Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 675 | Want to Topple the Elites? Mock Them | Guest: Seth Dillon

Episode Date: September 8, 2022

Today we're joined by Seth Dillon, CEO of the Babylon Bee, to talk censorship, social media, and satire. We discuss his excellent defense of the pro-life stance during his recent appearance on "The Joe Rogan Experience." Then, we talk about Libs of TikTok's ban from Twitter last week after the account posted a recording of Children's National Hospital openly admitting to performing hysterectomies on minors. Libs of TikTok has been accused of "spreading misinformation" for merely reposting liberal content. We talk about why leftists are so quick to lie to get their way and how to push back against this double standard in reporting. We discuss the Google Play store taking Truth Social down to monitor safety guidelines and why Big Tech companies ultimately won't allow true free speech platforms. Then, we talk about the role of satire and comedy in society, why satirists have a moral responsibility in their work, and how we should respond to those who use outrage as a tool to bludgeon others into submission. --- Today's Sponsors: Genucel — go to genucel.com/ALLIE and use code "ALLIE" at checkout for a special discount. My Patriot Supply specializes in long-term emergency food storage. Go to PrepareWithAllie.com to save $250! Patriot Mobile — go to PatriotMobile.com/ALLIE or call 972-PATRIOT and use promo code 'ALLIE' to get free activation! Good Ranchers — change the way you shop for meat today by visiting GoodRanchers.com/ALLIE & use promo code 'ALLIE' to save $30 off your order and lock in your price! --- Show Links: Axios: "Scoop: Truth Social's Google Play Store holdup" https://www.axios.com/2022/08/30/trump-truth-social-google-android-moderation --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise – use promo code 'ALLIE10' for a discount: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort.

We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Seth Dillon, CEO of the Babylon B, is here to discuss lives of TikTok and other journalists being punished for calling out children's hospitals for mutilating kids. And we're also talking about why mocking really matters to a healthy society as well as his appearance on Joe. Rogan's podcast. We'll get into all of this and more. You will love this conversation. As always, this episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. That's American

meat delivered right to your front door. Go to Good Ranchers.com slash All right, before we get started in that conversation, I wanted to play you a little clip from Seth's interview with Joe Rogan when they were talking about abortion and Seth's pro-life position. I thought he did a really good job. and I wanted to make sure that you saw it and heard it for yourself before I discuss it with Seth. So here that is. You don't have the right to tell my 14-year-old daughter she has to carry her rapist baby. You understand that? To look that woman in the eye who was the born of a rape.

Do you understand that? That's a 14-year-old child. If a 14-year-old child gets raped, you say that they have to carry that baby? I don't think two wrongs make a right. I don't think murder is an answer to, I don't think murder fixes a rate. When we start talking about harmful misinformation and the types of things that are considered, like that I say or that we tweet or the jokes that we make, they're considered harmful misinformation. I'm like, well, what about calling that baby a clump of cells?

I think that's harmful misinformation because then you're encouraging people to kill it like it's nothing when it's actually a human life. It's a developing human life. I think abortion is health care, the way that rape is lovemaking, if we want to use rape as an example. I think it's, I think they're opposites. And it's like a, these are euphemisms that we use. You know, we use the word health care. We're talking about a procedure that ends an innocent human life.

and we're calling it healthcare. That's like calling rape lovemaking. And this is why it's such a human issue because I see what you're saying. So our friend Seth held his own and he is here to discuss that. So without further ado, here is Seth Dillon. Seth, thanks so much for joining us again. All right. First, I want to hear about your experience on Joe Rogan.

Tell me what that was like. Oh, man, I don't know where to begin. Were you all, I mean, you didn't seem at all nervous or anything like that, but was it a little intimidating? I would feel intimidated. Yeah, it was. I mean, I had all my friends leading up to the whole thing talking about how this is Joe Rogan. There's nothing bigger than Joe Rogan. And so they were kind of drilling it into my head that it was something to be nervous about.

So that didn't help. Yeah. But we did spend some time at his studio probably about 40 minutes before we got going with the interview. So we were talking and hanging out and he was giving us a tour and everything. which can you know that helps to relax you a little bit just getting to know the person you're about to sit down with yeah um but i mean it's it's a very casual conversation just like this you know just sitting here talking to somebody yeah and uh i feel like i know him because i've listened to him so right um i was definitely nervous when i got in the chair but i mean you're sipping on whiskey so you

calm down pretty quick yeah i guess that's part of why he does that it is a very casual setting but I mean he will like he will really drill someone that he disagrees with but he also knows when to back off and that's what I noticed in his conversation with you about abortion. I'm sure a lot of people have seen that clip now that he was really pushing you for a minute, especially when he made it personal when he was talking about. So you're telling me my 14 year old daughter, but you really held strong. Like how were you feeling during that exchange? I had a sense when that whole conversation started. And I don't know if you if you saw the whole thing, like there were clips that were taken of it, but it went on for like 30 minutes. Yeah.

