Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - The Most Depraved Commentary I've Ever Heard

Episode Date: November 21, 2025

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenz  Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co  Right now, there's a clip going viral from former Obama White House aide and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz  that is so appalling and depraved it's hard to believe it's real. But many people are missing the most dangerous part of her commentary. Her comments reveal exactly what the ruling class in America wants to do to online speech, and why we need to fight back so hard to protect our online freedoms. Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0 https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz

Welcome back to Free Speech Friday. Right now, there's a clip going viral from a conference hosted by the Jewish federations of North America that is so appalling and depraved that it's hard to believe it's real. Former Obama White House aide and Obama and Hillary Clinton speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz said this. I think that since October 7th, but really before then, there have been huge shifts in America on how people think about Jews and Israel. And I think that is especially true of young people. So we are now wrestling with a new, I think, generational divisional.

divide here. And I think that's particularly true in that social media is now our source of media. And this, you know, it used to be that the media you got in America was American media, and it was pretty mainstream. You know, it generally didn't express extreme anti-Israel views. You had to go to a pretty weird bookstore to find global media and fringe media. But today, we have social media, which is a global medium. It is shaped, its algorithms are shaped by billions of people worldwide who don't really love Jews. And so while in the 1990s, you know, a young person probably wasn't going to find Al Jazeera or someone like Nick Fuentes. Today, those media outlets find them. They find them on their phones. It's also this increasingly post-literate media, less and less text, more and more

videos. So you have TikTok just smashing our young people's brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza. And this is why so many of us can't have a sane conversation with younger Jews, because anything that we try to say to them, they are hearing it through this wall of carnage. So I want to give data and information and facts and arguments, and they are just seeing in their minds carnage, and I sound obscene. And, you know, I think, unfortunately, the very smart, I think, bet that we made on Holocaust education to serve as anti-Semitism education, in this new media environment, I think that is beginning to break down a little bit. because, you know, Holocaust education is absolutely essential.

But I think it may be confusing some of our young people about anti-Semitism because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews. And they think, oh, anti-Semitism is like anti-Black racism, right? Powerful white people against powerless black people. So when on TikTok all day long they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it's not surprising that they think, oh, I know, the lesson of the Holocaust is you fight Israel. You fight the big, powerful people, hurting the weak people. Now, obviously what she said is so appalling because she's more outraged at young people seeing the carnage in Gaza than she is about the carnage itself.

And this idea that young people are taking the wrong lesson from Holocaust education is also really absurd. Holocaust education is so crucial in America, especially, to prevent the atrocities that happen to Jewish people during the Holocaust from happening ever again to anyone, not just Jewish people, but anyone. Never again means never again for anyone. And a ton of other commentators have done a really good job breaking down the problems with what she said about Holocaust education. But I want to talk about a part of her quote that nobody is focusing on. And I don't think anybody is really talking about.

And that is when she's talking about the media. So Hurwitz says, you know, it used to be that the media you got in America was American media. It was pretty mainstream. It didn't express extreme anti-Israel views. You had to go to a pretty weird bookstore to find global media. But today we have social media.

which is a global medium. And then she talks about kind of like how bad this is. And she says, you know, they find this information on their phones and it's increasingly video instead of text. To me, this part of her comment was honestly just as if not more bone-chilling than the rest of the stuff that she said. Because I think once again, we're really seeing the true motivation behind why there is such an aggressive effort to censor social media.

You guys have to remember, you know, if we zoom back 15 years ago, social media was correctly framed as, liberatory. I write in my book extremely online about the rise of the blogosphere and bloggers and early social media pundits who really used the internet and this new global medium to challenge establishment power. You know, some of the most well-known bloggers became well-known by poking holes in the traditional media's manufacturing of consent for the Iraq war. They were these bloggers that were challenging these narratives of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction and really circumventing, you know, the mainstream media's monopoly on the information

ecosystem. Then if we move into the early 2010s, we saw the rise of Instagram and Twitter, especially. You know, you had things like the Arab Spring, which of course the U.S. was happy to frame as liberatory, you know, oh, wow, Arab people, you know, revolting against their leaders. How amazing, right? Like American powerful leaders were like, we love that. And you saw, honestly, Donald Trump's rise to presidency, which Donald Trump himself is very anti-democratic, but his rise and this sort of antsy institutionalism and the grassroots nature of his rise. was indicative of this more like democratized internet where these powerful groups like the DNC and the RNC don't necessarily control who you know the next political candidate is in the presidential race so the internet is sort of democratizing things it's upending power alongside of social media we have the rise of digital media so you have outlets like vice and buzzfeed news and just this whole new media ecosystem that's challenging the hegemony of traditional establishment media like CBS news New York times etc once Trump is elected And basically the entire mainstream media apparatus is able to sell this sort of reactionary narrative to liberals.

