracksInPomo on Substack, Instagram, and Twitter. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/stephen-adubato/support

In this video, Kendall and Starla Bridges share their personal experience of a broken marriage that began with broken lives. They discuss Camille Paglia's book "Sexual Personae" and the critical sign that she documents before the collapse of every society for the past 5,000 years, which is the acceptance of transgenderism. They highlight two critical indicators of the collapse of the nation, the current state of nuclear families and the lack of adequately-educated Americans. The Bridges emphasize the importance of reading, math, and science in remaining innovative and rebuilding our nation. To have a better marriage, they suggest knowing who you are with God, yourself, and everyone else, and improving yourself by going on new adventures, learning new information through real communication, and getting yourself healthy. Join Kendall and Starla Bridges in their quest to make Better Marriages, Better Families, Better Communities, Better Nation, and ultimately a Better World.

SPECIAL GUEST: DINESH D'SOUZA In this episode, I'm sounding the alarm on the influx of migrants expected to pour across the Texas-US border in the coming days as Title 42 expires. Plus, the NY Times believes it found the 'smoking gun' text message from Tucker Carlson that supposedly got him fired. The text shouldn't have surprised Tucker. Might the bigger issue for Fox News have been fear of regulation from Democrats? And, the Federal Reserve raised rates to the highest level in 16 years but, it's still not enough to fix inflation. Joining me today is conservative thought leader, Dinesh D'Souza. Dinesh, a filmmaker and media commentator, is the host of the Dinesh D'Souza podcast. In today's discussion, we look at why gender dysphoria has become the topic du jour for both sides of the aisle. According to Dinesh, it may mark a dangerous turning point for Western civilization. Today's show is sponsored in part by: https://LegacyPMInvestments.com https://Ruffgreens.com    Support the show: https://trishregan.store/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Many of you I'm sure are familiar with the provocative scholar and social critic Camille Paglia. You may have seen her recently interviewed by Jordan Peterson on her criticisms of cultural Marxism. An older video of a talk she gave has recently resurfaced where she describes transgenderism in particular and androgyne in general as a sign of civilizational collapse. I want to show you just how prescient her comments were in light of what's happening today.   Highlights:  ●      “Camille Paglia, who is herself a very outspoken lesbian and more of a classical liberal, recognized that this current trans mania, as it were, is first and foremost, potential child abuse, what she called a crime against humanity if sex reassignment surgery is imposed children, who are not prepared to make such a life-altering, permanently body-altering decision. But secondly, it's actually just the latest outworking of a common human experience of social and cultural alienation.” ●      According to Paglia, androgyne is not just a matter of societal degeneration, it concurrently presents itself as an opportunity for traditional manhood to rise up around the periphery of such a confused culture and take it over! And that's exactly what we're seeing all around the world.”  Resources:  ●      Need employees? Don't hire workers who hate your values. Post your jobs on RedBalloon.work. America's leading non-woke job board. https://em.redballoon.work/register-for-redballoons-upcoming-webinar-with-turley-talks ●      Get carrying TODAY with Countrywide Concealed HERE: https://www.frebahlem.com/BG484F42/G38H44Q/ ●      Learn how to protect your life savings from inflation and an irresponsible government, with Gold and Silver. Go to http://www.turleytalkslikesgold.com/ ●      Ep. 1555 Sylvester Stallone DESTROYS Woke INSANITY!!! ●      You can download my NEW GUIDEBOOK “5 Steps to ESCAPE the Great RESET" for a limited time for FREE at https://free.turleytalks.com/escape-the-great-reset/ ●      Get Over 66% OFF All of Mike Lindell's Products using code TURLEY: https://www.mypillow.com/turley ●      Want free inside stock tips straight from the SEC? Click here to get started now: https://webinar.tradersagency.com/insiders-effect-turley ●      Join Dr. Steve for an unedited, uncensored extended analysis of current events in his Insiders Club at https://insidersclub.turleytalks.com/ ●      BOLDLY stand up for TRUTH in Turley Merch! Browse our new designs right now at: https://store.turleytalks.com/ ●      Make sure to FOLLOW me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrTurleyTalks ●      Get 25% off Patriotic Coffee and ALL ITEMS with Code TURLEY at https://mystore.com/turley   Thank you for taking the time to listen to this episode.  If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and/or leave a review. Sick and tired of Big Tech, censorship, and endless propaganda? Join my Insiders Club with a FREE TRIAL today at: https://insidersclub.turleytalks.com Do you want to be a part of the podcast and be our sponsor? Click here to partner with us and defy liberal culture! If you would like to get lots of articles on conservative trends make sure to sign-up for the 'New Conservative Age Rising' Email Alerts. 

