Seeing people say that Taylor Lorenz is going to have an alt-right turn after the last couple days but I think that misses the dynamics here. It's not Left/Right, it's High Trust/Low Trust, and she's been Low Trust for a long time.
Replies
Very very low
aug 20, 2025, 6:02 pm • 0 0 • view
There’s no spectrum or dynamics though. She’s just a mentally unstable person who marinated too much in her own online persona & clout.
aug 21, 2025, 6:53 am • 1 0 • view
This pattern has repeated over and over. It explains so many people’s bizarre transformations. This seems like it should be relevant to Brianna Wu’s strange turn, but she wasn’t ever really big on conspiracy theories. I don’t get it.
aug 20, 2025, 6:27 pm • 6 0 • view
There are different types of heel turns. Wu's deal is more about extreme pick-me-ism
aug 21, 2025, 11:17 am • 2 0 • view
What is it she has low trust of?
aug 20, 2025, 6:48 pm • 1 0 • view
Probably institutions and norms and society in general.
aug 20, 2025, 7:25 pm • 2 0 • view
But if that’s it—I DO get it, and it’s revealing. Most of us have attachment to knowledge producing institutions, norms and a grounding in some body of knowledge. The right requires you to leave all that behind. Figuring out why that’s so easy mystifies me even if I see the low social trust.
aug 20, 2025, 7:34 pm • 1 0 • view
I have lived amongst these folks my whole life and they suffer from something akin to oppositional defiance disorder.
aug 20, 2025, 7:37 pm • 4 0 • view
What strikes me is how adolescent it is. It’s NORMAL in an adolescent. Maybe even good. (Adolescence is a strange time, cognitively…it is developmental though.) A touch of opposition/distrust is required then, for developing a capacity for independent inquiry. Somehow they don’t develop further.
aug 20, 2025, 7:43 pm • 1 0 • view
My son is almost 10. The defiance is strong in him. God forbid he gets stuck there. I'll blame myself for not moving away from these hillbillies.
aug 20, 2025, 7:45 pm • 1 0 • view
Is that the version you experience? I experienced it more in the sorta ‘people who are curious but didn’t go to college’…mostly hippies and rightwingers…in the SW. I am wrangling a defiant tween now—one that hates to read. But so far, his public school is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
aug 20, 2025, 7:49 pm • 0 0 • view
I'm in Ohio, not too far from the Appalachian foothills in the rust belt. Rednecks, hillbillies, and so so so much poverty. His public school is doing okay and I purposely chose one with diversity. But he also hates to read! He does enjoy being read to and gets interested in history so there's hope!
aug 20, 2025, 7:56 pm • 1 0 • view
I lived in that general area for a short time years ago and it was a fiasco. Dealing with the people—I just couldn’t get them. At all! It was eye-opening to find this out about myself. I didn’t know I was that sensitive to my social/cultural environment. I found a nice neighborhood but I struggled.
aug 20, 2025, 8:00 pm • 1 0 • view
I really don't get them either. I understand who they are, but I can't figure out why. I've lived the same life they have and I don't buy any of the excuses about economic anxiety and all that bullshit.
aug 20, 2025, 8:12 pm • 2 0 • view
RIGHT. OK, I may get it now. If the idea is that’s how people get into MAHA and MAGA—but perhaps it’s also not having a firm footing in the framework that lets you understand what’s going on in the first place. They can’t draw on existing science, medicine, economics, or other bodies of knowledge.
aug 20, 2025, 7:31 pm • 5 0 • view
It's like they cultivate a habit of rejecting experts and then who's left to turn to?
aug 20, 2025, 7:34 pm • 2 0 • view
Yes. That’s what happens. I HAVE seen how they do that. As a child, I remember a friend’s father ridiculing someone for being ‘open-minded’ as their mind would fall out of their head. For years, I puzzled over what he could mean then realized—oh, it’s THAT. People without a firm basis for belief.
aug 20, 2025, 7:38 pm • 2 0 • view
Yup!
aug 20, 2025, 6:01 pm • 0 0 • view
She might feel better if she dropped the temperature in her luxury apartment (on a journalist's salary!) below 86F
aug 20, 2025, 9:53 pm • 0 0 • view
She's not making any kind of turn. People wilfully misunderstood her entirely true point about how Nazis strategically use civility while leftists strategically disdain it. She's a hypochondriac, and there are a LOT more of those in liberal-left spaces than anyone wants to admit.
aug 21, 2025, 8:47 am • 5 0 • view
I’m no expert but imo the biggest bear trap pundits face is their desperate need for attention and validation, and that positive and negative forms of both nourish their weird, broken psyches
aug 20, 2025, 6:25 pm • 20 0 • view
aug 20, 2025, 6:27 pm • 11 0 • view
she's not Alt Right, she's just more concerned about clicks than good journalism her whole thing is being good at becoming big on social media
aug 20, 2025, 10:45 pm • 3 0 • view
It's been a fascinating ride watching the unhinging of her posts since leaving the NYT and then WaPo. I'm not a blind champion of either publication, but I think we're also witnessing the perils of practicing journalism without external editorial input (not counting the shouting hordes).
aug 20, 2025, 6:10 pm • 37 0 • view
What happened? I've been offline
aug 20, 2025, 6:22 pm • 1 0 • view
She has has own substack and youtube now.
aug 20, 2025, 6:58 pm • 5 0 • view
Related
aug 20, 2025, 6:08 pm • 72 1 • view
What did she do now?
aug 20, 2025, 9:10 pm • 2 0 • view
This further proves my idea that low trust results in reactionary politics, which is ironic because rw love to talk about how high trust = no brown people (eg japan)
aug 20, 2025, 8:09 pm • 2 0 • view
They're yearning for what they know they don't have, listen to miller talk about how lonely he is some time
aug 22, 2025, 3:30 am • 1 0 • view
And the real danger with being low trust anything is that it puts you at increasing risk of entering the crank zone, which is when your politics become so contradictory to outsiders that you become non-partisan, and that's where she's likely headed.
aug 20, 2025, 6:02 pm • 359 20 • view
Crank magnetism is probably a bit of a dated concept these days but once you embrace other ways of knowing in one area the threshold to do so in others seems to be lowered.
aug 20, 2025, 6:06 pm • 10 0 • view
I think she’s been there tbh Like just utter crank about COVID stuff and it’s influenced her other takes already
aug 20, 2025, 6:03 pm • 91 0 • view
Yeah I feel like her entry point is Covid/wellness crankery
aug 20, 2025, 6:13 pm • 32 0 • view
Unfortunately even earlier She was "cooked" on Twitter/X and pushed to an extreme for attention Like America's response to COVID and lack of basic masking etiquette here deserve criticism, but handing it to Nazis accommodating about masks grooming you with classic tactics? bsky.app/profile/iwri...
aug 20, 2025, 6:39 pm • 16 0 • view
100%. Lorenz really was a good tech reporter, once upon a time. Her stuff on the digital landscape was legit, as late as 2018. All her post-Covid nuttiness kind of overshadows the massive amounts harassment she received at the hands of Elon, Tucker Carlson et al.
aug 20, 2025, 10:02 pm • 6 0 • view
Masking has been a criticism of hers for a long time, and she isn't wrong. Leftist spaces have been dropping the ball on this. I understand holding leftists to higher standards, but that's something you do in your community, not as a journalist, while fascists occupy and kill us.
aug 20, 2025, 6:12 pm • 5 0 • view
she is very much wrong about masking
aug 20, 2025, 6:47 pm • 0 0 • view
You don't get to demand that leftists act differently than everyone else when you aren't one. If you actually believe that they are better ethically, then why aren't you more involved in the community? If you don't believe that, why are we constantly held to different standards?
aug 20, 2025, 6:12 pm • 3 0 • view
Reminds me of when Klippenstein pushed a breathless “exclusive” that Pentagon officials had war plans for a conflict with Iran drawn up and, like…yeah. That’s what general staffs do. It’s their whole thing.
aug 31, 2025, 1:31 pm • 1 0 • view
The right isn’t really the right anymore, it’s realigned to the bottom half of the horseshoe.
aug 20, 2025, 6:06 pm • 3 0 • view
Shes already pretty much an anti vaxxer!!
aug 20, 2025, 6:03 pm • 11 0 • view
yeah - I don't think she's ever likely to end up endorsing the right wing bullshit around like, race, or gender, or trans rights or anything. But she could easily be a Greyzone style weirdo
aug 20, 2025, 7:06 pm • 16 1 • view
“I think we should spend $1trn on the border wall but just to make it tall enough to block airborne COVID”
aug 21, 2025, 6:37 am • 5 0 • view
This is true, but I’d also add - audience capture might be the only drug more addictive than heroin.
aug 20, 2025, 9:35 pm • 3 0 • view
Naomi Klein in Doppleganger called it the "far right/far out" which I liked a lot
aug 31, 2025, 1:31 pm • 1 0 • view
and rich v poor, and she prefers the rich to the poor.
aug 20, 2025, 6:16 pm • 0 0 • view