Claire Lehmann On Staying Independent
The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan
Andrew Sullivan
4.6 • 836 Ratings
🗓️ 9 May 2025
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Claire Lehmann is a journalist and publisher. In 2015, after leaving academia, she founded the online magazine Quillette, where she is still editor-in-chief. She’s also a newspaper columnist for The Australian.
For two clips of our convo — on how journalists shouldn’t be too friendly with one another, and how postmodernism takes the joy out of literature — pop over to our YouTube page.
Other topics: a modest upbringing in Adelaide; her hippie parents; their small-c conservatism; her many working-class jobs; ADHD; aspiring to be a Shakespeare scholar; enjoying Foucault … at first; her “great disillusionment” with pomo theory; the impenetrable prose of Butler; the great Germaine Greer; praising Camille Paglia; evolutionary psychology; Wright’s The Moral Animal and Pinker’s The Blank Slate; Claire switching to forensic psychology after an abusive relationship; the TV show Adolescence; getting hired by the Sydney Morning Herald to write op-eds — her first on marriage equality; Bush’s federal amendment; competition among women; tribalism and mass migration; soaring housing costs in Australia; rising populism in the West; creating Quillette; the IDW; being anti-anti-Trump; audience capture; Islamism and Charlie Hebdo; Covid; critical Trump theory; tariffs; reflexive anti-elitism; Joe Rogan; Almost Famous; Orwell; Spinoza; Oakeshott; Fukuyama and boredom; tech billionaires on Inauguration Day; the sycophants of Trump 2.0; and X as a state propaganda platform.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Next week: David Graham on Project 2025. After that: Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson on the Biden years, Sam Tanenhaus on Bill Buckley, Robert Merry on President McKinley, Walter Isaacson on Ben Franklin, and Paul Elie on his book The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to [email protected].
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Hi there. Welcome to another dishcast in the age of you know who, it seems to be getting hairier and hairier. |
| 0:39.9 | As the days go by, I want to thank you all for the subscribing. |
| 0:44.1 | We have had just another, we're having a bit of a boomlet right now in subscriptions. |
| 0:49.1 | I don't know quite know why, but we're extremely grateful, especially those of you who have subscribed to the whole thing, |
| 0:56.4 | including the full podcast. If you haven't subscribed to the whole thing, at some point in |
| 1:02.7 | this conversation, we will peter out to your immense frustration, and we would like to encourage |
| 1:08.2 | you to avoid that in advance by subscribing. |
| 1:11.5 | We don't want to be the biggest. |
| 1:13.8 | It's about having the right audience, not the biggest audience, I think. |
| 1:18.3 | And I think that's something I learned from the old days of the Two Republic, |
| 1:22.4 | that in fact you don't want to be Time magazine necessarily. |
| 1:25.9 | And this community is wonderful because it is so selective. |
| 1:32.2 | None of you, I don't think, listening to this because you agree with me on everything. |
| 1:37.1 | Thank God you don't. |
| 1:38.2 | And I'm just grateful that in a period where liberal democracy is under such that we have this little community that is genuinely open, is debating, is taking me on. |
| 1:52.0 | We air dissents. |
| 1:54.0 | I try and respond. |
| 1:55.0 | I'm learning and you're learning, and this is an ongoing conversation in the great, Oshodian sense of never really |
| 2:02.0 | resolving itself, but trying to figure out what the truth is right now, and that is the goal |
| 2:06.5 | of this podcast in various ways. But today, we have someone I've always wanted to talk to, |
| 2:13.8 | who's been around for quite a while in terms of making a difference in the online |
| 2:19.5 | and beyond conversation in general. Her name is Claire Lehman, and she's a journalist and publisher, |
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