BRIAN LAMB: Helen Andrews, in January of 2019, you wrote for First Things magazine something called Shame Storm. What is it?
HELEN ANDREWS: Well, I noticed that it seemed to be happening just about every week that somebody, either a famous person or even an ordinary man on the street, was getting subjected to social media condemnation, just found themselves in the middle of a shame tornado for some kind of misbehavior, either genuine misbehavior or perceived misbehavior. And that these pile-ons were just much bigger that they had ever been at any time in human history because of the Internet. And that this was a massive social phenomenon that was creating casualties left and right.
And a lot of people are worried about the effect that this is having both on the victims of these shame tornadoes and on the rest of us and what, the sort of voyeuristic appetite it's creating. And I have my own particular perspective on this phenomenon because way back in, 2010 the same sort of thing happened to me and this was, of course, very, very early on in the phenomenon of people and things going viral. So, as someone who's been through it myself, I pay close attention to this new phenomenon.
LAMB: Why did you decide to tell your own story which caused you so much trouble before?
ANDREWS: Yes. Well, it was a tough decision to write this essay, because it brought back what was really a very troubling and almost traumatic experience in my own life. But the hinge event was actually a headline that I read in the New York Times about a man who had committed suicide in a parked car in the West Village and not been found for seven days, which was a funny sort of New York headline. But as you read down into the story, you discover that this man had an ID for Geoffrey Corbis, but the reporter looked up and found that this Geoffrey Corbis had only existed for a year and that this poor fellow had, well, the worst moment of his life was when he threw a sandwich at a server at McDonald's for giving him the wrong order.
And she turned out to be pregnant and this funny little story made the local newspapers, but it was at the top of his Google search for the rest of his life from then on after it happened in 2013. He couldn't get a job because anytime anybody Googles his name, this funny story came up and so any prospective employer said oh, I don't want to hire this guy, throwing sandwiches at pregnant servers, and it ruined his life. And he tried to get a fresh start by creating this new identity, officially legally changing his name to Geoffrey Corbis and it didn't work out.
And so, the tragedy of that man really reminded me that if someone can kind of shine a light on this new phenomenon of shame storming and condemn it, that it might do some good.
LAMB: I foresaw this story in the New York Times in a David Brooks column. And he gives out something called the Sidney Awards every year; he's got part one and part two. These are people that write long articles in newspapers or magazines but not the short form journalism. And he wrote about you. He gave you the first Sidney Award this season in December when he gave it out. And did you know that was coming and what impact did that have when you saw it?
ANDREWS: I had no idea that was coming. In fact, I had no idea that this story that I wrote for First Things was going to be as well-received as it was, but I got a lot of positive feedback even before David Brooks was kind enough to highlight it in his Sidney Awards.
I got emails from people a lot, dozens, from people who said I've been through this myself. It made the local newspaper or even some famous people that I've heard of and read their books and seen on TV who had been subjected to this MeToo movement, who had lost their jobs over allegations of misbehavior. They said, "Yes, when I was subjected to my own shame storm, it ruined my life, and so thank you for writing this and telling a little bit about what it's like from the inside."
LAMB: C-SPAN had a little bit to do with all this which we will explain and it's complicated and I warn our audience to listen carefully on how all this works. But let me just start with a couple of things. What are you doing today? What's your job?
ANDREWS: Right now, I'm the managing editor of the Washington Examiner weekly magazine.
LAMB: And what is that because I know you haven't had that many editions of it?
ANDREWS: That's right. For a long time, the Washington Examiner has been a great newspaper, one of the best places for coverage of the Hill and the White House, and it has had a magazine supplement to that, but only released here in the district. Just as of January 1st, the Washington Examiner is taking its magazine which has existed for so many years as kind of an adjunct to the newspaper and taken it national. So, we're sort of reborn and have only been around for a couple of weeks but we've got a great team, looking forward to big things.
LAMB: Is it fair to say that the Examiner magazine replaced the Weekly Standard? I know this is a controversial thing; the same man that owned the Weekly Standard owns the Washington Examiner.
ANDREWS: What you say is true. The extent to which the one is a replacement for the other is all happening above my pay grade.
LAMB: You're from what part of the United States?
ANDREWS: I'm from Raleigh, North Carolina.
LAMB: Where did you go to university?
ANDREWS: Yale. I went to Yale where I majored in the Yale Political Union.
LAMB: And what does that mean?
ANDREWS: Oh, technically, my major was Religious Studies and I did my final thesis on Oscar Wilde under David Bromwich, the great scholar of the romantics, but I spent most of my time in the Yale Political Union mixing it up on the debate floor.
LAMB: What year did you graduate from Yale?
ANDREWS: 2008.
LAMB: And when did you come to Washington?
ANDREWS: I came to Washington right away. I had started a blog as a senior in college and it had gotten the attention of some editors, so from the moment I graduated, I bopped around from internship to internship at places like the American Spectator or the American Conservative and eventually wound up as an associate editor at National Review.
LAMB: What is First Things magazine?
ANDREWS: It's America's premier journal of religion and culture. It's got a bit of a Catholic heritage, most of their staff is Catholic but it's very ecumenical. It does a lot of long form journalism about issues of faith and culture.
LAMB: And how did you get into your interest in religion and Catholicism, and were you born Catholic or are you a convert, give us that background.
ANDREWS: Oh, I come from a Catholic family, but was not raised Catholic. My heritage a few generations back is Catholic, but I was raised in a very secular suburb, I was raised in the Church of NPR.
LAMB: In Raleigh.
ANDREWS: In Raleigh, yes, near the Research Triangle Park. But developed an interest in theology in college and so ended up making it my major and studying Oscar Wilde and specifically his Catholic conversion.
LAMB: You also are listed as being a Robert Novak Fellow. Is that still alive and well or is this something you did earlier?
ANDREWS: Well, once you're a Robert Novak Fellow, you're in the alumni family for life. But, no, I came back to the United States after living for most of the last decade in Sydney, Australia in 2017. And the week my plane landed, I learned that I had been awarded the Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship, which basically the concept of it is that it allows working journalists to take a year off from their day job and work on something longer like a book manuscript, which is what I did.
LAMB: And did you write a book?
ANDREWS: I did.
LAMB: And where is the book?
ANDREWS: We're working on getting a publisher for it shortly.
LAMB: And what is it about?
ANDREWS: The book is about the baby boomers and baby boom generation and all of the terrible things that they've done to America and western civilization.
LAMB: And you are what, a millennial?
ANDREWS: Yes, born in 1986.
LAMB: OK. The video. You came here in 2008 and in 2010, we covered this event, what was it?
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. And it took young conservative writers and editors in their 20s and early 30s and just gave them a few thousand words and said give us whatever you've got.
So, I contributed my essay to that anthology. And as part of the promotion for the anthology once it was released, they had a couple of book panels where they had Jonah Goldberg who was the editor of the anthology and then three of the contributors, one of whom was me, another of whom as it turned out was a guy named Todd Seavey who was my ex-boyfriend.
LAMB: So, you're both sitting there at the table. First, let me introduce our audience to Todd Seavey and then we'll come back and have you explain who he is.
(Video)
TODD SEAVEY: I think you'll find a lot of Helen's positions are actually guided by the desire to increase suffering and...
ANDREWS: I'm Catholic.
SEAVEY: That might explain it, although I don't -- you start connecting the dots and realize, though she sounds like an old tiny old fashioned Catholic moralist, she's almost always defending something that most of us would find horrific.
(End of video)
LAMB: That's Todd Seavey. And when you were sitting there, when he started to talk this way, what was your reaction?
ANDREWS: I was in shock. I had no idea what was coming. We had been chatting amiably for half an hour just in the Green Room before this panel started. So, as far as I knew, we were on excellent terms.
And so, this was during the Q&A after everyone had delivered their remarks, and he suddenly out of nowhere launches into a -- that's a short clip but it ends up being about a four-minute rant you'd have to call it about how evil I am.
LAMB: We've got the rest of the clip here which we're going to show in just a second. How long did you date him?
ANDREWS: A couple of years.
LAMB: And what's the difference in your ages?
ANDREWS: He's a little bit older, a little bit older.
LAMB: And is he still in town?
ANDREWS: He's in New York. He's been in New York for decades and decades. He lives in New York.
LAMB: And subsequent to all this so everybody knows, you married. When did you get married and I believe he's an Australian?
ANDREWS: He is an Australian. Yes. In 2012, we got married.
LAMB: And you left town after this incident which went viral, and as David Brooks said on YouTube our video saw, within 48 hours half a million people watched it.
ANDREWS: Half million people watched it. It was featured on the nightly news here in D.C. It was on Fox News, all the cable shows did segments about it. It was written up, of course, in Gawker and Talking Points Memo and just about every place.
LAMB: OK. Let's watch the continuation of what Todd Seavey had to say about you on this panel.
(Video)
SEAVEY: I probably should confess that Helen and I dated for two years. So, we've sparred about many things. It might come as a surprise to some of you that we dated for two years, not just because we have ideological differences but because there are probably some people in this room who also dated Helen during those two years given how tumultuous things got. It was sort of on again-off again.
ANDREWS: Yes. I'm in favor of combativeness.
SEAVEY: And at times her gamesmanship would even include things like coldly saying at one point that she was going to play matchmaker and set up a couple and then seduce the man away to play with his mind and hurt the woman, which when you think about it is pretty creepy, kind of disturbing.
ANDREWS: Is all this going on C-SPAN?
SEAVEY: Yes, that is all on C-SPAN. This is -- and I...
ANDREWS: For the record...
SEAVEY: I believe five months later she made good on this somewhat disturbing promise.
UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: OK.
SEAVEY: And I doubt anyone here who knows me well really thinks I'm making this up. So, I came up wondering when you strip away the things you don't like like Allan Bloom's values and tradition which you reject at one point explicit in the essay, what is it you don't want people to do to each other? What sort of evils are beyond the pale when you encourage the world to this sort of boxing and brawling and fighting and hurting each other in an almost sadomasochistic way?
UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: Maybe we should move on.
ANDREWS: Well, off the top of my head...
JONAH GOLDBERG: I think she has the right to respond on this one, yes.
ANDREWS: Off the top of my head, what do I think is off-bounds, I don't know, spilling your heart out on C-SPAN?
(End of video)
LAMB: So, Jonah Goldberg obviously got a little nervous there and she said OK.
ANDREWS: I love Jonah.
LAMB: I mean, was there tension in the room when this happened?
ANDREWS: You could say that. You could say that there was. And I think one of the reasons why Todd was able to keep going and going for minutes and minutes is that nobody really knew what to do. Everyone was just kind of shocked and astonished.
