There is something so delicious about a single, tight joke in one headline that captures the political moment, or even just the banality of our lives. Here are some examples: “Drugs Win Drug Wars,” “Nation Throws Off Tyrannical Yoke of Moderate Respect for Women,” “I Have Decision Fatigue, Says Woman Whose Only Decision in the Last 7 Years Was Not Going to Law School.”
These headlines are from satirical news sites The Onion and Reductress. Both are on the political left. In fact, for the last few decades, all of the big political comedy came from the left.
Until The Babylon Bee came along in 2016.
The Bee is a conservative, Christian satirical news site, which may sound like an oxymoron. It did to us. Until we read it and discovered it’s funny. Often really funny. While everyone else was busy criticizing and mocking the right, the Bee found success by filling a void. The Bee’s infamous tagline is “Fake News You Can Trust.”
Here are a few recent headlines: “Biden Cancels Aid to Syria After Finding Out Some Needy Americans Live There” and “Canadian Dentist Now Offering Euthanasia as Alternative to Cavity Filling.”
The crazy thing about the Bee is that the headlines are often not just satire, but prophetic. Here’s an example: In 2020 the Bee posted “Democrats Call for Flags to Be Flown at Half-Mast to Grieve Death of Soleimani.” And now Ivy League students are flying Hezbollah flags and mourning the death of the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. In 2021, the Bee published the headline “Triple-Masker Looks Down on People Who Only Double Mask.” Later that same day, CNBC featured a graphic highlighting the higher efficacy of triple-masking.
While the Bee’s anti-woke takedowns have garnered fame, or infamy, depending on who you ask, they do try to be equal opportunity critics, poking fun at the right too. Here are two 2016 headlines about Donald Trump: “Psychopathic Megalomaniac Somehow Garnering Evangelical Vote” and “Shocker: European Supermodel Who Married Billionaire Reality Star Might Not Actually Be Conservative.”
Still, in the past few years, The Babylon Bee has been the target of online censorship, deplatforming, and media scrutiny. Twitter suspended the Bee’s account in 2022 after it made a joke misgendering Admiral Rachel Levine, President Biden’s head of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. The Bee was later reinstated when Twitter was taken over by Elon Musk, who said, “There will be no censorship of humor.”
These days, The Babylon Bee still gets fact-checked by Snopes and USA Today, which perfectly encapsulates our internet age: a parody page getting its jokes fact-checked because people really can’t distinguish between truth and humor.
Today on Honestly, the CEO of The Babylon Bee, Seth Dillon, is here to talk about it all: the Bee’s Twitter suspension, how he views content moderation and censorship in 2025, the concept of punching down in comedy, the growth of antisemitism on the far right, and how he’ll keep being funny during the Trump administration.
Click below to listen to the podcast, or scroll down for an edited transcript of our conversation:
BARI WEISS: There’s the political revolution of Trump and what’s happening in Washington, and then there’s the revolution of what could be called the counterculture happening on platforms like X, podcasts, and Substack. And I see you and the publication you run, The Babylon Bee, as being key figures in that movement. Does that track for you?
SETH DILLON: Yeah, it does track with me. Generally speaking, politics is downstream from culture. For example, you had a lot of ideas that were being pushed from the top down in education, and then the media was just so outlandish and crazy—like the idea that men can become pregnant and chest feed, and that drag queen story hour is good for kids.
When you go so far off the deep end to some radical extreme—right or left—you’re going to have a lot of people who say, “Wait, stop, I’m not willing to go there. I want to live in reality. I want to stay sane.”
So I think a lot of the cultural shift has involved that kind of thinking and reasoning. Also, the Bee is a comedy site. We make jokes, we try to make people laugh. We want to make them think, too. We want to confront some of these bad ideas and have an influence on the culture and try to use humor as a vehicle to speak truth to a post-truth culture.
On taking over the Bee to fight for free speech:
SD: I initially was just really interested in investing in it. But Adam Ford, who had founded it and was running it, was deeply concerned about big tech censorship. He had started to get fact-checked by Facebook. The big tech companies started working with these fact-checkers, and they started fact-checking all these articles from conservative publications and threatening to penalize them with demonetization and deplatforming. And the Bee, before I even got involved, started getting caught up in that. Like with this joke: “CNN Purchases Industrial Size Washing Machine to Spin the News Before Publication.”
It’s just a silly jab at CNN. But the funniest part was that it got fact-checked by Snopes and rated false. And then Facebook sends a message to us and says, “Look, if you continue spreading fake news, we will take you off our platform.”
Adam was like, if things don’t change, the Bee is going to end up getting deplatformed completely. From my perspective, if there’s a fight to be fought for free speech, what better ground could you be standing on than in defending satire, comedy, and humor?
On the Bee’s Twitter suspension, and a phone call with Elon Musk:
BW: In 2022, USA Today named Admiral Rachel Levine, a trans woman, Woman of the Year. Shortly after that, the Bee posted a headline that named Admiral Rachel Levine “Man of the Year.” And then the Bee’s account was suspended. Many people said trans people are already subject to so much ridicule, and posts like this just fan the flames against a minority group. How do you respond to that criticism?
SD: That’s a good question. A fair question. And what it boils down to is the concept that comedy should be something that only punches up at the power structure. That the oppressors can do no right, the oppressed can do no wrong. They’re marginalized, and they need to be protected and insulated, and the powerful can be the subject of scorn and ridicule. It has to be one-directional that way. I reject that way of thinking.
First of all, because the number-one rule of comedy is—it should be—to be funny. To tell jokes that make people laugh. Not thinking about where you are in the power structure.
But also, one of the other primary reasons I reject that frame of thinking is because it’s exactly the opposite of what they say it is. Admiral Rachel Levine is a transgender admiral in the Biden administration, a high-ranking government official. The narrative that’s being imposed on the culture is from the top down, from the institutional level, where all the cultural, institutional power is behind it. This is stuff coming from the top down, imposed on people that really do in large numbers find it absurd and objectionable. So we were, in fact, punching up.
BW: Twitter, which was a very different Twitter before it was bought by Elon Musk, said the joke violated the platform’s rules on hateful conduct. They suspended your account and said you could have your account back if you deleted the tweet and acknowledged that you violated the rules. And you guys said no. Tell us about your decision to keep yourself in Twitter jail rather than admit wrongdoing.
SD: Well, it’s funny. Their mission statement at the time said Twitter is a platform for free expression without barriers. And then, in the fine print, there’s long lists of barriers, things that you can’t talk about, things that you can’t say, things that you can’t even joke about.
This was not some kind of serious harmful claim. It was just a joke. It certainly falls under the umbrella of free expression without barriers. What they did was lock the account and say, “If you want to restore access, you have to delete it, and you have to admit that you engaged in hateful conduct.”
We had a conversation, where we said, “Look, I don’t think we can live with ourselves if we continue to play into this system of oppression.” This is the thought police telling you what you can and can’t say, what you can and can’t joke about. And if we play an active participatory role in that by willingly and voluntarily censoring ourselves, then we’re only perpetuating the problem, rather than playing a part in fixing it.
BW: So it was the right ethical or moral decision, the right political decision for you, but very bad for your business, arguably?
SD: Yes. This is one of the things that I do feel like we lack in our culture is people who are willing to pay a price for the freedom that they supposedly value. How much do you really value the freedom that we have in this country if you’re not willing to pay any price for it?
The really disheartening thing was that there were very prominent people who reposted that same joke of ours, and they got locked out the same time we did. And they deleted the tweet, so that they could continue to communicate on the platform. And that was discouraging to me because I was like, This is not going to change unless we change it.
One person who was willing to pay a price for it was Elon Musk. And that’s where the story goes from there.
Elon found out that we were suspended, and he tried to message us directly to the Bee account. And he was like, “I heard you guys were suspended, is that true?” And we couldn’t reply to him because we were locked out. We had to delete the tweet in order to respond to him. And so we’re like, How do we get in touch with Elon Musk!?
He ended up finding our number and calling us. And we had a conversation with him about it, and he was expressing his concern that there are so many things that deserve criticism that you can’t criticize. He mused at the end of the call, “Maybe I just need to buy Twitter.” We thought it was a joke when he said that.
Some people say he bought Twitter to free The Babylon Bee. It was much bigger than that; he already had this concern about how speech was being curtailed so aggressively.
But we don’t actually have protection of free speech in the public square. You have to depend on there being someone who’s rich enough and influential enough, who actually cares about freedom to come in and rescue you and save the day. I think it’s kind of sad that we’ve gotten to that place.
On fighting antisemitism on the right:
BW: You came on my radar for being one of the most outspoken Christian conservative voices pushing back against antisemitism on the right. Why is that a hill that you have been willing to die on? Not just die on once, but seemingly every other day?
SD: Part of the reason it’s important to me is because I am a lifelong Christian. I grew up in the church. My dad was a pastor. When I start to see Christians suggesting that Jews are evil Christ killers and that we should have this disdain for them and that it’s biblical or theologically founded, it’s absolutely insane and bizarre to me, and it’s something that needs to be addressed, because it is growing. The Jewish roots of the Christian faith are deep, and there is no reason why there should be any animosity between the Jewish people and the people in the Christian faith, because that’s where Christianity came from.
It seems to be primarily an online thing. I think that a lot of that is the safety of the anonymity that online platforms can give you. A lot of these people will say this stuff online, but they’re certainly not going to say it to your face. I think it’s less and less fringe, though, as we’re starting to see more prominent voices take it up and try to bring it into the mainstream.
It’s the idea that Jewish people are deceivers, that they control everything. They hate Christianity. They’re responsible for all of the bad things that we reject that come from the left—any of the things that the right would find objectionable.
So what could be more important than calling that out?
BW: I have to say I’ve been sort of despairing at how few of those voices there have been calling this out from the right. How do you understand that?
SD: I think there is, on the one hand, a desire for avoiding conflict within our own camp. We don’t want to make enemies on our own side, and so we need to be kind of unified. We need to pick our battles. And the real battle is with the left. That’s part of it.
BW: What have been the consequences of your speaking out on this issue?
SD: Mostly just mean things being said, which happens all the time anyway. There are, without naming names, some very prominent and powerful people telling me they want nothing to do with me. They find me loathsome and have lied about me and mischaracterized me.
BW: There is an active discussion now about whether there is a “woke right” or not.
SD: So one of the things that you’ll hear from people on the right is that wokeness is inherently a leftist thing. And the reason I disagree with that is because the way I view and understand wokeness is like an operating system. It’s a methodology through which you view the world, and it’s characterized by a number of key features: the oppressed-oppressor dynamic, the critical consciousness awakening to see it, and having a scapegoat that you attribute all the bad things to.
If people on the right are also using that framework, then that itself is proof that we shouldn’t just assume that this is inherently a leftist thing. It can be and is being used by people on the other side as well.
