#17 - Claire Lehmann

Balaji Srinivasan (0:00)

Claire, welcome to The Network State Podcast. You're the editor and founder of Quillette, which was for a while combating, you know, the craziness on the left. Now you actually also combat to a large extent the craziness on the right. Basically enlightened centrism for a long time. And you know, we don't agree on everything, we agree on a lot of things. Do you want to give the quick spiel on Quillette and everything you've done over the years?

Claire Lehmann (0:21)

Sure, well thanks for having me on, Balaji. It's a real honor to be talking with you. So I founded Quillette about a decade ago, and at the time, I was reacting mostly to what I perceived to be increasingly hyperbolic sort of left-wing narratives, particularly in media that were untethered to any kind of evidence or statistical reality. So I was studying psychology at the time, and I had been trained to look at sociological questions through a quantitative viewpoint, and you know, I was reading stuff in media, particularly on the issue of gender that was simplistic, I knew was false. And so I just had a reaction. I was politicized by the early woke narratives that I saw in media. And doing a little bit of digging and reading made me realize that in academia, certain fields had been distorted by political, a political drift to the left. So in my field of psychology, certain sociological, social psychology questions were sort of inflated in importance, you know, such as like stereotype bias or implicit bias. Those questions were inflated, and there was not much evidence to support them, whereas other findings were sort of suppressed. So I became more aware of the fact that left-wing orthodoxy and dogma, particularly around issues of race and gender, were sort of disfiguring both academia and the media. And so that motivated me to launch Quillette, and it just so happened that it coincided with the 2016 election of Donald Trump. And so what happened was, particularly in the United States, a lot of left-wing institutions and people on the left sort of went insane. And so we had this huge wave of cancel culture, people being sacked from their jobs in the tech industry, people being sacked from their jobs or cancelled in academia, in artistic communities sort of swept through the culture between 2016 and... sort of peaked in 2020, I would say, with the George Floyd riots. And so we sort of have ridden this cultural wave of increasing wokeness, and we were just early in criticizing wokeness. I guess you could say, but now that wokeness is sort of receding slowly, we're becoming more sensitive to the illiberalism that is emerging on the right. So that's been our journey. And, you know, our values, myself and my editors that I work with, our values haven't changed dramatically. We've always considered ourselves small l liberals, slash small c conservatives.

But we're reacting and responding to waves of illiberalism, whether they come from the left or the right. Yeah.

Balaji Srinivasan (3:16)

And I do think that they call the right reactionary because it reacts, it does move second. And so I do put some blame, me, much of the blame, on the left for creating today's right. Because the reasonable, you know, like the Romney-style reasonable center-right kind of person, or even the Bloomberg Democrat center-left or what have you, that person was just given a hole in their head. And essentially, it was like a natural selection process of antibiotic resistance to select for an unreasonable right.

And now, of course, that right is unreasonable. So there you go. That's happened, unfortunately, many times in history. And the result is just two things that just start punching each other, where the left magics into existence, the thing that it constantly preaches against. And the right's like, there's actually a meme that talks about this. It's like, all these young kids are told they're the bad guys. They're like, I guess I'm the bad guys. And they put on the mask. And they're all bad together, that kind of thing, right? So this happened in Europe in the mid-20th century, where communism led to, communism came first, and then fascism arose in part as a reaction to communism. And of course, they just punched it out in, go ahead.

Claire Lehmann (4:30)

The communists not only described liberals as being fascists in the 1920s and 30s, they described slightly watered down communists as fascists. You know, the extreme left has always demonized their enemies as fascists, and then they create support for a genuine fascist movement. And then, you know, lots of people are, by that stage, they're exhausted. They can't fight the extreme left anymore. So I would agree with that analysis.