LAMB: What did you say to him after the panel was over?
ANDREWS: We didn't say much, but I thought it was really important to look him in the eye and shake his hand and say, "Well, good to see you."
LAMB: But the point of this is you wrote your essay in First Things about this event, what happened after this aired?
ANDREWS: Well, it got a ton of coverage and went viral. Everybody that I knew saw it. Everybody at my workplace saw it. I was walking down the street with my parents and people would stop and point and say, "Hey, you're the C-SPAN girl," especially if you were living in New York or visiting D.C., the two places where I was at that time, the people who've seen that video live in those two towns, so there was a lot of pointing and staring and snickering.
LAMB: That was in 2010.
ANDREWS: That's right.
LAMB: And so, what happened to your life after this?
ANDREWS: Well, a few months or well, a little over a year after that, I decided that I wanted to move on from my job an National Review and find a new job, and that was when it first hit me that this really was at the top of my Google search and always would be, and so that everybody that I was sending a resume to and was hoping would bring me in for a job interview would see this video. And so, I did not get as many call backs as I was expecting.
LAMB: Well, to prove your point, we just Googled you today, even though your name has changed and you can see that right there is the video and your name is Helen Andrews now. At that time your name was...
ANDREWS: Much more distinctive. I was the only Helen Rittelmeyer on the planet so, yes, all the Google results were concentrated on me. I eventually -- well, there were a lot of reasons why I'd moved out of town, got out of town and moved to Sydney, Australia. The first and most important was that I fell in love with an Australian and he moved back.
But I have to admit, a part of it was kind of relief, at wanting to get away from this whole story, although as I discovered, moving to the other side of the world doesn't 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 for them on the issue of non-profit regulation, the video came up again and people linked to it and said, "I don't care what this person has to say about non-profit regulation."
LAMB: So, what were you -- your piece is called Shame Storm, did you feel shamed by this or did Mr. Seavey feel ashamed by this?
ANDREWS: Certainly a lot of embarrassment. But one thing that I've noticed watching more and more of these cycles when somebody becomes the worst person on the Internet for a day is that it almost doesn't matter to the dynamic whether they've done something genuinely evil or just something silly like throwing a sandwich at a McDonald's person or whatever it is, everybody piles on the same way.
LAMB: I have here a September 7, 2009 blog from your former friend Todd Seavey. And I just thought -- I'm going to read the first part of it. This is 2009. This happened in 2010.
He starts to write in his blog and it's headlined Helen Rittelmeyer Postscript. One year ago this month, Helen Rittelmeyer came to one of the monthly Manhattan Project gatherings that I hosted for three years now. For the first time, I went on to date someone I met there -- obviously meaning you. For a period of about 10 months, she was mentioned so many times on this blog that you deserve some sort of final summation.
ANDREWS: Oh.
LAMB: I mean, what is this? This is all new in certainly my lifetime where it's all being spilled out on a blog and how often did he write about you on his blog?
ANDREWS: You know, it's funny. When I first started dating Todd, one of the things that I learned about him was that he had appeared in one of his ex-girlfriend's memoirs. She was someone who had been an MTV rock and roll journalist and ended up converting to Catholicism and becoming a faith journalist.
So, she wrote a memoir about that journey from sex, drugs and rock and roll world to the Roman Catholic Church. And she devoted a chapter in there to her experience dating Todd, because Todd is an atheist, an aggressive atheist and this was during her conversion, so it was about that dynamic.
And one of the stories that's on the record in that 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're really good together. If anyone has any advice they can give for how to win her back, let me know. Now, she, of course, found that catastrophically embarrassing.
So, that was a little bit of if my life were a novel, that's what you would call foreshadowing.
LAMB: How often did he write about you in his blog?
ANDREWS: Often. Todd's a very upfront guy, lives his whole life or, at that time; he blogs less now. But the way a lot of people do nowadays with their Twitter accounts and Instagrams; it was all up there.
LAMB: Here's a headline from the City paper of Washington on October 20, 2010 right after this happened. Dear secretly sadistic conservative heart-breaker Helen "boxing Helen" Rittelmeyer, some thoughts on your penance. And they start off by saying it was perhaps the single most captivating moment in the history of heterosexual conservative romance.
I don't need to go on with this, but when this started to happen, what happened to you, all this publicity?
ANDREWS: Yes. I remember when that blog post came out because the author of it 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 happened. And I just -- I wasn't a public person at that time, so I had no experience giving interviews to journalists and I was feeling so overwhelmed and humiliated that I just didn't answer anybody's emails.
But, of course, the person who wrote that blog post went on and wrote it up anyway without any comment from me.
LAMB: What did Todd Seavey say wrong about you in his, call it whatever you want to, his, will you call a diatribe or what it is, but he was obviously on the attack?
ANDREWS: Yes. Well, the important thing to say in Todd's defense is that he didn't say anything he didn't believe; everything Todd said he believed was true. And now, the particular story he's alluding to about matchmaking, the facts were distorted from his perspective, so that is, I think, inaccurate. But from his point of view, that's what he thought.
LAMB: What's the Justine Sacco story that you write about in your piece?
ANDREWS: I consider that to be kind of the very first real inaugurating event in our new era of these Twitter shame storms. She was a PR executive living in London who had fewer than 200 Twitter followers, so just an ordinary person with a normal job, not a public figure of any kind.
