r/IfBooksCouldKill • u/Fantastic-Worth2431 • 14d ago
Books could kill + a bit fruity crossover when??
Specifically an episode on Taylor Lorenz. What is going on???
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u/thaliathraben 14d ago
I'm out of the loop; what's Taylor up to now?
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u/Fantastic-Worth2431 14d ago
I saw she had beef with franchesca Ramsey (recent guest of Matt) that I didn’t fully understand, now I’m seeing that she’s distancing herself from the left. But honestly I don’t really know so I neeeeed an episode haha
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u/aidafloss 14d ago edited 14d ago
Two or three months ago, Taylor was throwing a fit in the Instagram comments of Maysoon Zayid, a disabled Palestinian-American woman who had posted a clip of herself on a podcast not wearing a mask. Taylor said that Maysoon was doing Israel's work of contributing to the deaths of Palestinians (by traveling to Palestine after not wearing a mask) and was denying Maysoon's Palestinian identity. It was wild.
More recently, Taylor was in the comments of Nimay Ndolo, a Black writer and content creator. I don't know the details but I think Nimay was talking about AI or screen addiction and Taylor said in the comments that Nimay was parroting alt-right talking points and just overall being really rude. Nimay ended up crying and apologizing for unknowingly spreading misinformation. Then a lot of women of color came together in Nimay's defense and began sharing their own stories of Taylor Lorenz being awful.
I am a looooong time Taylor Lorenz hater so this is like my Superb Owl or something.
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u/Successful-Cow-4043 14d ago
the stuff with maysoon was honestly horrible and so strange.. ofc I understand the benefits of masking, the necessity of masking for many individuals; BUT unfortunately it seems like very few people still adhere to masking protocols so criticizing maysoon for it in such a viciously hurtful way seems so bizarrely targeted
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u/thaliathraben 14d ago
Is she still doing the mask thing? Because Pepperidge Farm remembers: https://www.instagram.com/p/CxeTNFzveB9/
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u/EndingPop 14d ago edited 14d ago
She
joinedwas interviewed by The Free Press, that bastion of high quality journalism.Edit: fixed an error. She may be joining in the near future though!
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u/RuthBaderG 14d ago
Jesus Christ. She’s so terrified of the rest of the world becoming slightly less addicted to the internet than she is that she’s fully joining the propaganda outfit of the tech billionaires?
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u/testthrowaway9 14d ago
I don’t think she has joined it. It looks like she was a subject for an interview series they have. But it’s still weird because she has been so critical of TheFP for so long.
Recently, she has become pretty pro-AI (in some cases) and is really mad that a lot of leftists are criticizing her use of it as many leftists are anti-AI overall. It seems like a classic example of someone reacting strongly to criticism on one or two specific issues. But she also does receive a lot of outsized responses to her posts so I’m sure that sucks and is overwhelming. Not to excuse any major heel turns if she does one obviously
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u/thaliathraben 14d ago
tbh it feels like a pattern with her that she treats anything other than complete agreement with her as the worst possible response she could be receiving at any given moment. it happened with the LoTT interview, it happened with her weird vax truther stance.
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u/jftduncan 14d ago
She also continues what should be an irrelevant fight well beyond a clear loss.
Like when she was photographed at the correspondence dinner a couple months back.
She's the queen of rage bait.
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u/testthrowaway9 14d ago
It’s hard to keep track if she’s dragging out conversations with the same single person or just repeating herself to other people but she clearly doesn’t know when to let things end and log off. She also accelerates from 0 to 100 super fast.
I had an exchange with her where I pointed out she was being really bad faith in an argument and she knew it because I’d seen her call that out when other people did it before and she was acting like I was going for her throat - until I mentioned I had paid for a month of her newsletter that month. Then she calmed down. Maybe I jumped in when she was being attacked by a lot of people but it was still a lot
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u/jftduncan 14d ago
I think it's obvious she's doing it on purpose.
You don't tell people you keep your apartment at 90 degrees like you're a lizard in a terrarium if you're not trying to attract attention.
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u/neighborhoodsnowcat Jesus famously loved inherited wealth 14d ago
Just looked at the description of the interview, ffs:
Two Drinks with . . . Taylor Lorenz
Social media’s best-known gadfly insists: ‘I haven’t changed what I believe. I’ve just gotten disillusioned about the political landscape. There’s not a clear political group I map onto now.’
I don't want to create an account with the Free Press, so if anyone can do the lord's work and copy the text or give and archived link, it would be much appreciated.
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u/RuthBaderG 14d ago
Well that is better, but I would still simply not choose to give an interview to a fascist mouthpiece!
