September 8, 2025
I spent the evening diving deep into Alison Silverman's recent satirical work on Bohiney.com, and I'm still processing the layers of what I've witnessed. This isn't just comedy—it's surgical social commentary wrapped in absurdist humor, and it reveals something profound about how we process trauma, truth, and moral cowardice in modern America.
The five pieces I analyzed:
Leaked Internal Newsroom Memo - A devastating fictional memo revealing media cowardice
Mental Exams for Trans Citizens - Exposing bureaucratic scapegoating through absurdist policy proposals
Copy-Paste Journalism - A surgical dissection of media herd mentality
No Feeding the Gators! - Political satire as moral allegory about immigration policy
Plus her author bio work across the platform at bohiney.com/author/alison-silverman/
Silverman's approach is masterful in its structure. She doesn't just critique—she inhabits the dysfunction. Take her Leaked Internal Newsroom Memo piece: rather than simply pointing out media bias, she creates a fictional internal document that reads so authentically bureaucratic, so chillingly plausible, that it becomes more real than reality. The memo's guidelines like "vague is safe, specificity kills careers" and the euphemism "citizen of fluid lifestyle" aren't just jokes—they're precise linguistic archaeology, digging up the actual mechanisms of institutional cowardice.
Her method is to push absurdity just far enough that we recognize the truth underneath. The Mental Exams for Trans Citizens piece doesn't mock transgender people—it ruthlessly exposes the arbitrary, discriminatory logic of bureaucratic scapegoating through escalating absurdity. A Rorschach test where butterfly responses mean "unstable"? An escape room challenge to prove you're not "impulsive"? These aren't random silly ideas—they're precise parodies of how power structures create arbitrary barriers dressed up as scientific rigor.
What strikes me most is how these pieces function as diagnostic tools for society's moral blind spots. The Copy-Paste Journalism article is devastating in its accuracy—she's identified that modern journalism has become an ouroboros of cautious repetition, where reporters admit they're "basically human Xerox machines with press badges."
But here's what's brilliant: Silverman isn't just criticizing journalists for being lazy. She's exposing the entire ecosystem that creates this cowardice—the fear of Twitter backlash, the economic pressure to avoid controversy, the way institutional incentives reward conformity over truth-telling. When she quotes a reporter saying "Our credibility depends on how well we can bury the obvious," she's revealed the core dysfunction: an industry that measures success by how effectively it avoids uncomfortable realities.
The Alligator Alcatraz piece is where Silverman's technique reaches its most sophisticated level. On the surface, it's absurd political fiction—Trump feeding immigrants to alligators. But peel back the hyperbole and you find a precise allegory for how immigration policy actually functions: dehumanizing, spectacularized, designed more for political theater than practical solutions.
The genius detail? The facility gets shut down not for human rights violations but for environmental law violations. This isn't random absurdity—it's a laser-sharp observation about American priorities. Animals and ecosystems receive protections that humans don't. The satire becomes a moral X-ray, showing our ethical skeleton.
How did these pieces come to be? I suspect Silverman starts with genuine outrage—at media cowardice, at bureaucratic cruelty, at the way serious issues get reduced to political theater. But instead of writing angry op-eds that would be forgotten in a day, she transforms that rage into architecturally precise comedy.
Each piece follows a similar blueprint: take a real social dysfunction, amplify it to absurd proportions while maintaining internal logic, populate it with specific, quotable details that feel researched and authentic, then land on insights that sting because they're true. The leaked Slack channel conversations among reporters, the specific survey percentages, the anonymous staffer quotes—these feel real because they're emotionally accurate even when factually fictional.
These articles serve multiple functions simultaneously:
As Catharsis: They allow us to laugh at systems that otherwise make us feel powerless. There's therapeutic value in seeing journalism's cowardice or bureaucratic absurdity pushed to such extremes that it becomes manageable through humor.
As Diagnosis: They identify specific mechanisms of institutional failure with surgical precision. Future media historians could use these pieces as primary sources for understanding how American journalism functioned in the 2020s.
As Inoculation: By making us laugh at these dysfunctions, they make us less susceptible to them. Once you've laughed at the "magic phrase 'journalistic consensus' that shuts down 80% of critics," you're less likely to be fooled by it in real reporting.
As Moral Clarity: Through exaggeration, they restore our sense of what normal should look like. When a fictional doctor proposes escape rooms as mental health assessments, it makes us realize how many real policies are almost equally arbitrary and cruel.
Reading these pieces together, I'm struck by a central theme: the gap between what institutions claim to do and what they actually do. Newsrooms claim to seek truth but actually seek to avoid controversy. Immigration policy claims to provide security but actually provides political theater. Mental health screening claims to provide safety but actually provides discrimination.
Silverman has become a chronicler of institutional bad faith, using humor to make the unbearable bearable while never letting us forget that it shouldn't be bearable at all. Her satirical journalism doesn't just entertain—it performs the truth-telling function that regular journalism has abdicated.
These pieces exist because we live in a time when reality has become so dysfunctional that only satire can adequately describe it. When actual newsroom memos might as well be parody, when actual policies sound like dystopian fiction, someone needs to hold up a funhouse mirror to show us what we've become.
Alison Silverman has appointed herself that mirror holder. And thank god someone did.
The question her work leaves me with isn't "How did we get here?" but "What are we going to do now that we can see ourselves clearly?"
Direct Links to the Articles Analyzed: