british member for the standing in for prime minister theresa may during this week's question time. then senator amy klobuchar announces her candidacy president. -- for president. ♪ announcer: this week on "q&a," helen andrews discusses her first things magazine essay on online shaming, called "shame storm." brian: in january of 2019, you wrote for first things magazine something called "shame storm." what is it? ms. andrews: i noticed that it seemed to be happening just

about every week, that someone was being subjected to social media condemnation. they found themselves in the middle of a shame tornado over this behavior genuine or perceived. and these pile on's -- ons were bigger than they had ever been in humans history because of the internet and this was a massive social phenomenon that was creating casualties left and right. a lot of people are worried about this effect that is having on victims and the rest of us and the voyeuristic appetite it is creating. i have my own particular perspective on this phenomena because back in 2010 the same sort of thing happened to me. this was very early on in the

phenomenon of people and things going viral. so i paid very close attention to this. brian: why did you decide to tell your own story, which caused you so much trouble before? ms. andrews: it was a tough decision to write this because it brought back what was a tremendous experience in my life. but the event was a headline i read in the new york times about a man who had committed suicide in a parked car in west village who had not been found for seven days. it was a funny sort of new york headline, but if you read down in the story, you discovered that this man had an id for jeffrey corbis but jeffrey corbis had only existed for one year. this poor fellow had, the worst moment of his life was he threw a sandwich at a server who gave

him the wrong sandwich at mcdonald's. and i turned out she was pregnant and all these things. but it was at the top of the google search for his name. he could not get a job. anytime anybody googled his name, this funny story came up. perspective employers did not want to hire a guy who threw sandwiches at pregnant servers. and it ruined his life. he tried to get a fresh start by legally changing his name to jeffrey corbis and it did not work out. so the tragedy of that man reminded me that if someone can shine a light on this new phenomenon of shame storming and condemn it, it might do some good. brian: i foresaw this story in a david brooks column in the new york times. he gives up something called the sydni awards every year.

part one and part two. these are people who write long articles in newspapers and magazines. and he wrote about you. he gave you the first sydni award this season, in december -- sydni award this season, in december. did you know it was coming? >> i had no idea. i did not know my story would be as well received as it was. i got a lot of positive feedback, even before it was highlighted in the award. i got emails from people. dozens who said they had been through this themselves. people who had been subjected to this me too movement who had lost their jobs over allegations of his behavior. they say it ruined their lives so thank you for writing this and telling a little bit about what it is like from the inside.

brian: c-span had a little bit to do with this, which, it is complicated and i warned our audience to listen carefully on how it works. let me start with a couple things. what are you doing today? what is your job? ms. andrews: i am the managing editor at the washington examiner weekly magazine. brian: and what is that? ms. andrews: for a long time, it had been a great newspaper, one of the best places for coverage of the hill and white house and it has had a magazine supplement to that but only released here in the district. as of january 1, the washington examiner is taking its magazine,

which has existed for 70 years as an adjunct and taking it national. -- for so many years as an adjunct and taking it national. brian: it is fair to say the examiner magazine replace the weekly standard? i know there is controversy. the same man owns both. ms. andrews: that is above my pay grade. brian: you are from what part of the united states? >> i am from raleigh, north carolina. i went to yale. i majored in the yale political union. technically, my major was religious studies and i did my thesis on oscar wilde but i spent most of my time in the yale political union. mixing it up on the debate tour. i graduated in 2008. i came to washington right away. i started a blog as a senior in college and had gotten the attention of some editors. from the moment i graduated i went from internship to

internship and eventually wound up at in this -- as an associate editor at national review. brian: what is first things magazine? ms. andrews: it is a premier magazine about religion and culture. it has a little bit of a catholic heritage. there's a lot of longform journalism about issues of faith and culture. brian: how did you get into your interest in religion and catholicism? were you born catholic? ms. andrews: i come from a catholic family but was not raised catholic. my heritage from a few generations back is catholic and i was raised in the church of npr. near the research triangle park and i developed an interest in theology in college and ended up making it my major.

i studied oscar wilde and his catholic conversion. brian: you are also a robert novak fellow. is this something you did earlier? ms. andrews: once you are a fellow, you are in the alumni family for life. but i came back to the united states after living for most of a decade in sydney, australia. in 2017. a week after my plane landed i found out i had one -- won the award that allows journalists to take a year off from their day job and work in a book. brian: did you write a book? ms. andrews: i did. we are working on getting it published. it is about the baby boomers and that generation and the terrible things they have done to america and western civilization.

