Taylor Lorenz is Cretinous and Deranged

The former New York Times and Washington Post reporter takes Luigimania to a new level

Former New York Times and Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz, speaking about accused killer Luigi Mangione on CNN MisinfoNation with Donnie O’Sullivan:

To see these millionaire media pundits on TV clutching their pearls about someone stanning a murderer when this is the United States of America. As if we don’t lionize criminals… There’s a huge disconnect between the narratives and the angles that mainstream media pushes and what the American public feels… You’re going to see women especially that feel like, ‘Oh my God,’ right? Like, ‘Here’s this man who’s revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome, who is young, who’s smart.’ He’s a person that seems like this morally good man, which is hard to find.

I know Lorenz is a human bug-zapper whose purpose is luring people to doom by drawing them to the glow of the impossibly stupid online utterance, but even by her standards this is nuts. For one thing, Lorenz is a leading advocate for dumbed-all-the-way-down media like her “beloved” Vine, which featured six-second-max videos. If someone handed her a hardcover book, she’d be a serious threat to bite it. Her invoking Flannery O’Connor and A Good Man is Hard to Find in the context of Luigi Mangione is high comedy. Regarding America “stanning” murderers because “we give them Netflix shows,” which does she mean? Americans may be fascinated by O.J. and Bundy and Phil Spector, but we don’t gush cartoon hearts at them over cable, we watch them in lurid docudramas.

In reply to co-host Walter Kirn’s deserved ribbing about the MisinfoNation being “the least organic interview in history,” Lorenz charged him with being one of those “weird men who have these outrage meltdowns when I try to talk about extremism online.” Doesn’t she mean “endorsing” extremism in this case? As for “weird,” let’s recap:

When I first read Lorenz I thought she was CIA performance art, a Langley-designed version of a Tony Clifton act designed to collect the names of the 907% of readers who’d recoil in revulsion. In a 2021 Times piece called To Fight Vaccine Lies, Authorities Recruit an ‘Influencer Army,’ Lorenz described a White House effort to use TikTok influencers like Ellie Zeiler to get 12-18-year-olds to get the shot:

Ms. Zeiler quickly agreed, joining a broad, personality-driven campaign to confront an increasingly urgent challenge in the fight against the pandemic: vaccinating the youthful masses, who have the lowest inoculation rates of any eligible age group in the United States.

Writers made of lesser stuff might be troubled by questions like “Do 12-year-olds need this vaccine?” Months later, fellow Times writer David Leonhardt wrote that “for children without a serious medical condition, the danger of severe Covid is so low as to be difficult to quantify.” Others might wonder about the ethics of government end-running parents and “news” by using online jewelry and dress merchants to hype vaccines to kids. I remember finding impressive the breezy unconcern Lorenz showed for such questions.

Most interesting was the happy ending to the piece, in which influencer Christina Najjar a.k.a. “Tinx” interviewed Anthony Fauci. Questions ranged from whether or not it was safe to try to get pregnant with Harry Styles after the vax to how old Fauci thought Najjar looked:

Stories like this are what make the recent Lorenz transformation into a spokesperson for popular rage against “barbaric establishment institutions” a tough one to swallow without laughs. For years, Lorenz was a one-person global surveillance operation, hunting unorthodoxy in every corner of the Internet and investigating the dangers of “unfettered conversations” on sites like Clubhouse, where the level of freedom was such that one user “discouraged people from getting the shots.” Lurking, she heard billionaire Marc Andreessen, or so she thought, wantonly using the word “retard” while no one stopped him:

It turned out not to be Andreessen and Lorenz had to agree the issue had been “clarified” for her, which naturally resulted in a lot of chuckling in media. Glenn Greenwald described her as a “deeply unwell Swiss-boarding-school-educated neurotic who is paid by the New York Times to lurk outside teenagers’ TikTok houses.” Tucker Carlson meanwhile said she was “at the top of journalism’s repulsive little food chain.” After tweeting that the abuse she’d had to suffer had “destroyed her life,” she was the beneficiary of a whole academic study devoted to tracking the abuse she suffered after the Carlson-Greenwald meanness (I don’t remember a school offering to provide any of my friends with similar services), then went on MSNBC to discuss the results. One clip went viral:

Lorenz was mocked anew for this performance, becoming the prize subject of a wide range of Internet meme artists (the AI version of Joe Biden as crying Lorenz was disturbing). Naturally, she blamed the right people for the development: MSNBC.

Lorenz claimed the network and host Morgan Radford (the one trying desperately to be sympathetic in the video) for throwing her “under the bus,” adding, “If your segment or story on ‘online harassment’ leads to even worse online harassment for your subjects, you fucked up royally and should learn how to cover these things properly.”

This wouldn’t be relevant, except as prelude to Mangione. Pre-Luigi, Lorenz had perhaps the world’s most stringent definition of harm, identifying private use of the “r-slur,” being described as a “Swiss-boarding-school-neurotic,” and an MSNBC host failing to aggressively edit out her own embarrassing interview comments as life-imperiling behavior.

She went from the New York Times to the Washington Post to (ironically) Substack. After the Mangione murder on December 4th last year, Lorenz became Luigi’s version of Bundini Brown, telling Piers Morgan she “felt, along with so many other Americans, joy” after the murder of United HealthCare CEO Brian Thompson (she denies the murder is what was what caused the “joy”; be your own judge).

Her Substack for a while was a Luigi fan page, which makes sense now that we know that “I saw the biggest audience growth that I’ve ever seen” with Mangione text. With article titles like “The merchification of Luigi,” “Inside the CEO shooter standom,” and my personal favorite, “Why ‘we’ want insurance executives dead,” Lorenz practically lashed her business to Mangione’s public image. Overnight, we went from living in a world where calling someone an untalented Swiss-boarding-school dipshit is unconscionable PTSD-inducing unfairness, to one where shooting an insurance executive in the back is cause for giddy celebration and smiles.

When the Thompson/Mangione affair happened I laughed at the idea that there would be a counter-massaging campaign framing Mangione’s half-cocked Unabomber imitation (with its mailed-in, tweet-length manifesto) as an improvement on Trump-style underclass rage. Now, Mangione as press darling is definitely a phenomenon, and not just in publications like People and US Weekly (wildest headline: Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Is Not Jealous of Luigi Mangione: ‘There Is No Truth to It’). Ken Klippenstein responded to news of federal efforts to seek death penalty charges by writing that “Luigi Mangione Becomes a Political Prisoner,” while the New Yorker before the New Year ran a piece comparing Luigi to Walter White of Breaking Bad and other “man of the people” American outlaw archetypes.

Mangione the rich sociopath is the opposite of that archetype, far more Leopold and Loeb than Bonnie and Clyde, and it’s telling that there are people who think this can have mass appeal. It’s one of the dumbest ideas of era, but who better than Lorenz to sell it?