Sally does her washing on the narrowboat, and with spring in the air, her thoughts turn to the past. She reads from an old favourite, the children's classic novel, The Wind in the Willows, and discusses its characters and themes with her friend from next door, Maeve Magnus, who is reading it for the first time and sees close parallels between the book and their own lives on the river. Sally recalls her fierce search for meaning and direction of her university days, and how she plunged into the writings of the American scholar Camille Paglia; then she reads an illuminating passage written by a former student, the writer, art critic and academic, Rebecca Birrell. Sally ends by reflecting on her desire for privacy and space, and the adoption of literary and artistic personae, reaching back to the masks worn by actors in ancient Greece. The Wind in the Willows is a children's novel by the Scottish novelist Kenneth Grahame, first published in 1908. It details the story of Mole, Ratty, and Badger as they try to help the excitable, impetuous, swaggering, but hapless Mr Toad. The novel was based on bedtime stories which Grahame, a successful banker and financier, told his seven-year-old son. The book's impressionistic descriptions of the English countryside and its mythic search for moments of grace have made it an enduring read for adults as well as children; while the setting of the book partly drew on the author's experiences of living beside the River Thames, south of Oxford - not too far from where Sally and Maeve now live. Grahame died in 1932 and lies buried in Oxford's Holywell Cemetery. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, which Sally read avidly at university, is a 1990 book about sexual decadence in Western literature and the visual arts by scholar Camille Paglia. The novel draws on the conflicts of Greek drama and demonstrates their continued relevance in its comprehensive study of Western art and literature, from Botticelli and Leonardo daVinci to Shakespeare, Goethe, Coleridge, Emily Brontë and Oscar Wilde. This Dark Country: Women Artists, Still Life and Intimacy in the Early Twentieth Century by Dr Rebecca Birrell is published by Bloomsbury Circus. It is both biography and art critcism of 10 female artists, including Dora Carrington, Vanessa Bell and Gwen John. It was the Guardian Art Book of the Year and shortlisted for a number of other prestigious awards. The producer of the podcast is Andrew Smith: https://www.fleetingyearfilms.com The extra voice in this episode is Emma Fielding. Thanks to everyone who has supported us so far. Special thanks go to Violet Henderson, Kris Dyer, and Maeve Magnus. If you would like to support us, please visit - https://gofund.me/d5bef397

Based on the idiosyncratic comic series by Sam Kieth and William Messner-Loebs, The Maxx centers on a vagrant with delusions that he's a mighty superhero. While ineffective in the real world, The Maxx is powerful and important in the world of The Outback, a fantasy version of Australia that appears to be bleeding into reality. The Maxx's supporting cast includes "freelance social worker" Julie, a jaded rape survivor who helps/enables The Maxx. The main antagonist is Mr. Gone, a serial rapist who seems to have secret knowledge about Maxx, Julie, and The Outback itself. Roughly a third of a comic series was adapted into 13 animated shorts that appeared on the anthology program MTV Oddities. The show was met with low ratings and critical confusion before it was quickly canceled, but the property itself has endured to some degree in nerd culture ever since. VHS and DVD releases were coupled with a role playing game and an audiobook. The comic itself got collected into paperback in 2003 with a remastered version following ten years later. A feature film has been in development hell since 2019. Ryan is joined by Cheryl and Sylvan for an extensive discussion about this complex, singular, and surreal work of art. Talking points include the deconstructionist trend in 90's comics, how the feminine perspective is expressed in The Maxx, and what the show (and comic) have to say about rape culture. The philosophies of Camille Paglia, which are espoused by Julie in The Maxx, are given an examination as well. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ryan-valentine3/support