>> and you are a millennial? ms. andrews: yes. born in 1986. makes you came here in 2008 and in 2010, would cover this event. what was it? >> i was approached by harpercollins about contributing an essay to an anthology of essays by young conservatives called "proud to be right, voices of the next conservative generation." it took young, conservative writers and editors in their 20's and early 30's and gave them a few thousand words and said, give us whatever you've got. so i contributed my essay that anthology and as part of the promotion for the anthology once it was released they had some book reviews. i was one of the contributors and another was my ex-boyfriend. brian: so you are both sitting

there at the table. first let me introduce our audience to todd and then we will come back and you can explain who he is. >> i think a lot of what helen says is designed to increase suffering. ms. andrews: i am catholic. [laughter] >> that might explain it. but you start connecting the dots and you realize she is almost always defending something that most of us would find horrific. brian: when he started to talk this way, what was your reaction? ms. andrews: i was in shock. i had no idea what was coming. we had been chatting amiably for half an hour in the green room

before the panel started so as far as i knew we were on excellent terms. this was during the q&a after everyone had delivered remarks. suddenly out of nowhere, he launches into a four-minute rant about how evil i am. brian: we have the rest of the clip, which we will show in a second. how long did you date? ms. andrews: a few years. brian: what is the difference in your ages? ms. andrews: he is a little older. he has been in new york for decades. brian: subsequent to this, you married. you married an australian? ms. andrews: yes. in 2012 we got married. brian: and you left town after this incident that went viral. and david brooks said on youtube the video had half a million people watch it within 48 hours. ms. andrews: it was featured on

the nightly news ndc and fox news and all the cable shows. -- in d.c. and fox news and all the cable shows. brian: let's watch the continuation of what todd seavey had to say about you. >> i should probably confess helen and i dated for two years so we have sparred about many things. you might come as a surprise to some of you that we dated for two years, not because of the ideological differences but because there are probably also people in this room who also dated helen during those two years. given how tumultuous things god. -- things got. at times, her gamesmanship included coldly saying that she would play matchmaker and then seduce the man to hurt the woman, which when you think about it, is creepy and

disturbing. >> is all this going on c-span? five months later she made good , on this disturbing promise and i doubt anyone who knows me thinks i am making this up. i keep wondering, if you strip away the things you do not like which include tradition, what is it you do not want people to do to each other? what sort of people are beyond the pale when you have encouraged a world of brawling and fighting and turning on each other in a sadomasochistic way? i think she has the right to respond on this. ms. andrews: off the top of my head, what do i think is out of bounds? i don't know, spilling your heart out on c-span? brian: obviously goldberg got a little nervous there and said,

ok. was there tension in the room when this happened? ms. andrews: [laughter] you could say that. you could say there was. i think one of the reasons todd was able to keep going is because no one knew what to do. everyone was just sort of shocked and astonished. brian: what did you say to him after the panel was over? ms. andrews: we did not say much but i thought it was really important to look him in the eye and shake his hand and say, good to see you. brian: the point of this is that you wrote your essay about this event. what happened after it aired? ms. andrews: well, it got a ton of coverage and went viral. everybody i knew saw it. everyone at my workplace saw it. i was walking on the street with my parents and people would stop and point and say, you are the c-span girl.

especially if you were living in new york were visiting d.c., the people who saw that video lived in those two towns so there was a lot of pointing and snickering. >> that was in 2010. what happened to your life after this? ms. andrews: a little over a year after that i decided i wanted to move on from my job and i found a new one. that is when it first hit me that this really was at the top of my google search and always would be. everyone i was sending a resume to who i was hoping would bring me in for a job interview would see this video. so i did not get as many callbacks as i was expecting. brian: to prove your point, we googled you today, even though your name has changed and you can see it, right here is the video and your name is helen andrews now.