She was about to get on a plane for a Christmas vacation to Cape Town. She was going to go visit some relatives in South Africa. And she tweeted as a funny joke, "Going to South Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white." Now, she said later and I believe her completely, that she meant this joke to satirize racism, the perception that only black Africans get AIDS that, of course, everybody gets AIDS, it's a multiracial problem.
But a reporter at Gawker who didn't have anything to write about because it was Christmas time and there was no news saw this tweet and decided to do a post about it. And within a few hours millions and millions of people had followed Justine Sacco on Twitter and favorited that tweet and quote tweeted it saying what a horrible thing it was. And the thing that made this story so gripping was that Justine was on a plane and didn't have access to the Internet.
So, the hashtag became, has Justine landed yet because, of course, once she landed she would discover that she had become a figure of hate for millions of people she had never met. She said later that when she got off the plane and turned her phone on, it basically melted.
LAMB: By the way, let's just look at a little video of a report of this at that time.
(Video)
UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: Justine Sacco now apologizing after this offensive tweet went viral "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white." In a statement, Sacco now 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 at Internet giant IAC where she repped some of the biggest names online like Match.com, The Daily Beast and About.com.
This is one of the fastest responses in crash and burns I've ever seen.
(End video)
LAMB: Do you remember this happening at that time and did you have any reaction then?
ANDREWS: I remember where I was. I was in a car on the way to rural New South Wales because I was spending Christmas vacation out in the country at a friend's country house. And I had Twitter on my phone. And I saw this story and I saw, has Justine landed yet.
And I have to admit, for the first half hour there I was joining everybody else. Oh my goodness, has she landed yet. This is such a gripping story, I want to follow this, click, click, click. And it took a while for it to really sink in that what was happening to her was so similar to what had happened to me, and that maybe the moral thing to do was to not join in the pile on of this innocent bystander.
LAMB: What did you think of IAC firing her?
ANDREWS: That's the aspect of these shame storms that bothers me the most, and that I think is most -- that needs most to change, because it happens most of the time that whoever finds themselves the subject to this kind of online shame storm does lose their job. And it's hardly ever because their boss says I think your misbehavior is genuinely offensive and my company needs to take a stand against it, or I genuinely think you're going to be a threat to your co-workers because of what it now emerges you have done.
That's not -- 90 percent of the time, the employer says, "Sorry, I think you're great but I need to let you go so that my phones will stop ringing." I need to cave to the mob because otherwise they're going to keep clamoring for your head so I just need the story to stop, that's why I need to let you go.
I would really like in the future for employers like IAC to show a little bit more backbone and say, "No, this person is a good employee and this has no effect on their job performance, we're going to stand by our guy."
LAMB: A bit risky for me to say this, but I found online that she'd been rehired at IAC just recently but there's a lot of years in between them. Actually, I don't know what -- I have to go back and look at the date on her -- her story was in 2013.
So, along the way, you must have decided to become a journalist.
ANDREWS: Well, I was a journalist then.
LAMB: But, I mean, other than writing your opinion pieces and all that, you're running a magazine now. What, where in your trip from North Carolina to Yale to Washington D.C. did you decide that you wanted to be in journalism instead of religion which you studied?
ANDREWS: Well, the Religious Studies major was just a major. The Yale Political Union was my undergraduate career.
LAMB: What does that mean, by the way, Yale Political Union?
ANDREWS: If you know about the Oxford Union or the Cambridge Union, we bring a guest speaker on and then we have formal debates according to Robert's rules of order with motions for order and clarification and all that parliamentary style type stuff, on matters of mostly political interest but occasionally we'll do a more philosophical debate.
LAMB: And how much time did you spend on the Yale Political Union?
ANDREWS: All the time that I wasn't asleep.
LAMB: Did you run it?
ANDREWS: I was speaker, yes, that's right. I was the one with the gavel.
LAMB: And why and how did you get into that, and I guess the other thing is the impact of these kinds of experiences for people and colleagues obviously make a difference?
ANDREWS: Oh, absolutely. You asked when I decided to go into journalism and I can't answer that because it never really was a decision. I just kind of drifted into it. I mentioned earlier that I just started a funny little blog on Word Press way back in the day when people had blogs and it was only from being discovered by editors from that that I started writing for magazines and eventually that turned into a career.
LAMB: So, what was your experience, and there's some other things that you wrote about in the magazine article we'll get back to, but what was your experience living in Australia and what impact did that have on your thinking about your politics, the media, the Internet?
ANDREWS: Well, on the one hand it made me appreciate the Internet more, because even though I was on the other side of the world nine time zones away, I continued to freelance for National Review and First Things and all the places that I used to write for back when I was based in New York City.
So, it was really great to be able to keep up with friends on Skype and Twitter and all of that and to be able to keep writing, which would not have been possible if I'd had to air mail all of my drafts back and forth with editors.
But it also gave me some appreciation of the dark side of the Internet's global scope, because as I mentioned before, I eventually became a regular talking head on the ABC which is the Australia's BBC doing political panel shows. And 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 mentions.
LAMB: So, what was your -- you say you're conservative, what kind? I know everybody wants to break down the conservatives by about six different categories. Define your conservatism.
ANDREWS: Now, as you might conclude from the Religious Studies degree, I'm a strong social conservative but a fiscal conservative as well, and I'm very ecumenical. I'm kind of at the middle of the Venn diagram. All varieties of conservatism I consider to be allies.
