On this week’s episode, Seth Dillon, the CEO of Babylon Bee, joins us to talk about the importance of satire, and why the left is hellbent on destroying it. We discuss why mockery is not hate speech, what it’s like being censored for speaking the truth, and how the absurd has become reality. Finally, Seth shares with us some of his favorite Babylon Bee headlines.
Seth Dillon is the CEO of The Babylon Bee, the world’s most trusted, factually accurate news source. Taking on the tone of a traditional news media publication, the Bee satirizes real-world events and public figures. Dillon’s experience with censorship and de-platforming has placed him on the front lines of the battle for free speech in the public square. He now speaks on college campuses and at conferences across the country about the effectiveness of humor, the moral imperative of mockery, and the dangers of censorship. He occasionally signs off Twitter to enjoy time with his wife and two sons in Juno Beach, Florida.
TRANSCRIPT
Beverly Hallberg:
And welcome to She Thinks, a podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host Beverly Hallberg, and on today’s episode, I’m delighted that Seth Dillon, the CEO of the Babylon Bee joins us to talk about the importance of satire and why the Left is hell-bent on destroying it. We’re going to get into why mockery is not hate speech, what it’s like being censored for speaking the truth, and how the absurd has become reality. Finally, Seth will share with us some of his favorite Babylon Bee headlines, which ones still make him laugh today. But before we get into the conversation, a little bit more about Seth, as I mentioned, he is a CEO of the Babylon Bee, the world’s most trusted, factually accurate news source. Taking on the tone of traditional news media publication, the Bee satirizes real-world events and public figures. Seth, a pleasure to have you on She Thinks today.
Seth Dillon:
Great to be with you. Thank you.
Beverly Hallberg:
Can you first of all just tell us the history of the Babylon Bee? I know The Onion was a place that I used to go to years ago, I have to admit. I don’t think they’re very funny today, but how did the idea come about and how has it grown into the machine it is today?
Seth Dillon:
Well, I mean, it’s basically an answer to The Onion. There’s a lot of stuff that the Left is doing really well in comedy and entertainment over the course of the last several decades, and nobody was really doing that successfully from another perspective, from a different worldview. And so the Bee was started in 2016 as kind of an answer to this secular progressive ideology being pushed by the media and entertainment industries and comedians themselves to offer just a fresh perspective. And so there was a big void there, obviously, because the Bee took off. It went viral like crazy right out the gate. It was generating millions of impressions on the website within two months of launching. So I got involved in 2018 and took over from the founder, Adam Ford, and I’ve been running the site ever since. And so we’ve just continued to grow and branch out into video and doing all these things.
So it’s been exciting to see what’s happened with it. But basically we’re making inroads in an area where it used to be very predominant thought that came from a secular progressive perspective, and we’re bringing a conservative Christian worldview to the issues. And I think part of the reason I think that we’re so successful with that right now is because our worldview is actually attached to reality. And so our jokes are funny, whereas the Left’s narrative that they want to promote is often completely out of sync with reality. And so a lot of those jokes don’t land. So I share your frustration with The Onion. I used to think they were a lot funnier than they are. I think the further left that they’ve moved, the less funny they become.
Beverly Hallberg:
And so when you get together as a team, how do you guys decide what you’re going to write about? Do people just come with different ideas? I’m assuming these are fun meetings that you have with people.
Seth Dillon:
We just toss around ideas all day. We’re looking at the headlines, we’re looking at what’s going on in the news, and then we try to piggyback on that to tell jokes. Basically, satire is exaggerating the truth to make a point. And so it’s like a caricature, but it’s challenging. I think probably the most common misconception out there right now about the Bee is that we have so much low hanging fruit. There’s so much material. People say it all the time, they’re like, oh, you’ve got to love how crazy the world is. There’s so much material, and honestly, it’s more difficult because we’re having to satirize or make a parody of that which is already a parody of itself.
I mean, I tell people all the time, I’m like, imagine if your job is the write jokes that are funnier than what Democrats are doing in real life. Or imagine if your job is to write jokes that are funnier than a Kamala Harris speech. I mean, good luck. Come on. That’s not exactly very easy. So I think it’s actually more challenging in this present environment than it would be otherwise because the world is becoming satirical. And so if the Bee goes out of business, I don’t think it’s going to because there’s a funnier competitor out there, it’s going to be because satire and reality are finally indistinguishable from each other.
Beverly Hallberg:
And how many times have you written something satirical and let’s say a year or two later, it actually becomes true. Does that happen often with your articles and headlines?