ms. andrews: my maiden name was much more distinctive. i was the only helen rittelmeyer on the planet. i fell in love with an australian but i also wanted to get away from the story. as i discovered moving to the other side of the world does not really solve the problem in the age of the internet. i got a job as a -- at a think tank and when i released my first report, the video came up and people linked to it and said, i do not care what this person has to say. brian: your piece is called "shame storm." did you feel shamed by this or did todd seavey feel shamed by this?

ms. andrews: certainly a lot of embarrassment. one thing i have noticed watching more and more of these cycles, when someone becomes the worst person on the internet for a day is that it almost does not matter to the dynamic whether they have done something genuinely evil or just something silly like throwing a synergetic mcdonald's person or whatever it is. everyone piles on the same way. september 7, 2009, there is a block from todd seavey. i'm going to read the first part of it. this is 2009. this happened in 2010. he writes, one year ago this month, helen came to a project gathering i have posted for

three years. for the first time i went on to date someone i met there. for 10 months, she was mentioned so many times on this blog that she deserves a final summation. what is this? this is new in my lifetime where it is all being spilled out on a blog. how often did he write about you? ms. andrews: it's funny. when i first started dating todd one of the things i learned about him was that he had appeared in one of his ex-girlfriend's memoirs. she was someone who had been in mtv rock 'n' roll journalist and converted to catholicism and she wrote about the conversion. she devoted a chapter to her experience dating todd because he is an aggressive atheist and

this was during her conversion so it was about that dynamic. one of the stories that is on the record in the chapter is that when they broke up, todd sent a mass email to everyone he knew saying "my girlfriend has just broken up with me but i think we are really good together. if anyone has advice on how to win her back, please let me know." of course she found that catastrophically embarrassing. so that was like foreshadowing. brian: how often did he write about you in his blog? ms. andrews: often. this is a guy who writes about his whole life, the way a lot of people do these days. brian: there is a headline from the city paper of washington from 2010, right after this happened. " dear secretly sadistic

conservative heartbreaker helen, some thoughts on your penance." they start off by saying it was one of the most captivating moments in history. i do not need to go on with this. when things started to happen, what happened with you with this publicity? ms. andrews: i remember when that blog post came out. the author approached me for a quote to see if she could get my reaction and i got a lot of requests for media and to talk to reporters after this. i was not a public person at the time and i had no experience giving interviews to journalists and i was feeling overwhelmed and humiliated so i did not answer their emails. but of course they wrote it up

anyway without comments from me. brian: what did todd say about you in his diatribe? he was obviously on the attack. ms. andrews: in his defense, everything he said, he believed was true. the particular story he is a -- alluding to about matchmaking, the facts were distorted from his perspective. so that is inaccurate but from his point of view, that is what he thought. brian: what is the justine story you write about? ms. andrews: i consider that the very first inaugurating event in our new era of twitter shame storms. she was a pr exec in london who had fewer than 200 twitter followers. a normal person, a normal job,

not a public figure. she was about to get on a plane for christmas vacation to cape town to visit relatives and she tweeted " going to south africa. hope i don't get aids. just kidding. i'm white." she said that she used this joke as satire to point out racism. but a reporter at gawker saw the tweet and decided to do a post about it. within a few hours, millions and millions of people had followed her on twitter and quoted it saying it was horrible. and she was on a plane and had no access to the internet. so the #became -- the hashtag became #has justine landed yet?

because once she landed she would discover she had become a figure of hate for millions of people she had never met. she said when she got off the plane and turned on her phone, it basically melted. >> justine now apologizing after this offensive tweet went viral. in a statement, she tells abc news words cannot express how sorry i am and how necessary it is for me to apologize to the people of south africa. she was fired saturday from her top pa -- pr job where she repped some of the biggest names online like the daily beast and match.com. >> this is one of the fastest crash and burn's i have ever seen. bur -- crash and burns i have ever seen.

>> did you have any reaction at the time? ms. andrews: i was in new south wales and i was in a car and i had twitter on my phone and i saw this story. i have to admit, for the first half-hour, i was joining everybody else. has she landed? i want to follow this. this is gripping. it took a while for it to sink in that what was happening to her is similar to what happened to me and maybe the moral thing to do is to not join in the pile on of this innocent bystander. brian: what you think about abc firing her? -- iac firing her? ms. andrews: i think that needs most to change. it happens most of the time that whoever finds themselves the subject of an online shame storm loses their job and it is hardly ever because their boss says i

think your misbehavior is genuinely offensive and might company needs to take a stand, or a genuinely think you will be a threat to your coworkers because of what you have done. 90% of the time, the employer says, sorry, i think you are great but i have to let you go so my phone will stop ringing. i have to cave to the mob because they will keep clamoring for your head. i would really like in the future for employers to show more backbone and say, this person is a good employee and this has no effect on their job performance. brian: i found online that she had been rehired recently. a lot of years in between. her story was 2013.

along the way, you must've decided to become a journalist. ms. andrews: i was a journalist then. brian: but you are running a magazine now. from north carolina to yale to washington dc, why did you decide to be in journalism instead of religion? ms. andrews: the religious studies major was just a major. the yale political union was my undergrad career. >> what does that mean, by the way? >> we bring a guest speaker on and have formal debates according to roberts rules of order, parliamentary style stuff. all matters of political interest but some philosophical debates. brian: how much time did you spend on the yale political union? ms. andrews: all the time i was not asleep.

i was the speaker, the one with the gavel. brian: how did you get into that? and the impact of these experiences for people in college make a difference. ms. andrews: absolutely. you asked when i decided to go into journalism. it never really was a decision. i just drifted into it. i mentioned earlier i started a little blog on wordpress way back in the day when people have blogs. through that i started writing for magazines and eventually that turned into a career. brian: what was your experience living in australia and what impact did that have on your thinking about your politics, the media, the internet? ms. andrews: on the one hand, it

made me appreciate the internet more because even though i was on the other side of the world, i continue to freelance. it was great to be able to keep up with friends and to keep writing, which would not have been possible if i had to use airmail back-and-forth with editors. but it also gave me appreciation of the dark side of the internet's global scope. because i eventually became a regular talking head on political panel shows. every time i went on, at least one person on twitter would find the old c-span video and throw it up in my twitter engines. brian: -- twitter mentions. brian: what was your conservative -- how do you find your conservatism?

-- define your conservatism. ms. andrews: i am a strong social conservative but also a fiscal conservative. i'm very ecumenical. all varieties of conservatism i consider to be allies. brian: how is alan bloom connected to you? ms. andrews: earlier in that panel discussion, i had spoken disparagingly about alan loom and the point i was making -- alan bloom and the point i was making his he presented himself as a great books conservative and made a case that everyone should read books. for me, i think the reason to read good books is so you have something more interesting to talk about then why it is good

to read good books. by harping on the basic book that reading books is good, he stalled the cultural conversation at a preliminary stage and was not terribly helpful or interesting. brian: did you ever meet him? ms. andrews: he died before i came to college. brian: he was here a long time ago on the show. ms. andrews: and he is a very engaging writer. brian: what is the difference between a conservative and a libertarian,? ms. andrews: libertarians do not always sign on to the social conservative agenda. brian: your thesis and who you studied most at yale was oscar wilde.

you talked about his catholicism. did he practice it? ms. andrews: his was a death bed conversion and the subject of my thesis was looking at his earlier career and finding foreshadowing of the ultimate decision he made to join the church. brian: what else did you learn about him when you spent so much time? ms. andrews: it was a year-long project and i had a long-standing interest in him and the movement called decadence, of which he was a part. it was a literary movement in england. the thing i found most compelling is they were all aggressively frivolous young men. the philosophy of life was

nothing matters and it is not important to be moral and we should all lead splendid, beautiful lives. almost all of them, as they grew older, had some moment of crisis when they realized that was just a really silly and superficial way to go about life. for oscar wilde, that was being at his trial and conviction. he spent two years in hard labor, and for someone who had never done a days work in his life, it was deeply traumatic. he had to confront deeper, more spiritual questions then he had given time to before. brian: why was he in prison? ms. andrews: he had a young, gay lover whose father was very opposed to his son being in a gay relationship, especially with someone as flamboyant as oscar wilde. so his father accused them of

being a gay couple. oscar, in a classic moment of hubris, sued the man for libel and that led to a big trial, the trial of the century that was written about in all of the papers. he was convicted. brian: how long did he live? ms. andrews: after prison, a few years. prison broke him physically. he was not in a good condition when he got out. he moved to france and was there for a few years, a broken man traveling under a false name. did not outlive that for long. brian: you called yourself a birkian. what is that? ms. andrews: i am a follower of

edmund burke. he's the greatest political thinker that the english speaking world has ever contributed. the french revolution was something new when it arrived at the tail end of the 18th century and no one who lived in that time grasped how consequential a revolution in human affairs that would be except for edmund burke. he correctly perceived that it would be a bad thing. not a new dawn for liberty. it was going to be a catastrophe. brian: and was it? and how? ms. andrews: what is wrong with the french revolution?

guillotines have to be high up on that list. the subordination of all political affairs to raw, human reason. i think it is a bad way to go about things. humans are imperfect and we are not equipped to think through everything rationally from a to z and the way the roof -- in the way the revolutionaries thought we could. edmund appreciated things like tradition. brian: you have studied a lot in the past and you lived in australia and you know what is going on in the u.s. right now. what is your opinion of where the u.s. is now in history? ms. andrews: democracy has never been in more trouble. i personally, great fan of our current president. i like a lot of his policy decisions and i like the refreshing candor he has brought to our debate. but there has been a denying

that his election is an indication that something has gone wrong and there is a lot more division than our government is prepared to handle. the intrusion of celebrity into the world of politics is a big danger sign, because celebrity is intrinsically false. it is actually one of the reasons why the shame storm phenomenon bothers me so much. when you are in the middle of it, you really realize just how much the version of events that gets presented in the press is a looking glass version. you read a story and you say you do not recognize the person. this isn't right, this is inaccurate. it is a distortion. once you have been through that, you realize all the other

stories you have been reading, where you read a profile and you think you know them, it is not true. you do not know them at all. so the celebrity lens is distorting and i think we should have areas of our culture that are exempt and immune from the intrusion of celebrity style culture. brian: as you know, there are a lot of people who cannot understand why conservatives or evangelicals or catholics, strong religious people, would like this man. what do you say to that? explain how that works out in your own head. a lot of the media, the washington post has made a career out of showing how many times he has allegedly lied. and cnn and msnbc have gone after him on a daily basis. there is a great deal of split in our media. you run a conservative magazine.

tell us why you like this guy. ms. andrews: i think the number one reason that covers a lot of other bad stuff is that he took some policy issues that the republican establishment had really neglected. their base was in one place on immigration and trade and foreign wars and the republican establishment was way over somewhere else and they ignored what the people who were voting for them wanted them to be doing. trump was the first guy to come along and say, yeah, i think we should have a border and close it and not have as many soldiers in the middle east. maybe our trade policy should not be dogmatically free trade in all instances.

it is the fault of the republican establishment for leaving that huge vacuum open for someone like trump to come in and fill but you cannot blame him for doing so. you almost have to thank him, especially if you are on his side, like me. brian: when did you first say you liked him and he was your guy? ms. andrews: when he got the nomination. brian: did you like him during the primary? ms. andrews: yes. as an immigration hawk from way back, he is somebody i had my eye on. brian: let's go back to your first things. i am sure people can get this essay online. when did you marry and was it before you went to australia? ms. andrews: over in australia. i met him here. i have lived in australia for five years. brian: why did you move back? ms. andrews: i was homesick.

and if your business is conservative journalism, it is hard to make a living in australia because they only have one conservative magazine. it is called quadrant, and everyone should read it and subscribe, but there is not the same infrastructure you have in a place like d.c.. brian: one conservative magazine for the whole country? ms. andrews: yes. brian: what about television and radio? ms. andrews: they have sky news, but not a lot in the way of magazines or journalists. brian: who is moira dunnigan? ms. andrews: she is a brooklyn-based journalist who decided during the heyday of the me too movement to create a shared google spreadsheet in the google cloud. the purpose was for women

working in journalism or media to be able to post anonymous accusations against their male coworkers and colleagues of sexual misbehavior. so they would put the name of the guy and say what he did. he asked me back to his hotel room after a night of drinks, or whatever it was. no names attached. just the accusation and then everyone who had a link could see it. she created that document. brian: i have the list. some 70 men were listed by name and what they had supposedly done wrong. what was your reaction? what did you think of that idea? ms. andrews: i do not believe in anonymous accusations. i have heard a lot of other women who work in media defend the anonymity.

