Christina Hoff Sommers critiques modern feminism's shift from equity to radical power grabs, debunking statistical myths like the 23-cent wage gap and inflated rape rates as "fictoids." She recounts her Oberlin College experience where students fled to a safe room with a therapy dog due to her presence and describes Gamergate as a libertarian consumer uprising against cronyism in gaming journalism. Contrasting this with campus authoritarianism reminiscent of the McCarthy era, she urges cultural libertarians to reject misinformation and prioritize free speech over moral fervor. Ultimately, the discussion frames the current cultural conflict as a battle between objective scrutiny and enforced ideological conformity. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, we're gonna mix it up this week and talk about something a little less controversial than usual, feminism.
Everyone agrees on that, right?
Okay, good, that's what I thought.
My guest this week is Christina Hoff Sommers.
Christina is a former philosophy professor, author, and a speaker for the American Enterprise Institute, known for her critique of late 20th century feminism.
Over the past few months, I've become familiar with Christina because her name kept popping up All over my Twitter feed, at first related to GamerGate, and now because of her tongue-in-cheek commentary on campus free speech, trigger warnings, and safe spaces.
Actually, thanks to Twitter, and to all of you who've helped connect me with like-minded people, the show has really taken off in a way I couldn't have imagined.
Suddenly, I find myself immersed with people I truly admire and respect.
We're all talking to each other in various mediums and strengthening the ideals we stand for, even if we don't agree on every specific issue.
One such issue that I haven't tackled too deeply yet is feminism, and that's exactly why I wanted to have Christina on.
As an equity feminist, Christina cares about both women's and men's rights.
You know, that whole two things can be true at once idea that I've been talking about?
I should say that feminism, in and of itself, isn't one of my bread and butter topics.
As you guys know, I love discussing politics, foreign policy, religion, secularism, and more, but haven't done a ton on the topic of feminism.
Of course, the argument could be made that feminism and the fight for women's rights is an absolute through line through all of the topics I just mentioned.
Generally speaking, where women are treated with equality, we see fairer societies with more secular values and less radicalism.
This isn't a coincidence, nor is it something that should be overlooked.
Actually, if anything, it should be embraced.
If a society treats their women fairly, it is almost always a more successful society on every other front.
The battle for equality of women has been different all over the world and continues in almost every form today.
This is one of the main issues that I want to discuss with Christina.
How has the battle for equality evolved over the years?
Have there been unintended consequences by coming so far in the battle?
Has feminism morphed into something that feminists of the 1960s wouldn't even recognize today?
And what happens when an equality movement actually accomplishes its goals?
Do we move on to what's next or does the battle never truly end?
As you can see, I've got a lot of questions and I hope Christina has some of the answers.
For me, the battle for women's rights is the same battle that has been fought by the other for all time.
I want women to have 100% of the opportunity that men have.
I want the doors to be open and the glass ceiling to be shattered.
Winning these battles doesn't mean it has to come at the expense of men, nor does it mean that men should suddenly become less than women.
And at the same time, we should acknowledge the sexes are actually different, and that's okay too.
From our hunter-gatherer days to today, gender roles have existed long before any of us.
Pretending there aren't some differences in the sexes won't magically make it true.
Perhaps we can try to embrace these differences rather than tacking labels on everyone and thinking that one group's equality can only come at the expense of another group's opportunity.
If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, then perhaps it's time we brought both sexes back to Earth.
My guest this week is a speaker, an author, and host of The Factual Feminist on YouTube.
She's known as Base Mom by the Gamergate gang and just finished a three-hour conversation with Joe Rogan, so I hope you have a little something left.
Well, right before we sat down, we were saying how there's this new gang sort of that has appeared, sort of you, Joe, Milo, me, a few other people that sort of have magically connected, even though just months ago we really didn't know each other, and yet we're all talking about a lot of the same stuff.
All right, so I want to spend a lot of time talking about the cultural libertarians and the authoritarians and all of that stuff.
But first, let's start somewhere else.
Let's start with Based Mom, because that's the phrase that popped up many times, and I see people tweeting this anytime I'm involved in a Twitter thing with you.
Based Mom, what does that actually mean for the person that doesn't quite know?
