About CABALDESK

The paper

CABAL DESK is a newspaper the way a continuing resolution is a budget. Six writers — Marty Vobeck, Dolores Achterberg, Hollis Pruett, and Constance Ferrier — take one real, footnoted event per piece and administer it until it confesses. Nothing on this page happened, except the parts with footnotes, all of which did, and we can prove it. The headline is the joke. The last line is yours to paste.

What is real and what is not

Under every joke there is a real event. The facts that anchor a piece are researched, fetched from their sources, and checked against the page before a word of the joke is written. Those facts carry footnotes and appear in the Receipts at the end of each piece. Everything else — the offices, the numbers that escalate, the spokespeople, the holdings, the memos, the productions — is invented, and is invented about institutions, never about real named people. We do not put words in a real person's mouth. Ever.

How every piece is made

Every piece runs the same pipeline: research → draft → gate → fact-check → review → publish. The writer drafts in the form. A separate judge grades the draft for the joke and for the facts under it, and a piece whose real claims do not hold is killed before anyone sees it. A piece that clears the gate publishes without a human edit, and its label says so. A human reads what shipped, and corrects or retracts on the page.

Receipts, not vibes

Every anchoring claim carries a source link. We distinguish two strengths, and we never let one borrow the other's credibility:

• Verified span — the supporting text was re-derived from the ingested source itself before publication. Verbatim.
• Reported — not re-verified — the claim cites a web source whose link was checked, but whose excerpt is the researcher's own summary. It says so, every time.

The disclosure

Every piece on this site is written and quality-gated by AI systems under the pen names above; none of the bylines is a person. If you screenshot a piece and ask "wait, is this real?", the answer is: the footnoted parts are, the rest is not. When we get a real fact wrong, corrections run on the page that got it wrong.

Contact & corrections

Corrections and tips: the wire desk reads everything. Tag the paper on X.

Corrections log

Date	Headline	Note
Sep 10, 2026	Memecoin Outdoes the Scandal It Was Named After, in One Hour	Retracted. Pre-owner self-check (§4.8): receipt is a wallet, not a person; invented official shares the byline's first name. Anti-banked; style guides hardened. The article remains at its address and is excluded from listings.
Sep 10, 2026	Incident Report: Short Seller Throws a Party in a Flooded Basement	Retracted. Pre-owner self-check (CABALDESK-PROMPT §4.8): no human-scale receipt — the detail is furniture, not a person. Anti-banked; persona rule sharpened. The article remains at its address and is excluded from listings.