and they have defended moira dunnigan. they say of course they need to be anonymous where they will otherwise be subjected to harassment and people will be mean to them on the internet. but ever since she has been revealed as the creator of this, she has gotten a book deal, a regular columnist deal and she has been vaulted into celebrity. nothing bad has happened to her. quite the opposite. so considering that, the fear of harassment is no excuse for not fulfilling the basic duty of putting your name next to an accusation. especially when the accusations are career ending. brian: do you know how many career ending examples? has it been public that they are

career ending? ms. andrews: no and that is the sad thing about these shame storms. we the consumers very rarely hear about the aftermath. so we do not always know when people get fired. but i heard after my essay was published from some of the people on the list and the stories i heard were not only did i lose my job, but now i cannot get another one. brian: let's go over this thing she did again. explain it. she published names? ms. andrews: the way a google spreadsheet works is anyone can go in and alter it and change it. and everyone sees the changes. brian: how did they know to go there? ms. andrews: the link was passed around behind the scenes. it was forwarded from woman to

woman and went viral. brian: and she did it anonymously? how did her name become public? ms. andrews: that's right. the spreadsheet became a huge phenomenon and everyone in town was talking about it. have you seen the list, have you gotten a link? it was put in big bold letters at the top not to forward it to any men. so it was a secret document, or intended to be. so became this huge, secret, buzzworthy item. harper's magazine decided it would be a good hook for their coverage of the broader me too movement and they assigned an essayist to write about it. the essayist, katie, poked around and i think she figured out who had put it together.

brian: did she think it was a good idea or not? ms. andrews: the harper's essay is skeptical of the me too movement. to my great astonishment, this article of katie's attracted a huge shame storm of its own on her. so that is the thing that makes me really skeptical of the motivations of the people that are behind the media and the me too movement. they are attacking not just people they believe have misbehaved in the workplace, but they are attacking the people who are dissenting from their ideological line. brian: last january, moira donegan talked to the new york times video unit. here is what she had to say. >> the idea was that women could

use it to name people who had behaved badly toward them, whether through sexual assault or rape or harassment. i shared it with some women colleagues and friends in my industry who i knew had stories. and they sent it to people who they knew had stories. by the time i was forced to take it down 12 hours later, there were more than 70 men named and 14 of them had their names highlighted in red which denotes more than one woman who were accusing that person of violent physical assault. brian: what happened to her after she was outed doing this? ms. andrews: yes. she got a book deal. brian: did she have a full-time job? ms. andrews: i don't know. i have not followed her. brian: i have a copy of the list. so even though it was scrubbed from google, it is still there. ms. andrews: the internet is

forever. anyone can find it. brian: what is your reaction to this? is there any solution to this situation? ms. andrews: it is not a new problem, having your name in the paper and being humiliated by a story. it has happened since the 19th century. but in every previous era until the -- until about 10 years ago there was a time limit on it. your story would be in the paper and everyone would talk about it but eventually, thanks to the power of human memory, it would fade. people would forget. or you could move to a new town and someone is not going to look in all of your old hometown papers to see if your name was mentioned. you could escape it. now, escape is no longer possible. so i think it is a real dilemma and i do not know if there is a solution for it other than

scrubbing google results. journalist, over the years, a lot of people have quoted anonymous sources and people have been hurt. is there a difference? ms. andrews: yes. if moira donegan had gone to an editor and said, pick a name from the list, i want you to write an essay on this guy because i think he did this thing. the first thing the buzz feed editor would have said is, who is making this accusation, and can i talk to them to see if it can be substantiated? the media and list says you cannot have the name of the person making the accusation. you cannot check it. that is basic editorial judgment. a story with that level of

substantiation would never make it past an editor but now, the editor gets around the need of a level of corroboration by not covering the accusation, but covering the spreadsheet. brian: in your piece, you talk about jeffrey goldberg, the editor of atlantic magazine and kevin williamson. can you explain that story? ms. andrews: kevin williamson was a colleague of mine at national review and had been hired as one of the very few conservative writers. he was going to be a house writer contribute a regular column. four days after he took the job, he was fired. not for anything he had done a -- or written, but because someone found an old audio

recording where he had given his views on abortion, which he said is a form of murder and should carry the same punishment, which was then distorted in social media into something about kevin williamson supports lynch justice for pregnant teenagers. the left-wing mob wanted him to be fired, and he was. brian: you call it a left-wing mob. isn't it kind of the same thing happened to the weekly standard where the mob did not like the fact that no crystals magazine was not pro trump, so all of a sudden there is no longer a magazine? ms. andrews: i think people who own things are allowed to do with them what they decide is best and i think that was an editorial judgment on his part that was a long time coming, but

i do not know the story on what motivations people have. i think if jeffrey goldberg had said, i have come to the conclusion that you kevin williamson are a toxic person who believes people things and i do not voice in my magazine, that is editorial judgment i can respect. but the way that the mob freight -- framed their demands is that he is a threat to his female coworkers because he believes abortion is a form of murder therefore he believes 25% of women who have had abortions deserve to be killed, therefore he wants to murder a quarter of the women in his office. so many feminists pretended to believe in when really they were just trying to get him fired.

brian: here is kevin williamson talking to glenn beck. >> a pretty good guy, even though he fired me. [laughter] he is a good editor and i admire him. he just made the wrong decision in this case. the campaign to have me fired will start immediately and he did not take me seriously. he viewed the atlantic did not have the liberal imagination of the new york times and he was wrong. people were quite bent out of shape of the prospect of having to read my words at this venue instead of that venue. brian: what happened to kevin williamson? ms. andrews: he is back at the national review. as someone who has been a woman at a workplace where kevin

williamson has worked, he is not only a great coworker, but gives a lot of energy to mentorship for all of the journalists in his office, men or women. which is not something everybody does. brian: going back to your experience at yale political union, were you able to bring in speakers that you did not agree with? how free were you to do what you wanted? ms. andrews: in my day, there was a lot of lively debate that was oriented toward issues. there was none of this shouting people down. the result was a great mix and sometimes surprises happened. we had a guest from the sierra club go up and give an impassioned case for conservation and he was astonished that i gave a seconding speech as an ally, and unlikely ally from the conservative side wants to save trees.

i think that atmosphere has changed, even at just the past five years. i went to australia, and i come back and i go to alumni events and the stories i hear are very different from the people in the yale political union now. brian: what worries do you have that now the you have talked about this video from 2010, you wrote about it and got a sydni award out of it and we are re-showing it, will have a future impact? ms. andrews: i worried it would dredge it all back up. that is one thing a couple people said to me. helen, are you sure you want to take this assignment? because your name is different and you can move on. but the very day i first set

down to write the first page, my husband happened to be at a conference and his lunch table . you want to talk about bad breakups of the conservative movement and one guy at his table said, if you want to see bad breakups, you have to see this. and he pulled out his phone and pulled up the c-span dio. -- video. so the idea that it was dead and and mostlyrgotten, it was, but it never really will be. brian: what does your husband do? ms. andrews: he is an advocate for taxpayers. he wants to keep taxes low. sydney so he to could start and organization because australia does not have any really conservative think tanks.

so he had a wide open field, and he founded the australian taxpayers alliance. brian: what happened to todd seavey and do you still talk to him? ms. andrews: he is a good guy and we reconciled. we are on good terms. he was one of the first robert novak fellows. i see him at alumni functions every year. brian: has he married? ms. andrews: no. brian: what is he doing now? ms. andrews: he left his job at fox news because of the fallout from the video. so he suffered from that. now he makes a living as a ghostwriter and a writer. he has a book called libertarianism for beginners. it is a comic book. if you like comic books about politics, you will like that. brian: when he went back to fox

news to work for little bit, did he have trouble getting in the building? ms. andrews: yes. he said that still happens to him today when he gets for a spot. ooked for agets b spot. it was years after he had left his position at fox and he was booked to talk about a halloween shows on ufos. completely benign. when he showed up in the lobby, security told him he was on a no admit list. so that was presumably fallout from the c-span thing. brian: for those who want to read your essay, it is called "shame storm," and it is in a magazine called first things, which can we -- which can be found on the internet. our guest is helen andrews. thank you for joining us. ms. andrews: thank you. ♪ [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2019] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org]

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