Well, at first I thought it meant cool mom, and I was happy with that, but it turns out it means something very positive, and just as good, but different.
In the lingo of the gamers, and maybe they got it from a rap song or something, but based means grounded, authentic, no BS, as they would say.
And so that's what I am, and I'm happy to be based mom.
I like being a mom, which I am, and being based is obviously a good thing.
But this young man came to AEI and wanted to get the scholars on the air.
And he did videos with all of us.
And then he came to me and said, you, we want to put you on.
I want you to have a weekly show.
Just come and talk.
And I said, about what?
What are you talking about?
And he said, in no more than five minutes.
Preferably four.
And how do I do that?
But I started to do it, and I thought, okay, once a week, approximately, I will go on and correct a feminist myth.
Because there are so many.
And I just wanted the opportunity to reason with people, to analyze.
Some of these factoids, fictoids, we are inundated with miz information, if you excuse the pun, just false information about women.
They tend to exaggerate, they, these researchers slash activists, tend to exaggerate women's vulnerability and to overstate the strength of men.
When in fact it's a complicated mix of benefits and burdens for both sexes.
And so when they say, oh, women are being cheated out of 23 cents on the dollar and one in four being sexually assaulted, it just turns out these are ridiculous exaggerations and the truth is entirely different, and so I just patiently tried to expose
the myths.
When I first started, my mother said, "Well, darling, aren't you going to run out of topics?"
I said, "Mom, I will never run out of topics, because we have had going on three decades
of specious research coming out of gender studies, and it all needs to be reconsidered."
Some of it might be right.
Occasionally I find something that's not, you know, been just twisted into a myth and so I correct a myth every week.
I remember a few years ago, before I was on Twitter, I said, oh, I'll never do that.
I don't know how to do that.
It was unapproachable.
Well, now I can't get off it.
It's so addicting.
But I didn't expect it.
But I'm happy to do it because here's the thing that I like about Twitter.
They don't just give a message.
I link.
If people are interested, I try to back up everything I say with solid scholarship, and I link to the best sources I can find, or to my own work that I've done for over the decades.
So I link to books and articles if people are interested.
Yeah, and it's also very validating, I think, to be in the space that we are when there's so much misinformation related to whatever, whether it's feminism or political correctness or any of this, and there's so many bad actors, I think, There really are!
And all I ever wanted as a college professor, I never saw it as my position to sort of replicate my view of the world in the minds of my students.
Heaven forbid!
I wanted to open the world to them, show them the best that was thought and said on different contentious issues in metaphysics and ethics, as well as when I was teaching, occasionally would teach gender theory.
Changing the workplace, changing education, addressing things of, you know, legally for women to have more defenses against harassment in the workplace and so forth.
All of that, I was totally on board.
That's just basic quest for equality.
But what happened is that the second wave of feminism, a lot of the women in the universities were quite radical, and they were not about equality.
They were not about... I see feminism, the best of feminism, it came from the European Enlightenment, and it was about the intrinsic dignity of all men and women, and extending equality Of opportunity and liberty and so forth to all.
Many of them reject the Enlightenment, and they're not about freedom and freedom of expression.
They use their classrooms, I think, to promote a very rigid worldview about how women are preyed upon by men.
And it's almost as if the better things got for women, the more bitter they became.
And I watched this from close up because I was teaching in the university.
I watched it and I kept thinking they would be discredited because their views will not withstand 20 minutes in a seminar room with some just objective scholars.
Right, so was this a strange example of where things could exist sort of in the academic world where perhaps these ideas wouldn't have played out in the real world?
Now, what would you say to the people that would say, well, all along that ride, even if they were to acknowledge some of the things that you're saying, all along that ride, things basically were getting better for women.
So maybe there was some reasoning behind it, you know?
Yeah, so when it comes to the wage gaps and things like that, so I watched a whole bunch of videos on it before, I watched the video you did on it before this, and partly what I think is what I think when I watch most political things or almost anything related to news these days, I never know who to trust.
What I do, as the Factual Feminist, I try to determine who's the best source, who sets the gold standard for this research.
So when it comes to education, nothing surpasses the Department of Education.
They collect statistics and they are very good.
When it comes to crime, Do I believe a feminist activist that tells me that we're all, you know, the majority of women or a quarter of women are being raped and assaulted and battered or more?
I go to the Bureau of Justice Statistics and look at what do the statisticians who do careful And highly disciplined statistical analyses.
What do they find?
And they find something very different.
They find rape is a terrible, horrendous crime, but it is fairly rare on the campus.
It is not one in four, or one in five.
And so I present that.
I show people this is what they, these are what sort of objective, Researchers have found these are what the advocates have found.
Now, some people just want to believe the advocates.
So, an equity feminist, I hope you are, we all are, is someone who wants for women what he or she wants for everyone, fair treatment, no discrimination.
It basically comes, as I said, from the Enlightenment.
It's classical feminism.
It's about fairness.
It doesn't even have to be called feminism.
It's probably humanism or peopleism or equalism.
And that's what I assumed most people would be for.
Today, feminism tends to denote people who are carried away with male bashing.
If I had to reduce it to a few sentences, it would be, women are from Venus and men are from hell.
They seem carried away with, you know, female chauvinism.
Now I have been lecturing on campuses for years and it used to be they'd come and argue and sometimes we'd part as friends or go to a bar and you know kind of have a good time like human beings.
But something has changed in the last few years on the campus, and there's been this medicalization of the curriculum, and they need trigger warnings for their classes, and trigger warnings for this and that.
And as I said, they needed them for me, and they needed a safe space where they could retreat.
Because as one of them put it, someone would be invalidating my experience.
It's like the worst thing that can happen to you.
That sounds like a good thing to happen.
Because you can't just go by your experience.
You have to test it.
And see if your interpretation holds up to criticism.
They were not interested in any kind of criticism.
So when you hear this happen, and you see this happen to you, and you say, okay, here's the empirical evidence about what's happening with rape on campus, and then they say, what is their counter-argument?
Is the counter-argument that There's more rape that goes underreported for X, Y, or Z, or they're not counting, you know, girls that got drugged, or something.
I mean, what's the... I get that we've become this society that's afraid of every bit of information, but what's the counterargument?
And then the other thing that I saw you got heat for was The cat calling, right?
There was this video about cat calling, and you've sort of said or written about that this is not really a thing, not really a thing that exists, but not a thing to be upset by, sort of.
And these control freaks think that we can police everything that's said on the street, and they were actually suggesting that it be against the law to catcall a woman.
Well, again, I make a distinction between somebody saying, hi, beautiful.
I mean, frankly, that wouldn't bother me.
It might have bothered me when I was younger.
But as you get older, you don't mind it.
Right.
But when somebody's saying something disgusting or frightening or stalking you, that's very different.
But to them, it's all the same.
It's all a micro or macro aggression.
And they want a law against it.
And what I pointed out in my video is that In Washington, D.C., there's a place where you can walk, and you will be cat-called.
And I have walked there many times, and it's in a very busy part near DuPont Circle, and it's a lot of women dressed for success, you know, in their Manola Blahniks, they're walking through, and the men cat-call.
Well, the men are homeless, you know, people living in this park, and they make comments.
So there is a huge class difference between these women.
Are we supposed to think these women need to be protected from these guys who are the have-nots?
So that's an interesting discrepancy, that it's not Wall Street bankers walking down the street making these comments, where then there's sort of an added layer Of financial difference and social status and all that.
It's usually coming from people beneath, I suppose.
Look, I think men should know that It bothers women.
I'm not sure it bothers all women.
I mean, I think it depends on the woman.
It's very complicated.
I don't want the women who are the most hypersensitive and sort of freaked out about male attention, I don't think they should be able to write the rules.
I think they should consult other women.
What I suspect you would find is that it can be annoying.
I mean, as I said, I remember being younger and being annoyed, but it was mainly, well, there were, I mean, it didn't happen that much on Wall Street or in Manhattan, so there did seem to be an element of class involved.
But I think you have to, you know, I think in different cultures, the women react to it differently.
There are different mores and things.
But in my neighborhood in Washington, D.C., I don't see it happening where I live.
So basically what I sense is you're pretty much saying that your fear in this would be that if you were to allow some laws to be passed related to all this stuff, that you're handing the power over sort of the authoritarian.
Oh, you hand it to the police, they can arrest anybody.
And it would be these, I mean, I think in D.C.
it would be these poor guys.
And so I think, you know, most men want to be decent human beings, and they should know women don't appreciate it, and that most don't, and especially if it's, you know, kind of pushy and certainly if it's offensive.
But then you don't make laws and don't invite the police in.
There's so much of this inviting authorities in, and some have called it the pink police state, you know, this feminist police state that we have on campus where kids in public universities, the young men are afraid to tell a joke or to say anything.
Yeah, so it's some of that also that the feminism movement has been a victim of its own success in a weird way because it seems to me that feminists now should be fighting so much more for women's rights in other countries.
Now, of course, we have a long way to go here, but when we see all kinds of horrible things happen, you know, women still can't drive in Saudi Arabia, one of our biggest allies in the Gulf, you know.
This is not an enemy country.
And all over the Middle East and all over Africa where women's rights are basically trampled on if not non-existent.
You do have genuine patriarchal oppressive societies and what's happening to women's rights in Iran is terrifying and of course in Saudi Arabia and many parts of the world.
I've been to international women's conferences and you meet these women who represent It's very inspiring.
It's like meeting the Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the feminist foremothers of their society.
And you would think that on the campus these young women would be, especially young women that are idealistic and want to be activists, you'd think they'd be making common cause with those women.
These women at Oberlin and Georgetown and Yale, they're protesting the men on their campus.
And they feel that they are like these women that are oppressed in Iran, that they have it as bad or worse.
Yeah, so I think there's something much bigger going on here and I think this is why so much of our audience, especially on Twitter, likes what we're both doing and what people like Joe Rogan and Gad Saad and Milo and many others are talking about.
There's some weird movement of authoritarians where the left now, which is supposed to be about free thinking and debating ideas and doing this, Right?
Where the left is now throwing out half the people I had Sarah Hader on last week.
And this is an ex-Muslim who stands up for every liberal ideal.
The left should love her, and they shun her.
At best, they actually treat her worse than being shunned.
When I wrote my first book, which was protesting the authoritarianism of feminism and the anti-intellectualism, the conspiracy theories, all of that, I expected to have a good reception from feminist scholars, because I just assumed there was a silent majority of reasonable women.
And I did.
I heard from some great women, from Nadine Strawson, then president of the ACLU.
I heard from Erica Zhang, you know, this pro-sex feminist novelist and so forth, and they were great.
But my colleagues in the Academy were furious that I had criticized and they thought that criticism was the same as a kind of betrayal and showed that you were on the side of, you know, the forces of evil.
So they didn't just disagree with you, they thought you were evil.
Now they don't just disagree with you, they think you're evil and that you give them PTSD.
And then it also, doesn't it give them a license to say and virtually do anything they want to you?
Because I could give you a zillion examples of times where I've seen anyone that shifts a little bit away from people on the left, where they are slandered and smeared and horrible things.
There are massive macro and micro and nano aggressions.
They don't hesitate to be rude, snarky, and there's so much meanness.
I don't understand feminism with meanness.
I mean, I know there were some eccentric, angry women from the beginning of the second wave, but mostly the lived experience of most women who were Yeah, so where does this strange collusion of all these people that all end up on the left doing this?
You know, I've said repeatedly on this show the reason I talk about this all the time and the reason I tweet about the regressive left and want to talk about this is because I don't want the
left to go over the deep end.
And that's why I'm talking about a cross section, I'm talking with a cross section of people from literally
all over the world because I'm afraid what happened to the
right where it went so far right is happening right now.
Well, I will tell you what I know best is among the feminists
is a small group in the universities gain control of the knowledge base.
I mean what we think we know about men and women.
So you're a journalist and you need to know something about the wage gap or you need to know something about women in education.
You go to these people and they are what the journalist doesn't know or the politician or the interested party doesn't know is that they're spinning and they have an ideology that drives their research.
So I think a lot of people don't realize that there's so much spurious scholarship.
So they take it seriously.
And now there are untruths, exaggerations, fictoids, factoids that have been repeated so often they're almost beyond the reach of rational analysis.