LAMB: What was Todd Seavey's reference to Allan Bloom, how is it connected to you and who is Allan Bloom?
ANDREWS: Oh. Earlier in that particular panel discussion, I had spoken, I'm sorry, a little disparagingly of Allan Bloom, conservative though he was. The particular point I was making was that he presented himself as a great books conservative and built a career with books like Closing of the American Mind, making the case that everybody ought to read good books.
Well, for me I think the reason to read good books is so that you have something more interesting to talk about than why it's good to read good books. So, by harping always on this sort of really basic point that reading the classics or western civilization is good, Allan Bloom kind of stalled the cultural conversation at a really preliminary stage that was not terribly helpful or interesting.
LAMB: Did you ever have him in a class or did you meet him or do you know him?
ANDREWS: Oh, I think he died before I came to college.
LAMB: He's been here before, I mean, a long time ago on the Book Notes show.
ANDREWS: Sure. And he's a very engaging writer and if anybody out there hasn't read Closing of the American Mind, go out and read it. It's a useful, useful book.
LAMB: What's the difference between a conservative and a libertarian?
ANDREWS: I'm a conservative. Todd is a libertarian. No, libertarians do not always sign on, although sometimes they do, to the social conservative agenda.
LAMB: In your thesis and who you studied most at Yale was…
ANDREWS: Oscar Wilde.
LAMB: And why Oscar Wilde? You talked about his Catholicism. Did he practice Catholicism?
ANDREWS: His was more of a deathbed conversion. But the subject of my thesis was looking at his earlier career and earlier work and finding foreshadowing of the ultimate decision he made to join the church. And there is a lot of it there.
LAMB: So what else did you learn about him when you spent so much time? How much time did you spend studying?
ANDREWS: That was a yearlong project, although, I had a longstanding interest in Wilde and the movement of which he was a part, the movement called Decadence, which existed in England and France. It was a literary movement.
And the thing that I found most interesting and compelling, enough to write a thesis about it, about the Decadence was that they were all as young men aggressively frivolous. Their philosophy of life was that nothing really matters and it's not terribly important to be moral.
We should all just live splendid lives. We should lead beautiful lives and have the most amount of amusement that's possible. And almost all of them as they grew older had some moment of crisis where they realized that that was just a really silly and superficial way to go about life.
And for Wilde that was being his trial and conviction, after which he spent two years at hard labor, so hard time, which for somebody who had never done a day's work in his life was deeply traumatic. And he had to confront deeper and more spiritual questions than he had given very much time to before.
LAMB: Why was he in prison?
ANDREWS: He had a young gay lover called Alfred Douglas whose father was very opposed to the idea of his son being in a gay relationship, much less a gay relationship with somebody as flamboyant as Oscar Wilde.
So Douglas's father made a stink and accused them of being a gay couple. Oscar, in a classic Greek tragic moment of hubris, sued Queensberry for libel for calling him Bosie's gay lover. And that lead to a big trial, one of the -- the trial of the century in the 19th century that was written up in all the papers. And he was eventually convicted.
LAMB: How long did he live?
ANDREWS: After he got out of prison, he lived only a few years more. Prison really broke him physically. He was not in a good condition when he got out. So he moved to France and lingered for a few years there, kind of a broken man, traveling under a false name. And, yes, didn't outlive that for very long.
LAMB: You called yourself something that I watched it with you on it a Burkean. What is a Burkean? And are you still a Burkean? This was years ago I think, when you said this.
ANDREWS: Sure. No, I am always and will always be a follower of Edmund Burke. I think he is the greatest political thinker that the English speaking world has ever contributed.
LAMB: Why? What did he say that you liked?
ANDREWS: The French Revolution really was something new under the sun when it arrived at the tail end of the 18th century. And no one who lived through that time grasped just how consequential a revolution in human affairs that was going to be, except for Edmund Burke.
And he correctly perceived at a time when not many other people did that it was going to be a bad thing. That it was not going to be a new dawn for liberty. It was going to be a catastrophe.
LAMB: And was it in your opinion and how?
ANDREWS: What's wrong with the French Revolution? Oh gosh, guillotines have to be high up on that list. But the subordination of all political affairs to raw human reason I think is a bad way to go about things.
I think humans are just imperfect. We're not equipped to think through everything rationally from A to Z in the way that the hubristic French Revolutionaries thought we could, which is why Edmund Burke is such a useful corrective because he appreciates things like tradition.
LAMB: Bring all this to today. You've studied a lot in the past. And you lived over in Australia. And you know what's going on in the United States right now. What is your -- I'll give you just a broad question. What's your opinion of where the United States is now in history today?
ANDREWS: I think democracy has never been in more trouble. I personally am a great fan of our current president. I think I like a lot of his policy positions and I like the refreshing candor that he's brought to our debate. But I think there is no denying that his election was an indication that something has gone wrong and that there's a lot more division than our system is prepared to handle.
LAMB: Explain that.
ANDREWS: Well, I think the intrusion of celebrity into the world of politics is a big danger sign, because celebrity is intrinsically false, which actually is one of the reasons why the shame storm phenomenon bothers me so much, because it's, well, as -- when you're in the middle of it, you really realize just how much the version of events that gets presented in the press is always a looking glass version of events.
You read a story about yourself and you say, "I don't recognize this person at all." Or you read a story about somebody that you know and you said, "This isn't right. This is inaccurate. This is a distortion."
