Taylor Lorenz is the Bette Noire of the incels, and she's on trial in the United States for the murder of an American woman. She's got a case against a man named Patrick Mangione, who's been charged with first degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder.
00:00:00.000Well, the Luigi trial is upon us, and it is set to be the trial of the century internet style.
00:00:11.180And Luigi has one notable supporter, and she is the Bette Noire of the incels, and that is Taylor Lorenz.
00:00:21.720It's hilarious to see these millionaire media pundits on TV clutching their pearls about someone standing a murderer when this is the United States of America, as if we don't lionize criminals, as if we don't have, you know, we don't stand murderers of all sorts.
00:00:39.780Do you know what I hate is using internet language in real life?
00:00:44.020I was in a conversation once with someone who used unalive to refer to killing someone, as if our phone call was going to be demonetized or something if we use the word kill.
00:01:02.680I really hate that. Just stop using standing. That's just stupid.
00:01:08.580There's a huge disconnect between the narratives and angles that sort of mainstream media pushes and what the American public feels, and you see that in moments like this.
00:01:20.640And I can tell you, I saw the biggest audience growth that I've ever seen, because people were like, oh, somebody, some journalist is actually speaking to the anger that we feel.
00:01:31.600The women who got her outside court in New York.
00:01:35.020So you're going to see women, especially, that feel like, oh, my God, right?
00:01:38.900Like, here's this man who's revolutionary, who's famous, who's handsome, who's young, who's smart.
00:01:47.360He's a person that seems like this morally good man, which is hard to find.
00:02:08.320Some of how people cannot understand why people have sympathies for Mangione strikes me as the same as a lot of media not understanding why people support Trump.
00:02:25.260It's because a lot of people are just really, really desperate.
00:02:29.860They want somebody to take on the system.
00:02:33.380They want somebody to tear down these barbaric establishment institutions.
00:02:38.540What I find fascinating here is that it is a sort of revolutionary normie.
00:02:46.980It's a normie revolution, maybe even a bourgeois revolution, but not in the way that Marx meant it.
00:02:54.560So let me pick some low-hanging fruit on this first.
00:03:00.040So it is fascinating that there is just this obvious contradiction in what Taylor Lorenz is saying.
00:03:09.200So she makes a very similar argument as Alex Jones made when he was being interviewed by Piers Morgan 10, 15 years ago, and they were talking about gun control.
00:03:21.740Piers Morgan, who's more or less conservative, was basically saying, like, come on, man.
00:03:27.160No other country has the gun issues that the United States has.
00:03:31.600And many of those other countries have hunting, hunting culture.
00:03:35.640In fact, maybe even a little bit of gun culture, but it's so much worse than the United States.
00:04:53.640And the entire economy was based on, you know, pulling things out of the earth and getting wildly drunk, gambling, shooting the dealer when he cheats you, and then screwing prostitutes, taking one as your wife.
00:05:11.460But yeah, you're certainly leaving out quite a bit of American identity.
00:05:16.660So she says that, and then 30 seconds later, she says, he's such a moral man.
00:05:25.600And he's like the perfect man for someone like Taylor Lorenz, because he holds all of her midwit values.
00:05:36.980I mean, what we learned about Luigi was that he was worried about doom scrolling, reducing autonomy or something like this, or the fact that health insurance providers might be rejecting a significant portion of their clients.
00:05:57.440And so we're all not fully integrated into the healthcare system.
00:06:02.260Like this is what he was fighting for.
00:06:04.660Now, I get, in a way, many criticisms of the healthcare system, but this is a sort of unreflective, completely non-Marxian, middle-class conception of the world.
00:06:19.560You're a wagey, and you want better benefits is, in effect, what you are fighting for.
00:06:25.780So he basically appeals to the normie, millennial, not-too-bright leftist.
00:06:34.740Taylor Lorenz has been concerned with, you know, anti-trans bigotry on social media, etc.
00:09:08.520But Luigi and revolutionaries around him felt like the system wasn't working well enough.
00:09:15.520So Marx, to his credit, or Lenin, Chase, everyone, they wanted a radically different social order.
00:09:26.880And they, in fact, predicted and longed for some sort of great crisis in the current order so that they could implement a new way of being.
00:09:47.260The French revolutionaries, unquestionably, not at the beginning at the very least, but unquestionably at some point, were committing a sort of genocide, a kind of classicide, against the landed aristocracy and even the church.
00:10:05.440They were trying to implement a new age of reason.
00:10:10.700Now, I don't necessarily agree with any of these people, but I guess I can respect game when I see it.
00:10:22.220The normie revolutionary, represented by Taylor Lorenz, is, in effect, this notion that middle-class America isn't working in the way that they hoped.
00:10:33.800And they feel that there's some sort of demon on the other end who isn't allowing them to experience the American dream.
00:10:46.220So there must be malice involved with Brian Thompson, this sort of douchey, multimillionaire dude who is running UnitedHealthcare.
00:11:04.000And, you know, everyone has a right to health insurance.
00:11:07.100And so he needs to help out all of these people.
00:11:10.780This is not at all how an actual revolutionary would act and think.
00:11:17.440It's a sort of angry, violent, normie reactionary.
00:11:21.100They are worried that the middle-class existence that they were promised and that they are, in effect, living is going to be taken away from them or won't be implemented to them in the way that they desire.
00:11:38.460And you see a lot of this with, like, red note people.
00:11:42.380I mean, I don't know if the red note trend is popular anymore.
00:11:47.240But when it looked like TikTok was about to be banned right before Donald Trump was sworn in, there was this move to red note.
00:11:57.440And they were seeing all of these fake LED-laden Chinese cities.
00:12:03.220And they were also seeing the impact of, first off, all the stuff we talked about last Tuesday, free-floating currencies.
00:12:12.660They were seeing the impact of currency manipulation by the Chinese.
00:12:18.700They're constantly weakening the yuan.
00:12:21.320And so you'll get into a situation where they can buy a bag of groceries for the equivalent of $20 U.S.
00:12:29.600Well, of course they can, because it's the fucking exchange rate.
00:12:34.180And the fact that you are falling into the same trap as Tucker Carlson going to Russia is kind of incredible.
00:12:45.540Russia has a different currency situation with the U.S. due to different causes.
00:12:51.620But, yes, you can go to Russia and feel like a millionaire, and that's the life of the expat, the tourist.
00:13:03.000But if you're living in Russia and groceries cost 40% of your monthly wage, you're going to have a very different attitude towards the situation.
00:13:18.220She was looking at Red Note, and then she was, like, pointing eastward or something.
00:13:22.940They don't tell us what it's like over there.
00:13:25.500You can have an apartment, and you can afford groceries, and, like, they just get health care.
00:13:34.380Maybe there's even a stronger millennial quality to this than I even imagine.
00:13:39.300Because it's not even the American dream that was constructed by the government through things like the GI Bill after the Second World War or the promotion of home ownership, the creation of the suburbs, which was a sort of government finance collaboration.
00:14:03.480Those suburbs can't exist without the federal highway system.
00:14:11.300They obviously wouldn't exist without big finance making massive bets on suburbs, et cetera, et cetera.
00:14:18.900So the American government created this American dream, which, if we're really being honest, I mean, a lot of us could maybe be tagged as anti-American in this group.
00:14:30.780But if we're really being honest, was a sort of healthy, if I guess a bit white bread and boring ideal of you can go to the burbs, have two kids, own a car and two television sets, and TV dinners are cheap, and you can watch game shows every night.
00:14:56.140And mom, while she's running the dishwasher and washing machine, can watch her stories, her soap operas, and dad's hard at work nine to six, and he'll commute back to the burbs, and you go to church on Sunday and teach your son baseball on Saturday.
00:15:13.280I mean, we can criticize from some Nietzschean standpoint the last man nihilism at the heart of situations like this, but it was sort of good, and it could be eugenic in many cases.
00:15:31.860It was at the very least a sort of fertile model.
00:15:35.800The burbs wasn't really promoting culture and intellectual activity.
00:15:41.580It was promoting strip malls and chain stores in the end, but, you know, nothing's perfect, I guess.
00:15:52.340To this millennial model of, I want to live with a roommate or even live alone in my apartment.
00:16:02.000And the fact that groceries are less expensive and that the government pays for my anxiety meds and my birth control.
00:16:16.060It's this millennial revolutionary standpoint where their pathetic lifestyle, it's become too expensive, and it looks like it might even become impossible at some point in the near future.
00:16:34.680And so they're looking to a state capitalist or communist Chinese government as fully implementing their nihilism.
00:18:23.900And many women will naturally see that and love it and want to birth his child.
00:18:33.740So that's a sort of baseline quality of why anyone would be attracted to someone like Luigi, who I just think is pathetic and should be bullied.
00:20:46.600This is like the perfect millennial thing.