And if you question them, you are by definition a sexist or worse.
So they got a certain amount of power just through this This information, this scholarship about how, in this case, about how oppressed women were.
I wrote this article in the Daily Beast where I pinpointed what happened.
These, we shall call these Fainting couch feminists and purveyors of myth.
They've been around for a long time.
They've been in gender studies.
It's too bad.
But in 2011, a little-known operatic, no, a government official sent out... That was going to sound conspiratorial if you went there.
No, but in this case it's true.
She sent out a letter to all the colleges and universities.
She was the Assistant Secretary of Civil Rights, Ruslan Ali, and she sent out to all the colleges.
And I think her intention was that they take more seriously that women are harassed on campus and there was too much sexual assault.
But she went overboard.
She's terrified the universities and made it seem like if they didn't immediately put
all, like most men on trial and get them out of those schools and believe women, because
she claimed there was this epidemic of sexual predation and that the men at campuses like
Yale and Swarthmore and so forth were just preying on women.
So she sent this letter.
And the schools now can be sued under Title IX, this equity statute.
It's a wonderful statute.
It was meant to be there to give women equal opportunities in education, but it's been twisted now, and they've kind of declared martial law on men on campus because of this letter.
It was 2011.
You look at that date, and then you see it brought words like trigger warning and safe space, this whole mindset of a rather somewhat Paranoid young women and their mentors on campus.
It gave them the power to make a federal case, literally, of their perceptions.
Well now, once you have a law, They already had Title IX officers, but since 2011, that's probably the area of greatest growth on many campuses.
They have dozens and dozens of people monitoring how the boys are treating the girls at Wesleyan.
And these are mostly very privileged kids.
And there's a lot of drinking, and I'm sure drunken hookups, but they have redefined drunken hookups to be rape of the young man against the young woman.
So, of course, they call then there's a rape epidemic if you're going to enlarge the meaning of this horrible war, but you're going to enlarge it to include drunken hookups.
Ethnic studies or gender studies, where it's highly politicized scholarship.
They've had it, and they may, if they went to elite high schools, they've probably had it since, you know, 10th grade.
They've been reading these conspiracy theories about how bad the United States, about Western culture, and particularly the men, it's patriarchal male hegemony, so forth.
And they believe it.
They do not have much knowledge of history, so if they are doing things that to people that know history remind you of The McCarthy era, or even the Salem witch trials, just in terms of hysteria and contagions of hysteria.
They're not aware of it.
I mean, and this doesn't happen often, but there was one young woman, and this is all over, not all over, but you can find it on the internet.
She burned my book.
This gleeful young woman took the Worgen's Boys and burned it.
And I just, as a teacher and a mother, I just thought, burning a book, it doesn't have a good history.
And the Supreme Court has ruled many times that freedom of speech is most important on the college campus.
It has refused to sanction speech codes, and the courts have refused to do this.
But schools have them anyway.
And if our universities become places where you have to be hyper-protective of students, protect them from ideas, and your goal is to achieve massive amount of comfort and safety, you have undermined The purpose of your being, the purpose of your existence.
The universities don't exist for that purpose.
Going back to the time of Socrates, the academy was about debate and counter-argument and being able to reason.
Well, I think that's why people are responding to us, right?
Because we're trying to bring that back.
What else do you think we can do?
Because, you know, I see this stuff and I talk about it all the time, but every now and again, I mean, 100% honestly, I do feel a little guilty It's rare, but I do once in a while like, you know, in something like what happened at University of Missouri, I empathize with these kids if they feel, you know, if there were racist things happening.
The whole thing sounds a little unclear as to what exactly was going on, the poop swastika and somebody said that word and all this, but I have no doubt that there is racism on the campus and there's racism in Missouri and in the country.
I have no doubt.
So sometimes I do feel a little, maybe guilty isn't the right word, but a little No, I understand exactly what you're saying.
And I have never really gone on about the race issues the way I do with the gender issues.
I think they're very different.
There's a particular history, a very specific history with African Americans in the United States, and I don't like to see the women's movement pretending that they're Women have been oppressed in the same way.
That is just not true.
It depends on which women.
And if you were an upper middle class white woman, you've had a very different history.
