Taylor Lorenz is a Disinfo Dupe
Taylor Lorenz is a Disinfo Dupe
Learn what a “Disinfo Dupe” is here
Like Kiera Butler and Brandy Zadrozny, Taylor Lorenz publishes fear porn and calls it journalism. Marked by her extreme fear of COVID, a lack of respect for personal authority, an online addiction, and trying to weaponize victimhood, Lorenz is a disinfo dupe.
Who is Taylor Lorenz?
Lorenz currently works for the Washington Post, where she covers internet culture as a media reporter. Last year, she published a book called Extremely Online.
As someone who boasts about spending most of her time on the internet, Lorenz mostly seems to stay in a bubble of like-minded folk. She covers different corners of internet culture, and does have a pattern of making publicized engagements with people whose thoughts are different from her own. Yet instead of showing intellectual curiosity and attempting to learn from these opinions, she instead fights back with the unbalanced conviction of a zealot.
An interview that Lorenz conducted in February with Chaya Raichik, the founder of Libs of TikTok, epitomizes this pattern. Lorenz makes a show of wearing a medical mask while the two engage in a very tense, but made-for-meme-culture, conversation that was rife with tension, passive aggression, and soundbites, yet devoid of any sense of wanting to learn from each other.
Lorenz, whether knowingly or not, has been part of a pattern of reportage that privileges the mainstream media’s messaging so hard and fast that she upholds it even when new facts present themselves. Apparently nothing on earth scares her more than COVID.
Demonstrating continued support of mainstream media and its narrative of fear on the COVID epidemic – the flag that Lorenz has carried perhaps farther than any other journalist – speak to having been duped by Big Pharma and the narrative of fear that it, as well as Big Government and the corporate-sponsored legacy media, have spread.
Lorenz’s affinity for legacy anything makes sense given her biography: Born in New York City, she was raised in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, one of the richest towns in the nation. It is situated on part of Connecticut’s “Gold Coast,” where the average household income is nearly $240,000 and the median property value is $144 million. It is a town of financial firms and hedge fund managers. She also boasted of attending an expensive Swiss boarding school in a now-deleted Tweet from 2020. She received a political science bachelor’s degree from Hobart and William Smith College.
Lorenz was employed by the New York Times as a technology reporter before moving to the Washington Post, two of the most ideologically entrenched media outlets in the country. The Times’s initial, panicked reports on COVID-19 were somewhat understandable at the time, given that the city was an epicenter of the virus and suffered thousands of tragic casualties, but Lorenz took their coverage of the virus into an online obsession with spreading fear and shaming people who disagreed that everyone should live in complete fear of this virus. Continuing to spread this panic today, Lorenz has carried this fear well beyond its rational life.
Lock Yourself in Your House Forever
Lorenz’s fear of COVID borders on mania. This past year, she skipped her fourth Christmas in a row, posting on X that attending would be “social murder.” On June 5, 2024, she posted that liberals “refuse to mask or push any form of sustained airborne disease mitigation” and this is a “far right stance against public health.”
We repeat: It is the year 2024. Lorenz is in favor of permanent masking, and her fear of the now-endemic (not pandemic) virus is so strong that Fox News reports that she has gotten into Twitter (X) feuds even with colleagues, as in this exchange where her fellow Washington Post writer, Helaine Olen, posted, quite mildly, that “At some point we’re going to need to begin a conversation about the people still too afraid to leave their homes because of COVID…this is not a healthy way to live.” Lorenz responded with outrage, “What an absurd, insensitive thing to post.”
Except it’s not absurd. This exchange between two colleagues at one of the nation’s largest newspapers shows how we have allowed binary thinking, spoon-fed to us by several major media outlets, to divide us. (One Washington Post headline read: “Macron is Right: It’s Time to Make Life a Living Hell for Anti-Vaxxers.”) This division is what’s absurd.
Of course, people should absolutely have the option to vaccinate, to mask up, even to socially isolate for all eternity (though that last one sounds depressing). But the vitriol between those who choose such options and those who do not is useless, often painful, and exacerbated by a line of binary thinking promoted by mainstream media and its Big Government/Big Pharma props and benefactors, along with Lorenz.
Personal Authority
In her social media interactions – which Lorenz must see as critical, given her high engagement and that it is her field of study – it’s evident that she has become a classic “disinfo dupe.” She thinks she is doing the right thing with her binary thinking and ad hominem attacks. But she has bought hook, line, and sinker into a Big Pharma-driven narrative, one that’s inextricably, and financially, linked to mainstream media – to the point where this narrative can actually do harm to others, even those who are trying rationally to engage with her. There is one party line for Lorenz, which seems to consist solely of endless COVID vaccinations and total lockdown forever. Until they find you in your basement, covered in cobwebs. But at least you were vaccinated!
And what of the other points of view; are they really as dismissible as this narrative would make them seem? Scores of parents have come forth about how emotionally and psychologically damaging the lockdowns were on their children and even themselves, as detailed in a study published by the National Library of Medicine.
Even masking, which can be an act of generosity and politeness in public if you think someone near you prefers it, has a detrimental effect on very young children when carried out long-term, as reported by NPR. Masks bar them from seeing the facial expressions of others at a critical time when they are making sense of interactions and the human world.
A large body of literature now shows that masking was ineffective at preventing the spread of COVID because SARS CoV-2 was airborne. Even before the pandemic, randomized controlled studies existed that showed community masking does not prevent the spread of respiratory viruses.
Of interest, a major Cochrane Review of the entire scientific literature on mask efficacy showed little to no benefit from the practice during COVID. Cochrane Editor Karla Soares-Weiser publicly threw the scientists under the bus, claiming she had the study changed and accusing the authors of fraud. However this claim was not true, and the work was never changed at all, according to Paul Thacker.
Perhaps perpetual isolation is perfect for a journalist whose reportage is nearly one hundred percent about online trends. But she could also consider that for others – for most, even – it’s a mental health death sentence, and one that should perhaps never have been inflicted on society (certainly not on children).
People should not have had to watch their elderly loved ones slowly die through nursing home windows. They should not have been fired from their jobs for making a personal medical choice, a claim supported by the recent verdict from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in which public school employees were granted the right to sue the School Board in Los Angeles, as reported by Bloomberg. These employees – and others – should not have felt constantly terrified and shamed by mainstream media outlets for making their own decisions. Maybe, Taylor Lorenz, it’s time to let other people have their own personal authority?
TikTok is the new CNN
In “The White House is Briefing TikTok Stars about the War in Ukraine” (Washington Post, October 2023), Lorenz reported on a strange new merging of the online and political worlds: active recruiting by the Biden administration to rally social media stars, many of them teenagers, in support of the Ukraine War. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki and Security Council members invited 30 TikTok influencers (with millions of followers between them) to listen to a talk about the administration’s objectives and the harrowing threat of possible use of nuclear weapons by Russia, with the expectation that these starry-eyed youngsters will spread the information. No matter anyone’s political leanings, this strategy is essentially an administration deploying youth and children in a propaganda campaign.
And while I respect the savvy and creativity of TikTok influencers, and do not want to sound too old school, this kind of promotion gives one the odd feeling of hearing that, say, the Bay of Pigs invasion is being given the thumbs-up by your high school football team.
Seeking Attention Then Playing the Victim
Lorenz also has a habit of inserting herself into events and then publicly playing the victim. One of the first times she received media attention was in 2021 when she falsely claimed Marc Andreessen had used the “r-word” in a Clubhouse chat, as reported by Fox News. Never mind that Lorenz had not been invited to the discussion.
She also appeared in a segment on MSNBC in 2022 where she publicy cried about how being a journalist is “terrifying” and “really hard.” While Honest Media does not support online bullying, which Lorenz claims to have received, she hardly seems like someone to cry about being on the receiving end of it after she has doxxed other internet figures and exposed them to all sorts of the kind of bullying that she then cried about.
For example, Lorenz doxxed the creator of “Libs of TikTok,” Chaya Raichik in a Washington Post column. After her identity was revealed by Lorenz, Raichik received enormous backlash for her conservative views (although Lorenz received her share of criticism as well for doxxing). Yet the two then teamed together to conduct the aforementioned absurd interview in which Lorenz wears a COVID mask and they seem determined to disagree and collect soundbites to share with their respective followers rather than have a good-faith conversation. It is not the only time, however, that Lorenz has doxxed a TikToker – Ariadna Jacob shared her own story of having her home address published online in a story despite Lorenz having given assurances that she would not do that exact thing.
Of course journalists, like anyone, can make mistakes, but Lorenz seems to only hold other people accountable for theirs. She did not apologize to Andreessen or Jacob, but did complain that the MSNBC interview in which she cried actually exposed her to more online backlash and bullying, as reported by Fox News. Clearly, Lorenz thinks it’s fine to expose others to harassment, but will do anything to avoid taking responsibility when it happens to her.
Because of her quest for attention while simultaneously weaponizing politics and fear against anyone who disagrees with her, Taylor Lorenz is most certainly a Disinfo Dupe.
Great piece Matt & Nikos!
Lorenz will be employed for her attracted views and not for the content of her drivel.