A recent editorial rebuttal was published on Jezebel on June 27th, 2018. The rebuttal was against another feature that was published recently on The Atlantic on June 18th, 2018 by journalist Jesse Singal titled “When Children Say They’re Transgender”. Jezebel author, Harron Walker, took issue with Singal’s piece that examined some of the controversies within the transgender community.

However, the real story isn’t about Jezebel’s rebuttal to Singal’s feature, but rather the fact that Jezebel broke a story about another secret cabal of Left-wing influencers, consisting of 400 members from journalistic organizations, media outlets, and academia, all of whom help dictate the current media landscape of news media consumed by English-speaking readers and viewers.

Walker was nonplussed at the very presence of a clandestine group of Left-wing journalists colluding to shape narratives in the media, avoiding and passing up every attempt to out its members or discuss the full extent of the secret group. In fact, Walker was more perturbed at the fact that the narrative that other media influencers helped Singal shape wasn’t navigated to the kind of ideological island that they wanted.

The Jezebel piece provides receipts of the secret Google group, operated through a listserv that rolled out various messages across various threads about topics that the members either discussed at leisure or used to help shape their coverage in the news.

In this particular case, Singal used the group to help reinforce his own ideological stance on the issue of transgenderism. Other members chimed in with their own support; all the names were censored by Jezebel.











The group basically reinforced Singal’s position, and lightly chided others away from criticism. The narrative was set; it was all about protecting it.

Interestingly, despite being a Left-wing group, they still criticize the more extreme Left for not accepting Singal’s piece, which was criticized by some Social Justice Warriors as being transphobic.

okay let’s do this: so, jesse singal is popular because he engages directly with the cissexism and transphobia of your average white cis person. he makes transphobic parents feel like what they’re doing isn’t abusing their kids but is instead nobly protecting them. — 🌈🦊♿ ACL (@BinaryVixen899) June 28, 2018

Let’s be real if Jesse Singal turned out to be a cannibal there’d still be cis people defending him because they need his transphobic monstrous self to harm trans people. — Tolvie/Kat/Zyna (@MxTolvo) June 28, 2018

the only defense jesse singal knows how to give when the junk science he cites is widely debunked and he’s outed as having sourced his shit largely from a transphobic parent group is to cry about how mean the trans people are being to him — ☭⚥But What About The Civilian Applications?⚥☭ (@NoraReed) June 28, 2018

Jesse Singal is massively transphobic and this article has some screencaps from a private forum showing what he really thinks about how trans people talk about being trans.https://t.co/YLkOOvuEFi — Lisa Harney – Rapid Onset Gender Euphoria (@lisaquestions) June 27, 2018

So essentially, those outside of the group felt that Singal was misguided in his approach to addressing trans issues, while those in the group felt he was moving the dial in the right direction for making trans issues more widely accepted in the public sphere.

The fallout of Singal’s story has resulted in mixed results, as some of the Left-wing media sites have called it “fearmongering”, while others have run to its defense, claiming that “transgender activists have become hysterical totalitarians”. The article’s subject matter even managed to make its way into a Pacific University piece published on June 25th, 2018, which attempts to reinforce Singal’s piece and run defense for the feature.

Essentially, the outing of the group had more to do with a member not agreeing with the groupthink over Singal’s piece, rather than outing the group on the grounds of Left-wing collusion being a dangerous precedent for shaping minds on important sociopolitical topics in this day and age.

It’s a rare time where the infighting resulted in outing something most people have known for quite some time: that the news is shaped by people trying to socially engineer the way we think. The rumblings from the masses date back to the days of the JournoList that was created Vox Media’s Ezra Klein, which was a private group consisting of 400 members of media influencers, journalists, and academics.

Given that members of The Atlantic are on the current list, it should come as no surprise that back on July 21st 2010, Clive Crook penned a piece for The Atlantic dismissing the JournoList’s influence as nothing more than Right-wing conspiracies. And yet, ironically, on that very same day another post went up on the Atlantic by Jeffrey Golderg outing JournoList 2.0, consisting of 173 members, which was put together in order to kill the stories about the original JournoList being used to shape media narratives.

Another group was discovered in 2014 consisting of 1,000 members, headed up by Left-wing activist Billy Wimsatt, as reported by Red State. This new JournoList had members from CNN, Huffington Post, and Al Jazeera, to name but a few. Many of them used their positions and status within the journalism ring to push for the kind of politics they wanted at the forefront of public consciousness.

This kind of social engineering through media manipulation has been going on for years across nearly every sector of media journalism, including video games.

In 2010 Ars Technica writer Kyle Orland also started a secret e-mail group for media journalists, which ended up consisting of 150 members from within the tech and video game media sphere. This included writers, editors, site managers and staffers from IGN, PC Gamer, Rock Paper Shotgun, Engadget, Polygon, Kotaku, TechRadar, GamesRadar, GiantBomb, Ars Technica, The Escapist, Destructoid, and even the Xbox division.

The GameJournoPros was instrumental in helping shape the narrative of #GamerGate as a harassment campaign (which was proven to not be true after reports were published by Women Action Media!, and the FBI) due to the fact that many of the members on the list were friends with one of the story’s subjects: Zoe Quinn.

Gamers angry about journalistic impropriety and unethical behavior were shouted down as misogynists by the exact same corrupt journalists who were publishing articles to protect their friend Zoe Quinn. The group was only outed due to a leaker, where the contents were published over on Breitbart.

Unlike JournoList, the GameJournoPros also had connections to Wikipedia, allowing any historical information to be scrubbed from the net, as evident with the deletion of the GameJournoPros Wikipedia page, which was quickly removed shortly after the news broke about the group’s connection with shaping the media narrative around #GamerGate.

This was thanks to some of the Wikipedia editors being friends with Zoe Quinn, and they were on hand to edit, modify or delete content that didn’t support the narrative of Quinn and the GameJournoPros.

Meanwhile, media outlets refused to report on the GameJournoPros since many of them were either former members of the group or had friends on the group. Editors for PC Gamer defended the group’s function and claimed that those worried about its influence were “vastly overstating what it represents”.

﻿

After Breitbart outed the group in September of 2014, it was shut down shortly thereafter. However, remnants of the group – and those who proved to be most loyal – were recruited into GJP 2.0, which formed a short period after the original group was closed down.

The second group’s existence was confirmed by another Left-leaning journalist who was dating someone who was part of GameJournoPros 2.0.

These groups existing and shaping news media narratives has proven to be very dangerous when it comes to informing the general public, since the views and the news being presented are sculpted by what a self-appointed group of gatekeepers want you to know as opposed to what you should know.

Unfortunately it doesn’t seem as if there’s going to be any changes to this format of elitist forming groups and controlling news media from back channels so long as people keep visiting and funding the very outlets that manufacture propaganda.

Nevertheless, I attempted to reach out to Jesse Singal to ask about what role he plays in the secret Google group, but he has me blocked on Twitter.

(Thanks for the news tip Homer)