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Nov. 27, 2015 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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Feminism, Free Speech, & Gamergate | Christina Hoff Sommers | WOMEN | Rubin Report
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dave rubin
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.
Christina Hoff Sommers, welcome to the show.
christina sommers
Lovely to be here.
dave rubin
Do you have a little something left?
christina sommers
I do, I do.
I'm just getting started.
dave rubin
Three hours.
You did three, did you go a little over?
Where were you with Joe?
unidentified
Just three.
christina sommers
In his little man cave there.
It was a very cozy little studio.
dave rubin
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.
It's pretty cool, right?
christina sommers
Right.
And I think that what we are is we're rejecting the cultural authoritarians.
And so we come from different political places, but we share this commitment to freedom and, you know, just live and let live.
What happened to that?
dave rubin
What happened to that?
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?
christina sommers
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.
dave rubin
There you go.
All right, so let's start with the factual feminist.
Let's go there first.
I want to do a little history of feminism, but what brought you personally to be doing these types of videos and talking about this stuff?
Just your journey a little bit.
christina sommers
Well, I've always been a, I was a professor for many years and wrote scholarly articles and books and I wasn't doing videos on YouTube.
I thought that was, at the time, I thought it was about, I don't know, cats.
dave rubin
It's still mostly cats.
christina sommers
It's still mostly cats.
Yeah.
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.
dave rubin
Yeah, so before we dive right into the feminist stuff, how do you like being in this space?
Because obviously it is new to you to be in the YouTube space and interacting with people like this.
christina sommers
Twitter.
dave rubin
And Twitter and all that.
christina sommers
Gamers, I've never played a video game, really.
dave rubin
Yeah, I mean, did you ever expect to be sort of a hero to the gamer gay community?
I want to talk about that later too, but just being in this interesting digital new thing.
christina sommers
No, no.
I didn't think I would.
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.
So it's as if all my writing has a new life.
dave rubin
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!
christina sommers
So many angry people!
dave rubin
Yeah, but for us it's nice that we can be like, look, here's some information, and then we can go back and forth when we want.
And it's very freeing to me, I find.
And then when I'm able to connect with like-minded people, I find it to be great.
christina sommers
I find it great.
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.
But when I taught gender theory, I found that there was the closed-mindedness combined with a kind of penchant for conspiracy theories.
Paranoid theories about the patriarchy that happens not to exist, at least certainly not in the United States or Western Europe.
And I thought if I had my ideal university, I would have some radicals there, because you can always learn from people that are pushing the envelope.
But you don't only have radicals.
And in gender scholarship, it may be a bit of an overstatement, but I don't think so.
Really, that's all we have.
dave rubin
Okay, so before we get to all that, let's back up a little.
Let's just lay out some basic definitions.
Because I do find that with a lot of this, people don't even understand what a feminist is anymore.
You know, you have your first wave feminists, your second wave feminists, third wave feminists.
Now there's things beyond that that you've coined.
So can you just break down some of the basics?
What was the first feminist movement?
Just give me a couple breakdowns.
christina sommers
Well, that would be the suffrage movement.
And that was the struggle for the vote.
And then after women earned the vote, there was a period of quiescence.
And we didn't hear much from feminists throughout the 30s, the 40s, the 50s.
Then it came back in the late 60s, early 70s.
And that was the second wave.
And it had work to do.
There were a lot of just arbitrary barriers preventing women.
Holding women back.
They needed to be taken down.
It was obviously time to do that.
dave rubin
So this was stuff more like in the workforce, things like that?
christina sommers
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.
unidentified
Right.
christina sommers
But they do not subject their research to scrutiny of objective scholars.
They evaluate one another.
dave rubin
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?
christina sommers
Well, they didn't, and I didn't see them in the real world, and I thought they would be contained in the academy and then would go away.
That has not happened, partly because of social media and these Twitter mobs and things.
It's come into the mainstream, and now we hear Words like trigger warning.
dave rubin
Oh, we're going to get to plenty of that.
We should have issued a trigger warning before we sat down.
christina sommers
Oh, we should have.
Yes.
unidentified
Is this a safe space?
christina sommers
I am a walking trigger warning.
dave rubin
Do you consider this a safe space?
unidentified
I'm feeling fairly... Fairly freaked?
christina sommers
A little micro-aggressed upon, but not too much.
dave rubin
Okay, so then that was second wave feminism, right?
It evolved into that, yeah.
christina sommers
But the second wave had a radical extreme and that extreme became the mean because they got a monopoly on the professorships.
dave rubin
And that's what you would refer to then as third wave feminism.
christina sommers
Well, yeah, third wave is probably the intersectional feminism or, you know, there are various names for it.
But it didn't correct the excesses of second wave feminism.
It took those excesses and made them even more extreme.
dave rubin
Yeah.
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?
christina sommers
There was some reasoning, but at a certain point what you had is just people, it was kind of a power grab.
And there were women like me, Camille Paglia, a lot of libertarian feminists, dissident feminists.
We were just disinvited from the party.
And students didn't have the benefit of hearing a range of opinion on contentious issues.
Take something like, well, something like the wage gap.
unidentified
Yeah.
christina sommers
If you are an economist and you hear that group A is earning less than group B,
you know, you want to know why, they immediately say discrimination.
They blame employers and the patriarchy.
But if you do the proper controls that any competent economist would do
and you ask, well, do they differ in any way?
Do all the men -- because when you hear that wage gap, they're just doing the average
of all the men in the workplace working full time and all the women.
Well, men and women do not study the same top subjects in college.
They do not work the same number of hours.
Men, on average, work more hours.
They take more dangerous jobs.
Women are far more likely to take --
A few years out of the workplace or more.
These are relevant to your earnings.
So then what happens when we do the proper controls?
And there are very good studies.
The Labor Department commissioned a fantastic study that did all the proper controls.
It gets to a point where there are just a few cents you can't explain.
Now, it could be discrimination, and I'm enough of an equity feminist to worry about that if I'm cheated out of a few pennies, or women are.
But chances are it's not.
Chances are it would turn out There's some innocent explanation.
dave rubin
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.
unidentified
Right.
dave rubin
But I watch these studies and I say, this study, well why was it done this way?
Who funded this?
Who funded that?
How do you, in the mix of all this, figure out what to actually believe?
christina sommers
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.
I don't understand that.
dave rubin
Yeah, all right.
Well, I do want to touch on that in a little bit, but just to finish up just sort of the waves of feminism.
Now, you consider yourself, and you coined the phrase, I think, equity feminist, right?
Can you tell people?
christina sommers
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.
I hate to say it.
dave rubin
Okay, so from there now, let's backtrack to what you just said about the campus stuff.
Because I know this is a place where you get a lot of heat for this, when you've talked about the rape situation.
christina sommers
Yes, I went to Oberlin College, and everyone was triggered, and 30 people and a dog fled to a safe space.
They had a safe room, there was a therapy dog apparently, and 30 triggered young women, and they went to a safe room.
unidentified
And they were so... Wait, can we really try to parse that out?
dave rubin
I mean, what does that actually mean?
Because I know we know what it means.
Yeah, what does it mean?
We joke about this stuff all the time.
christina sommers
I wish I didn't know.
unidentified
But they literally, because you were coming to speak... They felt that I would give them PTSD.
christina sommers
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.
dave rubin
Yeah.
christina sommers
And if someone presents me with some good data and good arguments I'll change my mind.
I've changed my mind many times and I look forward to doing it again.
dave rubin
Yeah.
christina sommers
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.
unidentified
Right.
dave rubin
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?
christina sommers
Yeah, well, they cite their own studies.
But I've spent many years, and so many other people, looking at these methodological failures.
There are ways in which we could throw together a survey tonight and ask people questions and find an epidemic of whatever you want.
All you have to do is ask questions that are a little vague, and it helps, too, to ask a non-representative sample of people.
That's what they do.
They ask usually a mix of serious questions, but then a few vague ones.
That's all you need.
Now, does it mean your study is going to be valid?
No.
Does it mean you're going to generate some useful propaganda for your cause?
Yes.
unidentified
Yeah.
dave rubin
All right.
So I saw that piece at Oberlin.
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.
christina sommers
Well, it's complicated.
And as I said, there are times where it's very threatening.
But you have to make distinctions.
And this is the basis of thought.
I mean, human rationality, making distinctions.
And being out in the public square, there are going to be Interactions.
You know, people will come up with petitions, people will beg for money, people will say things.
It's just part of being alive.
dave rubin
Yeah.
christina sommers
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?
unidentified
Right.
dave rubin
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.
christina sommers
Not always, but often.
unidentified
But is that enough to dismiss it?
dave rubin
I get what you're saying.
There's a wild discrepancy between, you know, you're cute or whistling at a girl versus leering and following.
christina sommers
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.
dave rubin
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.
christina sommers
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.
dave rubin
I know comedians at comedy clubs that are afraid.
christina sommers
Well, they better.
They're unwelcome on campus.
It's a hostile environment for humor.
Yeah.
And so that's why you have to be careful.
And sometimes you'll get what you wish for, but then you get a lot more.
You get a lot more repression, authoritarianism.
It's just not worth it.
dave rubin
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.
Why don't feminist groups focus on that at all?
christina sommers
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.
So it's delusional.
dave rubin
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.
christina sommers
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.
dave rubin
Yeah, so 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.
Well, it's fascinating, isn't it?
christina sommers
Because they do to other people exactly what they say.
dave rubin
The right is doing?
christina sommers
They demonize.
They objectify.
They otherize, to use their word.
They micro, macro.
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?
dave rubin
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.
What brings these people together do you think?
When often they shouldn't have a lot in common?
christina sommers
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.
dave rubin
Yeah.
christina sommers
So you have to sympathize.
And then they then kind of went off the deep end with this psychobabble and these psychodramas about, I'm triggered.
I mean, at Brown University, this was a year or so ago, and there was a story about it.
You may have seen it, I'm sure you did, in the New York Times by Judith Shulevitz.
At Brown University, they had a debate.
So it was a feminist, two feminists actually, a libertarian feminist and someone else, another feminist, debating rape statistics.
And you would think that's perfect.
What more could the students want?
They can hear both sides and their sides well represent.
No, they didn't want the debate at all, and they formed a safe room.
And in that safe room, they were playing tapes of frolicking puppy dogs.
They had bubbles, coloring books, Play-Doh!
Maybe I made up the Play-Doh.
No, I think they had Play-Doh.
dave rubin
It was probably there.
christina sommers
It was there.
So, this is so infantilizing.
And again, I and many other feminists of my generation look at it and think, this is infantilization.
This is the opposite of what feminism should be.
And when I got to college, we threw out the dorm counselors and the guardians of our virtue and all that.
We wanted to be in charge.
dave rubin
So what went wrong, do you think?
Was there a moment that something snapped?
If, in fact, something went wrong and the feminist movement went from these two extremes, what do you think happened there?
christina sommers
Well, I think I know what happened.
No one listens to me.
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.
dave rubin
Yeah, that's so interesting because I can see the line now to when you were talking about the cat calling, why the slippery slope exists.
If you were to create a law, well then you could be in this similar situation.
christina sommers
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.
dave rubin
Right.
So I see, there's so many pieces here that are related to feminism and so much of this
authoritarian stuff and the college stuff.
The Yale thing, which we were both tweeting about, that happened a week and a half ago
or so with the professor that wrote the piece about the costumes.
christina sommers
Halloween costumes.
dave rubin
Halloween costumes.
And if you see someone that's wearing something offensive, either ignore it or use your free
speech to engage them and why you aren't happy with it and hopefully have a conversation
about it.
And that professor's husband, I believe is the dean there, he got into this argument
with the student and the student basically said, and it was all caught on camera, basically
said this is not a place of intellectualism.
This should be a home.
christina sommers
A home.
dave rubin
I really, like, it takes a lot to really get me crazed, but I thought, this is dangerous now, what's happening.
You know, and I also, I usually don't feel like a grandpa, but I felt like a grandpa, like, you kids, like, how stupid are you kids?
But it really struck me as now we have something systemic that we have to turn the tide on.
christina sommers
Right, and it is dangerous, and here's why.
Some leftists I've seen, they're embarrassed by it, who wouldn't be?
But they say, oh, it's just kids acting out.
No, it's not just kids acting out.
These are kids who have been fed a lot of bad, crazy information in their...
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.
Right.
dave rubin
I assume then she tweeted it at you and put a hashtag.
christina sommers
Well it was on Tumblr and someone sent it to me.
Yeah.
dave rubin
So basically they're creating an atmosphere where almost everything, I mean it really feels 1984 Orwellian reverse.
Everything is this sort of double speak and reverse of how we're supposed to have debate, right?
I mean if you can't have an intellectual debate in college, well how are you going to get out to the real world and do it?
christina sommers
Right.
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.
dave rubin
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.
Let's take it then.
christina sommers
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.
dave rubin
What did you make of that professor at Missouri, the woman who was standing there?
Screaming at the reporter who, you know, she was saying, we need some muscle around here to get the reporter out of there.
christina sommers
She was behaving like a thug.
It was thuggish.
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.
dave rubin
Yeah, well now you can see that.
I mean, it's happening right now.
It's turning on them right now.
You can see the left eating itself.
christina sommers
Right.
dave rubin
And as someone on the left, I probably shouldn't be taking that much joy in it, but because it's been so warped, I actually am.
I want, you know, as we've been calling them, the regressives, I want them to, I want them to go the way of the dinosaur.
Enough of this.
christina sommers
Enough of this.
I know.
