Kat Abughazaleh, 26, launched campaign for Congress in Illinois after getting laid off by Media Matters, a Soros-funded activist group
Kat Abughazaleh, the 26-year-old Democratic influencer running for Congress in Illinois, is dating Ben Collins, the former “misinformation” expert at NBC News who recently became CEO of The Onion, a satire website that used to be funny. The Chicago Tribune accidentally broke the explosive story on Monday by casually mentioning the relationship in a report on Abughazaleh’s longshot campaign to succeed retiring Rep. Jan Schakowsky.
“Abughazaleh left Washington on ‘super short notice’ to accompany her partner, Ben Collins, in Chicago after he became CEO of the news satire site The Onion last spring,” the Tribune reported. “They landed in a two-bedroom apartment on North Michigan Avenue with a monthly rent of around $4,000.”
It helped that Abughazaleh was unemployed after being laid off by Media Matters for America in 2024. The Soros-funded liberal activist group was struggling financially amid an ongoing defamation lawsuit and several state investigations after accusing Elon Musk and his X social media platform of promoting Nazi content next to sponsored ads. Abughazaleh launched her congressional campaign in March, several weeks before Schakowsky announced her retirement. In a launch video featuring a keffiyeh—the Palestinian durag often worn by anti-Semitic protesters—Abughazaleh took aim at Democratic incumbents for “cowering to Trump” and said it was time for the party to “grow a fucking spine.” She touted her work as an “independent journalist” who has “fought fascists” and debuted an electric campaign slogan: “What if we didn’t suck?”
Collins resigned from NBC News in Jan. 2024 after complaining for months that doing journalism had left him “irrevocably depressed and anxious.” It’s not entirely clear what Collins actually did at NBC News except post angsty partisan diatribes on social media, which got him suspended in 2022. He continued to get paid despite not writing many articles in 2023, though he did showcase his considerable journalistic talents with a 400-word piece titled, “Fake Picture of Explosion at Pentagon Spooks Twitter.” For his remarkable ability to stay employed at a major corporation without producing anything of value, Collins earned a coveted Washington Free Beacon Man of the Year award. He also received “special recognition for incisive reporting from the trenches of the information war” at the 2023 Walter Cronkite Awards for Excellence in Television Political Journalism. Judges praised Collins for his “brilliant, brave work … bearing witness to the extremism on the dark web.” Several months later, the misinformation expert was duped by Hamas propaganda.
Abughazaleh was thrilled when Collins became CEO of The Onion in May 2024. “This is the only good development in media to happen in weeks / months / years!!!!!!” she wrote. “Congrats, Ben!!!!!!” The Chicago-based publication, once renowned for its satirical humor, has struggled to revive its reputation on Collins’s watch. Much of the output is just left-wing angst posing as satire.
The Onion frequently attacks Trump, but also criticizes Democrat leaders as spineless cowards, echoing Abughazaleh’s campaign platform. Recent headlines include, “Democratic Leaders Stand Real Still In Hopes No One Notices Them” and “Chuck Schumer Helps Pull Democrats Back From Brink Of Courage.” Collins aggressively promoted Abughazaleh’s campaign announcement on Bluesky, the social media app for obnoxious liberals, without mention that they were lovers. “[L]ol Kat is 110% percent going to win, holy shit,” he wrote. Abughazaleh was “going to be in Congress,” he insisted after posting a screenshot of the LGBTQ+ section of her campaign website, which compares Republicans to Nazis for “trying their best to villainize queer (particularly trans) people” and denounces Democrats who “might be happy to throw trans people under the bus.”
Please join us in extending our heartfelt congratulations to the happy couple. They deserve each other.
This article was originally published at freebeacon.com
