BN: If you look at the chronology of the examples in the book, one of the earliest ones is the White House going after Fox News. Do you think there’s any sense in which the White House normalized this behavior to some degree? It continued with the “war on women” in 2012.

KP: I do think that they did. I think this was something that was already happening without them but certainly by having the President of the United States engage in this behavior it was normalizing it. It was normalizing the idea that you can do the delegitimizing–and that was exactly their language, that Fox News was not a legitimate news organization. And again, not just that we’re not going to talk to them–which is not okay for the government–but they we’re also telling other people not to treat them as a legitimate news outlet. They’re taking an extra step of telling everyone else what they’re supposed to do and it’s intimidating. To me this was a very serious issue. I do think, like I said, if George Bush had done something like this to a media organization people would’ve been screaming from the rooftops, including me. But for some reason this was something that really got very little pushback. There were a few reporters–namely Jake Tapper was probably the main one who said ‘you know, this isn’t okay’–but for the most part it was just accepted.

BN: Finally, you’re pretty critical of a lot of feminist writers, the people at Jezebel etc. Do you consider yourself a feminist and how do you differentiate your views from what they do?

KP: Well, I do consider myself a feminist but I would differentiate myself in the same way I differentiate myself from all the other liberals in the book, because I consider myself liberal as well but I call them the illiberal left… I actually think that feminists have it right when they say you shouldn’t objectify women, that you shouldn’t make misogynist comments about them or obsess about their appearance if they’re running for office and all these other things. And yet, as you see in the book, when it involves a conservative woman or a woman they don’t like they are more than happy to engage in that kind of behavior. And they know full well that it works because they’re the ones who invented the theory that objectifying women is dehumanizing. I actually believe that and I don’t think you should do it to anybody. I don’t think you should do it to any woman whether she is liberal or conservative.