I find Camille fascinating to listen to, and she’s an atheist, transgender, lesbian, feminist, pro-pornography radical. She’s brilliant, she’s witty, she’s subversive, she’s unique, and she’s a dyed in the wool iconoclast. She also absolutely despises CRT and postmodernism, thinks feminism has been ruined by animosity toward men and a failure to appreciate innate sex differences, and thinks teaching people about classical art, literature, and especially religion should be the core of American education. She’s a bag of contradictions and surprises.

People like her are invaluable because they’re able to criticize these movements and institutions from the inside and give insight into them, positively and negatively. She’s completely willing to challenge the prevailing fashions, whether it’s 1950s conventionalism or 2020s political correctness. And because she’s always been on the radical left, she has a unique ability to criticize the errors and hypocrisy of her own political movement. And in my opinion, the best critics and criticisms of any ideology always come from within.

Camille has said, publicly, that the current transgender craze is part of the assault on masculinity, that it’s a sign of a larger cultural collapse, and that anyone who collaborates in assisting a child in gender reassignment or puberty interference is guilty of a crime against humanity. That’s a pretty subversive thing for a liberal public intellectual to say in this day and age. Maybe you could have said that twenty years ago and remained a liberal, but now it’s likely to get you excommunicated and branded as alt-right, if not ejected from polite society altogether. It goes radically against the grain of the prevailing attitudes among the left’s thought leaders. But she’s quite unapologetic about it.

She’s a feminist, but according to her book on art history, the movement toward androgeny is a consistent historical sign of late-stage cultural development, when a civilization is starting to unravel. Its citizens perceive themselves as very sophisticated, but have lost belief in the ideals that established the culture, and are soon consumed by fringe barbarian cultures that still preserve the ideal of heroic masculinity (often in very savage but powerful forms). That doesn’t sound like the argument of a left wing radical. But if you listen to her, you can see how it flows from the same fountain of radicalism that drove her way back in the 60s.

There’s a secondary risk she mentions, that a culture can get retaken by overly heroic and orderly elements within its own society and become tyrannical. The weakness of the Weimar Republic in Germany was overtaken and cured by the rise of Hitler. That sort of revolution cures one problem, but creates new ones. So you need to be cautious about who you ally with or use as tools to fight your present battles. You have to be very careful about their character, not just their useful positions. In the long run those people can do more to hurt the cause than help it, by enacting the worst version of it and alienating the people.

One last bit of advice Camille gives that I think is worth heeding for Christians is that it’s very easy to criticize, but if you don’t also take the time to properly articulate what you have to offer, what there is to love about your position, you’ll lose. That’s why she says fine art died forty years ago. All it can do now is criticize and tear down and defy conventions. It doesn’t create. And that makes it uninspiring and unlovable and degrading.

You win culture wars by articulating, through any and all means possible (art, music, architecture, speech, story, books) the great beauty of your position and what there is in it to love, not just what there is wrong with the other folks. Both tactics are useful, but one (criticism, which arouses fear) is stronger in the short term, and is more temporary and connected to the enemy of the moment. The other (creativity), arouses love, and it can last and keep making its case eternally (as the cathedrals of Europe still declare the glory of God and his creation and draw people long after the builders are dead).