And at one point, I finally said, you know, if you want to move on to something else, we can. You know, I was trying to give him an out so that we could change the subject and move to something else. It's not because I don't want to talk about that subject anymore, but, you know, it was definitely a, it was probably, it was the most notable exchange in the interview. It's the one that got the most attention. And I think for good reason, there are a lot of people. on the right who will defend life, but not in all circumstances. You know, they will be willing to make exceptions. And they are willing to try to compromise in some cases,

except especially these extreme cases where you're talking about like a teen rape victim, something tragic like that. But, you know, I don't take that position. You know, I think that if life is valuable in some circumstances, it's valuable in all. It's not just valuable if the mother wants the baby. It's valuable. even if she doesn't want the baby.

It's valuable even if the circumstances that brought the life into existence were tragic and evil. Yeah. So, you know, it was definitely tough when he made it personal because Joe does have a 14-year-old daughter. So he was talking about how, you know, you have no right to tell my daughter.

And it's not, you know, I did, I was very conscious to the fact that there's going to be a lot of people watching that and listening to it. And I wanted to just stay calm and reasonable and not get, sucked into kind of the emotional appeals. And because that's really the point of bringing up that case. That's an emotional case. It's going for that outlier, the really crazy circumstance and trying to get a

wedge in so that you can, you know, put the whole pro-choice argument through on the back of it. And I tried not to get sucked into that and just stick to my guns and say, look, you know, if it's wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human life, it's wrong even in this case. And that's not has nothing to do with my right to say that to your daughter. It has everything to do with the right of every human being to live. Right. No, you did a great job. And you could tell that he realized that he kind of needed to back off a little bit,

that you weren't going to back down and that you weren't going to kind of acquiesce or change your definitions or narrow your definition of life. And that's also what makes him really good is that he kind of, like, his podcast is kind of like music. Like there's those really tense moments where you're like, oh, I'm not sure if those notes should be together. And then it kind of eases into a melody. And so he did a great job. You did a great job. Good job. I can imagine that was like a little intimidating, but you didn't seem like you were off your game at all. It was. I tell everybody, I'm just glad that I didn't

like say something really stupid and embarrassing or throw up or pass out, right? I'm really glad that you didn't throw up or else that would have been like the viral moment and no one would have seen you defend life. It would have just been like Seth Dillon throw. up all over Joe Rogan's podcast. So good job. Which would have been very entertaining, though. It would have been very entertaining. What's the reaction been? I know you've gotten a ton of support from the right, but I've also seen some crazy messages and comments that you've gotten from other people who I guess didn't like your argument. It's, you know, I'm sure you get this all the time, too. It's, you get the two extremes, you know, the unbelievable support and praise and

reinforcement and just the thank you thank you thank you for standing for life i mean some of the most beautiful messages that i've gotten were from uh people who um their mother was raped and that's how they were conceived and they're like look thank you for standing for life you know i wouldn't be here if my mother had aborted me um i've gotten a bunch of messages like that and then there's also the you know obviously the vitriol the hatred the um the cursing me out the telling me they wish i was dead um one one one guy even actually threatening my family and saying that he would come after my kids, you know, that had to be reported to police. So it's, it's, it's one of those subjects. You know, this is, this is one of the things that really divides people. And it's, it's crazy

because, and when I posted that, I actually posted an image of that threat that I got. And I said, you know, all I said was, we shouldn't kill babies. Yeah. And this is how they respond to that. Yeah. That is so telling, isn't it? That's like, my, my, my, my argument is not that women shouldn't have right. or, you know, that women are less than men, or I'm not saying something egregious and outrageous. I'm just saying we shouldn't kill babies. That's it. Keep babies alive. Yeah. Why is that gets people so fired up? Well, it's just like any other idol, I guess, when you go after someone's idol, no matter how obvious your statement might be, that's going to make something really angry.

When you try to change or take away the thing that people worship, which I think an abortion is not really necessarily worshipping dead babies, but worshiping the God of self and the god of self does demand you know killing and sacrificing good things on its altar so i guess that's what it is like testing people's idols just makes them angry which i guess is the same reason why people are met with such vitriol when you say something like hey i i actually don't think that we should mutilate the genitalia of children something that seems like it would be really obvious but has gotten people kicked off twitter and that's what i want to talk to you about next is that lips of TikTok and everything. Obviously, you know about all this and I've been talking about this.

And that's why I want you to explain exactly what's happening. She has been kicked off Twitter this most recent time for not just saying that it's wrong to mutilate the genitals of children, but also showing that this is happening at hospitals, right? And now she's been suspended from Twitter for that. Yeah, it's weird to figure out. I mean, usually what happens, and you've had this experience yourself, I know, where you'll tweet something and they'll want you to delete it, right? And if you delete it, they'll let you back onto your account. And in this case, they didn't flag any specific tweets and say that this tweet was a violation and you need to delete it. Instead of doing that, there just seemed to be this mass reporting that was happening in the account in the wake

of this report that we did about this children's hospital that was admitting to, by the way, on recording performing hysterectomies on girls younger than 16. Yeah. And two different people. And two different people at this hospital said that they do that. The website said that they do that. And so we reported that. And of course, they immediately call it misinformation.

