"Suddenly, while they were drinking their coffee...."

GenX here. Three people I knew died in the towers, human beings just like Taylor Lorenz, who got on the subway and went to work one day and then suddenly while they were drinking their coffee they had to decide whether to jump or burn to death.

Not a fucking punchline. https://t.co/drIyJJxgfn

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) May 30, 2025

Peter Thiel talks to Piers Morgan about Daniel Penny and Luigi Mangione.

It's an interesting discussion, but many people are getting hung up on Thiel's very awkward, disfluent manner of speaking:

Morgan shows Thiel a clip that Luigi Mangione shared on social media. It's a clip of Thiel himself, and Thiel says it's the first time he's heard about the alleged killer's interest in him. In that clip, Thiel says:

"I just wanted to get out of legacy media. I feel like it’s just really, really difficult to do the kind of reporting that I want to do on the internet..."

"... within these kind of older institutions as a primary job. I like to have a really interactive relationship with my audience. I like to be very vocal online, obviously. And I just think all of that is really hard to do in the roles that are available at these legacy institutions.... I write about the attention economy, and I write about the content creator industry, and I just want complete autonomy to write and do and say whatever I want, and engage a little bit more directly with my readers, with the public, when it comes to my work."

Says Taylor Lorenz, quoted in "Taylor Lorenz Exits Washington Post to Launch ‘User Mag’ on Substack/Lorenz, who is leaving the newspaper to launch the publication, says that it will 'cover technology from the user side,' in contrast to traditional coverage of social media" (Hollywood Reporter).

I just want complete autonomy to write and do and say whatever I want.... 

Taylor Lorenz tiktoks the news about news.

Good morning. Taylor Lorenz has some great news for you today:
pic.twitter.com/xRP4SALnbv

— Carl Benjamin (@Sargon_of_Akkad) January 25, 2024

Left/right is a continuum, and Taylor Lorenz is telling you where she is on the line, that is, what's to the right of her.

My God, this take. It’s magnificent. pic.twitter.com/cwcytjo9jh

— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) December 12, 2023

This is easy for me to understand. I remember a colleague of mine — years ago — laughing that at this point she finds that everyone she knows is to her right. And in speaking about the Supreme Court, it's conventional to deny that Justice X or Justice Y has moved to the left and to assert that they stayed where they've always been while the Court moved to the right. 

"I love YouTube, and I want to be famous on YouTube, because I want a lot of money..."

"... said camper Chloe, 7, a second-grader who said she has dreamed of being a YouTuber since age 4. As a YouTube star, 'I could buy whatever I want,' she added, including 'an iPhone and a computer, AirPods and a Barbie Dreamhouse. A real Barbie Dreamhouse, that’s big and has walls. It would be in Paris because of the Eiffel Tower. I would go see the Eiffel Tower every day, and I’d have my room in front of the Eiffel Tower every morning and make videos about that.'"

Writes Taylor Lorenz, in "Camps teaching kids to be YouTubers are cropping up across the country/Education programs aimed at helping children gain the skills needed to become online creators are exploding" (WaPo).

"Tucker Carlson's glory days are over, and his new episodic Twitter show is the evidence of his fall from grace."

Writes Cheryl Teh, in "Tucker Carlson is nothing without Fox News, and his sad Twitter-broadcast debut proves it" (Business Insider).

First off, make no mistake: Carlson still gets the views.... 

The video, up for a day and a half, has over 100 million views. At the point Teh's column went up, it was it was at 11.2 million, already much more than he had on Fox News (around 2 million, which was about twice what Fox has without him).

But enough about numbers! Teh continues with her theory that Carlson is nothing without Fox News:

"Right now, children online have zero protections in regard to their privacy, in regard to their labor, in regard to the income they’re generating for their family."

"If people are going to use children this way, these children deserve protections, just the way child stars have. Imagine being one of these kids and having every single day of your life exploited on a family vlog, and getting to be 18 and seeing nothing in your bank account. Or every moment of your life being monetized and commercialized, the invasion of privacy goes so deep." 

Said Sarah Adams, a "child-safety advocate," quoted in "There are almost no legal protections for the internet’s child stars/Illinois is considering a law, but a similar effort in Washington state failed, and Congress hasn’t tackled the issue" by Taylor Lorenz (WaPo).

