September 22 2026 - 6:15pm
Taylor Lorenz has found another way to keep people talking about Taylor Lorenz. In a new Free Press profile, the journalist once associated with the Hall Monitor Left and policing other people’s speech has emerged as an evangelist for online freedom. She praised the First Amendment and called America “the best country”, while claiming that Elon Musk had improved X — despite once calling it “the Nazi app”. She added that she mourns a future in which we squander AI because “a bunch of doomsday cultists keep getting media tours”.
To the online Left, a friendly appearance on Bari Weiss’s website looks like apostasy; to the e-Right, it’s Lorenz’s come-to-Jesus moment (though not literally). Another possibility — and the one I believe — is that Lorenz remains remarkably faithful to the world that made her famous: the internet is her workplace, social habitat, and preferred model of civilization, and it’s where she spends almost 17 hours a day. The medium is the message.
Consider Lorenz’s pedigree. For many years, she covered internet culture and tech for the Atlantic, New York Times and Washington Post as a more traditional reporter. In a telling 2018 essay for Nieman Lab, she predicted that journalists would increasingly prioritize their personal brands, cultivate loyal followings and establish their own distribution channels. It reads now like an early business plan for her, as does her 2023 book, Extremely Online, a history of how the creator economy was built.
In 2024, she left the Washington Post after the paper opened an internal review into an Instagram post featuring then-president Joe Biden and the caption “War criminal :(”. Since then, she has carved out a more explicitly Left-wing corner of the internet for herself, first through her own Substack and podcast, then as a contributor to Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo from January 2025. In the last year, she streamed with Hasan Piker and continued her running feuds with other streamers and journalists, including me. It is a model of internet politics in which confrontation is not a distraction from the content but part of the content. And the numbers suggest that it works: online combat gets eyeballs.
But as of late, she’s received negative feedback from her highly Left-wing socialist audience for her stances on AI, which she embraces. She’s accused the Left of being too knee-jerk against tech and last week quote-tweeted a Politico story about Americans souring on AI, writing that “we are going to lose a chance at a better world.”
Has one of the internet’s most conspicuous Leftists finally been mogged by the free market? She doesn’t go that far, telling the FP: “I really feel like there’s not a clear political group I map onto now.” But what this Free Press interview may represent is a new season of Taylor Lorenz. In some sense, she’s become the MrBeast of online journalism, a creature of pure algorithm who, over time, has turned her own personality and feuds into an endlessly renewable source of content. The projects, collaborators, and antagonists change, but Lorenz remains the product.