And once you've been through that, you realize all the other stories that you've been reading where you read a profile of somebody and you think you know them. That's not true. You don't know them at all.
So the lens of celebrity is always distorting and so, I think we should have areas of our culture that are immune and exempt from the intrusion of celebrity-style culture.
LAMB: But as you know there are a lot of people that can't understand why conservatives or evangelicals or Catholic, strong religious people would like this man. What do you say to that? Explain how that works out in your own head about -- a lot of the media, the Washington Post has made a career out of showing how many times he's allegedly lied.
And it's not -- CNN and MSNBC have gone after him on a daily basis, every hour, the entire hour. And so, there is a great deal of split now in our media. And you run a conservative magazine. So, tell us why you like this guy.
ANDREWS: I think there are -- well, the number one reason that covers a lot of the 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 policy, foreign wars. And the Republican establishment was way over somewhere else. And they kind of ignored what the people who were voting for them really wanted them to be doing.
And Trump was the first guy to come along and say, "Yes. I think we ought to close the border. I think we ought to have a border. Yes, I think we maybe not -- maybe we shouldn't be, have so many soldiers in the Middle East. Maybe our trade policy shouldn't be dogmatically free trade in all instances."
So, it's the fault of the Republican establishment for leaving that huge vacuum open for somebody like Donald Trump to come in and fill, but you certainly can't blame him for doing so. You almost have to thank him, especially if like me, you're on his side on those three issues.
LAMB: When did you first say you like him and he was your guy?
ANDREWS: I think when he won the primary, when he got the nomination.
LAMB: Did you like him during the primary?
ANDREWS: Yes. Yes. As an immigration hawk from way back, he was certainly somebody I had my eye on.
LAMB: Let's go back to your first things, and I assume people can get this online under the name Helen Andrews and Shame Storm. By the way, when did you marry? And did you marry before you left to go to Australia or over in Australia?
ANDREWS: Shortly after, over in Australia.
LAMB: You meet him here in United States?
ANDREWS: Met him here. Yes.
LAMB: And you lived in Australia for how long?
ANDREWS: Five years.
LAMB: And why did you move back here?
ANDREWS: I was homesick. I missed it. Also, if your business is conservative journalism, it's a little hard to make a living in Australia because they've got just one conservative magazine, which is a great magazine. It's called Quadrant. And everybody should read it and subscribe. But they're just -- isn't the same infrastructure that you have in a place like D.C.
LAMB: One conservative magazine for the whole country.
ANDREWS: Yes. Yes.
LAMB: How about in television or radio, how much conservative television or radio is there?
ANDREWS: They've got Sky News and they've got some great conservative hosts there. So if you're into TV, that market is well-served. But, yes, not a lot in the way of magazines or journalism.
LAMB: Who's Moira Donegan?
ANDREWS: She is a, I believe Brooklyn-based journalist who decided during the sort of heyday of the #MeToo Movement to create a shared Google spreadsheet in the Google cloud. And the purpose of this spreadsheet 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 a guy and say what he did. He asked me back to his hotel room after a night of drinks or whatever it was with no names attached. They just put their accusations up there in the cloud and then everybody who had a link to that document could see them. That was Moira Donegan who created that document.
LAMB: And, I mean, I've got the list here of some 70 men that were listed by name and then what they had supposedly done wrong. What was your reaction to that? What did you think of that idea?
ANDREWS: I don't believe in anonymous accusations. And I've heard a lot of other women who work in media say or defend the anonymity of the accusations and the original anonymity of Moira Donegan as the creator of this list, because she was only outed as the person who created it a few weeks after it was taken down.
They said, "Of course, they need to be anonymous because otherwise they're going to be subjected to harassment or people are going to be mean to them on the Internet." But ever since Moira Donegan has been revealed as the creator of this media men list, she's gotten a book deal at Simon & Schuster, a regular columnist deal at the Guardian. And it has vaulted her into celebrity. Nothing bad has happened to her from being outed, quite the opposite.
So, I think considering that, I think fear of harassment is no excuse for not fulfilling the basic duty of putting your name next to an accusation, especially when these accusations are as they were for so many of those 70 men, career-ending.
LAMB: Do you have any idea how many career-ending examples there are?
ANDREWS: No.
LAMB: I mean has it been public that they're career-ending?
ANDREWS: No. And that's the sad thing about these shame storms, it's we, the consumers of these new stories very rarely hear about the aftermath. So we don't always know when people get fired. But I actually heard after this First Things essay of mine was published from some of the people on that list. And the stories I heard from them were not only did I lose my job but now I can't get another one.
LAMB: So, let's go over this thing that she did again. Explain it. She published, people fed her names?
ANDREWS: The way a Google spreadsheet works is that anybody can go in and alter it and change cells in the spreadsheet. And everybody sees those changes.
LAMB: How did they know to go there?
ANDREWS: The link to the document was passed around behind the scenes. It was forwarded from woman to woman and went pretty viral within the small world of New York and D.C. media.
LAMB: And she did this anonymously. She didn't have her name on it.
ANDREWS: That's right.
LAMB: How did her name then become public?
ANDREWS: This spreadsheet became a huge phenomenon. Everybody in town was talking about it. Do you know who's on the list? Have you seen the list? Have you gotten the link to the list? And it was put in big bold letters at the top. Do not forward this to any men.
