The mean-girl nihilism of Taylor Lorenz

’Tis the season to be jolly! Most of us are currently feeling joy because Christmas is around the corner. But if your name is Taylor Lorenz, it’s because a man was shot dead in broad daylight.

Lorenz, former columnist at the Washington Post and former tech reporter at the New York Times, has quite a knack for saying things that set normal people aflame in indignation, as well as a knack for crying fake tears and generally being loathsome. Just last week, she called people who don’t wear masks ‘dumb fucks’ who are ‘raw-dogging the air’ and ‘spewing… disease-laden breath’. I had no idea that people were still so terrified of breathing this many years after Covid.

This time, America’s liberal mean girl has really outdone herself, announcing on Piers Morgan Uncensored that she concurs with her fellow ‘progressives’ in celebrating the apparent assassination of a man, because he worked in an industry she does not approve of.

Last week, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down on a Manhattan sidewalk. Now, I think that American health insurance, overall, does not work in the interests of the American people. But I am also against extra-judicial killings. Does that make me right wing?

Such moral niceties are of no concern to Lorenz, however. ‘I do believe in the sanctity of life’, she told Morgan, before demonstrating clearly that she does not. She described how she, ‘along with so many other Americans’, apparently, felt a sense of ‘joy’ when she heard about Thompson’s death. When Morgan vehemently pushed back on her use of the word ‘joy’, she backpedalled a bit: ‘Maybe not joy, but certainly not empathy.’ She tried to justify this by alleging that ‘Tens of thousands of Americans, innocent Americans, died because greedy healthcare executives like this one pushed policies of denying care to the most vulnerable people’.

At one point she managed to make a more defensible point, saying: ‘I want to fix the system, you’re right – we shouldn’t be going around shooting each other with vigilante justice.’ But, then, just as you thought she’d realised that killing is actually bad, she said she felt ‘vindicated, celebratory, because… it feels like justice in this system, when somebody responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans, suffers the same fate as those tens of thousands of Americans who he murdered – or the system murdered’. She couldn’t help but keep digging.

Lorenz’s madness wasn’t limited to one appearance on Piers Morgan’s show, either. In a post on Bluesky, she wrote: ‘People have very justified hatred toward insurance company CEOs… As someone against death and suffering, I think it’s good to call out this broken system and the people in power who enable it.’

Call out the system? On that, I’d agree. But Thompson, a father of two children, was not ‘called out’. He was shot twice at close range. The video of his death was circulated around the world. How can someone claim to be ‘against death and suffering’ and also defend this?

What’s more, Americans were already very aware that their healthcare system is utterly broken. Only a fool like Lorenz would claim that Thompson’s killing was somehow ‘raising awareness’ of the flaws in an immensely complex and mind-bogglingly expensive system.

Every excuse, every attempt at justification for this killing, falls flat. Even if you were to somehow set aside the moral objections to murder, simply taking out one CEO of one company will do nothing to eradicate the rot at the heart of the system. Nor will it ensure American children can get life-saving medical care. Why would it? Does this really need to be spelled out?

Perhaps for Lorenz it does need spelling out. After all, she is not very bright. She is a spoiled, cosseted member of the American elite. You can’t tell if she’s gone mad, or is just desperate for attention. Her attempts to LARP as a radical reveal a nihilism beneath.

Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here.