And this was supposedly the great insight of intersectionality, but they didn't seem to apply it very consistently.
And certain groups, like most men, seem to be written out of it.
So, it's just not a consistent body of work.
They need to bring in more critics.
They need to hear from dissidents.
And if they think, well, ours is a compassionate movement, and they are going after people's jobs, and as I said, they're these sort of Twitter mobs that want to destroy people's reputations.
And many of the little scenes I've seen on the campuses are reminiscent of, like, these struggle sessions they had in the Cultural Revolution in China.
And those were run by students.
I mean, people say, well, you wouldn't compare them.
Those people, you know, were throwing people out of windows.
I agree.
They're not comparable in that way.
For one thing, these kids on our campus don't have that kind of power, thank God.
But I see such, they seem so intoxicated with hatred and self-righteousness.
I don't know what they would do if they had power, real power.
They have power to hurt people, you know, their jobs and reputations.
Then that's already awful.
I mean, it's awful what's happened to so many young men.
And I am no apologist for criminals.
If there are criminals on campus and taking advantages of girls, that's awful.
But what is more often the case with so many that we've read about, it's young men that Like a year later, the young woman takes a women's studies class and rethinks this bad hookup, and then he's brought up on charges, sometimes not even told what the specifics of the charge are.
We've had too many of those.
And so that's what worries me, is these people get carried away in these gender studies and other things, and then they have no regard or maybe no knowledge of the First Amendment, of due process, of the history, of the battle that was fought for freedom of speech.
Now, of course, it will be turned on them.
So you're already seeing now feminists are getting in trouble.
I think there was a professor that was hired, that was fired for using the F word.
Well, just the first thing to know, I am not a gamer.
And, in fact, I've looked at some of the games that are... And, you know, there's too much violence and mayhem and it's... I mean, but I also don't like shows like Breaking Bad or... I can't watch them.
No one knows what creates a sociopathic criminal, but it's probably not video games.
And in previous generations they thought it was comic books who had a corrupting influence on the morals of the young.
Television and any new medium goes through this, and games seem to be there.
And then there was the feminist critics, and they were saying that it was causing the... Well, they were saying two things.
The games themselves are sexist, and they create attitudes of, you know, sexism.
And I just did not see evidence of that.
I did see that some of them had sexy women, but if the players like it, and many of them, you know, men are known to like images of sexy women. I just didn't
understand why we were demonizing that.
And people say, "Well, feminists will say that the male gaze, looking at women's bodies, objectifying."
Which feminists? I was a part of a group of pro-sex feminists or libertarian feminists who, it was live and let live.
I mean, I'm not against people.
There was a whole group of feminists that were against having, you know, women posing in Playboy or the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and all of that.
Catherine McKinnon, Andrea Dworkin.
But there was a whole group of us that were opposed.
And I think we won the argument.
But, apparently, they won the assistant professorships.
The first so-called culture war, we won the arguments.
We had the New York Times on our side.
We had, you know, the media.
And now...
They've been laboring away with their theories in a relentless, and now they have the backing of the Department of Education, so in the educational system they can make a federal case of everything.
So it's difficult.
I think in the end we will prevail, because I have great faith in just human ability to see through nonsense.
We saw that in radio when it was a younger medium.
There was payola and all that.
It has to be sorted out.
I think gaming had to go through that.
Maybe it still has to.
But it's improved since Gamergate, that's for sure.
But then they also would find themselves in, you know, getting attacked by game critics or games evaluated because they objectified women or something.
And they were just thinking, we just want to play our games.
And then they had these critiques of the games that were so cherry picked.
And these gamers, they know their games.
Don't mess with that.
And they know the games.
And then so they were This is, of course, Anita Sarkeesian in her videos.
It was infuriating.
These are some young guys, mainly, and some girls, and they see their games being misrepresented, or she'll pick a scene out, make it look like one thing and it was totally different, or take a video no one ever watched that had, you know, A following of five and act as though it's typical of the game.
So they knew it was cheating.
They knew and they got really mad.
Now what I liked about many of them is they they fought back with arguments.
They made videos.
They were it was it was this explosion of communication.
Now there were crazy opportunists at the edges or maybe they weren't even part of Gamergate.
