It can be hard to maintain friendships as an adult. People move to new cities, start families, and experience all sorts of other life events that make it difficult to keep in touch. Sometimes, you end up losing all of your friends because you can't stop writing pro-genocide propaganda for Bari Weiss's stupid website.
That last circumstance is the one in which Free Press reporter Olivia Reingold currently finds herself, which we know because she won't stop tweeting about it. Reingold, who joined the Free Press in 2022, started giving updates about the disintegration of her personal life shortly after publishing a big "investigation" that clumsily attempted to downplay the starvation of Gaza's children by observing that some of them were also suffering other ailments. Shortly after having her name attached to one of the most evil pieces of journalism ever produced, Reingold started losing friends.
"Over the past few days, I've received thousands of hate comments, death threats, oh and my childhood best friend broke up with me due to my 'morals,'" Reingold wrote in a tweet published on Aug. 20.
Less than a month later, Reingold was back with another update: A different childhood best friend had just disinvited Reingold from her wedding:
Just yesterday, my oldest friend broke up with me. A different one. I’m now down to three or four friends from before 2022, when I shocked my liberal circle by joining The Free Press.
It wasn’t lost on me that this happened within hours of the news of Charlie Kirk's murder. If there was ever a time for coming together, it was now. And yet here she was, telling me that she didn't want to associate with me anymore because of who I am.
When we discussed certain issues like Israel, she realized we actually weren't that far apart. We both believe in a two state solution and want the war to end. And yet, she couldn't knock her overwhelming suspicion that I was bad.
She said it as kindly as possible but uninvited me from her wedding.
Yesterday, buried in a self-pitying rant about how nobody outside of her workplace has reached out to see how she's dealing with the "trauma [of] covering these past two years," Reingold revealed that her network of friends and former colleagues has continued to dwindle:
A few reporters I completed Report for America with have become my biggest harassers.
Just yesterday, an NPR host I once interned for sent me a message intended to break my spirit.
I caught a former friend from Columbia—a girl who comes from media royalty—liking negative tweets about me.
"Dude, is this why you haven't been responding to my texts asking to hang out?" I immediately texted her.
"Dude, is this why you haven't been responding to my texts asking to hang out?" is perhaps the most heartbreaking message that an adult American woman with no real problems can possibly compose. This person's life is grim as hell!
You would hope that a person confronted with social ostracization this intense would engage in some self-reflection and reconsider some of her professional and personal choices, but Reingold seems happy to continue down the path she's on. "I don't need the committees to protect the so-and-so's or the friends at the fancy papers. I have a mission—and that's to tell the truth, wherever it may lead," she wrote at the end of her latest tweet. Big talk from someone whose idea of journalism is putting on a hijab to go "undercover" and pretend her life is in danger at a pro-Palestine convention in Chicago.
One day very soon Reingold is going to wake up and have to confront the fact that one of the few friends she has left in the world is an elderly colleague who is really excited about AI actresses because they will allow him to finally "see a virgin on-screen." That's tough.
