Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker is on a mission to abolish boys and girls and turn Illinois into a horror movie. That’s according to the North Cook News, a newspaper mailed to thousands of homes in Chicago’s northern suburbs last month. “No more boys and girls?” read one recent front-page headline. “Pritzker family leads push to replace ‘myth’ of biology.” The article was accompanied by a photo of Pritzker and his cousin, Jennifer Pritzker, who is transgender.

A “special crime edition” of the print paper pushed the wild claim that Illinois’s new SAFE-T law, which would abolish cash bail statewide in 2023, would usher in a real-life version of The Purge, the 2013 Ethan Hawke movie about a terrifying annual holiday where all crime is legal. The framing has caught on, with the Right calling the measure “the purge law.”

When did the local newspaper transform into Fox News: City Edition? The short answer is it didn’t. The North Cook News and its thirty-five sister publications targeting the Land of Lincoln aren’t homegrown journalism. They’re products of a company called Local Government Information Services (LGIS), which dresses thinly veiled right-wing political propaganda as the trusty ink-stained institutions of yore that traditionally document people, places, and happenings in your backyard. But it’s only possible and effective because of the evisceration of local news.