I watched this a second time.

Paglia, for all her insight, seems like discarded revolutionary, bitter that the promises of the revolution never materialized, yet too idealistic to see the promises as momentary Machiavellian manipulations toward a larger goal.

More specifically, she was promised that universalism, individualism and free speech were guiding lights for humanity.

She does *not* believe, as a growing number of us do, that these once-leftists virtues were Machiavellian steps toward the destruction of Western civilization. They were merely prying open the door to infiltrate and poison the institutions of the west.

I’m old enough to remember when burning the flag and desecrating the symbols of Christendom were hailed as heroic expressions of free speech. In school, debates were organized with exactly this framing.

But as soon as the leftists seized control, free speech, free expression, individualism, went out the window, in the name of class struggle, tolerance (for “oppressed groups only”), anti-hate speech.

Viewed in a time frame that spans more than a generation, this isn’t a case of lost direction, but exactly the deliberate dismantling of the West about which those despicable, ungrateful Cultural Marxists wrote.