So, it was kind of a secret document or at least intended to be. So it became this huge buzzworthy item. So, Harper's Magazine decided this would be a good hook for their coverage of the broader #MeToo Movement.
And they assigned the essayist Katie Roiphe to write an essay about it. And Katie, in the course of her research for this did a little poking around into the story of the media men list. And I think she was the one who figured out through shoe-leather reporting who had put it together.
LAMB: And did she think it was a good idea or not, or could you tell from her writing?
ANDREWS: I think the Harper's essay, which was eventually published and you can read that online too is skeptical of the #MeToo Movement. And to my great astonishment, this article of Katie Roiphe's which is skeptical of the #MeToo Movement attracted a huge shame storm of its own on her.
So, that's the thing that makes me really skeptical of the motivations of the people that are behind the media men list and the #MeToo Movement that they're attacking not just people who they believe have misbehaved in the workplace but poor Katie Roiphe for dissenting from their ideological line.
LAMB: A little over a year ago back in January of 2018, Moira Donegan talked to the New York Times video unit. And here is what she had to say.
(Video)
MOIRA DONEGAN: The idea was that women could use it to name somebody who had behaved badly towards them whether through sexual assault or rape or harassment. I shared it with some women colleagues and friends in my industry whom I knew had stories.
And then from there they sent it to people they knew had stories and they sent it to people they knew had stories. And by the time I was forced to take it down, which was about 12 hours after I created it, there were more than 70 men named and 14 had their names highlighted in red to denote that there were more than one woman who were accusing that particular person of violent physical assault.
(End of video)
LAMB: So what happened to her after she was outed doing this? Anything?
ANDREWS: Yes. She got a book deal.
LAMB: I mean, does she have a full time job? Did we know anything else about her?
ANDREWS: I don't know. I haven't followed her career very closely. I just…
LAMB: And we haven't seen the book yet.
ANDREWS: No. I think it's just been contracted a few months ago, so…
LAMB: I have a copy of that list, so clearly even though it was supposedly scrubbed from Google, it's still there.
ANDREWS: It is now online. Anybody can see it and find it. It's on the Internet. The Internet is forever.
LAMB: And so, what's your reaction to this? I mean, is there any solution to this situation?
ANDREWS: It's not a new problem, having your name in the paper and being humiliated by an awkward story. It's something that's happened since the dawn of the yellow press in the late 19th century. But in every previous era until about 10 years ago, there was a time limit on it.
Your story would be in the paper and everybody would be talking about it, but eventually thanks to the wonderful powers of the human memory, it would fade. People would forget or you could move to another town and somebody who you're trying to get a job from three hours away isn't going to go look up all your hometown papers and go through all the microfiches to see if your name is mentioned. You could escape it.
Now, escape is no longer possible. So, I think there's -- it's a real dilemma. And I don't know if there is a solution for it other than what the EU now has the right to be forgotten of scrubbing people's Google results.
LAMB: But as you know and as a journalist over the years a lot of people have quoted anonymous sources and people have been hurt by that. Is there any difference in this?
ANDREWS: There is. One of the ways that it's useful to think about the media men list and Moira Donegan in particular is that if she had gone to say an editor at BuzzFeed and just picked a name from the list and said, "I want you to do an expose on this guy because I think he did this thing."
The first thing that BuzzFeed editor would have done is said, "Who's making this accusation and can I talk to them and can I figure out if they can substantiate it in any way?" The media men list basically says, "No, you can't have the name of the person who's making this accusation. You can't do anything to check it."
So that's kind of basic editorial judgment that those kinds -- a story with that level of substantiation would never make it past an editor. But the way it works now is the editors kind of got around that need for some level of corroboration by not covering the accusation but by covering the phenomenon of the spreadsheet.
LAMB: We were talking about Jonah Goldberg earlier, but this is in your piece. This is about Jeffrey Goldberg who, the editor of Atlantic Magazine and some gentleman named Kevin Williamson. Can you explain that story that you write about?
ANDREWS: Yes. Kevin Williamson who was a colleague of mine at National Review had been hired as one of the very few possibly at that time, the only conservative writer at the Atlantic. He was going to be one of their house writers and contributing a regular column.
I think about four days after he first took the job, he was fired. Not for anything he'd done or written, but because I think it was Media Matters or it might have been somebody else found an old audio recording where Kevin had given his views on abortion, which are prolife.
And he said that abortion was a form of murder and should carry the same punishment, which was then distorted in this tornado looking glass world of social media into some line, Kevin Williamson supports lynch justice for pregnant teenagers. And so the leftwing mob agitated for him to be fired and he was.
LAMB: You say leftwing mob, isn't it kind of the same thing that happened to The Weekly Standard who owned -- that Philip Anschutz owned that and owns your magazine now where the mob didn't like the fact that Bill Kristol's magazine wasn't pro-Trump, so all of a sudden there's no longer a magazine.
ANDREWS: Well, 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 in coming, but of course I don't know the story of The Weekly Standard, so I shouldn't comment on what motivations people had as that went down.
LAMB: But the Atlantic is owned by Steve Jobs' widow.
ANDREWS: Yes.
LAMB: So…
ANDREWS: And I think if Jeffrey Goldberg had said I have come to the conclusion that you, Kevin Williamson are a toxic person who believes evil things and I don't want your voice in my magazine, that's an editorial judgment I can certainly respect. But the way that the mob framed their demands was not Kevin Williamson believes bad things and shouldn't be given a voice.
It was Kevin Williamson is a threat to his female coworkers because he believes that abortion is a form of murder, therefore he believes the 25 percent of women who have had abortion supposedly deserved to be killed, therefore he wants to murder one quarter of the women in his office, which is just this logical leap that so many feminists during the Kevin Williamson-gate pretended to believe in, when really if you step back and think about it for a minute, they really were just trying to get him fired.
LAMB: Here is Kevin Williamson talking to Glenn Beck, August 1st, 2018.
(Video)
KEVIN WILLIAMSON: So Jeff Goldberg is editor of the Atlantic and a pretty good guy even though he fired me. Everyone makes mistakes. It's all right.
GLENN BECK: Right, we all get one.
WILLIAMSON: He's a good editor. He's a good editor. I admire the man. He's made a wrong decision in this case. But I told him when he hired me, I said the campaign to have me fired will start immediately when you announced that you've hired me.
And it's going to be fairly intense. And he didn't really take me seriously, I think because his view of the Atlantic isn't -- doesn't have the position and the liberal imagination that the New York Times has or something. And he was wrong about that as it turns out.
BECK: Yes.
WILLIAMSON: So people were really quite bent out of shape over the prospect of having to read my words at this venue instead of that venue.
(End of video)
LAMB: So what happened to Kevin Williamson?
ANDREWS: I think he's back at NR.
LAMB: National Review.
ANDREWS: Yes. Although, for the record, as someone who has been a woman in a workplace at which Kevin Williamson worked, I could say he's not only a great coworker but really gives a lot of energy to mentorship of all the young journalists in his office, men and women, so, which is not something everybody does.
LAMB: Go back to your experience at Yale Political Union, were you able to bring in speakers that you didn't agree with or the other side didn't agree with? In other words, we hear so much about what's going on on college campuses. How free were you to do whatever you wanted?
ANDREWS: In my day, there was a lot of lively debate, but it was always oriented towards the issues. There was no -- none of this no platforming stuff or shouting people down and the result was a really great ideological 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 at that time chairman of the Party of the Right gave a (seconding) speech.
Oh, I have an ally; an unlikely ally from the conservative side wants to save trees. I think that atmosphere has changed even in just the past five years. I went to Australia and now I come back and I go to alumni events or I talk to undergraduates who are in the Yale Political Union now and the stories I hear are very different from the sort of convivial atmosphere that I remember.
LAMB: What kind of worries do you have that now that you've talked about this video that went viral back in 2010? You wrote about it. You got a Sidney award out of David Brooks on it. That's why we're talking about it now and reshowing it, will have a future impact on you, do you think?
ANDREWS: I worried that it was going to dredge it all back up. And that's one thing that a couple of people said to me. They said, "Helen, are you sure you really want to take this assignment? It's kind of -- it's died down. People have forgotten. Your name is different. You can move on."
But the very day that I first sat down to write word one, page one of this essay, my husband happened to be at a conference. And his lunch table got to talking about bad break ups in the conservative movement.
And one of the guys at his lunch table, literally this is completely true, said, "Oh, if you want to hear about bad break ups in the conservative movement, you got to see this." And he pulled out his iPhone and pulled up the C-SPAN video. Not knowing that he was talking to somebody who is now married to me.
So, yes, this idea that it was all dead and gone and forgotten, mostly it was, but it never really will be. So, I might as well, if I can draw a lesson out of it, keep talking about it.
LAMB: Where did you meet your husband and I believe his name is Tim?
ANDREWS: Tim. Yes.
LAMB: And what does he do?
ANDREWS: When I met him, he was working for Grover Norquist at Americans for Tax Reform. He's an advocate for taxpayers. He wants to keep taxes low. And so we moved back to Sydney, so that he could be the Grover of Australia and start an organization there that advocates for taxpayers, because Australia, in addition to not having any conservative magazines, doesn't really have any conservative think tanks or activists groups either.
So, he really had a wide open field and founded the Australian Taxpayers Alliance, which is still going strong.
LAMB: What happened to Todd Seavey and do you still talk to him?
ANDREWS: Sure. No. Todd is a genuinely good guy. And we've reconciled. And we're now on very good terms. And he's actually, was one of the first Robert Novak Journalism Fellows. So, I see him at alumni functions every year.
LAMB: Did he marry?
ANDREWS: He hasn't so far as I know.
LAMB: And what is he doing now?
ANDREWS: It's -- shortly after the C-SPAN video, he left his job working at Fox News because of the sort of fallout from the video, so he suffered from that as well. And now he makes a living as a ghost writer and a writer. And he has a book, Libertarianism for Beginners, which is a comic book but if you like comic books about politics, you will like that one.
LAMB: But you say in your piece that when he went back to Fox News to work on the Kennedy Show for a bit that he had trouble getting in the building.
ANDREWS: Yes. And he says that still happens to him today when he gets booked for a spot. It was years after he had left his position at Fox. And he was booked to talk about, I think for a Halloween show on UFOs, so a completely benign funny little spot. But when he showed up in the lobby, security told him he was on a no-admit list. So, that must have, presumably as fallout from the C-SPAN thing too.
LAMB: For those that want to read our guest's essay it's called Shame Storm and it's in a magazine called First Things, which can be found on the internet. And our guest has been Helen Andrews, which we thank you very much for joining us.
ANDREWS: Thank you.