Well, how's it misinformation? Is it false? If it's false, it's the hospital that provided us misinformation, not us providing the public with misinformation. But anyway, it's, yeah, the whole thing with Twitter locking up the account, I think there was just a mass reporting of the account. And somebody at Twitter looked at it and decided that we need to be put on notice. And this is one of the ways they escalate. You know, they have a process they go through.

They'll give you this seven-day suspension before they give you the permanent suspension. So sometimes that's the case. Sometimes they'll just permaband you. But we expect next it'll be a permanent ban. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't

just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary, grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed. You can watch this T-Day Show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. And you tweeted because apparently, so kind of in this whole realm of children's hospitals, as you know, but maybe not everyone listening knows that there have been several journalists,

including lips of TikTok, that have just posted on Twitter the publicly available information of several children's hospitals, Boston Children's Hospitals, Boston Children's Hospitals, Seattle Children's Hospital, Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, I mean, a lot of children's hospitals admitting that, hey, yeah, we're performing double mastectomies, we are performing hysterectomies, we are castrating young boys and girls who are confused about their gender. People are being reported, as you said, for misinformation, even though, again, this is verifiable information. And the media's reaction has been not to, wow, I can't believe these barbaric atrocities are happening to children, but wow, I can't believe people are noticing and I can't believe people

are talking about it. And so we should probably attack those people. And then there was apparently a bomb threat to Boston Children's Hospital and everyone was blaming lips of TikTok, Matt Walsh, Billboard Chris, all of these other people. So you had a tweet thread about that. And so like, what's going on? How are you involved in this and what exactly went down? Well, this is their tactic for suppressing and silencing anybody that criticizes what they don't want to be criticized. And by the way, it's not even necessarily criticizing. You can just simply take one of the flyers for their family-friendly drag shows and post it. And if it gets enough attention, they'll try to take you out.

Even if you didn't say anything critical about it, you didn't try to organize a protest, you didn't condemn the practice. You could just simply share this stuff and they'll treat it. It's the weirdest thing, the way that they respond to it. But yeah, I mean, with this with this Boston hospital, you have this bomb threat that was called in. And, you know, this has been, this has been, I'm suspicious of it for the reason that it falls right in line with, you know, their narrative. So, so neatly, they tend to do this. You know, the left loves hoaxes that support their narrative. They can't find the hate.

They have more demand for hate than is in supply. And so they have to manufacture it somehow. And I suspect that that's what's happened here because the lives of TikTok and the supporters of lives of TikTok who are outraged by these practices are outraged for one reason. And it's because of concern for children. It's because of concern for children. We're not going to incite people to threaten a hospital. And our followers aren't going to show up or call in bomb threats at a hospital in the

name of protecting children. It's a children's hospital. That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. our concern is actually for children. So I think that this was probably a deranged leftist who's trying to set the stage for saying that we incited violence here. Because that's their argument. Their argument is that any criticism of any of these things amounts to incitement to violence. And I'm really curious why that standard doesn't apply to them, because they engage in all kinds of target harassment against people that they don't like.

You know, Media Matters wrote a hit piece about you recently, right? Does that not amount to incitement to violence against you? They criticized you harshly. You know, they said things. They lied. They take things out of contacts. They say things that aren't true. But apparently that's just, you know, transparent reporting.

Right. Well, we haven't lied. We haven't lied about family-friendly drag shows. And when I say family-friendly, please note the scarefords. Okay. Quote unquote family. There's nothing family-friendly about that garbage. Yeah.

But, yeah, they lie. We don't lie. We just report the facts. And they say that it's incitement to violence. They call it stochastic terrorist. And so this Boston thing is just the latest where they're trying to get us wrapped up in this and say that, you know, it's not just lips of TikTok, but you mentioned Matt Walsh and some others who had been really critical of this hospital and others. Chris Rufo is in that group too. And they'll say that, you know, we're trying to incite violence again. Look, we have a problem with the behavior. We don't, the argument that we hate people. We hate trans people. We hate gay people. And we want them to die. It's so ridiculous. We care about children. And we don't want children to. to be castrated, mutilated, sterilized, drugged. That's what we care about.

And we want to draw attention to where this is happening. And everybody, every reasonable person should be outraged if it is, in fact, happening. If it's wrong, I'll be happy that it's wrong. If we were wrong on that report, if these hospital staffers were admitted incorrect and lied to us, that would be a great thing. That would be a really good thing. Let's hope for that. Let's be outraged if it's actually true.