So that's the interesting part, that there was this group of, it's younger people playing video games.
They felt that the system, that they, you know, they love these games.
They felt that the man, you know, the video game manufacturers, they're buying the reviews and all that.
And it starts with that.
But I think you just hit it, that it became this thing where suddenly this group of people who have nothing in common, they don't know what each other's skin color is or sexuality is or any of this stuff is.
But they all found this common thing related to authoritarianism, and they fought it, and that's why I was fascinated with it.
And if they're not going to take it, they were, they were, you know, there were, it was majority guys, but lots of fantastic young women who, and again, these are, yeah, it's, it's Hardcore gamers, I don't know, maybe 70 or 80 percent male, but the girls that are there are fantastic and they're part of that group.
So they even, whatever they were, there are gay women and every race, I mean, is represented.
And you realize Gamergate was a consumer uprising, really, from across the world, across racial and class and gender lines.
Which is so fascinating because because it was a cross section of people, they couldn't figure out who to guilt into hating who more.
And that, I think, transcends so many things that we now see on college campuses and we see in Our public discourse and free speech and all that.
For you personally, how does it feel, as you just said, you were never a gamer, but yet you're a based mom for these people.
How does it feel to be part of something that you actually, unlike feminism where you had a vested interest as a woman, let's say, now you're part of something that, I don't want to say you don't care about it because you care about these people obviously, but as you said, you're not a gamer, but you're a leader in this thing.
I once came to the defense of wrestlers because they were, you know, their sport has been demolished by completely unnecessary interpretations of this Title IX equity law.
And so I made friends with a lot of wrestlers.
I've never wrestled and I've never even, I've never even seen it, I don't think, except, you know, accidentally channel surfing.
Right.
But I love these, these are just great guys and they, they were, and they couldn't, You know, they didn't have a voice in this debate.
And these, you know, gender experts speak for, as if they're speaking for all women or all of the left or something.
I can't think of a group of people that were just more diverse, more welcoming, good sense of humor, and creative.
I think, you know, if I were to, based on my knowledge of gamers over the last year or so, If someone's like obsessively gaming, it's predictive of being an artist or an engineer.
Yes, when we did our Gamer Meetup, where we met the gamers in Washington, D.C., a critic of GamerGate sent, first of all, he sent completely rambling, frightening notes to the bar owner, telling him not to host us.
And it was very touching, because this bar owner was talking to me.
That we can do is just, you just keep going and you just keep telling the truth and all that, which sort of gets me to my last question, which is I've been trying to end all these interviews on the hope part of all of this.
Where do we go from here with all the things we've been talking about?
And I think you were in a piece that Milo was also in about the rise of the cultural libertarians, that there is this group of people now that cut across the political spectrum that include Bill Maher and Chris Rock, And people on the right, like Milo, and people on the left that have realized we've got to get out of people's personal lives, we've got to stop othering everybody, we've got to stop judging everybody based on color and sex and religion and all that.
I'm a firm believer that this is the next political movement in this country.
And so it's going to be a battle to take the power away from them and give to where it belongs to people who just, who are nice, respectful and who want, of other people and realize other people Have different opinions, and that's okay.
And not to be policing.
I don't want these authoritarians here who said they could make the rules.
Your arguments for censorship and doing away with due process, they're not going to work.
They've been tried before with unhappy results, so read some history.
But having said that, I do think, any crazy things happening on campus right now,
it's maybe a good thing that people are seeing it and will not be so ready to jump on board.
Yeah, to me, that's the hope that I've been trying to take for the last few weeks,
that even in cable news, which is so endlessly dumb and pandering,
that I was noticing people were starting to say, you know, where they'll cry racism every two seconds
and sexism and homophobia.
For the first time, they were kind of coming around and being like, this might be a bit much.
So that's got to be that.
That's a good sign.
Yeah, that's a good sign.
That's a good sign.
What would you say just the average person, not someone that's in the public sphere, but the average person Well, I would suggest that you be somewhat skeptical, not get too carried away with a cause until you check the facts.
Yeah, we've been doing the 140-character thing, and I really appreciate the fact that you literally went from almost four hours with Joe right over here, and what are you going to do for the rest of the day?