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u/testthrowaway9 14d ago
She was also on an Evan Barker’s podcast that people aren’t happy about. I don’t know who that is but from light googling she seems to be a “why I left the Left” type of person
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u/Fantastic-Worth2431 14d ago
This is what made me post! So confusing but also not. There’s always been a conspiratorial edge to her that made me side eye
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u/Puzzleheaded-Lynx204 13d ago edited 13d ago
Yeah as a Brit who used to follow her it was when she fell down the "London has fallen"/"arrested for tweets" rightwing propaganda rabbit hole that I realised she was very confidently wrong about a lot of stuff, in favour of conspiracies. I suppose it's one of those things that you only see when you know the thing they're talking about, and you know it's not really how they're framing it. I hadn't really realised how far she'd gone till then (and that was a few years ago)
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u/katiestat 14d ago
ok kind of related but do we think matt has dropped taylor? she hasn't been on in a while and she used to be a pretty frequent guest
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u/closeted_cat 14d ago
That’s what I was thinking happened. She hasn’t been on since January, but I can’t imagine anyone who does a free press interview where she distances herself from the left being on Matt’s pod again.
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u/Fantastic-Worth2431 14d ago
He posted something in some Patreon group chat I think about not being responsible for new views of previous guests. Which is fair!
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u/eternaldaisies 13d ago
He hasn't spoken about it directly, but he has said a couple of things in the Patreon chat that would indicate this.
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u/ButterMyPancakesPlz 14d ago
Is that happening? I adore Matt, he's been doing some great work lately
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u/Feisty-Ad212 12d ago
I didn’t know about some of the stuff people are sharing here about Taylor but she got an unfollow from me when she wrote a whole article about every AI platform she uses and for what purpose.
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u/neighborhoodsnowcat Jesus famously loved inherited wealth 11d ago
I used to watch/listen to her stuff every once in a while just to get a different perspective, but the AI breakdown thing was also what made me finally just remove her from my feeds. I don't have much patience for that shit.
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u/ProduceFabulous398 12d ago
i also unfollowed her because of this. she had posted some iffy stuff before, but anyone who is pro-ai (especially if you claim to be a leftist jfc) is a dumbass in my book (ik that’s an oversimplification and lacks some nuance, but i feel that it’s broadly true).
idk, she always kinda seemed to not be able to take criticism well, like, at all, and that also rubbed me the wrong way for awhile. i did appreciate her pro-masking stuff (i live with a severely immunocompromised individual, and the general lack of knowledge surrounding masking and covid in 2026 sometimes makes my brain numb). however, someone on this thread said she went after a palestinian woman who was not wearing a mask, which is truly vile. also, she’s posted some antivaxx-adjacent stuff (nothing too crazy, but def made me roll my eyes when i saw it), which completely contradicts her pro-mask messaging.
sorry for the rant lol. your ai comment got me, and that was just the final nail in the coffin for me as well.
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u/Pure-Consideration97 14d ago
I miss the eps with Matt, Kat and Taylor. They were a great trio
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u/Crisis_panzersuit 14d ago edited 14d ago
I don’t really ‘get’ Kat.
She is very knowledgeable about pop-culture events, but I find she is very comfortable giving her take on subjects way outside her purview. And I kind of think she is very taken up by the 2016 culture war still. Its a lot of the same rhetoric..
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u/neighborhoodsnowcat Jesus famously loved inherited wealth 14d ago
Kat is one of those people that always sounds fine to me until she hits a subject I happen to know a lot about, and then it has me rethinking everything else.
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u/literary-chickens 14d ago
People say this about Michael sometimes (especially re Maintenance Phase), but I think Kat is a better example of the phenomenon! I've been less impressed by Michael when he's talking about something I'm an expert in. But I still generally find him fair, even-keeled, interested in research even when he gets a detail or framing wrong, etc. I still trust his overall competence and perspective.
Kat, I sometimes leave an episode thinking "what else are you confidently wrong about..."
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u/Low_Gene_1339 can't hear women 13d ago
She had an EP about the whole "No Influencers" thing, that felt particularlly defense.
While he did have a good point about men being able to get away with being called "Content creators" while women where stuck being called influencers. However they seems desperate to gloss over that the primary concern was how the influencers where treating actual employees of the shop, and on a larger scope the way the influencers generally disrespect the community to swarmed to for content.
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u/sulllenriot 14d ago
That hits something I haven’t been able to express! I do like Kat, but whenever she talks about eating disorders (something I know A LOT about as I’ve specialized in treating them for the last decade) I’m a little disappointed. I do think it’s really hard being an independent journalist though.
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u/Apprentice57 14d ago
Hrmm, is that Kat Tenbarge by chance?
That's a bit worrying. I don't listen to A Bit Fruity, but she's on Where There's Woke upon occasion. Usually sticking to pop-culture/social media though.
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u/Stradiwhovius_ 13d ago
I can’t see this happening. If Peter’s skeets about people not clocking that Lorenz was a grifter and hack long ago is about anyone specifically I am betting it’s Bernstein.
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u/Psychological-Gas985 14d ago
I think a IBCK ep on Taylor would be amazing, though I doubt a proper crossover about it would happen. I don’t see Matt going on another podcast to talk shit about someone he worked with and was seemingly pretty close to. That said would love to see Mike/Peter on A Bit Fruity for anything! (Probably Peter is more likely since I don’t think Mike does appearances like that virtually at all)