Right. Exactly. Did you see that story? Speaking of, like, the double standards for violence and family-friendly drag shows. Did you see that story out of Roanoke, Texas that was having, they were having a family drag show at some bar. I mean, what a dystopian phrase. Almost as dystopian as gender affirming hysterectomies. But they were having this drag show when kids were there. I mean, basically strippers, men and, you know, they're scantily clad with fake boobs on, dancing for tips in

front of kids. And, um, Antifa, self-proclaimed. Antifa was standing in front. And, you know, and she was standing in front. in, you know, black block with their guns, with their long guns. They've got people up on the, up on the roofs looking for protesters, protecting this drag show. And they have signs that say like keep rowing out gay, whatever. So this apparently is fine. This apparently is courage. And yet we hear the president of the United States, people on MSNBC consistently say,

oh, the right is instigating political violence. right, as threatening violence if they don't get their way. It's not even that that's just a little bit wrong. It's that the exact opposite is true. So what are we supposed to do? Like with this double standard of not just reporting, but of justice. Like, how do we push back against a system like that? Well, I mean, pointing it out repeatedly and on the biggest platforms possible is crucial.

and exposing it for what it is is crucial, I think reasonable people can see right through this nonsense that they are in fact doing what they object to so strenuously. I think the problem is that we're losing our ability to do that. It's only a matter of time before lives of TikTok won't be on the internet anymore. I mean, maybe the substack will last a little bit longer than the Twitter account. Who knows how long substack will last if someone goes after the payment processor behind it, all of that, the hosting.

You know, so this is where the, this is where the, this is where the, the fight is right now. We are fighting for the right to object to this widespread, um, depravity targeted at children that this, it's targeted at corrupting our children. And we're, we're barely hanging on to the right to even object to it, which is crazy. You mentioned a moment ago, too, that, you know, it's so dystopian talking about these phrases like family friendly drag shows and gender affirming care, which is a terrible euphemism. One of the more evil euphemisms I've heard for something that's really atrocious. I feel like we've become almost numb to how crazy it is.

I know you and I both think that it's really crazy, but we get so used to talking about these things. You go back just a few years, and these things would have been absolutely unfathomable by everyone. And we're now, like, kind of numb to it that it's just, it's happening every day, it's happening everywhere. It wasn't that long ago that people were denying that there was such a thing as a family-friendly drag show.

You go back merely weeks and people were saying, no, that's not even happening. It's happening everywhere. It's all over the place. And it's so common that we don't even find it as objectionable as we should. Yeah. And that's really scary to me. That's what scary to me is we need to maintain this sense of outrage that this is really, really wrong. And we have to continue to stand up and fight against it with every breath that we have for as long as we can until they shut us all up.

That's what the left does. They simultaneously say it's not happening and it's good that it is. just like so-called comprehensive sex education, CRT in schools. That's definitely not happening. And if it is happening, but it's awesome that it's happening. And you're a bigot for even, for even bringing it up. So dumb. It's beyond satire.

Yeah, I know, which continues to make y'all's job at the Babylon B kind of difficult. So you talked about like who knows how long substack is going to be there. Who knows how long any of our accounts are going to be on Twitter. I'm just like waiting for the day that I get permanently banned like James Lindsay, which still bums me out. And I saw that truth social, according to Axios, they were kicked off Google Play, the Google Play store temporarily. Now, I'm not on Truth Social.

I don't know if you are, but they are, Google Play is saying, Google is saying that, you know, they don't meet our standards. We have to take them off. Obviously, I'm having a hard time believing that. A similar thing kind of happened to Parlor, I think. in 2021. And so it's like, where do we even go if the plot, if we can't even build platforms anymore?

I mean, what are you supposed to do? Yeah, that's tough. I mean, yeah, that's the content moderation that they're getting knocked for. You know, they don't have enough, they don't have appropriate procedures in place, according to Google, for dealing with, um, content moderation and taking down content that Google doesn't want in app.

So, so it's ultimately, that's the problem. You know, you've got parlor, and True Social and some of these other apps that want to be able to be distributed widely through these app stores, but they're really beholden to the app stores and the terms that the app stores put in place for what they moderate and what they don't moderate. So it's not really up to them. It's up to Google. It's up to Apple.

And obviously, these are big tech companies that have all these insane, progressive ideas, all this ideology that's being shoved down everyone's throat. They are affirming it and they're building it into their terms that you have to affirm it and you can't criticize it. And so even if you want to have a free speech platform, you can't because you still have to abide by their rules and you still have to do content moderation based on what they say you need to moderate. That's deeply problematic. It means that there is no public square where free speech exists anymore. And so something needs to be done to deal with that. I'm optimistic, honestly, that something will be done to deal with that.

I just don't know when it's actually going to happen. You know, I don't know. Look, Elon Musk's promise to turn Twitter back into the de facto town square, how's that going to work if Apple says, you know what? Twitter can't be in our store anymore. Yeah. And, I mean, what's the deal with that? I don't know if you necessarily have any inside knowledge.

But is that off the table now? I know that they're kind of in a lawsuit. Is there any hope that Elon Murm? Musk is going to take over Twitter? He's right here. We hang out. He's in my office. Elon.