Of Bowling, Of Alcoholism, Of Shame, Of ADHD, Of The Glory of Autism, Of The Touchstones of Camille Paglia and Ayn Rand, Of Susan Sontag, Of Philip Roth, Of The Painting That Hangs In The Bathroom at Madonna's House, Of Shepherd's Pie, Of Magic Mic...and Of That Sinister Word PARASOCIAL. You've got a friend in me.   Full episode only for subscribers. To support the show and follow the complete twisted narrative with twice as many episodes, plus bull sessions and secret chapters, become a patron at patreon.com/filthyarmenian.   Please rate, review, and spread the word.   Follow us on twitter/instagram @filthyarmenian

(episode also on my youtube channel, like and subscribe lololol! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn_xTpd4lFbYzEU3jzKNyOQ)New a guy in his room #141!! This time I talk about the Idaho killer NOT beig quiet, a Tennessee cops 'open marriage', Camille Paglia and old/new feminism, and homoerotic sports stuff!!! Sike and Lubscribe now!Topics:Breaking news!!Idaho killer NOT QUIET.Grower not a shower podcast?Tennessee woman cop fucking every male cop while being married,Band couple at college,When women are aggressive,Feminism contradicting itself now w me too,Camille Paglia on Harvey Weinstein,(Clip from Paglia lecture at Lafayette College: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqrwKkrCzOY&t=7023s)No trailblazers on the left anymore,Homoerotic male sports,How soon do guys have gay sex after going to prison?Any port in the storm girl!Straight guys with tiger king,Guy goes gay right away in jail.

https://patreon.com/breaktherules to help us grow + SUBSCRIBE to our Youtube: http://breaktherules.tv/ https://linktr.ee/breakth3rules Support Break The Rules ( + have your message show up during the show) via SuperChat Crypto: https://cointr.ee/breakth3rulesPaypal: https://streamlabs.com/breakth3rules DISCORD: https://discord.gg/hHTNg3M====================================================Alexander Bardhttps://twitter.com/BardissimoJack the Perfume Nationalisthttps://www.patreon.com/perfumenationalisthttps://twitter.com/lotus__pointJane Gatsbyhttps://twitter.com/jane_gatsbyhttps://welcometowonderland.substack.com/Lev Polyakovhttps://twitter.com/Levpohttp://youtube.com/levpolyakov====================================================FOLLOW US:Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/breaktherulesTwitter - http://twitter.com/breakth3rulesInstagram - http://instagram.com/breakth3rulesFacebook - http://facebook.com/breakth3rulesMinds - https://www.minds.com/breaktherulesOdysee - https://odysee.com/@breaktherules:f/liveTwitch - https://www.twitch.tv/breakth3rules/DLive - https://dlive.tv/breakth3rulesBitchute - https://www.bitchute.com/channel/JfUzQfuQpWc0/Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/0yovF9Vo8n1fF1DGlMuWBhApple - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/break-the-rules/id1543233584

Glenn Belverio joins the pod to talk about his public access program Glennda and Friends, his friendship with Camille Paglia, the successes and failures of the Sexual Revolution, the future of Gen Z, the changing landscape of Greenwich Village, and the NYC crime wave. Follow him on Instagram @glennbelverio And watch Glennda and Camille Do Downtown here. $upport CracksInPomo by clicking on this link And follow CracksInPomo on Substack, Instagram, and Twitter. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/stephen-adubato/support

Glenn Belverio joins the pod to talk about his public access program Glennda and Friends, his friendship with Camille Paglia, the successes and failures of the Sexual Revolution, the future of Gen Z, the changing landscape of Greenwich Village, and the NYC crime wave. Follow him on Instagram @glennbelverio And watch Glennda and Camille Do Downtown here. $upport CracksInPomo by clicking on this link And follow CracksInPomo on Substack, Instagram, and Twitter. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/stephen-adubato/support

Check under the bed for ice picks because we're tackling Paul Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas' notorious 1992 Erotic Thriller/neo-noir, Basic Instinct. Along for trips to the gay bar and the beach house are Brooke Solomon and Jordan Gustafson from The Queer Quadrant podcast, who provide a very welcome bisexual perspective in a film accused of biphobia and misogyny. Plus: our obsession with the sequel Risk Addiction, ties to The Silence of the Lambs and Cruising, cocaine and cum, Catherine (and Sharon Stone) as a queer icon, a stacked cast of male character actors, and why you can't wear a sweater to the gay bar!References: > Celestino Deleyto. “The Margins of Pleasure: Female Monstrosity and Male Paranoia in Basic Instinct” Film Criticism Vol 21, No 3> Adam Morrison. "Essential LGBTQ Films: Basic Instinct." The Black List Blog> Camille Paglia. "Commentary." Basic Instinct BluQuestions? Comments? Snark? Connect with the boys on Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Letterboxd, Facebook, or join the Facebook Group to get in touch with other listeners> Trace: @tracedthurman> Joe: @bstolemyremote> Brooke: @brookebsolomon> Jordan: @JordanHGus> The Queer Quadrant: @QueerQuadrantBe sure to support the boys on Patreon!Theme Music: Alexander Nakarada Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

¿Qué es el arte de ejercer la autoridad? ¿Cómo se domina al otro? Nos aproximamos a la idea de imponer la fuerza y la supremacía a través de los sujetos que hemos conocido, desde el proto-incel al macho alfa. Contemplamos también la idea de la dominación a través de la exclusión, el deseo mimético, la mediación del deseo y la gente que copia. Nos adentramos en el Marqués de Sade, el masoquismo, las novias de los asesinos en serie, y muchísimas más cosas. Todo con las apariciones estelares de Mona Chollet, Liv Stromquist, Camille Paglia y Sheila Isenberg. No te lo pierdas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Son of the Old Left, father of the New Left, sworn enemy of the whole left -- "a century from now," in the words of Camille Paglia, "cultural historians will find David Horowitz's political and spiritual odyssey paradigmatic for our time." We gallop to the Rockies to catch up with the historic writer-warrior as he confronts his most powerful enemy yet...   To follow the complete adventure, subscribe at patreon.com/filthyarmenian for the encore episode from this encounter and much more.   Recommended reading: Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey and Mortality & Faith: Reflections on a Journey Through Time by David Horowitz   Sights: Shakespeare, Peter Collier, Ron Radosh, Raiders, Roger Goodell, Donald Trump, Ed Snyder, Mark Davis, Sontag, Rosenberg execution, Ramparts, Black Panthers, Robert Sheer, Isaiah Berlin, Erich Fromm, Tom Hayden, Huey Newton, Reason Magazine, Bill Kristol, Martin Luther, Pope Francis, Erdogan, Mel Gibson, Jesus, Protestants, Matt Drudge, Andrew Breitbart, Joan Didion, Ben Stein, 1939, supernatural diner experience, Bernie Sanders, Christopher Hitchens, Todd Gitlin, Mollie Hemingway, Henry Louis Gates, capitalism and rap, Twin Peaks, Mario Savio, Pascal, Paul Robeson, Charlie Chaplin's moonwalk, Morgan, Winter's Tale, AIDS, Larry Littlejohn, Van Morrison, Cocaine   Follow us on Twitter/Insta @filthyarmenian

