What is The Onion?

SATIRICAL COMEDIC NEWSPAPER, SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS, and SITE.

Who is Ben Collins?

CEO of THE ONION and PARTNER to KAT ABUGHAZALEH
Took over The Onion, let go of three people (including Chelsea Onik) then lied about it in the press.

Who is Jeff Lawson?

OWNER of THE ONION
Billionaire leader of a small staff and close to Ben as Chairman of the Board. Jeff has made his ambitions as a political backer very clear.

Who is Chelsea Onik?

Chelsea Onik — professional background (beginning at The Onion)

Chelsea Onik is a media strategist, writer, and creative operator whose professional work became publicly visible during her tenure at The Onion.

At The Onion, Onik worked in strategic and operational roles rather than as an on-byline editorial voice. Her work focused on internal systems that support digital media production: audience strategy, platform mechanics, monetization logic, and the translation of editorial voice into scalable formats across changing distribution environments. She operated at the intersection of creative development and infrastructure—helping satirical content function within real technological, financial, and organizational constraints.

During this period, The Onion was navigating broader industry shifts: declining legacy ad revenue, platform dependency, private-equity ownership, and the increasing pressure to align creative work with opaque algorithmic incentives. Onik’s work sat squarely inside those tensions. She was positioned close to decision-making processes that shaped how satire was packaged, distributed, and sustained under contemporary media economics.

After her time at The Onion, Onik continued working independently across media criticism, narrative strategy, and conceptual development. Her subsequent projects—often experimental and cross-disciplinary—reflect a sustained interest in how power operates through language, platforms, and institutional storytelling. Rather than traditional reporting or comedy writing, her work emphasizes structural analysis: how incentives shape speech, how authority is aestheticized, and how “neutral” systems quietly encode values.

This pissed Jeff Lawson and Ben Collins off.

Onik is best understood not as a conventional journalist or comedian, but as a systems-minded creative strategist whose background inside a major satire institution informs her later critical perspective on media, technology, and influence.

Chelsea Onik — personal background

I'm a cashier at Jewel, our regional grocery store. I was let go from my work in satire, deplatformed, and blacklisted by Ben Collins and Jeff Lawson.