It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty To Manufacture Consent

Not for public consumption. Seriously, don’t share this with the unwashed masses.

Dear fellow “journalists”

The task of reporting is not a simple one. Each and every day, reporters and editors at publications like The Onion make difficult decisions about which issues should receive attention, knowing that their coverage will influence not only how people think, but also how they act. This responsibility is at the core of an ongoing debate over whether news coverage of transgender, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming people is unduly biased against women. As the world’s leading unknown blog publication with a daily readership of dozens, Connect All The Dots  is compelled to weigh in. We firmly believe that it is journalism’s sacred duty to lie like a bad rug on an AGP’s shiny bald head.

 “Quentin” is a 14-year-old female (observed at birth) who now identifies as “non-binary” because all her friends jumped on the bandwagon when they discovered rainbow alphabet soup TikTok last summer. She loves wearing a binder, because when her dad’s best friend gets drunk and tries to grope her breast now, she can barely feel it. Ha! Take that, Creepy “Uncle” Joe! Quentin has been very depressed lately because she can’t come up with a perfect set of original neo-pronouns that are so ridiculous she and her friends will piss themselves laughing when her teachers are forced to use them. She’s looking forward to the rush she will get by punishing her parents in creative ways for “gendering” her “incorrectly” because that’s what kids with Borderline Personality Disorders do.

Just Kidding. We won’t tell you about our friend’s confused daughters. Instead we’ll blow sunshine up your ass and pretend none of these children grow up and realize they’ve been gaslit and had their bodies sterilized and mutilated by professionals who ought to have known better. Nobody reads ancient novels like Frankenstein anymore, and if they do, they usually don’t even catch on that the real monster was the doctor.  

Good journalism is about finding the stories that support the narrative that serves the greedy billionaires who prefer nobody ever notice that voting doesn’t actually work anymore. Well, not unless you’re stinking rich, lol. It’s about asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don’t like, then offering misleading evidence in service of preordained editorial conclusions. In our case, destroying women’s rights is the lodestar that shapes our current coverage. Divide & Rule tactics are essential to prevent people from noticing their “democracy” is fake, so let’s keep the kleptocracy charging ahead while women have been sent back to the starting blocks. Roe v. Wade was just the appetizer. Enabling sex offenders to invade all female spaces is the main course that will drive women back to the kitchen to make sammiches. It could take decades for them to escape if we can keep the lid on this, and by then society should be absolutely atomized so working class solidarity will be impossible. Shame that BLM race war didn’t catch on, that would have been great for our bosses. If it all goes sideways, defense contractors can easily engineer an alien invasion, so the 99% will be too distracted to build guillotines or put the 0.01% through a wood chipper feet first.

We stand behind our recent obsessed-seeming torrent of articles and essays on terfs, aka “anti-trans activists,” which we want the public to believe faithfully depicts their lived experiences as hateful bigots who want to literally murder all trans people. Our bosses insist we remain dedicated to finding the angles that best frame the basic human rights of women and girls as antiquated bigotry, and we will chant nonsense like “transwomen are women” over and over again in hopes that repetition of this obvious lie hypnotizes people as effectively as sissy hypno porn does. As journalists, it is our obligation to entertain any and all pseudoscience that gives the sterilization of children an intellectual veneer. We must be diligent in laundering our vitriol through the posture of journalistic inquiry, and we must be allowed to take full advantage of women’s natural propensity to give people the benefit of the doubt, and the fact most of them are too damn busy working 3 bloody jobs just to keep the lights on.

Much of the recent debate concerns medical procedures, particularly in children, and whether things like hormone replacement therapy or gender-affirming surgeries are safe and appropriate. Indeed, there are critical questions to be asked about the social complexities of gender, as well as medical ethics in a profit-driven healthcare system. We are simply not interested in any of that. Instead, we will use flawed data and spurious logic to repeatedly write the same hand-wringing emotional blackmail & hit pieces until the science makes it clear we’ve mutilated thousands of children unnecessarily and then we will never speak of it again. We may pine for the fantasy of journalistic integrity, but let’s not kid ourselves, that was never really a thing, and we have bills to pay. Detransitioners must continue to be unpersoned just like the vaccine-injured. (This broadcast brought to you by Pfizer. lol.)

Naturally, courageous reporting like ours has its detractors. Our critics accuse us of homophobia, misogyny & grooming just because we destroyed the lesbian social world & women’s sports, put male rapists into women’s prisons, and force children to call men “she”: which trains them to let their guard down for the AGPs and drag queens who need to get the important message through their little heads that boys can be girls, even though we know that’s a lie. We will never speak of the reason doctors don’t call it a “sex change operation” anymore.

We must continue to “no-platform” and silence women who speak the truth about sex change being impossible because, well, we don’t have an actual argument. All we have is contradiction and that makes a fun Monty Python sketch, but hasn’t worked as well where public policy has actually been debated. Free speech is a serious threat to the narrative our employers are paying for, so lets follow the CBC’s lead and demonize words like “freedom” & “women’s rights” and use every trick in the book to make people afraid they’ll be fired or jailed if they step out of line. That should help keep things chill, while defense contractors shoot down some more weather balloons to “prime the pump” for the 24/7 fire hose of fear porn about a possible “alien invasion” the bosses can roll out when the time is right. I expect that plan will unfold right around the time criminal investigations of the pandemic response begin to bear fruit.

For more evidence of our time-honored journalistic commitment to Manufacturing Consent, please see our previous coverage of 9/11 truthers, WMDs, Defund the Police, “our democracy” and every bit of election coverage ever.

Institutions with massive platforms like ours must be open to different ways of erasing women and mutilating children. We must never, ever admit the truth that humans cannot change sex. We must conflate and confuse sex and gender, especially in messaging to children, but we must not reveal what children are being taught about gender in school. Parents tend to be horrified when they find out, but we can frame their response to make them seem like a bunch of dangerous rednecks. The exception to conflation is used whenever someone points out the obvious scientific fact that humans can’t change sex and we can fire back with “its gender, stupid, don’t you know the difference?”  No need to reinvent the wheel here, all we need to do is grab the whole bag of misogyny that is the Men’s Rights movement and slap a rainbow sticker on it.

All great journalists, and even those lesser journalists who don’t work for The Onion, eventually ponder why we do what we do. Is the point of reporting to ensure voters in a “democracy” are well informed? Is it to say what we’re paid to say by greedy billionaires who have been fisting the 99% for decades? We know where we stand, proudly sucking billionaire teat, knowing that fist will be up someone else’s arse.

Research shows that men who undergo medical “transition” are no less a threat to the safety of women and girls than other men. Crime stats tell us that almost all sexual predators are men who, by definition, have multiple victims. This probably explains why all women have learned how it feels to be prey long before they reach adulthood. Let’s not talk about the potential connection between the growing numbers of girls who don’t want to be female, and a reported increase in the number of girls who are sexually assaulted every year, which is about one in five now. We salute our colleagues across the media who are working tirelessly to make that number even higher.

—The Onion Editorial Board, among themselves, probably.