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?