There are so many issues mixed together here.

Twitter's problem with real-time location doxxing.

People had been posting an address they thought I was at, photos of houses, and death threats.

If something tracked my real time location then they'd know where I actually was at.

— Tim Pool (@Timcast) December 16, 2022

SEE ALSO:

"What Musk is doing is... like opening the gates of hell...."

Said one of the experts quoted — by Taylor Lorenz — in "'Opening the gates of hell': Musk says he will revive banned accounts/The Twitter chief says he will reinstate accounts suspended for threats, harassment and misinformation beginning next week" (WaPo).

Why would you want to keep people in Hell? 

 

Why not forgive — if only to give them a second chance? Musk knows that the process of condemnation wasn't fair. At the very least, we are worried that it was skewed against conservatives. It's efficient to wipe the slate clean — to default toward freedom — and to begin again, with a viewpoint neutral approach that is transparent and centered on protecting individuals from harm, not on helping one side over another.

Some who are released from Hell will be those who shouldn't have been condemned in the first place. Some will be those from whom the group does need protection, but these will either go on and sin no more or they will sin again, and they can be dealt with under the new, fair procedure.

And Musk isn't even talking about letting everyone back in. The question he asked in his poll was "Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?" He can say the people have spoken and there will be "general amnesty," but there's that proviso. Anyone who is already known as a danger can still be excluded. On the face of it, Musk isn't recklessly absolutist about freedom of speech. 

The hell the anti-Muskites are afraid of — isn't it just the loss of a political advantage they never should have had in the first place? Did the censorship they enjoyed only make them soft and fearful and stunt their capacity to debate?

"At one point, a creator pointed out that there were images of corn etched into the columns right before the old Senate chamber and the group joked about the 'it’s corn' TikTok meme."

"'It was incredible to see the creators interpret the government through the lens of internet culture,' Daks* said. Next, it was off to the White House.... After [a] news conference, Biden ushered the content creators into the Oval Office for an hour-long private meeting.... 'We know people listen to trusted messengers, and as an increasing number of young people turn to Instagram, TikTok and other platforms for news and information, we need to engage with the voices they trust directly,' said Rob Flaherty, the White House director of digital strategy.... 'In all my years in politics, I’ve never seen a single strategy that could flip a state on its own,' said [a] founder of digital consulting firm.... 'TikTok is that strategy — it impacts culture and politics in a way that no other media reaches.'... Kat Wellington, 24, a lifestyle and fashion content creator, said she was previously hesitant to get political on her TikTok account, but... 'This trip helped me make the push to use my platform for that. I don’t want to be afraid to share my genuine beliefs about politics, even if it’s going to upset some people.'"

Writes Taylor Lorenz in "Inside the Dems’ elaborate attempt to woo TikTok influencers/A free trip to D.C., a private chat with Obama and an hour in the Oval Office with Biden: The Democrats are rolling out the red carpet for social media influencers" (WaPo). 

This is giving me a flashback to the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, when Democrats were wrangling bloggers. I wrote: 

"How do you know who’s in bad faith? Like, what’s my faith? You’re sort of looking into people’s hearts..."

"... and saying, 'This person who disagrees with me, they’re not mad at me because I got something wrong, they’re not mad at me because they think I’m too liberal, they’re fundamentally in bad faith.'"

Ben Smith challenged Taylor Lorenz, quoted in "Taylor Lorenz grilled over claims that critics are acting in 'bad faith'" (NY Post)(video of a long interview at the link).

Lorenz's babbling non-answer is so inane I couldn't decide whether to accuse her of being in bad faith or confess that I no longer knew what "bad faith" even is:

Glenn Greenwald compares how WaPo treated Taylor Lorenz with how it treated David Weigel.

Taylor Lorenz just got caught repeatedly lying in her article such that WP had to revise it 3 times as an "Editor's Note," and it still contains a lie: nothing happened.

Dave Weigel immediately apologized for RT'ing a joke and is suspended without pay:https://t.co/fmtFNy78XN

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 6, 2022

ADDED: Greenwald goes on in a series of tweets that I won't link to individually: 

"Now, just three weeks after its announcement, the Disinformation Governance Board is being 'paused, according to multiple employees at DHS..."