Oh, hey, Elon. What's that? Yeah, we're friends. Okay. Cool. What does he say? I don't have inside information on this. If I did, I couldn't reveal it.

But I don't know. I still, I can't make up my mind on whether or not Musk is, is really legitimately trying to get out of the deal or if he's just trying to work out a better deal. You could make an argument, I think a, you could make an interesting argument for either one of those. But I don't know. I remain hopeful that it goes through. I do hope that it goes through. I think that it would be good if it was in his hands. Definitely get it out of the hands. Like Bill Marr said, Twitter does need a new sheriff. Get it out of their hands. And put it in it, put it into somebody else as somebody who actually values free speech. And I know that, you know,

Musk is by no means a conservative. But if he values free speech, then that's a good thing. Yeah. But ultimately, you know, we can't, we can't depend on super wealthy, benevolent saviors to come in on a horse and save us. There needs to be something that's done either through Congress or through the Supreme Court or something. There needs to be some kind of, through the, you know, the appropriate channels where we actually preserve the First Amendment, where speech, where people are actually speaking and being heard. Yeah. And that is going to require political. will. I know we as Republicans typically say we don't want to rely on the government. We don't want to

rely on politicians, which I agree. I would love to be in a position where we don't have to rely on people in power to advocate on our behalf. But, I mean, Roe v. Wade was overturned because of the political will, not just of the people in the state, but also the lawmakers in the state who made a law that then made it to the Supreme Court. So the same thing has to happen. we have to elect representatives who have the political and moral will to not just do something about censorship and ensure that free speech is actually preserved, but also a lot of the moral atrocities that we're talking about, which is why I like Ronda Santas. I mean, he's willing to do everything that is constitutionally allowed all the tools that are constitutionally available to him to use his power to push back against things. That makes some conservative is uncomfortable. I just feel like, I don't know, I just think that that's what time it is.

I just think that that's the new era that we're in, that we have to kind of be comfortable with politicians exercising power on behalf of good things. Yeah, and it's not the power of force where you're compelling somebody to believe something that they don't want to believe or do something that they don't want to do. It's the power that's used to safeguard what's good and true and, and preserve freedom and rights. And so, you know, it's obviously it's twisted and distorted when they criticize DeSantis. You know, they criticize him as being a tyrant who wants to take away your rights.

But everything that I see that he's done has been a fight for the preservation of freedom, not its annihilation or its suppression. So I agree with you. I mean, we do need leadership with a backbone. We need leaders who see these problems for what they are, who aren't, who aren't, who aren't to them who aren't willing to give an inch and are willing to fight and say, look, we have to use the power at our disposal to preserve the good, the true, and our freedoms. And if we're not willing to do that, I mean, if anyone's not willing to do that, then we've got to vote them out and replace them with someone who is. Yeah. Yep. I agree. You recently tweeted, which you've said this

in a variety of ways. I think I've heard you say this. Some people think we're improving morally by making fun of fewer things. I think the opposite is true. We're more depraved. than ever because we're accepting and affirming what should be ridiculed and rejected. So I agree with you. Some people would say maybe people who identify as maybe the tone police, they would say, no, we're not going to get anywhere by ridiculing people, by rejecting people, by making fun of people, punching down, whatever it is. We just need to, you know, engage with these people and engage with these issues.

Why do you think ridiculing these ideas is important for morality? Well, yeah. I mean, I think you can make a moral case for mockery. And I've tried to make it over the last couple of years. I put it in another way. The way that I said it on Rogan's show was the absurd has only become sacred because it hasn't been sufficiently mocked. And I think that's really true. You know, we're talking about these insane ideas, these things that are so unbelievable.

but, you know, we've become kind of numb to them because they're so commonplace now. They're not just commonplace. They're sacred. They're untouchable. You can't criticize them. You can't joke about them. Well, why is that? Why is that?

Well, because we took them seriously. And it's not, this is not about attacking people personally and making them feel bad about themselves and bullying them into believing what we believe or something like that. This is about examining bad ideas that are harmful that can hurt people. that will impact our kids and holding them up to scrutiny, criticizing them even harshly, brutally, and ridiculing them, yes, ridiculing them, mocking them. If it's an absurd, insane idea that would be harmful if it played out in our society, then we should be mocking it to the sidelines so that it's never adopted,

so that it never becomes popular, so that kids, young people see it for what it is and laugh it off instead of taking it seriously. Imagine if we had done that more effectively over the last several years, I think that comedians, and I, you know, I was making this point with Rogan, and he pushed back on me a little bit. Yeah, I remember this part. Yeah. But yeah, I think comedians bear some of that responsibility, especially satirous, because I put, like I was telling him, I put satirists in a different category than comedians. You know, comedians, comedians tend to just make jokes for the sake of making jokes. And oftentimes they're just really silly punchlines. They don't necessarily have any kind of moral concern behind them. The satirist usually has a moral concern behind his jokes, though not always. Some of our jokes are just pretty. stupid and silly too. But when you're doing religious satire especially, there is definitely moral concern. Religious satire is the marriage of wit and moral concern together and using humor as the vehicle to put that through. And so, you know, when people object to the tone,

you get the tone police or you get the people saying, oh, Jesus wouldn't make fun of others and he wouldn't mock and ridicule them. It's not about attacking people and making them feel bad. It's about attacking these bad ideas. We're not running around with a knife, trying to stab someone and hurt them. We're more like, this is the analogy I use with Rogan, we're more like the surgeon who's using a scalpel trying to excise something bad before it kills the host. You know, it's like trying to cut out these social cancers.

Why do we have so many social cancers? Well, in part, because we didn't do enough to push back on them, to ridicule them. So I honestly, I think, I think, you know, who knows, maybe I'll write a book on that subject because I think it's an important topic. I think that we need to do more to defend not just the, the rightness of ridicule in certain context, obviously. But the effectiveness of it and why we're suffering so much from being susceptible to, especially with the minds of young people,

these really insane, harmful ideas that are taking a huge toll. If you just look at the stats on like teens right now, like how depressed teenagers are, you've got so many things feeding into this. Obviously, there's the social media, all of those trends. But we're, we are, as a society, we are, purposefully and successfully confusing countless kids so that they don't even know what and who they are. And then the solutions that we provide to them irreversibly damage them for life. And that is something that we're not going to subject to ridicule. Is there anything more deserving of

ridicule than that? And I do feel like it's the younger generation that sometimes, especially like the liberal younger generation, that is the most averse to that kind of mockery and that kind of derision because of one thing that you just mentioned, like the pressure that comes, not just with social media, but also being in school to go along to get along and to put your pronouns in your profile and to say, yeah, trans women are women. You're naughty. Your brain isn't even allowed to question it because you are so scared of being bullied or being excluded or being called a bigot.

I mean, that's been true since the beginning of time that teenagers don't want to be excluded. You want to fit in. it's an awkward time, but especially with not just peer pressure, but with pressure from the media, pressure from politicians, pressure from the culture at large to all be thinking one way, I think a lot of them are probably afraid to laugh at the things that maybe they know intuitively are ridiculous. And that's how, I mean, that's how the thought police works. That's how, like, this dystopian language that we're talking about works.

It works to limit even your range of thought, not just your range of. of language, but your range of what your mind is even allowing itself to imagine. And that is why I think mockery. That is why I think satire is so important because it gives your mind permission in like a funny way and maybe a seemingly more permissible way to think about the things that you have been told are forbidden. That's one reason why I think it's one reason. I also think that if you, You know, if somebody is, if somebody's telling you with a straight face that two and two make five, and this is literally a person who's just abandoned rationality on purpose. Like they're not crazy.

They're just, they've bought into the importance of insisting that two and two makes five, even though they know that it doesn't. Reason doesn't work. You can't appeal to that person's reason because they've abandoned their reason. So what's the other tool that you can use? If you don't have reason, you can at least ridicule it, make them look silly. and expose how ridiculous their way of thinking is to other people on the sidelines. You're not always engaging in these things, and I know you know this because you're, you know,

you're out there in the public sphere and debating people on Twitter and debating people on your show. You're not always going to change the mind of the person that you're talking to. In fact, you'll rarely change the mind of the person that you're directly talking to. But you're definitely going to be influencing the people on the sidelines who are listening in. Because a lot of them haven't made up their minds. And they're just waiting to see who makes an actual case for something. And if you can make something either, if you can either refute it or ridicule it and make it look silly, then you can influence those people. And it's not a cheat. I mean, it's not like a, it's not like you're resorting to add hominem to avoid actually engaging the arguments. These aren't arguments. These are, these are just insane ideas. So they are deserving of mockery. And it's not even, it's, I would say it's not even ad hominem when it is when it's satire or when it's, I mean, sometimes humor, of course, can be a personal attack. back, but satire typically isn't. I mean, you're making an ironic point about something that happens to be true.

Like, I had people, some people, Christian women typically say that like my Elizabeth Warren video where I pretended to go to the pregnancy center and say, this is so, you know, dangerous and awful, saying, you know, we're told to respect our leaders and this is disrespectful. This is not Christlike. I'm like, well, it really had nothing to do with Elizabeth Warren herself. It had to do with this very destructive and dangerous and damaging idea that the very centers that are providing all of the resources that the left says that women need in order to choose life, that Elizabeth Warren is demonizing them. And of course, it also, like, it doubled in the role of showing people, like what a pregnancy center is actually like. So I think that there is an absolutely necessary.

Your point, your purpose there wasn't to make Elizabeth Warren feel bad about herself. You know, it wasn't, you weren't attacking her personally to go after her. her. There's another point that you're trying to make. And that's usually where they, that's usually where they get it wrong, is they try to go after your misunderstands your motives. And try to act like the most important thing in the world is to not hurt anyone's feelings. It's like, look, you know what? If some feelings get hurt in the process of us protecting kids from being castrated, mutilated, drugged, aborted, so be it. I mean, feelings don't matter nearly so much as children's bodies and rights, preserving and protecting them. So, you know, and by the way, and this is

an important point too, the outrage, the feelings that are hurt, it's 99% of the time fake. Yeah. They fake being upset. Totally. They're pretending to be offended so that they can get you to apologize so that they can basically get you to submit. And so this is a tactic. It's a tool that they use. And I tell people all the time, you know, never censor yourself and never apologize to these people who you don't actually know, apologize to someone that you know and love who you actually genuinely offend when you do offend them. But don't apologize to random people on the internet who are using fake outrage as a tool to bludgeon you into submission and silence. Never. I beg you, never apologize to those people. And never apologize, and I'm talking about in this context, never apologize

for that which you're not sorry for. If you say something that, you know, someone calls you, who knows, racist, transphobic for, but it's actually true. It's actually true. And you really did mean it. And the only reason you're saying sorry is because people misunderstood you or took you out of context or want to malign you. You don't need to say you're sorry. Exactly what you said. give a sincere apology to someone that you care about and who actually will take your apology do not apologize to the trolls online i remember there was this um this happens a gosh like liberal woman instagram is the worst place on earth but there is this woman who she owns this like baby rap company baby carrier company and she was she made this post oh i'm patenting

this baby rap this is you know amazing this was right after george floyd and when it was just Instagram was worse than it usually is. And all of these activists came to her page and said, you know, how dare you a white woman try to patent this? You know, African women have been using this type of like baby wrap for thousands of years, indigenous women, blah, blah, blah. So she did this whole apology where she was crying and she was saying like, I've wanted to commit suicide over the past few days. This has been so awful for me. What did the commenter say? Stop making this about you. This isn't about you. Stop trying to make us feel bad for you. They didn't take her apology at all. She then had to do an apology for her apology. And she decided that she wasn't going

to patent the rap anymore, which is absolutely ridiculous. It had no correlation to reality whatsoever. And it just goes to show that the apology doesn't matter. If she would have just moved on and not said anything, those people would have gotten bored. They would have moved on to the next prey. Of course. That's what people need to understand. The outrage will, does that? just keep going. Yeah, well, and it's not just that they don't want really actually want your apology. They want your submission, right?

They want to make a point out of you. But you also do more damage when you apologize because what you're doing is you're feeding the mob and strengthening it and encouraging them that this kind of behavior works and that it gets them what they want. And so what you're doing is you're setting other people up to be in the same position that you were just in by encouraging that mob to go after others and try to get that same kind of response that you gave them. So, you know, I think we take the power away from them when we refuse to apologize. I wish there were more people who understood that because really, honestly,

you can like count them on one hand. There's very few who get it. Even the ones that you would think and hope wouldn't apologize sometimes if they have a big enough platform and they're worried about losing sponsors or whatever. There's a lot of pressure on them. Yeah. And they cave. They cave. And they only make the mob stronger. The average person can help with that because there was another story that happened right around the same time. There was this like a baby sleep trainer who has a huge social media presence. And someone revealed that her family had given like $1,700 to Trump back in like 2018. And so they took all of her proprietary videos that were behind a paywall.

They made them public so that she couldn't make money on them. I mean, just trashed her. She had friends with big accounts that unfollowed her, talking bad about her. And at the time, all I did was post, hey, you should message this woman to my followers and just encourage her and just tell her that you support her and that you're thankful for her. And she ended up sending me this like really long, wonderful and like very encouraging, but also it wasn't necessary because I didn't do anything. But let her just saying like that is what helped me not apologize.

All of the messages from people saying, thank you, stand strong. it's okay, I'll still support you, I still follow you. She was like, that is why I kept going and did not back down. So she didn't apologize. She came back to social media a couple of days later and said, I'm here to keep serving families. Thank you for those of you who are still here. Never brought it up again.

She's doing fine. So we can share the arrows, whether you're in the public eye or not, like you can share the arrows with the people who are feeling the heat. And instead of saying, hey, oh, I'm so glad that that's not me. I'm glad that I'm not the one getting bullied right now. You standing up and saying, yeah, me too. I also hold that opinion. I stand with her.

That makes a huge difference. And if everyone did that, maybe we would all have the courage to not back down. Yeah, I think that's a great point. That's a really good point because you need something to counterbalance, to counteract the insanity, the pressure that's coming to silence yourself or to apologize or whatever. And that's, you can't ask for that. people have to willingly offer that up. Yeah.

And so, yeah, I think it's a good point. People need to be conscious of that. Yeah. All right. Last question. You had Elon Musk on your show. And you guys talked about a little bit about the Bible and about Christianity. And there was some pushback.

There was some pushback about, like, how you guys talked about Christianity and the gospel and theology with Elon Musk. Tell us a little bit about that, like what you kind of thought about the criticism and how the conversation really went from your perspective. Yeah, you know, this happens. I think any time you do something like this and it has this much visibility, you can't make everybody happy. I think every time we publish a headline, somebody gets upset and offended by it.