Seth Dillon:
Yeah, it happens all the time. I think it’s happening actually more often now than it used to. We have nearly a hundred articles that we’ve tracked that started out as a joke that later became a real headline. And so we have a spreadsheet where we track those. And I mean, it’s kind of a common thing it, there’s a Shakespeare quote actually from King Lear, I think it was where he said, “Jesters do oft prove prophets.”
And you see it all the time. You see Simpsons jokes that come true or Family Guy or South Park. They’ll do some kind of satirical take on something and then it becomes reality, Monty Python even. And I think it’s good comedy. It’s good satire. It proves that the satire is rooted in reality because it’s just a tiny step away from becoming real. You just need someone crazy enough to go out there and make it real and that that’s going to happen from time to time, especially in a world as wild as ours.
Beverly Hallberg:
And why is it so important to have satire to be able to laugh? I know a lot of comedians have talked about being censored these days and really struggling with the cancel culture that they see. What does laughter bring to us? Why is it so important?
Seth Dillon:
Well, a number of reasons. I mean, I think that it’s important now with the current climate and culture. People take themselves so seriously. We have this idea that having a safe space is really important. It’s important to not be offended. We’re insulating ourselves from things that make us uncomfortable. The problem is what makes us more uncomfortable probably than anything else is the truth. And so people are actually insulating themselves from the truth in their effort to not be offended. And I think it’s one of the reasons that comedy is kind of in the crosshairs is because comedy’s a vehicle for truth delivery. It’s communicating the truth in kind of a unique and creative way that causes you to think about something or look at it from a different perspective than you normally would. And it’s one of the chief utilities of comedy in mockery. It’s the reason satirists have always existed is to hold the powers that be accountable, to point out the hypocrisy, to point out the flaws in their thinking and the bad ideas and the results that are going to come from those bad ideas.
I mean, that’s why it exists. I think the comedian’s job is to make you laugh first and foremost. And then on top of that, to poke holes in the popular narrative. And the climate that we’re in now, comedians are expected to affirm and push the popular narrative rather than poke holes in it. They’re not allowed to. They’ll get canceled. So there’s a lot of speech stifling, the stifling of comedy has been happening. And I don’t think that’s healthy for us because we need to challenge these things that are being pushed on us from the top down rather than just constantly promoting them without questioning them. The environment that says that you can’t joke about these things is not a healthy one. And I do appreciate that there are comedians who aren’t just on the right with us, but like Bill Maher, for example, Dave Chappelle, these guys see cancel culture for what it is. They value free speech. And then once you can be able to make the jokes you’re not supposed to make, and there’s a value in that.
Beverly Hallberg:
How do you determine when a joke has gone too far? So let’s say personal attacks or what people may see as mockery. Is mockery a good thing? How do you balance the Christian background that this outlet has with what some would say and maybe wrongly so that sometimes it goes a little too far?
Seth Dillon:
Well, yeah, I mean, mockery can be mean, right? There’s mocking somebody’s appearance, for example, and just putting them down to make them feel bad with no redemptive purpose in the mockery. I think that can be something that is legitimate to criticize if the purpose is really more along the lines of bullying. But the purpose that where we’re coming at the issues from is one where we’re trying to say, look, mockery in this context, the mockery of the Babylon Bee is the mockery of satire, which is to expose foolishness for what it is so that it isn’t taken seriously. The way I try to summarize, we don’t really have a mission statement, but if we did, this is what it would be. I would say our mission statement is we ridicule bad ideas. We ridicule bad ideas, and we do that for a purpose, not people.
I didn’t say ridicule people. I said, we ridicule bad ideas. And the reason that’s important is because bad ideas taken seriously can have catastrophic consequences. And so yes, I think there’s absolutely a moral imperative to engage in mockery. I think that we have a moral obligation. I think one of the reasons that the world is so crazy today that it’s so insane that we have these common beliefs that men can become pregnant and chest feed and that a three-year-olds can be transgender and things like this is because we took bad ideas seriously instead of laughing at them and ridiculing them and mocking them.
I say all the time, I imagine if these ideas had been laughed at instead of lauded, they wouldn’t be impacting our children the way that they are. You wouldn’t have teenagers regretting their transition surgery that did irreversible damage to their bodies. So yeah, there’s absolutely very serious and harmful things that are being advanced that should be mocked and made fun of so that they’re taken less seriously.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, you’ve experienced counsel culture yourself. The most notably was you were suspended by Twitter, pre Elon Musk days for a post where you named Rachel Levine man of the year. This was after USA Today named Rachel Levine, one of the high ranking transgender government officials in the Biden Administration, Woman of the Year. First of all, did you have any idea that when you posted this, that this was the moment which Twitter was going to say you went too far?
Seth Dillon:
It’s funny you asked that because we actually had a conversation internally about whether or not we were going to get kicked off Twitter or Facebook for this joke. And our editor in chief was going back and forth with our managing editor saying, yeah, we’re going to get kicked off for this. And he said, “Ha-ha, probably.” Yeah, I think we saw that there was danger in this because it was the joke that we made where we said, “Rachel Levine is our pick for man of the year,” technically ran afoul of the hateful conduct policy on Twitter where they have a rule against misgendering people. They have this rule in place where if someone identifies as a woman and you refer to them as a man, that’s hateful.
Even if it’s true, even if they are a man means a male person and Rachel Levine is a male, but it doesn’t matter that it’s a true statement, it’s considered hateful. So we knew that there was a potential issue there. We had no idea that we would get locked out and be forced to delete the tweet, though we thought that was possible that maybe we would have some kind of repercussion for that, but we certainly didn’t have any idea that a benevolent billionaire was going to come in and buy the platform to set us free after we’d been locked in Twitter jail for eight months. We didn’t see that coming.
Beverly Hallberg:
And when you were locked out of Twitter, because first of all, I think a lot of people found that you were brave for not getting rid of this, you’re going to stand by the work that you put out there. Did anything happen to your numbers? Did they go down when you were shut out of Twitter, or did you actually get a lot more traction after that?
Seth Dillon:
Well, initially, when something like that happens, you do get a spike of attention. There are people who weren’t aware of you, who become aware of you because of the news reports on the issue. We’re big enough where we get media attention when we get de platformed or we get censored or something like that. So I did a couple of interviews in primetime and then we had a lot of articles written about us, and so there’s an initial spike of interest in the story and the site will get more traffic, but eventually when all of that dies down, and it doesn’t take long for that to happen, a couple of days later, people have moved on to other things that they’re outraged about or distracted by, and you’re just short one social media platform that drove a lot of your traffic. So yeah, it cut one of the legs out from underneath us.
Twitter is one of the biggest social platforms. So to be off that platform was to be removed from the conversation. And when we decided that we weren’t going to delete the joke, I mean, it wasn’t a publicity thing, it was a principle thing. They wanted us to admit that we engaged in hateful conduct. They want us to say two and two makes five basically. And we said, no, we’re not going to do that. Two and two makes four. And that’s the whole point here is to mock this idea that society is trying to treat two and two as if it equals five. So we stood by that just on the principle of it and expected that we would never get back onto Twitter. We did not expect that there would ever be any recourse for that short of laws changing, the Supreme Court taking a look at how Section 230 has been interpreted and saying, oh no, they have a right to be on these platforms or something like that. We didn’t have any expectation that we get back on. We were willing to give up the platform for that truth.
Beverly Hallberg:
Now, something that is never not funny is when some of your headlines, your stories, your tweets, they get fact checked, like Snopes will do a fact check on it. Do people sometimes not realize you’re satirical, or is this even with the satire, they’re like, it’s still wrong and therefore shouldn’t exist?
Seth Dillon:
There are definitely people who don’t get that our jokes are satirical. That happens a lot. And I don’t blame them. People say all the time, oh, look how stupid this person is. They thought that Babylon Bee headline was real. Well, I don’t always know when I’m looking at the headlines, if I’m looking at a real article or satire, I can’t tell. I have to check and double check because it seems satirical. And we’ve launched a whole other website, notthebee.com, which covers all of this news that’s so crazy. It should be satire, but somehow isn’t because there’s so much of that. So I don’t really blame people when they get taken in by a satirical article and think it’s true because satire and reality are relatively indistinguishable at this point. So I don’t blame them for that. But it is funny when they fact check it because a lot of the stories that they fact check are the really silly ones, the ridiculous ones like Ninth Circuit Court Overturns the Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg or something like that, or CNN purchases industrialized washing machine to spin the news before publishing it.
Those kinds of articles are just kind of silly jokes that obviously aren’t true. You can’t overturn somebody’s death, you can’t spin the news in a washing machine. Those are absurd jokes. They’re not believable jokes. Other ones, we did a joke about how Trump had claimed to have done more for Christianity than Jesus himself, and that one got fact checked and it was rated false because it went viral. Everyone thought it was true. They believed it was true. Well, I think that’s kind of good satire. If people think it’s true, it means that there’s something to that joke. People believe that Trump really could have said that. Well, then you fast forward a little while, go to 2021, I think it was late in 2021.
We wrote the joke in 2019, and he actually said that he’s done more for Christianity and religion in general than any other person in history. So he actually said something very similar to our original joke. Eventually it just took him two years after we made the joke. But I’m always amused by the fact checking. I’m not really bothered by it. I think it’s ridiculous that the rating jokes false, but it is pretty entertaining.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, I want to get into some of my favorite headlines and was hoping to hear some of yours. So one of my favorites is from October 20th, 2021. The title of this one is a Liberal Parent Trying to Figure Out How to Cheer For His Son, Brandon. So this was after the Let’s Go Brandon came out and a recent one I really enjoyed was When Aaron Rogers retired from the… not retired, but moved from the Packers to the Jets. The headline was Aaron Rodgers Retires From Professional Football to Play with the Jets. So I enjoyed that one. What are some of your favorites, all-time favorites?
Seth Dillon:
Oh man, I mean, a couple of the ones I just mentioned are great because I love the ones that get fact checked. I love the jokes that come true when we do a joke about how a study has shown that the only people who are still wearing masks are just unattractive. They’re trying to cover up their face. And then an actual study comes out that shows that, attractive people are more likely to have ditched their masks than unattractive people. Stories like that where we’re like enough of a kernel of truth there that it actually does later on come true. They tend to be my favorites just because it’s so amusing to watch reality go down the tubes and become satirical. But I think the Trump one is great, that one. The reason the Trump’s the one that I just quoted about him claiming to have done more for Christianity than Jesus, the reason that one’s so great is because it got fact checked and rated false, and then later on did come true. That one has everything. So it’s both a fact check and a fulfilled prophecy.
Beverly Hallberg:
That’s right. Well, final question for you, and this gets more into just the call to action to the public. And so something I think people really appreciate with the Babylon Bee is that you guys aren’t afraid of any topic. You say things that people supposedly aren’t supposed to say. You do it in a fun way. What do you say to people who are afraid to even counter some of the liberal narratives that are out there? Of course, issues related to transgender is a big one. Anything that you encourage people to do? What have you guys found by pushing against a narrative that’s just false?
Seth Dillon:
Well, I would encourage people to speak the truth and not censor themselves. I think the way that I put it is when you censor yourself, you’re doing the tyrant’s work for him. I don’t think that we should do that. I think that when we play into the censorship by actually engaging in it ourselves and muzzling ourselves, we create this environment where more and more people are feeling that pressure to not speak freely. When we’re all censoring ourselves. The people who speak out are outliers. If more of us were speaking the truth, we wouldn’t be outliers and we’d be harder to quash. So I think it’s really important that in numbers, we boldly speak the truth, even if there is a consequence for that. It is a question I get all the time, well, what I lose my job? Or what if I don’t want to say the wrong thing when I’m in my classroom and have my professor make fun of me in front of the other students or put me down or make me look stupid.
People are always worried about whether they’re going to kick, get kicked off social media, get canceled in some way, and as long as they allow that to control their tongue than they are giving the tyrants who want to control their thought and speech more power than they should have. And the only way to take that power away is to speak the truth and to speak it boldly, even if it means you pay a price for it. And I say all the time, I guess you could say, the most notable thing that you can do on Twitter, the greatest achievement that you can have on the internet, on social media, on Twitter isn’t to become verified or go viral or build a huge following. It’s to get banned for saying something true. I mean, you got to be willing to give up something for the truth or how much do you really value it? People have been willing to lay down their lives for freedom in the past, and today we’re scared about losing our Instagram. So I think people need to grow a backbone and speak the truth boldly.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, thank you for being bold. Also, thank you for being funny. I think all of us just need to laugh a little bit more. I know so many people who enjoy the Babylon Bee. We appreciate the work that you do and also for joining us today, Seth Dillon with the Babylon Bee. Thank you so much.
Seth Dillon:
Thank you.
Beverly Hallberg:
And thank you all for joining us. Want to let you know before you go that IWF does want you to know that we rely on the generosity of supporters like you. An investment in IWF fuels our efforts to enhance freedom, opportunity, and wellbeing for all Americans. So please consider making a small donation to IWF by visiting iwf.org/donate. That’s iwf.org/donate. Last, if you enjoyed this episode of She Thinks, do leave us a rating or review. It does help, and we’d love it if you shared this episode so your friends can know where they can find more She Thinks. From all of us here at IWF, thanks for watching.
