The past couple of days have been a bonanza for those of us who work tirelessly to discredit the absurdly propagandistic New York Times, but it's important to remember that the problem with Pravda Media Narrative™-building is an industry-wide phenomenon.
Media outlets have often indulged in just making crap up out of whole cloth, but their primary tool has been the careful shaping and omission of facts rather than pure invention. But over the past couple of decades, the publication of outright fiction has reached pandemic levels. News outlets aren't quite as bad as some X accounts, where one need not even refer to real things, but it's getting close enough.
Russiagate was pure fiction, of course, as was the claim that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. The "fine people" hoax was provably false, yet repeated endlessly. Climate change stories veer so far off into post-apocalyptic science fiction that the "journalists" should quit their jobs, which are disappearing anyway, and try their hands at writing science fiction.
But it is on trans issues where the complete break between reality and "reporting" is most evident. They just make crap up, call somebody an "expert" to back it up, and ship the fish wrapper out the door.
Benjamin Ryan, a former New York Times writer, has been focused on the creative writing of journalists on this issue for a few years now, and he pulled out a story from The Washington Post published yesterday that exemplifies this genre of "journalism" perfectly.
— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) July 7, 2026
This Washington Post article claims that an NORC survey found 400,000 trans people have recently fled to another state.
As @kittypurrzog pointed out on @TheBARPod, the 400K figure was, with some faulty math, extrapolated by Erin Reed based on the NORC survey, which included just 10 trans people who said they’d fled a state. The survey did not provide a representative sample either. So this figure has been all but plucked out of the air and was not actually reached by NORC themselves. It is a figment of Erin Reed’s work with a calculator.
This is not to say that trans people are not fleeing red states. But it is extremely unlikely that 400,000 of them have.
Ben is being far too kind here, since his focus is on the liar who made the utterly unsupportable claim that nearly half a million trans people are fleeing Red states to Blue ones, which is, on its face, absurd. That would be about one out of four "transgender" people packing up and moving out. People who now, almost universally, live in Deep Blue cities already. I doubt anybody in Austin is packing up and moving out of fear, although, admittedly, they are already deeply mentally ill.
But as I read the story, it wasn't just the "expert" being quoted who made shite up. The reporter, a lefty based in Seattle, threw in some doozies herself. I particularly liked this line:
the need for aid has skyrocketed, nonprofit leaders say, as states such as Kansas and Idaho have stripped trans people of their drivers’ licenses and threatened to jail them if they didn’t use bathrooms that conform to the sex they were assigned at birth.
Nobody is stripping trans people of drivers' licenses. The only difference is that the drivers' licenses must state the sex of the person, not the fantasies of the driver.
Further evidence of the trans emergency is...that the DSA mayor of Seattle is being asked to declare a State of Emergency in order to open the floodgates of city money to NGOs who want it. Newsflash: NGOs want more money!
Since the 2024 election, Traction has helped 1,500 trans people flee red states — more than 20 times the 70 people it aided in the 18 months before the election. And it’s just one of several Seattle nonprofits whose leaders say they don’t have the resources to help the number of trans people who’ve left their homes for the safety of the Pacific Northwest.
Though trans people make up just 1 percent of the population in Washington state, the nonprofits that help them say their budgets are drained and their staffs are stretched so thin that last month the Seattle LGBTQ Commission asked Mayor Katie Wilson (D) to declare a civil state of emergency. Such a declaration would free up general fund dollars to bolster the nonprofits’ finances as they help transplants find housing and jobs.
“The conditions,” the commission wrote in a June 2 letter to Wilson and the City Council, “are an urgent policy concern and a life-and-death matter for internal displaced persons fleeing to Seattle for safety.”
Though no one tracks the migration of LGBTQ+ people from one place to another, a poll conducted by NORC suggests that roughly 400,000 trans adults fled red states in the six months after the 2024 election, a time when President Donald Trump issued a slew of executive orders aimed at restricting nearly every facet of trans life. Another 1.2 million trans people were estimated to be considering such moves.
That's an awful lot of fiction packed into one story. And it is all based on the fact that the NGOs exist for no other purpose than to recruit trans people to move to the Seattle area.
So much of the trans narrative is completely made up. There is no "trans genocide." Trans people are murdered at LOWER rates than the population as a whole, and almost all those murders occur because they are in the sex trade and deceived customers about their sex before things blew up.
Leaders from multiple nonprofits told the council that they were now hearing “every day” from people who were afraid to continue living elsewhere. But Taylor Farley, the executive director of the Queer Power Alliance, said they worried local groups don’t have the resources to help everyone who needs it.
“Our costs are rising nearly twice as fast as our funding is coming in,” said Farley. “Our community is under attack, and organizations protecting LGBTQIA+ people are struggling to survive.” (One conservative influencer in Seattle decried the “emergency” as an attempt by left-wing groups to tap public tax dollars unnecessarily.)
The story appears to have two underlying goals: to foster a sense that the sky is falling and to put pressure on Seattle to open the money spigot to fund these NGOs.
It smacks of the Climate Change grift and so many other "causes" where the journalists mix fact and fiction, create fake crises, and in the end make demands for money on behalf of NGOs that can make bank on the hysteria and move politics even farther left than they already are.
Every leftist wins.
Worth noting that conservative outlets like the Free Beacon exposed his sham blue collar image long ago. Those facts were largely ignored by legacy media. Now that’s changed. A cynic might say it’s because he’s now seen as a threat to their partisan tribe’s power quest. https://t.co/7h7Xf48mhI
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) July 8, 2026
There are variations on the theme, of course. When politicians and activists want to put their snouts in the public trough by funding a boondoggle, the media creates a utopian narrative, also built on fiction. California's high-speed rail is the ultimate example, but almost any prominent public works project fits the bill.
As Ed wrote earlier, once the crisis or utopia can no longer be promoted, the media narrative shifts on a dime to fit a new, useful narrative. Pravda Media, once it decided that Platner must go, begins reporting "scoops" that have long been reported by conservative or Independent outlets as facts.
Gee, maybe Graham Platner isn't really an oysterman! Who knew he came from wealth? You mean that Nazi tattoo might have indicated that he is a dirtbag? Shocking!
Katie Hobbs was a political genius until it was inconvenient, and they destroyed her. Same with Swalwell. All the "shocking" scoops were covered up until it was useful to trot things out.
Do ordinary people see this? I think the answer is both "yes" and "no." Clearly, trust in the media has plummeted. Every poll shows that. But it's also true that most people still get their news, and to some extent their opinions, from that same media. It takes work to dig up the facts, and most people are too busy to do so.
So their impressions of reality are still, by default, based on what they read and see on TV. That's especially true for the laptop class, which considers itself attuned to what is happening because it reads The New York Times and The Washington Post. That's why they were the most activated and crazy during COVID.
The propaganda works. Even when people have an inkling that they might not be getting the whole story.
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