So they say, oh, you guys thought that social media and the internet was liberatory? Well, look, it just brought you Trump. Isn't that so bad? Now there's misinformation on here. You know, we need to censor the internet. We need to ban things. You saw the rise of the tech lash in the second half of the 2010s where there was this sudden, like, appetite to regulate tech. And specifically to regulate the speech online.

As I've talked about before, you know, regulating speech online is actually not really. regulating tech. I am all for meaningful tag regulation. But that's not what any of these laws do, right? They're not breaking up Facebook's monopoly power. They're not challenging Google's business model. In fact, they're just giving carte blanche basically to these companies to censor content online. Now, during Trump's first presidency, some of this didn't work out too terribly. These platforms began cracking down on speech a little bit. They began removing misinformation. And then, of course, we have the COVID pandemic, which hits in 2020, pushes everyone online and sort of exacerbates all these issues. And also when you look at the rise of Trump's first presidency, 2016-ish to, you know,

2020, you saw the internet being this liberatory force. You had major social justice movements organizing the Black Lives Matter movement, me too. All of these ways where collective power on the internet was challenging institutional power. So Republicans were watching this and watching these social justice movements take hold. They also were leveraging the power of the internet to mainstream their MAGA movement. And Republicans just always have been very ahead of the game on the media environment. And so they just recognized the power of social media early. and realize that to have ultimate control over the media landscape in America, you'd have to seize control of social media.

So you've seen a lot of Republican efforts to do this. Of course, Republicans built their own alternative social media landscape with truth social, rumble, right-wing streaming platforms and things like that. And then you have Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter. You have conservative figures trying to get more and more influence over Facebook and basically them seizing more and more control over our online ecosystem. Of course, the TikTok ban is part of this as well. Establishment Democrats, meanwhile, in 2020 especially,

also start to see this liberatory power of social media. They see the Black Lives Matter movement rising online. They see this sort of collective power online. And they notice that a lot of that grassroots power is challenging the democratic establishment. And they don't like that. So they already start to sort of crack down. They want to crack down on speech. Joe Biden begins cracking down on speech when he takes office in 2021, starts censoring

accurate information about COVID's long-term harms. I've written about this. And there's been much covered how he put pressure on some of these social media companies to censor accurate information about COVID's dangerous, information about long COVID, information about the limitations of our current vaccines, which you should get. We're very pro-vax here, but vaccines, you know, don't stop transmission. And the Biden administration falsely claimed that they did. So you started to see these tensions come more and more to a head. Then we had October 7th, 2023, when Hamas launched their attack on Israel after this decades-long oppression of the

Palestinian people. And very quickly, the Democrats and the Republicans became completely aligned. on censoring the internet. And that is when you see all of these super aggressive laws start to come to fruition. And I just need you guys to understand censorship. They're never going to censor the internet and say, by the way, guys, we're taking control and we're censoring speech because we just want institutional people in power to have control over the whole media landscape. So you need to shut up. They're going to do it through moral panics. They're going to do it through manufacturing, you know, controversies. We saw this with comic books. We've seen this with rap music. We've seen this like every sort of moral panic

about tech and media throughout history. But in this case, it was this idea that the young people are getting brainwashed, right, by TikTok. You had Josh Hawley, a Republican, Mark Warner, a Democrat, Mike Gallagher, Republican. People on both sides of the aisle essentially saying, we need to ban TikTok. There's all this anti-Israel speech on TikTok. Mitt Romney said, actually just last year,

some wonder why there was such an overwhelming support for the TikTok ban. If you look at the postings on TikTok, the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media, it's overwhelmingly so TikTok broadcast. So basically this idea that like, hey, suddenly young people are hearing directly from Palestinians

about what's happening to them. That is challenging this mainstream media narrative. We empower you to have complete control over the media ecosystem. Now we can't basically brainwash people effectively. So we have to shut down social media. And of course they started with TikTok. I think TikTok was the easiest one

to kind of manufacture controversy around it was also the, according to Pew Research, the one social media app where there were more liberal and left-leaning news influencers as opposed to conservative, the one social media app. So it was really easy to manufacture consent for this ban. But then you see a lot of these politicians more broadly start talking about social media. So it's not enough to just ban TikTok and put it under Trump billionaire control and censor everything and appoint a former IDF soldier as the person in charge of content moderation. You have representatives like Josh Gathheimer from New Jersey, a Democrat, saying using social media, Russia, Iran, and China. have the ability to control what an entire generation of American children see and consume every day.

And that's really what you're hearing from this Sarah Hurwitz woman as well on stage to go back to the original quote. She's saying, you know, it used to be that the media you got in America was American media and it was pretty mainstream. It didn't express extreme anti-Israel views. You'd have to go to a weird bookstore. And this is the whole thing, right? The internet has broken the monopoly that people in power. had over our media ecosystem. And you see them trying to claw this back.

So you have, you know, David Ellison trying to buy up Paramount and Warner Brothers and CBS, obviously, which he owns now or Elon Musk, of course, he's in control of Twitter. But we still, thankfully, thanks to Section 230 and a lot of these other laws that are so crucial to protecting freedom on the internet, we still do have a somewhat democratic internet. We have a very monopolistic tech ecosystem, which, by the way, I'm in favor of regulating and breaking up. We have a lot of really scary laws, especially in the states right now.

aimed at censoring speech. This is why, actually, Benjamin Netanyahu himself said back in September in that meeting with influencers, weapons change over time. The most important ones are on social media. TikTok is number one. I hope that deal goes through because it's very important. And he described the TikTok deal as the most important purchase going on right now because basically he said social media is the most powerful influence tool of our time.

So what Sarah Horowitz is saying, again, here publicly in this event, is that people are getting information that is not pre-approved by the government and people in power, and we have to shut that down. And I think it's just so crucial to point out these glimpses of, you know, when these people sort of give up the game and say, like, what their ultimate goal is or reveal their motivations, because they're saying it. You have senators saying it. You have people in power saying it. You have these influential figures saying it. I mean, Sarah Hurwitz was named by the forward as, you know, one of their 50 most influential Jewish Americans. These are people with real power and sway over our political system. And so when I heard that quote, and then I heard everybody sort of talking about

the outrageousness of that quote, without talking about the social media part, it really scared me because there is essentially no appetite on the left to engage with tech policy. You have Democrats and Republicans completely aligned with censoring the internet. And then you have these stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid leftists that basically end up buying into the censorship's ideology thinking that it's somehow cracking down on big tech. And I've made so many videos in in this series about why that's not the case, why actually dismantling Section 230 would actually only entrench monopolistic corporate power,

how it would hurt our ability for grassroots organizing online, and all of these other things. But I really want people to kind of listen to that part of the Sarah Hurwitz quote again and think critically, because we're seeing this moral panic, especially around social media right now. I was just reading the latest New York MAG cover story, which is atrocious in my opinion.

And there's all these stupid narratives saying that, like, oh, social media is making. us dumber, you know, social media is destroying, it's rotting the kids' brains, all the stuff that they claimed about novels, comic books, television, etc. The media claimed back in the day that actually Walkman, listening to music on the go, was altering kids, you know, brain chemistry. All of these moral panic narratives are the same, but moral panics are how we get censorship. Again, they're not going to come out and say, hey guys, the young people are too anti-Israel, so we need to censor all of social media. I mean, some of them do come out and say it.

Again, the Sarah Horowitz clip is a good example. But the main way people in power are able to to push censorship legislation through is by villainizing these forms of media. So I guess I just ask everyone out there to please, please, please fight against identity verification, age verification online, fight to protect Section 230, fight against things like the Kids Online Safety Act, this horrible censorship bill, and just get involved in fighting for free speech online. I think that people on the left are starting to recognize the dangers of censorship when you look at, you know, how downranked certain content gets.

I imagine this content, this video itself will become incredibly downranked in the algorithm. A lot of my videos are demonetized when I talk about this stuff. There's so much institutional pressure, even from these tech companies, again, because of pressure from the government, to censor speech that they don't like. And so we have to fight for free and open Internet and fight against these monopolistic tech platforms as well by actually meaningfully regulating them by passing things like data privacy laws. And I hope you guys can start listening as well when you hear quotes like this and you hear people villainizing. social media, think about like what is their goal? Why is the entire mainstream media right now uniting behind this idea that we need censorship, we need age verification, we need to ban everyone under the age of 18 or 16 from accessing the internet. It's not because they care about young

people's mental health. They don't. If they did, they would pass tons of other things. One of six kids lives below the poverty line. You know, we have rampant gun violence. There are so many things that these lawmakers could do to help kids mental health or to help their test scores or whatever. COVID, by it, for example, we don't even do any disease mitigation in school and we're repeatedly infecting kids with a neuroinvasive, dangerous virus that causes cognitive decline. Okay, there's no interest in actually preserving young people's minds or mental well-being or anything like that. The goal is to seize back control of our media and information ecosystem.

That's what all of this is about. And I think you see it on display, clearer than ever, when you listen to comments like the ones that Sarah Hurwitz made. So thanks so much for tuning into this week's Free Speech Friday. I know this was a little bit of a different one. It was a little bit off the cuff compared to other stuff. I just kind of wanted to rant about this clip because I felt like nobody was paying attention to the most important part of it. Please, please, please support me on Patreon via the link below or by a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter, usermag.com.

That's usermag.com to support my work. As I mentioned before, this censorship stuff has really affected me and my channel. A lot of my videos get demonetized. A lot of them get significantly downranked in the algorithm. them anytime I mention things like Israel or Palestine or things like that. So every single dollar of support just makes such an incredible difference and ensures that I can continue to cover these issues. I'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Free Speech Friday.

See you then.