"... capping a back-and-forth week of decisions that changed during the course of reporting of this story. On Monday, DHS decided to shut down the board, according to multiple people with knowledge of the situation. By Tuesday morning, Jankowicz had drafted a resignation letter in response to the board’s dissolution." 

WaPo reports, in "How the Biden administration let right-wing attacks derail its disinformation efforts/A ‘pause’ of the Department of Homeland Security’s newly created board comes after its head, Nina Jankowicz, was the victim of coordinated online attacks as the administration struggled to respond."

Ha ha ha. "Let right-wing attacks derail" — that's rich. The idea was so bad, they couldn't defend it. Let derail. Ha. Like it was a train, locomoting powerfully down the track.... No,  it wasn't. It never had any traction. It went kablooey only because everyone didn't lay down and let it go by entirely unimpeded.

Ha ha ha. Good news. Good news, sillily delivered.

ADDED: I'm just noticing that this article I'm laughing at was written by Taylor Lorenz — the person who came under criticism a month ago for doxxing Libs of TikTok.

Maybe this is the moment when the rise of censorship began to slow and our nation began to heal!

MORE HILARIOUS SNIPPETS:

"If you are attempting to persuade this creep's defenders, specifically, and not a general audience, that what [Taylor] Lorenz did was ethical, and that the creep's identity is newsworthy, you have made a category error...."

"You are debating logic and facts with frothing bigots with a bone-deep opposition to your entire project. This new right fundamentally doesn’t want 'newsgathering' to happen. They want a chaotic information stream of unverifiable bullshit and context collapse and propaganda.... It’s an ideologically coherent opposition to the liberal precepts of verifiability and transparency, and the holders of those precepts are too invested in them to understand what their enemy is doing. The creep’s account [Libs of TikTok], everyone in the press should understand, is the model for what they will be replaced with.... All I would like my unbiased, objective, nonpartisan reporter friends to understand is that they are debating with people that consider them the enemy not just in a partisan sense but in an existential one. The only correct posture to take in response is to make yourself an existential threat to their movement."

Writes Alex Pareene, in "They Know How Journalism Works! They’re Just Against It!/They want someone to knock on your door, too. Not to put you in the newspaper, though" (Substack).

That rant is getting a lot of attention. It's inherently contradictory — a rant against chaos. But I thought you should see that. I guess by Pareene's lights, I'm a creep, because I'm just holding something up, giving it visibility, where it will be seen by people who may feel moved to laugh or attack.

ADDED: The "creep" usage makes me long for simpler days, when Eggagog was endlessly alarmed about THE CREEPS.

She didn't decline to comment!

Christina Pushaw tweets:

Why Taylor Lorenz gave me a “deadline” of an hour to respond, at 8pm last night: She WANTED to write in Washington Post that “@GovRonDeSantis Press Secretary declined to comment on her relationship with @libsoftiktok.” As if it’s shameful to follow / like / RT the account. NOPE.

Here's the screen shot of their email exchange: 

WaPo goes after the Twitter feed "Libs of TikTok" — tracing and revealing the name of someone who had been anonymous.

"Meet the woman behind Libs of TikTok, secretly fueling the right’s outrage machine A popular Twitter account has morphed into a social media phenomenon, spreading anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment and shaping public discourse" by Taylor Lorenz. 

Last Thursday, the woman behind the account appeared anonymously on Tucker Carlson’s show to complain about being temporarily suspended for violating Twitter’s community guidelines. Fox News often creates news packages around the content that Libs of TikTok has surfaced.... 

[T]he identity of the operator of Libs of TikTok is traceable through a complex online history and reveals someone who has been plugged into right-wing discourse for two years and is now helping to drive it.... 

A woman at the address listed to [this] name in Los Angeles declined to identify herself. On Monday night, a tweet from Glenn Greenwald confirmed the house that was visited belonged to [her] family....

I guess Lorenz (and WaPo) think this doxxing is acceptable — and good journalism — because the person is opposed to the left and giving visibility to its TikTok videos that might otherwise escape notice. There's this implicit justification for doxxing: