The press loves to police proper thought in this country. Telling us what is acceptable content and loudly decrying anything they can classify as "misinformation" has been a constant for years now. One of the third-rail items sure to get journalists in a frothing rage had been "COVID misinformation," which makes this next revelation regarding infamous Washington Post antagonizer Taylor Lorenz all the more perplexing from the standpoint of the non-emotional pragmatic thinker.
To properly put things in perspective for this entry, allow me to lay a foundation. Recently, at Townhall, I wrote our annual compilation of the worst journalists of the year, and I received a few comments remarking on the fact that Taylor Lorenz had not been featured higher in the Top 10. I’ve had to explain that this is in part because, after her notable ethical problems a year or so ago, the management at the Washington Post kept her on a much shorter editorial leash, pulling her off of the main site and making her submit pieces to specific superiors for proper vetting.
The other component is that Lorenz has unraveled into being a complete COVID hysteric. As the general public has moved away from the pandemic, Lorenz has instead clung even more firmly to the viral threat than ever before. Taylor has spent the past year uniquely obsessed with the viral contagion most others have walked away from, filing reports and filling up her social media with constant posts about the virus and how it affects her.
She claims to be “disabled” somehow as a result of COVID and makes demands that others need to be fully masked around her at all times. Well…not all times. It appears that she is willing to make exceptions when it suits her image and exposure. Over the holidays, she claimed that she was incapable of seeing her family for years due to her self-imposed restrictions, yet throughout last year, we saw examples of her willing to mingle with others in promotional publicity settings.
#1 Taylor Lorenz declares she cannot spend Christmas with her maskless family.
— Lie-Able Sources (@LieAbleSources) December 24, 2023
#2 Lorenz partying with celebs in March
#3 Accepting an influencer award this summer
#4 Looking comfortable with 10 others for a publicity shot in August pic.twitter.com/foCWBPSt4u
I give you this preamble to prepare you for the unhinged commentary to follow. Lorenz put up a response to an NBC News item regarding the war in Gaza, and the layers of journalism quackery on display are almost impressive. That item was a report detailing some of the health conditions and challenges facing the residents in Gaza following the outbreak of the war and Israel suspending some of the utilities it was supplying to the region, such as fresh water.
Lorenz latched on to a small pebble of information in that NBC piece and launched into a Blue-anon-worthy screed that is as unhinged as it gets, but unsurprising considering the source. Just days after embarrassing herself with a lengthy exposé on a Xitter account that was a parody (the online expert debunked the work of Richard Strocher, i.e., “Dick Stroker”), Taylor declared that Gaza was suffering from a massive outbreak of COVID and that this new strain had been manufactured in the U.S. to be released into the region.
(Here is the screen grab for evidence, since she has understandably locked down her account.)
As you likely missed this brilliance due to Taylor Lorenz locking her account, she is now projecting her Covid hysteria onto the Gazans, as if they face no other real issues at the moment. pic.twitter.com/a7qZk4EilE
— Lie-Able Sources (@LieAbleSources) January 16, 2024
To start, the NBC article says no such things even approaching this hysteria. Aside from a couple of tangential mentions of the virus, the lone reference to what the Gazans are facing was this entry: “Covid is also expected to ‘rear its head’ in Gaza.” The network had not even reported anything about cases in that region, just that it is expected to arise at some point.
But here is Lorenz stating that COVID is “raging” in the area (completely false), residents are being “slammed” with variants (a tough claim to make when not even one case was reported), and that these have been cooked up in some nefarious lab in America (hilarious Reynolds Wrap Chapeau theorizing), created by “people like you guys” (a baffling claim when “we” have been scorched for years by the likes of her for suggesting the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis), impacting “disabled people” who are incapable of purchasing groceries (a non-deft turn of the story onto herself.)
Yes, Ms. Lorenz has officially crossed the Rubicon of sanity and into the miasma-filled world of fever-dream lunacy. This is a primary example of why I downgraded her status as a journalist. What is more perplexing is how the Washington Post has not stepped in to rein in this behavior. Yes, you can say this a persona’s private account, except she is allegedly a journalist, and here she is dispensing some blatantly fraudulent material of a current events nature; this would qualify as that absolutely poisonous element in media these days: MISINFORMATION!
But the paper appears content to just let her wander off the reservation of sound thought and to unspool wondrously imbalanced crackpot theories. Big mystery why WaPo is losing a fortune and laying off staff on the regular, when it allows the likes of Taylor Lorenz to linger around and corrupt the already fractured reputation of a once-respected news source.
