-- so so security -- social security. >> there will be no legislative business tomorrow to allow members to attend a funeral service in dearborn, michigan for former michigan congressman john dingell. later in the week, debates on government funding and border security for current funding expires midnight friday. the senate is back 3 p.m. eastern for a package of bills dealing with natural resources. that,hey finish work on mitch mcconnell says they will take up the confirmation of william barr to be attorney general with a final vote possible later in the week. watch the house on c-span and the senate on c-span two. ♪

announcer: this week on q&a, helen andrews discusses her first things magazine essay on online shaming, called "shame storm." brian: helen andrews, 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 somebody,y week that even a famous person or an ordinary man on the street was getting subjected to social media condemnation. they found themselves in the middle of a shame tornado over -- for some kind of misbehavior, pileonst these

were bigger than they had ever been in human 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 both on the 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 as someone who has been through it myself, 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 very troubling and almost

traumatic experience in my own 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 and not been found for seven days. when you read into 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 she turned out to be pregnant and this story made the newspapers. but it was at the top of the google search for the rest of his life than on. on.hen he could not get a job. perspective employers did not want to hire a guy who threw sandwiches at pregnant servers.

it ruined his life. a new life byt starting this fresh identity 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, not the short journalism. and he wrote about you. he gave you the first sydni award this season, in december -- sydni award this season, in december. to do know it was coming? what impact did it have. ms. andrews: 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 myself and it made the local newspaper. -- even they miss people, famous people, 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 warn our audience to listen carefully on how it works. let me start with a couple things. are you doing today? ms. andrews: i am the managing editor at the washington examiner weekly magazine. brian: and what is that?

you have not had that many editions of it. 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. we are reborn and have only been on for a couple of weeks so we have a great team looking forward to great things. 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: what you say is true. it is all happening above my pay grade. brian: you are from what part of the united states? ms. andrews: raleigh, north carolina. brian: where did you go to

university? -- ms. andrews: i went to yale. 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. brian: what year did you graduate from yell? ms. andrews: i graduated in 2008. brian: when did you come to washington? ms. andrews: 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 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 is a lot of longform journalism about issues of

culture. brian: how did you get into your interest in religion and catholicism? were you born catholic? are you a convert? give us the background. ms. andrews: i come from a catholic family but was not raised catholic. my heritage a few generations back is catholic and i was raised in a very secular suburb 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 that is still alive and well, or is this something you did earlier? andrews: what you are a robert novak 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 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. brian: where is the book? we are working on getting it published. brian: what is it about? ms. andrews: it is about the baby boomers and that generation and the terrible things they have done to america and western civilization. brian: and you are a millennial? ms. andrews: yes. born in 1986. brian: the video. you can year in 2008 and in 2010 we covered an event. what was it? ms. andrews: 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 word and said get us whatever you got. i can to be did my essay that anthology and as part of the promotion for the anthology once it was released they had some book panels, or they had jonah goldberg, the editor of the anthology, and three contributors. one was me and other of whom as it turned out 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 for -- a lot of her things are two reduce

suffering. >> yet i am catholic. >> that might explain it. >> you start connecting the dots and though she sounds like an old-fashioned moralist, she is almost always defending something that most of us would find horrific. .rian: that is todd when he started talking that way, what was your reaction? i was in shock. i didn't know what was happening. we had been chatting amiably for 30 minutes 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. he 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 couple of years. brian: what is the difference in your ages? ms. andrews: he is a little older. brian: is he still in town? ms. andrews: 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 within 48o sought hours a half nine people watched it. ms. andrews: half a million people watched it. it was featured on the nightly news in d.c. and fox news and all the cable shows. it was written up in talking points and just about every place. brian: let's watch the continuation of what todd seavey had to say about you. [video clip] >> i probably should confess

that helen and i dated for two years, so we have sparred about many things. it might come as a surprise to some of you that we dated for two years, not because of the eligible differences but because there are probably also people in this room who also dated helen during those two years. given how tumultuous things got. it was on again and off again. >> i'm in favor of combativeness. >> 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? >> this is all going on c-span. >> just for the record -- think she actually five months later 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 you and what sort of people are beyond the pale when you have encouraged a world of boxing and brawling and fighting and turning on each other in a sadomasochistic way? >> off the top of my head -- >> 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 or visiting d.c., the people who saw that video lived in those two towns so there was a lot of pointing and snickering. brian: that was in 2010? ms. andrews: that is right. brian: 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 at national review 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. at the time your name was -- ms. andrews: much more distinctive. i was the only helen rittelmeyer on the planet. there were a lot of reasons why i moved out of town and moved to sydney, australia. important was i

fell in love with an australian and he moved back 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 eventually got a job 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

-- sandwich at a mcdonald's person or whatever it is. everyone piles on the same way. a septembere here 7, 2009 blog from your former friend todd seavey. ,i will 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 -- posted for three years now. 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 on his blog? 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 a memoir about that conversion from sex, drugs, rock 'n roll to the roman catholic church. 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."

she found that catastrophically embarrassing. so my life was a novel, that is what you would call foreshadowing. brian: how often did he write about you in his blog? ms. andrews: often. todd is a very upfront guy who writes about his whole life, the way a lot of people do these days with their twitter accounts and instagram. it was all up there. 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 perhaps the single most captivating moment in history of heterosexual conservative romance. i do not need to go on with this.

when the 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 the person who wrote that blog post went on and wrote it up without any comment from me. brian: what did todd say about you in his diatribe? he was obviously on the attack. ms. andrews: the important thing to say and todd's defense, he didn't say anything he didn't believe was true the particular . story he is alluding to about matchmaking, the facts were

distorted from his perspective. , but from inaccurate 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 executive in london who had fewer than 200 twitter followers. an ordinary person with a normal job, not a public figure of any kind. 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 later, and i believe her completely she said that she , used this joke as satire two

satirize 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. the thing that made this story so gripping was that she was on a plane and didn't have access to the internet. so the #became -- the hashtag became #has justine landed yet? once she landed she would become her she became a figure of eight from minds of people she never met. she said later went she got off the plane entered her phone on it basically melted. brian: this is a look at a report about this at this time. >> 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 pr job where she wrapped repped some of the biggest names online like the daily beast and match.com. >> this is one of the fastest crash and crash and burns i have ever seen. brian: do you remember this happening at the time and did you have any reaction? ms. andrews: i remember where i was. 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? this is such a grouping story i

want to follow this. 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 -- iac firing her? ms. andrews: that is the aspect of these shameless storms that bothers me the most and that i think needs to change. it happens most of the time that whoever finds themselves the subject of an online shame storm does lose their job and it is , hardly ever because their boss says i think your misbehavior is genuinely offensive and might -- my 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 need to cave to the mob because they will keep clamoring for your head. so i just need the story to stop and that is why i need to let you go. 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. we are going to stand by our guy. it is a bit risky for me to say, 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: other than writing your opinion pieces and that, you are running a magazine now. where in your trip from north carolina to yell to washington, d.c. did you decide you want to be in journalism instead of religion?

ms. andrews: the religious studies major was just a major. the yale political union was my undergraduate career. brian: what did that mean, yelp lyrical union? ms. andrews: 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 occasionally a more philosophical debate. brian: how much time did you spend on the yale political union? ms. andrews: all the time i was not asleep. brian: did you run it? ms. andrews: i was the speaker, the one with the gavel. brian: how did you get into that? and the other thing is the impact of these experiences for people in college make a difference. ms. andrews: absolutely. you asked when i decided to go into journalism. i can't answer that because 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 /had blogs. blogs.le had through that i started writing for magazines and eventually that turned into a career. brian: what was your experience and there were other things in vote in the magazine article, but 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 the other side of the world, nine time zones away, i continue to freelance for all the things i used to write for when i was based in new york city. 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. 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 up in my twitter mentions. you say you are conservative, but what kind. i know everyone likes to break it down. define your conservatism. ms. andrews: i am a strong social conservative but also a fiscal conservative. i am at the middle of the diagram all varieties of , conservatism i consider to be allies. seaavey'st was todd

reference to alan bloom and how are you connected? ms. andrews: earlier in that panel discussion, i had spoken disparagingly about 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 good 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 -- point 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 have him in a class or did you ever meet him? ms. andrews: he died before i

came to college. brian: he was here a long time ago on the book notes show. ms. andrews: and he is a very engaging writer. brian: what is the difference between a conservative and a libertarian? i am arews: conservative, todd is a libertarian. no, libertarians do not always sign on to the social conservative agenda. brian: your thesis and who you studied most at yale was oscar wilde. brian: why oscar wilde? you talked about his catholicism. did he practice catholicism? 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. there is a lot of it there. brian: what else did you learn about him when you spent so much time?

how much time did you spend? 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 and france. the thing i found most compelling is they were all as young men aggressively frivolous. their philosophy of life was nothing matters and it is not important to be moral and we should all lead splendid, beautiful lies and had the most amount of amusement as possible. 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 day's 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 called alfred douglas, whose father was very opposed to his son being in a gay gateionship, much less a relationship with someone as -- gay relationship 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 for calling him a gay lover, and that led to a big trial, the trial of the century that was written about in all of the papers.

he was eventually convicted. brian: how long did he live? ms. andrews: after he got out of prison, he only lived a few years more. 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? are you still want? this was -- are you still one? ms. andrews: i am a follower of edmund burke. i think he has the greatest political figure that the english speaking world has ever contributed. brian: why? what did he say that you liked. ms. andrews: the french revolution was something new when it arrived at the tail end of the 18th century and no one

who lived through that time grasped how consequential a time in human affairs that was going to 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? oh, gosh, guillotines have to be high on that list. the subordination of all political affairs to raw, human reason. that 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 in the way the french revolutionaries thought we could. that is why he appreciated

things like tradition. brian: bring all this to the day . you studied a lot in the past and you lived in australia and you know what is going on in the u.s. right now. i will give you a broad question -- what is your opinion of where the u.s. is now in history? ms. andrews: i think democracy has never been in more trouble. i personally am a great fan of our current president. i like a lot of his policy positions and i like the refreshing candor he has brought to our debate. but there is no denying that his election is an indication that something has gone wrong and there is a lot more division than our system is prepared to handle. brian: explain that. ms. andrews: well, i think 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 of events. you read a story about yourself and you say you do not recognize this person at all. 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. the lens of celebrity is always distorting and so 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, their -- establishment had 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: i think when he won the primary, 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 assume people can get this online under the name helen andrews and shame storm. when did you marry and was it toore you left to go australia? ms. andrews: over in australia. brian: you met him here in the united states? ms. andrews: 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 commit is hard to make a living in australia because they only have one conservative magazine. it is a great magazine called quadrant, and everybody should we 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? a conservative television and radio is there? ms. andrews: they have sky news, but not a lot in the way of magazines or journalists. if you're into tv, that market is well served but not 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. she was only outed as the person created it a few weeks after it was taken down. they say of course they need to be anonymous because otherwise they will 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 as they were for some many of the men, 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. wait, the consumers of the news stories, -- we, the consumers of the new stories, 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 cells in the spreadsheet. and everyone sees the changes. brian: how did they know to go there? ms. andrews: the link was passed around the hind the scenes and forwarded from person-to-person and went viral. brian: and she did it anonymously? she did not have her name on it? ms. andrews: that's right. brian: how did her name then become public? ms. andrews: 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, do not forward this to any men. it was intended to be a secret document. 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 through reporting who had put it together. brian: did she think it was a good idea? 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. january 2017, moira dunnigan 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 somebody 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 then from there 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? do we know anything else about her? ms. andrews: i don't know. i have not followed her. brian: and we have not seen the book yet? not.ndrews: it has 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 is something that has happened since the dawn of the yellow press in the 19th

century. but in every previous era until 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 somebody who you are trying to get a job from three hours away 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 what the eu now has that the right to be forgotten of scrubbing people's google but as aeople brian: . over the years, a lot of

people have quoted anonymous sources and people have been hurt. is there a difference? ms. andrews: yes. if more dunnigan had gone to an -- moira dunnigan 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 the way it works now the editor gets , around the need of a level of corroboration by not covering the accusation, but covering the phenomenon of the spreadsheet. brian: we were talking about jonah goldberg earlier, but in your piece, you talk about jeffrey kohlberg, 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 and possibly the only conservative writer at the atlantic. 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 but because i think it was media matters or someone else 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 say left-wing mob. is that the same kind of thing that happened to the weekly standard where the bob did not -- 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 adjustment on his part but i do not know the story on what motivations people have. brian: the atlantic is owned by steve jobs' widow. ms. andrews: 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. this is a logical leap that so many feminists during the kevin williamson-gate tended to believe in. but when you think about it, they were really 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] everyone makes mistakes. he is a good editor, i admire him. he just made the wrong decision in this case. i told him the campaign had me