And we bring back just an environment of openness and with jokes.
dave rubin
Yeah.
christina sommers
There shall be jokes.
dave rubin
I was going to say, let's move away from some of the serious stuff, but now I'm going to bring up Gamergate.
So I don't know which way is this serious or jokey.
We'll find out.
christina sommers
Tragicomedy.
dave rubin
Tragicomedy.
OK.
So actually, I remember very much the first time I heard of you was about a year ago or so when Gamergate was just starting to percolate up.
And I tweeted out, I said, I want to do something about Gamergate.
Can you guys point me in the right direction?
Because I really could not get a hold of it.
Which it seems like no one still can get a hold of it.
christina sommers
No one can explain it.
dave rubin
But your name came up and Milo Yiannopoulos and Adam Baldwin and a couple other people popped up and I was looking around.
And I did one video on it and I basically said, I tried to lay it out, but I basically said, I don't know what's going on here.
christina sommers
Right.
dave rubin
Now since then, I've had Milo on and I thought he did a pretty good explanation.
You've become sort of a, I guess like a heroine of the Gamergate movement for a lot of the reasons you're discussing here.
So if you were going to explain it in like two minutes, how would you explain the thing that is Gamergate?
christina sommers
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.
Too much violence.
dave rubin
But you believe they should exist if people so choose.
christina sommers
But, of course, it's not my taste.
I do prefer, you know, Pride and Prejudice or, you know, the latest PBS... Downton Abbey, that sort of thing.
But I don't impose that on everyone, and I recognize there can be great movies.
Alfred Hitchcock was a great director, but I will never see Psycho.
I'm too afraid.
I don't enjoy that experience of being terrified in the theater.
But people do, and it's harmless.
When the video game controversy erupted, I took a measure of it, and I saw some familiar players, because I'd been in some of these same battles.
And I saw that some of the feminist critics were cherry-picking, they were misrepresenting.
And that the Gamergate was being judged by, there are some extreme people associated with it at the periphery.
dave rubin
Like everything.
christina sommers
But like every, what movement?
I mean, Occupy Wall Street, there were crazy people on the periphery.
And Black Lives Matter, you go to the periphery.
But what you should do is go to the center.
And what are they saying?
That's what I try to do, is go and see what they were saying.
And these critics, first you had critics that said video games are causing mayhem, they create violence.
No one has been able to show that.
Psychologists are already just tired of it.
Forget it.
It's just going in a circle.
No one has been able to show that.
dave rubin
Yeah, and hasn't there been some studies that have proven it actually does the reverse?
Because people get some of their aggression out instead of actually shooting someone.
christina sommers
And it takes a lot.
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.
They've been there ever since, teaching these.
dave rubin
So you might have won the battle, they might have won the war.
christina sommers
We won all the battles.
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.
Eventually it has to fall.
dave rubin
Right, so my question there was, what is Gamergate?
And I think your answer, because your answer had almost nothing to do with Gamergate, I think it was the right answer, right?
Because that seems to be the confusion about what is Gamergate.
Nobody seems to really understand what it is.
At this point, it's morphed into so many different things.
christina sommers
It's so many different things, but at the core, it was a group of gamers who were There were issues I don't understand as not a gamer.
They were irritated by some cronyism in the gaming journalism.
dave rubin
Right, that some of the magazines were being paid off by the manufacturers.
christina sommers
All that was going on.
And that happened.
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.
unidentified
Yeah.
christina sommers
You know, we don't really.
Yeah.
So whatever.
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.
Maybe no one knows who sent threats.
unidentified
Right.
christina sommers
And people on both sides of the controversy get them.
dave rubin
Yeah.
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.
christina sommers
And they fought, and they fought, and they, you know, it just, it may erupt again, it comes and goes, but there was camaraderie.
Two times we've had these Gamergate hookups.
It's just a hashtag, it's not an organization.
In both D.C.
and in London we had a meetup and I met the gamers.
You can't meet a more delightful, friendly group of people.
dave rubin
So that, should that be the piece that gives you the hope that you were alluding to a second ago?
That there was this group of younger people that said, we're not going to take this bullshit.
christina sommers
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.
And it was just defending a hobby they love.
dave rubin
Right.
So that's sort of what it is, is that that's why the regressive left really hated the idea of this, right?
christina sommers
And they wanted the idea that there would be a rebellion.
How dare you?
You do not talk back to big sister.
dave rubin
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.
christina sommers
It's happened before.
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.
They speak for themselves.
People should know that.
dave rubin
Yeah.
christina sommers
So, how did it feel?
It's fine.
I mean, just because everyone seems great.
I mean, as I said, I haven't...
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.
They're smart too.
It's hard to play these games.
dave rubin
Yeah.
I mean, we've got the Army and the Navy now playing video games to learn how to actually do things.
So it's not that these, you know, I was used to, I was running around as Mario eating mushrooms.
I don't know how much that did for me, but I ate some mushrooms in college.
What about online harassment? Because that is also a piece of this and it also fits the feminism thing.
How much of it is, I don't want to say how much of it is real.
There's obviously plenty of it's real and we can look on any YouTube comment section and there's everybody harassing everybody for every other reason.
All the time, yeah.
It's endless.
How much concern should we actually have for this?
Or is it something that is not that important because it's just words in the digital space?
christina sommers
We should have concern for just a certain category of harassment.
First of all, we have to make distinctions.
If you're online and, you know, there are different... People can disagree with you, that can upset you, but, you know, live with it.
unidentified
Suck it up.
dave rubin
Yeah.
christina sommers
And people can insult you.
That's life.
Just unfollow them.
Then people can be obscene and, you know, like, it's probably more upsetting to a woman than a man, that kind of, like, sexual.
And then they can issue, like, really scary threats.
dave rubin
Right.
christina sommers
Now, obviously, with the really scary threats, and probably it's the obscenity.
Well, let's start with the threats.
You have to, we have to do something about that.
And I think we are.
I mean, I think they get reported.
And if they're credible.
But the thing is, with Gamergate, has anybody been hurt?
Is there any evidence?
It's all Internet nonsense.
I mean, that there are these threatening males and making... I mean, where are they?
I mean, where... Who has been hurt, exactly?
I mean, the worst thing... One of the worst things I read about was Milo getting terrible things in the mail.
dave rubin
Right.
christina sommers
Milo Yiannopoulos.
dave rubin
But he's pro-Gamergate.
Well, there were bomb threats.
Weren't there bomb threats called into something that he did?
christina sommers
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.
He was worried, and he thought, because this critic made it sound like he was hosting some, you know, I don't know, some Nazis or something.
The bar owner said, what can I do?
This is America.
He was from Afghanistan, I think, or an immigrant.
dave rubin
Right.
christina sommers
Or maybe Iraqi.
He said, what can I do?
This is America.
And I said, are you going to keep us out?
He said, no.
And then they were so pleased, and everybody was very generous, because we felt bad that they got a bomb threat.
And imagine making a bomb threat in DC.
They brought in vans and police dogs.
But of course, being gamers, we just went outside.
They partied outside.
dave rubin
Yeah.
All right.
So it had a it had a nice ending.
And I suppose that's all.
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.
christina sommers
It has to be.
dave rubin
So I guess, are you with me?
Give me something else.
christina sommers
Totally with you.
And I think that it was my acquaintance with the Gamers that gave me that hope.
Because politically, they're all over the spectrum, but they're very libertarian for sure.
And this was how they were acting.
And I just thought that I got some insight into how they were.
Because they're younger.
I mean, the Gamers are a lot younger than me.
Most of them.
And that gives me hope.
And what I like about it, too, is it can unite us from people who are conservative.
I'm still a registered Democrat, but out of respect for my mother and father, who are so liberal, I wouldn't dare register anything else.
But you can be conservative, you can be liberal.
What unites us as Americans, maybe as Westerners, too, is a love of freedom.
I mean that's our, so I think it can bring people together and we've, right now it's not, it's sort of the bullies have the upper hand.
dave rubin
Yeah.
christina sommers
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.
dave rubin
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.
christina sommers
Now, if you've got good information and moral energy, that's moral progress.
That's Martin Luther King, that's civil rights.
If you have bad information and moral fervor, that's fanaticism.
And history is one long lesson in the dangers of combining misinformation and moral fervor.
So be careful, choose your causes carefully, and if you do that, I think that leads to progress.
To being careful about your causes.
And right now, if you are a woman, and you are part of campus feminism,
I hate to say this, you have chosen the wrong cause.
That's not about liberty, it's about repression.
dave rubin
Well, you know what?
I look forward to seeing some of the comments on this one.
We'll see if they agree with you, and if they agree, great, and I have a feeling if they disagree, you'll be okay with that, too.
christina sommers
I'm okay with that.
Give me the evidence.
I'm persuadable.
dave rubin
There you go.
Well, it was a pleasure meeting you, finally, in actual life.
christina sommers
In real life.
dave rubin
We've been friends on Twitter.
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?
christina sommers
I'm meeting my nephew, and we're going out for margaritas and Mexican food.
dave rubin
Excellent.
All right, well, you guys can check out Christina Hoff Summers in all the usual spots on Twitter.
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