Taylor Lorenz Opens Up to Her ‘Close Friends’ about Biden the ‘War Criminal’

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz’s latest viral break with media ethics, and cover more media misses.

Another Taylor Lorenz Controversy

Taylor Lorenz, the Washington Post’s progressive technology columnist, found herself in hot water yet again this week thanks to her compulsive online oversharing. This time, she allegedly called President Biden a “war criminal” in a private Instagram post.

A screenshot of the Instagram story, which was shared with only select users using the platform’s “close friends” feature, was first obtained by New York Post reporter Jon Levine. The story features a selfie of Lorenz at a White House event for content creators. Biden can be seen in the background of the post, which Lorenz reportedly captioned, “War criminal,” with a frowny face.

The New York Times alum initially denied the veracity of the post, saying in a reply to Levine on X that “you people will fall for any dumb*** edit someone makes.”

Levine, for his part, stood by his reporting. NPR later found “four people with direct knowledge” of the post who “confirmed its authenticity.”

Lorenz then changed her story, writing on X that, “I literally never ‘denied it was real.’” She claimed in a second post that it was an “obvious meme,” an apparent reference to a musician Lucy Dacus, who last year referred to former president Barack Obama as a “war criminal :(.”

“Only about 7 people saw the actual close friends post (I have very few people on CF) and almost all are my normie non-media friends. So [I don’t know] who this guy is talking about [to be honest],” Lorenz said in response to the NPR report.

The Washington Post has said it is aware of Lorenz’s post and is “looking into it.”

Yet if Lorenz’s ability to wiggle out of past offenses offer any indication, there is little evidence she’ll face punishment for her apparent breach of the paper’s social-media policies.

Lorenz is no stranger to social-media controversy.

In December 2021, then–Washington Free Beacon reporter Matthew Foldi shared an Instagram story from Lorenz in which she called the United States a “trash country.”

The comment came in response to a question from a follower who asked why “COVID hasn’t woken new Americans up to fight for free healthcare.”

“Yeah if a global pandemic doesn’t help people in this trash country recognize the problems in our healthcare system idk what will,” Lorenz wrote.

Lorenz maintains a striking preoccupation with Covid-19, often lashing out on social media against the vast majority of Americans who chose to resume the patterns of normal life after the virus ran its course.

In 2022, she defended China’s zero-Covid policy and criticized her employer’s reporting on the subject, after it wrote in a post on X: “‘A coronavirus outbreak on the verge of being China’s biggest of the pandemic has exposed a critical flaw in Beijing’s ‘zero Covid’ strategy: a vast population without natural immunity.”

Lorenz was incensed. “There is no lasting ‘natural immunity’ to COVID. You can get covid over and over and over again bc there are so many endlessly evolving strains and antibodies wane. Also, choosing not to kill off millions of vulnerable people (as the US is doing) isn’t a ‘critical flaw.’”

Earlier this year, Lorenz wrote on X that Covid is “raging in Gaza, further disabling the vulnerable population there who is being slammed with variants cooked up in the USA by many people like you guys who won’t even advocate for masking in grocery stores so disabled ppl can safely purchase food.”

The tech columnist has come under fire for her questionable reporting tactics as well.

She perhaps most infamously revealed the identity of the owner of the Libs of TikTok account on X. However, Lorenz not only identified the user as Chaya Raichik, but she also included a hyperlink to Raichik’s real-estate license that included her physical address. The Post later removed the link saying while the information was “publicly available” that it was “ultimately deemed . . . unnecessary.”

Lorenz also knocked on the doors of the user’s relatives. The Post defended Lorenz’s work at the time as “basic reporting practices.” Though Raichik, who has since leaned into her internet fame, said she had to “hole up in a safe location” until the backlash from the reporting died down.

Meanwhile, Lorenz had posted on social media earlier that month that “doxxing, stalking, trying to hurt and smear ppl’s love[d] ones, threatening them, it’s not ok in any situation.”

The whole ordeal also came only weeks after Lorenz cried on television because of the online harassment she had received herself.

“You feel like any little piece of information that gets out on you will be used by the worst people on the internet to destroy your life and it’s so isolating,” Lorenz told MSNBC. “It’s horrifying . . . . It’s overwhelming.”

Lorenz again opened herself up to scrutiny over her reporting on two YouTube personalities who she accused of exploiting the Johnny Depp–Amber Heard trial for financial gain.

But two of the social-media figures whom Lorenz targeted, “LegalBytes” host Alyte Mazeika and an anonymous user named ThatUmbrellaGuy, said she never reached out to them for comment, though she had claimed to in the piece.

The Washington Post later removed the line in the story that suggested the pair had not responded to requests for comment, but did not add an editor’s note acknowledging the mistake.

And in 2021, she was forced to retract her claim that entrepreneur Marc Andreessen used the word “retarded” during a conversation on the social-media app Clubhouse.

“@pmarca just used openly using the r-slur on Clubhouse tonight and not one other person in the room called him on it or saying anything,” Lorenz wrote in a post at the time.

The moderator of the chatroom came forward and said it was another user who had spoken about Redditors referring to themselves as “R-word revolution,” and that Andressen had “never used that word, ever.”

She later retracted her claim and expressed regret over the “error.”

And then there’s the other general weirdness that has earned her a near-regular spot in the Media Misses section of this column.

Like the time she offered an unusual behind-the-scenes look into working relationships at the Post: “My editor retiring this month has f***ed me up worse than any breakup I’ve ever had. I throw up thinking about it and start crying. I literally don’t think I can work or exist without him idk what to do.”

Or when she appeared on the You’re Wrong About podcast to argue that actually, phones are good for kids. “This week, Taylor Lorenz fights our latest moral panic. Are phones really making kids anxious or are kids just good at noticing what’s going on?” a description for the episode reads.

And on the topic of pro-Palestinian supporters and LGBT rights, she even had to be fact-checked by disgraced former CNN host Don Lemon.

Lorenz trotted out the well-worn liberal line that while marginalized groups who are fighting for Palestinians would not have any freedoms in Gaza, “they don’t have any freedoms in Texas and Florida.” Lemon, a gay man, was quick to push back on Lorenz’s claim: “Taylor I’m a member of the LGBTQ community, if I go to Texas, they’re not going to throw me off a roof.”

Headline Fail of the Week

This week’s HFOTW is a game of spot the difference, featuring two CBS News posts.

“Vice President Kamala Harris is rolling out a new policy position, saying she’ll fight to end taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers,” the outlet reported last week.

And yet here’s how it framed a similar policy from former president Donald Trump back in June: “Former President Donald Trump’s vow to stop taxing tips would cost the federal government up to $250 billion over 10 years, according to a nonpartisan watchdog group.” 

Media Misses

• The Biden praise parade is far from over. Senator Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) suggested during a recent appearance on Jen Psaki’s MSNBC show that President Biden “literally saved our democracy in the U.S.” and predicted there will be “tears of joy” at the DNC when Biden addresses the convention on Monday night. Meanwhile, Representative Eric Swalwell (D., Calif.) said one day earlier that Biden has earned a place on the Democratic Mount Rushmore.

• Democratic strategist James Carville said racism is the driving force behind Republican support for Israel, during a recent episode of the Politics War Room podcast. “The reason I suspect that most of these people describe themselves as pro-Israel is because the Jews are whiter than the Palestinians.”

• Axios reporter Sara Fischer first reported that the Kamala Harris campaign is running Google ads that include headlines and descriptions of news stories that have been manipulated into appearing more deferential to Harris than the actual original news stories were. The ads include links to stories from outlets such as CNN, NPR, Reuters, the Associated Press, CBS News, and Time. After publishing her scoop, Fischer wrote in a spot on X that the campaign is “doing nothing wrong and Google, which is pretty strict about banning spammy ads, doesn’t see it as consumer harm.” She later clarified in a statement to Fox News that she meant only that the ads “didn’t violate any of Google’s rules.”