Naomi Wolf is one of my favourite feminists and runs the Daily Clout.   Naomi Rebekah Wolf is an American feminist author and journalist. Following her first book The Beauty Myth, she became a leading spokeswoman of what has been described as the third wave of the feminist movement. Feminists including Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan praised her work. Others, including Camille Paglia, criticized it. In the 1990s, she was a political advisor to the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Wolf's later books include the bestseller The End of America in 2007 and Vagina: A New Biography.   I am generally antagonistic towards (modern) feminism because it often appears to be a celebration of victimhood culture and a deliberate attack on family values and men. Having watched Cassie Jaye's documentary, The Red Pill, I was left feeling disgusted at the excessive hatred being vomited by feminists who were interviewed. Naomi, however, is nowhere near any of that misandrist nonsense. She shoots guns; she opposes abortion; she rejects state tyranny; she is heavily censored; and she likes men. Brilliant. JOIN THE JERM WARFARE COMMUNITY

In the final part of 2015, there's plenty to discuss. Hot off the VMAs, Taylor releases the Wildest Dreams music video and receives some backlash while turning out looks. Turns out the back half of this year was kind of cursed. The 1989 Ryan Adams version comes out to absolutely no one's enjoyment. Todrick Hall (noted villain) enters the canon. Then, there is a lengthy discussion of what is potentially Taylor's most revealing magazine profile: her GQ interview and cover shoot. We dive deep into the Katy Perry nonsense & take a moment to analyze how this moment altered the trajectory of her career forever. The year concludes with the bittersweet end of the 1989 tour, Out of the Woods music video, and a particularly heinous article by public intellectual Camille Paglia.

[rerelease] In our inaugural episode, we take on the dizzying condition of the American university system. Special guests include my brother Nick, Camille Paglia*, Patrick Deneen*, and Christopher Lasch*. Follow @cracksinpomo on IG for more subversive hot takes. *Disclaimer: they weren't able to make it in person.

[rerelease] In our inaugural episode, we take on the dizzying condition of the American university system. Special guests include my brother Nick, Camille Paglia*, Patrick Deneen*, and Christopher Lasch*. Follow @cracksinpomo on IG for more subversive hot takes. *Disclaimer: they weren't able to make it in person.

Pink Mountaintops frontman Stephen McBean has cited many unexpected influences for his first album with the band in eight years, including John Carpenter and David Cronenberg movies, bodybuilding books written by postmodern feminist Camille Paglia and 70s Disney read-along books.He talks from the tour bus en route to Denver, Colorado as part of the band's U.S tour about writing and recording the eclectic new album Peacock Pools (mostly) in lockdown, touring with Dinosaur Jr, David Bowie and the punk scene in his town when he grew up in Canada. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Camille Paglia Provocations - Camille Paglia Talk About Her New Book "Provocations" THE INTELLECTUAL DARK WEB PODCAST We Search the Web for the Best Intellectual Dark Web Podcasts, Lectures and Videos that can be understood by merely listening to save YOUR time. Then we make those Intellectual Dark Web Episodes available on Spotify and downloadable. IMPORTANT! GET THE MAIN WORKS OF HOBBES, LOCKE, ROUSSEAU / MACHIAVELLI AND THE US CONSTITUTION BOUND TOGETHER IN JUST ONE PRACTICAL BOOK: ||| MACHIAVELLI https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/niccolo-machiavelli-and-john-locke-and-thomas-hobbes-and-peter-kanzler/the-leviathan-1651-the-two-treatises-of-government-1689-and-the-constitution-of-pennsylvania-1776/paperback/product-69m6we.html XXX https://www.bookfinder.com/search/?author=peter%2Bkanzler&title=pennsylvania%2Bconstitution%2Bleviathan&lang=en&isbn=9781716844508&new_used=N&destination=us¤cy=USD&mode=basic&st=sr&ac=qr || ROUSSEAU https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/jean-jacques-rousseau-and-thomas-hobbes-and-john-locke-and-peter-kanzler/the-leviathan-1651-the-two-treatises-of-government-1689-the-social-contract-1762-the-constitution-of-pennsylvania-1776/paperback/product-782nvr.html XXX https://www.bookfinder.com/search/?author=peter%2Bkanzler&title=pennsylvania%2Bconstitution%2Bleviathan&lang=en&isbn=9781716893407&new_used=N&destination=us¤cy=USD&mode=basic&st=sr&ac=qr | Thank You Dearly For ANY Support! And God Bless You.

Greetings Trashlings & Welcome back, Molly!00:00 After a wonderful Miami wedding weekend (and hilariously horrible stylist), Molly is back in London lookin' like Shepard's pie!3:30 We missed the Grammys and the Oscars but other than "the big slap" why was the next biggest headline “Haley Bieber is not pregnant” LOL she's not pregnant, we'll know when she's pregnant, and more importantly whoooo cares!? SEO cares, is who! Search us! Oh, and BREAKING NEWS Jennifer Anniston is also not pregnant!5:09 Molly's dog is horny as hell! Does anyone know how to get the dog to stop licking his own dick and humping his lamb-doll to completion? How do dogs know the bathroom is the bathroom? You'd think potty training would be easier for us, but the truth is human babies are straight-up dumb!9:44 Tik -Talk! Molly is fascinated by Chinese a Tik-Toker & finds herself haunted by an array of Chinese beauty standard videos -- specifically the emphasis the Chinese put on a woman's “cranial crest." Also women with high cheekbones are assumed to be murderous and God favors those with low hairy-hairlines (see Camila Cabello). What's worse for culture? 2010's Women's magazines or Chinese beauty tik-tokers? Either way keep it coming, we love to feel bad!! 24:43 The collective unconscious is hack! From jokes to wedding dresses to pop songs — no one's original! Who invented the term “finsta”? Everyone? 27:18 Ed Sheeran reminds us today, on the heels of winning his court case defending his “Shape of You" copyright, that there are only 12-music-notes and just a handful of pop-chords so let's chill out on the plagiarism accusations.30:39 Remember Bras? If so, how do you put your bra on? While Sara either goes bra-less or opts for the easy-way-on, Oprah, Molly, and Sara's mom agree -- there's only one "right" way to put on a bra. Sara commit to challenge herself this week and put the bra on like a big girl.39:00 Real Housewives chunk! Molly interviewed RHONY star Leah McSweeney for a cover article in Ladygunn magazine (Click to read : LEAH MCSWEENEY SPILLS THE TEA ON RHONY GOSSIP + HER NEW BOOK CHAOS THEORY by Molly Mulshine!). Sara mixes up Bethany Frankel and mortal enemy, Kelly Bensimon and the homework is to watch RHONY S3 episode entitled “scary island" to understand. While it's always been the franchise anchor, this past RHONY season was so poorly received it didn't even get a reunion special! Bring back bad behavior republican lifestyle television for us to oogle at and judge. 50:30 Ok, but for real what's the scoop on the RHONY spin-off / throw back? What makes a good real housewife? What new additions do we want to see? Anna Delvey? Julia Fox? Camille Paglia? Candace Owens!? How much do we have to pay Carole Radziwill to return? Love you, CR!Leave a Review!Shop Space Trash Merch so Molly & Sara can become real housewives with a streetwear brand & you can hide your flat cranial crest! Follow @mollymulshine @saraarmour @themoonual See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

the thespians are joined by Jack from THE PERFUME NATIONALIST to discuss Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's 1978 musical EVITA and its 1996 Alan Parker film adaptation starring Madonna and Antonio Banderas. they also discuss Jack's high school theatre adventures, Hillary Clinton, and Camille Paglia.  follow Jack on twitter and instagram 

Another deep, wild, visceral powwow through the night with Jack Mason of The Perfume Nationalist as we discuss dogs and finding God in our 20s, Camille Paglia's mysterious love life, the phenomenon of Twitter groupchats, the irritating delusion of female innocence, and many other topics tailored perfectly for a Valentine's Day cancel reel. First hour here, full 4 hour session only on our Patreon.    Follow Jack on Twitter and Instagram, & subscribe to The Perfume Nationalist podcast Follow Filthy Armenian on Twitter and Instagram   If you like what you hear, please rate, review, and spread the word.

I am joined by FLOAT UNIVERSE to discuss esoteric Sopranos lore (SPOILERS, DUH!). Topics include: why Camille Paglia is wrong about The Sopranos, my personal experiences with the Italx community, Float's review of the Many Saints of Newark prequel film (which he reads in its entirety), our favorite characters and episodes, and our respective theories about the infamous ‘Made In America' finale. Schizotopia Patrons get access to all new episodes early. Please consider becoming a Patron: https://www.patreon.com/brainorigami

Warning: We swear a bit in this episode. You will not want to miss our first episode of 2022. Glenn Danas shares with us his story on reCHARGING his life when he became sober in 2005. Leading up to that crossroads, he lost his relationship with his significant other, lost his job at a prominent law firm, was broke, and had no relationship with his family. All of this occurred during a short window of time and his desperation and pain led him to do something about it. His recovery took over 9 months. As he said, he was lucky that he didn't need to go back to anything. This gave him the freedom to tell himself “Okay, I am here to do what I need to do, even if it takes a while”. He pulled on his humility to learn from others on recovery and resiliency to bounce back. Glenn gives us his insights on why “you are the problem” and words of wisdom for families who have relatives or friends who are struggling with addiction. An inspirational story for the new year. Glenn  is an attorney practicing in Los Angeles, California.  He specializes in civil appeals and class action litigation. The Daily Journal has recognized Glenn as one of the “Top 20 Attorney's in California under 40” in 2013, one of the “Top 100 Attorneys in California” in 2017, as well as one of the “Top Labor and Employment Attorneys” in California each year from 2015-2018. Glenn graduated from Emory University School of Law with honors and was a member of the Emory Law Journal. He received his undergraduate degree from Cornell University where he earned a Bachelor of Science in Industrial and Labor Relations. Glenn frequently presents on California appellate and employment law issues at conferences and seminars.Connect with Glenn to learn more about him and his background:Linked In - https://www.linkedin.com/in/glenn-danas-4678556/Twitter - @GlennDanasPodcast - Making Sense w/ Sam Harris - https://www.samharris.org/podcastsCamille Paglia - https://www.amazon.com/Camille-Paglia/e/B000AQ3UWE%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_shareJordan Peterson - https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/Sign up for our newsletter at https://abbraccigroup.com/. Please subscribe, leave a review and tell your friends about our podcast. Learn more about the CHARGE® model by purchasing the book, The Way of the HR Warrior. Let us know about the moments for you that changed your life trajectory. Drop us a note via our website.

Join Erin and Heyd as we explore an influential film of artist Julia Land Barbosa called The Watermelon Woman, first seen as a disgruntled teenager at her local shopping mall in San Antonio and would later impact her as a performance artist. With director, writer and editor Cheryl Dunye, we follow a journey of self-discovery as the protagonist researches the long-lost history of a black queer female actor from the 1940s in an attempt to reclaim the narrative. With one foot in the present and one foot in the past, this rom-com drama will have have you longing for the days of romance in the video rental stores while wondering if you should rent Aliens OR Carrie! And as always... be kind, rewind! Tangents include: embarrassing Goggle searches, Camille Paglia, NEA censorship, feminist film group break ups, Georgia O'Keeffe's "vagina" paintings, witchyness of art making For more information about Julia's studio practice, check out his website https://julialandois.com/ and Instagram @jblandois Follow us on Instagram @artists.talk.movies --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/erin-stafford/support

Somewhere on the road between Stalingrad and Forever21, something essential got misplaced amidst the bathos. Eric works through a bottle of Red wine on air with social, literary and artistic theorist Anna Khachiyan (co-host of the explosive and popular Red Scare podcast) to find out what is brewing on the anti-woke Left among the intellectual daughters of Camille Paglia. Anna takes us through her project of the reconstructed feminine combining irreverent intellectual dominance with a return to valuing motherhood informed by her claims on Soviet & American heritage. The intellectual foundation of the intersectional “oppression Olympics” and reparations discussion is further dissected amidst the twin specters of the Armenian & Jewish genocides which mysteriously appear not to register at all with today's progressives.  No puppies were eaten during this podcast, but an ambient trigger warning is otherwise in order for those with exquisite sensitivities. Caveat emptor and welcome to the Grand Finale of the inaugural year of “The Portal.”  See you all again in 2020! Skillshare: Get two whole months of unlimited access to thousands of classes for free Skillshare.com/PORTAL Chili: Save up to $300 on Chili sleep systems with visit chilitechnology.com/PORTAL Phlur: Get 20% off your FIRST custom Phlur sample set phlur.com/PORTAL See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Nothing describes the social pressure to conform better than Hans Christian Andersen's parable, “The Emperor's New Clothes.”          Do you remember it? An emperor hires two weavers who claim they can make a garment so fine it's only visible to the very wise. Of course, they end up not making any clothes at all. They pocket the emperor's money and send him on procession through the city naked.          No one—not even the emperor himself—dares to say anything thinking if they do, it means they're fools.  Only a child is willing to shout out, “The emperor is naked!”          Each week, I come across a headline that makes me think, “Finally! This has got to be our naked emperor moment. Somebody is going to call this out.”          Last week, for instance, the spokeswoman for a British doula association was forced to resign after reminding her social media followers that people who have wombs are... women.  Commenting on a health awareness campaign that encouraged “everyone aged 25-64 with a cervix” to get screened for cancer, the longtime birth coach wrote, “I am not a ‘cervix owner .  .  .' I am a woman: an adult human female.”          In response, angry transgender activists barraged Doula UK with complaints, ultimately driving someone willing to say the obvious out of her job.          Honestly, I just cannot imagine that the majority of people really want to live in a world where birth coaches aren't allowed to call women, “women.” In fact, it may be that we are ready to put at least some limits on the men who demand all the rights and privileges of women.          For example, a biological man who filed complaints against Vancouver beauty salons because they wouldn't wax his private area was just told by a Canadian court that he doesn't have a right to force female beauticians to touch him.          Then there's the ongoing custody battle over a 7-year-old Texas boy whose mother is convinced he's really a she and therefore should dress, live, and medically transition into girlhood. Since we last talked about this story on “BreakPoint This Week,” a Dallas judge refused to grant the mother sole custody—a big improvement over what the jury had recommended.          And, resistance is growing in the academy, too. A recent essay at The American Mind describes how a growing group of radical feminist are bravely taking on the demands of transgender activists, having realized that their very existence as women is threatened by increasingly unrealistic demands. In response, they've earned a derogatory nickname: “TERF's” which stands for “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists.”          Camille Paglia—a hard-left feminist, lesbian professor—has been mercilessly attacked for refusing to accept the claim that men who feel like women really are women. Paglia and other “gender critical” feminists think there's something essential to biological womanhood that no man can never appropriate, claim or understand – no matter how much makeup, hormone therapy, or surgery he endures.          As she told the Weekly Standard in 2017: “The cold biological truth is sex changes are impossible. Every single cell of the human body remains coded with one's birth gender for life.”          It sounds like something a conservative Christian would say.          The very fact that we now find ourselves as Christians lining up with radical feminists makes me wonder if we are, in fact, approaching a turning point. After all, the stakes are only getting higher? Sports championships that belong to women are already being given to men. Will scholarships designated for women be taken by men? And what will happen when a federal small business grant program for women entrepreneurs is claimed by a man? Or when women no longer are able to represent their country in the Olympics because men claim all of the spots on their team?          We will see whether there's a limit to what people will sit back and take. I suspect there is. After all, the emperor just can't walk around naked forever.