🔒 Taylor Lorenz Derangement Syndrome

I stumbled into one of the most deranged and sociopathic conspiracies I’ve ever encountered in all my time writing about oligarchs and I discovered it purely because I’m having some trouble figuring out why I’m supposed to hate Taylor Lorenz.

 The blockbuster article everyone was talking about recently was Ben Smith’s piece for Semafor about high-level right-wing influencers and their secret group chats. I’m less scandalized by the group chats thing than I think a lot of people are because it kind of just sounds like reindeer games to me. The smoking rooms and brandy snifters swapped out for the convenience of conspiring from the toilet. One phrase from the article did stand out for me in particular: the fact that these people all have a “particularly focused and developed dislike of the former Washington Post writer Taylor Lorenz.”

 I only ever heard of Lorenz for the first time within the past couple of years but the general sort of vibe is that this is somebody who We Don’t Like.

 This isn’t Cancellation. There is, it feels, a lower tier of notoriety that doesn’t rise to the level of being cancelled but still hangs in the air somehow. Taylor Lorenz is a successful writer with plenty of industry clout, her subscription numbers indicate she can do this relatively comfortably without too many side-gigs. There’s a spectrum of human suspicion along which you might say that someone isn’t blacklisted but they are greylisted.

 The question of why isn’t easy to answer.

 There isn’t anything I’ve ever seen about Taylor Lorenz that particularly bothers me. She appears to be either a democratic socialist or a social democrat, which is roughly what I think I am. She writes about online pop culture, which can get cringy but it’s good to document it. She seems, from my perspective, like a nice person.

 Yet when the Substack podcast interviewed Lorenz in 2023 the community from seemingly all over the political spectrum erupted in fierce outrage. For context, this episode aired directly after the Richard Hanania interview, after he’d been busted writing white supremacist material a few years back. People thought promoting Lorenz was just as bad.

 Substack CEO Chris Best was frustrated with “guilt by conversation,” like he was bothered that people might think he’s as bad as Taylor Lorenz. Here he is telling either a current or recovering white nationalist (depending on what level of repentance you believe from Hanania) that he’d be bothered by that.

It’s easy to just go with the grain, here, especially when it’s bipartisan. I don’t know who everyone on the internet is. I’ll admit that, in the short time that I’ve known of the existence of Taylor Lorenz, I’ve assumed that she’s kind of a shit person and have treated her accordingly. Sometimes you just go where the water flows.

 So, what if the water is polluted?

 Here’s where I believe that the general bad vibe that people get from Lorenz is the result of a creeping miasma that’s bled into the social media environment through the deliberate efforts of some of the most powerful men on the planet. It’s because it’s fun to try to utterly destroy somebody. This is what men bored with their wealth do for sport.

 Sometimes I wonder if I actually believe in the existence of evil, as a concept, and then I come across something like this.

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