, fired immediately and he did not take me seriously. seriously take me because his view of the atlantic does not have the addition the liberal imagination of the new york times and he was wrong. people were quite bent out of shape over 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. for the record, as someone who a workplace which kevin wayne some worked, he is not only a great coworker but gets a lot of energy to mentor ship for all of the journalists in his office, men or women. this is not something everybody does. your: going back to expense at yale political union, were you able to bring in speakers that you do not agree with or the other side did not agree with?

we hear so much going on in college campuses 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. i remember we had a guest from the sierra club go up and give an impassioned case for conservation and he was astonished that i as the chairman of the party of the right 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 in just the past five years. and now iaustralia come back and i talk to those in the l political union now, and the -- the yale medical union now, and it is different from what i remember. 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? it has died down, people have forgotten, 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 got to talking about bad breakups and 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 called up the c-span video, not knowing that he was talking to

someone who was now we are to me. so the idea that it was dead and gone and forgotten, as leo was, and mostly it was, but it never really will be. brian: where did you meet your husband, tim? what does he do? ms. andrews: he is an advocate for taxpayers. he wants to keep taxes low. we moved back to sydney so he could start and organization because australia does not have any really conservative think tanks or activist groups. so he had a wide open field and founded the australian taxpayers alliance. it is still going strong. brian: what happened to todd seavey and do you still talk to him? todd is as. andrews: genuinely good guy and we have now reconciled. we are on good terms.

he was one of the first robert novak fellows. i see him at functions every year. brian: has he married? ms. andrews: he hasn't so far as i know. brian: what is he doing now? ms. andrews: shortly after the c-span video 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, but if you like comic books about politics, you will like that one. brian: you say in your piece when he went back to fox news to work for the kennedy show for a bit, he had trouble getting into the building? ms. andrews: yes. it happens now at times. 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, funny little spot. 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 our guest's essay, it is called "shame storm," and it is in a magazine called first things, which can be found on the internet. our guest is helen andrews. thank you for joining us. ms. andrews: thank you. ♪ [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] ♪ >> for free transcripts or to give us your comment about this program, visit us at q&a.org. q&a programs are also available as c-span podcasts.

>> next sunday on q&a, monica norton from the washington post talks about james baldwin's book and the impact the book had on her as a teenager. that is q&a sunday at 8:00 eastern and pacific time on c-span. here is a look at what is live on the c-span networks today. your calls and comment on "washington journal next. at noon, the house begins session with general speeches. on c-span2 at 9:45 eastern, the jewish council for public affairs conference discusses the crimes and criminal justice. at 1:30 p.m., journalists and human rights protections discussions. the senate comes in at three :00

p.m. to continue work on natural resources bill. on c-span3 at 12:15, a foreign-policy discussion on iran on the 40th anniversary of .he iranian revolution at 2:30 p.m., senator marco rubio talks about the situation in that is available. -- in venezuela. , from the net conference in washington, d.c., we will discuss do not regulations and monitoring with federal trade commission or rebecca slaughter ilson.il tilson -- ch >> is more expansive and they can say to industry, here is how you have to treat traffic over the internet, here is how you treat privacy. they had a privacy role at the sec and we don't have the ability to do that across the board when it comes to consumer protection issues.

we have limited will making authority and we have sector specific laws that will protect some data some of the time but sector not housed in specific silos anymore. mean so many different things when i talk about privacy that it is hard to see that congress does anything that is specific because people have a yet agreed on what the problem is. were is a lot of areas people could agree on that these are the type of things we're trying to stop consumers from suffering. could get there, or right now a conversation is very vague and it talks about privacy as a general idea and people mean different things about privacy. >> watch the communicators tonight at 8:00 eastern on c-span two. morning a discussion with john bennett and mike liles . later a reuters columnist mark miller discusses efforts to

preserve social security. you can join the conversation on facebook and twitter. "washington journal is next. is next. [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] ♪ host: good morning. it's monday, february 11, 2019. the flags remain at half-staff after the death of former congressman john dingell of michigan and yesterday the house lost congressman walter jones of north carolina who began serving in 1995. died yesterday at age 76. the chamber will gavel in at noon eastern. the senate is back at 3:00 p.m. we begin following the release of the green newl