00:20:48.800Broadway musical plus murder plus normie politics.
00:20:53.000They were just showing fan edits of Brian Thompson lying in the sidewalk, and then fan edits of Luigi and his six-pack or whatever.
00:21:03.080Maybe it will come back in Trump's second term.
00:21:06.520An interesting trend to keep your eye on.
00:21:09.900I've noted recently that the most radical people I know are sort of middle-class people who have not been politically engaged throughout their lives and for whom the American dream has largely worked.
00:21:27.880They have two cars in the driveway, a big house, all the baubles that they could ever want in the world.
00:21:33.920And they are deeply discontented and radical, but in a strange way, like my parents even have been radicalized.
00:21:43.480And I laid at the feet of social media, and I feel like people that are especially new to the Internet, older people, have really been radicalized by these algorithms.
00:21:56.380They got heavily online during COVID, probably.
00:21:59.400It's also like an unintended consequence of COVID.
00:22:43.760But basically, if you hate your parents and they don't let you take the car out, or, you know, the man's got you down, or your social study teacher sucks, or the girl doesn't want to go to prom with you.
00:22:55.360You buy vans and you're commodifying revolution, where you can be anti-social and anti-patriarchy, you could say, while purchasing something from a major corporation.
00:23:10.160And so it's the amazing gelatin-like quality of capitalism.
00:23:17.840I think the left wants to believe that capitalism is cruel and gray on gray and brutal and is run by boring white men in horn-rimmed glasses.
00:23:32.520But the reality is that capitalism is going to sell you the Che Guevara t-shirt, or it's cool, it's gay, it's trans, trans in multiple ways.
00:23:45.160It can kind of transition to other things.
00:23:47.560So it's going to allow you to engage in radical dissent through purchasing products.
00:23:59.680Now, maybe this situation has progressed or it's been amplified in a way.
00:24:06.920Maybe with social media, which is capitalism, but different.
00:24:11.940It's almost, you know, like in a new stage.
00:24:15.580When I was younger, you could commodify your dissent by being a skateboarder and buying a Santa Cruz skateboard or listening to Nirvana, buying an album, which I believe was produced by Warner Brothers.
00:24:28.680So capitalism will allow you to dissent against the system and it will profit off that.
00:24:36.920But maybe something more extreme is happening with social media.
00:24:43.300Teenage girls looking at Instagram feeds of these women who in many cases have a sugar daddy of some sort, who are Botoxed out, have fake breasts, are on a yacht, are just living their best life.
00:25:02.120They're, you know, traveling to Greece and having like the greatest meal ever.
00:25:07.020And it's casual and relatable, yet totally beyond your spending capacity.
00:25:15.300Like maybe there's something new that's happening with social media that is generating actual alienation and suicidal alienation, in fact, in young people.
00:25:27.860And it really is different because, remember, if you buy the Nirvana album or wear the vans, you're commodifying your dissent and you're sort of neutralizing it.
00:25:39.280You know, you can function normally and go to school and even study, take the SAT and get into college while being a Kurt Cobain fan.
00:25:50.860But in some ways with social media, it's radicalizing people to go kinetic offline.
00:25:59.720And that could be, I suck because I'm not attractive.
00:26:05.380I'll never be her, my favorite Instagram model, and I'm just going to kill myself.
00:26:10.960Or social media is getting people to engage in J6 and effectively try to overthrow the government.
00:26:19.460It's making them kinetic offline in a way that was unappreciated and unintended.
00:26:27.800Whereas the previous variations of capitalism were able to neutralize people and make their real-world activity not damaging to society.
00:26:43.520So maybe something has changed, actually.
00:26:46.220I would just comment that as someone who owned Nirvana Records and Vans shoes, you weren't looking at them 24-7.
00:26:53.860And, you know, you ignore your shoes when you're walking around, but these phones and the engagement level of social media with the constant dopamine hits of checking lists and scrolling that is insidious.
00:27:23.260And they also have a sort of similar message in a way.
00:27:29.040So J6ers eventually attempted to overthrow the government.
00:27:36.920Now, they did it in a buffoonish manner that was never going to work.
00:27:43.660And it involved them stealing lecterns and taking a poop in the hallway of Congress or putting their feet up on Nancy Pelosi's desk or whatever.
00:29:02.540And I think it was, if we're being a little bit unfair here, it was kind of like a bunch of cringe people from the internet who had seen memes and, you know, read Andrew Anglin or something.