Molly Fischer writes:
And then, perhaps most important: She, like Trump, gives her audience the vicarious thrill of watching someone who appears to be saying whatever the hell they want. Reading Paglia is a bit like how it must have felt to be an enthusiastic attendee at a Trump campaign rally: She can’t possibly REALLY mean that, you think, and laugh, bewildered — but can you imagine how annoyed it must make people?
She doesn’t seem especially troubled by the rise of a certain kind of outlandish vitriol on the right. When I asked her about Yiannopoulos, she wrote back: “Too many gay men have lost the scathingly cruel wit for which they were famous in the pre-Stonewall era. None of his satirical jibes seem any worse than the campy insults that the great female impersonator Charles Pierce had Bette Davis fling at Joan Crawford. However, true reformers need to build as well as attack. When I burst into notoriety, I had a 700-page book behind me and campaigned on a detailed agenda critiquing both the Left and the Right.”