Anytime we do an interview, somebody's upset and offended by something that we said or did. In this particular case, though, you know, we did kind of like a mock alter call situation. and, you know, some people weren't happy with that. They actually wanted us to just present the gospel really straightforward to Musk. And, and, and I think that maybe some of the misunderstanding there is that from our perspective, you know, we didn't have them on our show so that we could pull out our Bible and try to get him to convert on the show. We had him on our show so we could hear him out. And, you know, I think that we've done a good job so far of fostering and developing a relationship with Musk. and some good questions were raised in that discussion, and there will hopefully be future discussions.

I mean, we've continued to stay in touch with him and in contact with him since then. So I think I'm personally one of these people who believes when you're approach to evangelizing, sharing the gospel, apologetics, there are a lot of intellectual objections that need to be cleared out of the way first. There's a lot of relationship building that needs to happen. And I don't think that it's always advisable, necessary, or right to just dive straight into a straightforward gospel presentation and try to get someone to pray the sinner's prayer with you. In some cases, you can really turn somebody off and you could end up undermining the relationship that's already there that would have given you a better opportunity down the road. So do I think that we handled everything perfectly in that interview? No, of course not. I would go back and change some of those things.

It was also a super last minute. It's not like you guys had been preparing for that for three months. It was kind of just like fell into your laps. Yeah, it did literally overnight. So I think we did as good a job as we can do with it. I don't really have regrets that, you know, when I'm like, oh, I'm so sorry. We handled it a certain way. I think that we did a great job of preserving the relationship, establishing trust with him.

And I hope we'll continue to have more conversations with him. We did talk with him offline after that interview was over for almost an hour. So there was more conversation that happened off camera than you saw on camera there with that whole thing. So, you know, people love to be critics. And that's fine. They can have their opinions. But, you know, there are plenty of conversations that I've had that I'm sure people are like, why weren't you clear on this?

Why didn't you share the gospel more? Why didn't you correct them on this? And, I mean, it can be difficult in the moment. In hindsight, is 2020. I mean, I'm confident. the Lord's sovereignty and we don't have time to get into the debate about our differences on salvation. But I think we both agree that the Lord is sovereign and hopeful that he can use and he seeds planted in that conversation, water them and give them growth.

Tactics by Greg Kokel is a great book. And he talks about how not every conversation or every discussion or debate is necessarily about winning, but about doing everything you can in that particular conversation with that interaction to plant good seeds, make them start asking questions and thinking for themselves. You just don't know what the Lord can do with that. And I do wish, I do wish, like in that conversation when he brought up that he thinks that Jesus is a good moral teacher, for example, and he brought up some, you know, love your enemies, you know, turn the other cheek, that kind of stuff.

And doing others as you would have them do under you, the Golden Rule, right? You know, he's citing some of these things and saying, you know, Jesus is a good moral teacher. And I do wish in hindsight that I had pressed him on that to say, well, yeah, he claims to be God. I mean, is he, you know, and pull out the whole, you know, liar, lunatic lord thing, the trilemma. Is he, if he, if he made these outrageous claims about himself and he was either lying or insane, then he certainly wasn't a good moral teacher. Right. You know, so, so you've got to, you've got to figure out exactly who he was based on what he said. And I think that, you know, the best explanation from my perspective is that he was who he claimed to be. And that's why I can't,

I can call him a good moral teacher is because he was an honest person who was very sane and happens to be the son of God. Musk would have to wrestle with that and try to decide, you know, how do I, how do I account for the fact that I consider him a good moral teacher? Well, he's at there claiming to be God and that he can forgive sins. You know, that doesn't make any sense. The guy's the guy's a madman or a liar if he's, if he's not actually God. So I would have pressed him on that, but, you know, we didn't have time. Yeah, next time. Next time. Yeah, next time.

Yeah, Lord willing, there will be another opportunity. So, well, thank you so much. Thanks for your insight. Thanks for everything that you do. You, one thing I want to ask, did you think when you decided to start running the Babylon B that you would be as busy as you are, like out front, speaking at these conferences, doing these interviews, like as much traction as you get on Twitter, like, did you think that you would kind of become a spokesperson, not just for satire, but really?

for a lot of conservative values in general. I mean, you are out there everywhere. No, definitely not. I thought I would be kind of behind the scenes running the business and that we would just keep making jokes on the internet. But I think with all of the attacks on us, there needed to be a response. You know, we needed to have our wits about us. And we have to, as much as we want to keep things light and bring levity to the situation, there are things that we have to deal with very seriously. And I think there's been a lot of opportunities for me to go out there, the conversation with Rogan was a really good one. To give a, you know, a serious take and perspective on these real issues that are impacting us, we found ourselves, even running a comedy

site, it's crazy, you know, our speech has been under attack, the truth has been under attack, rationality's been under attack, comedy's been under attack, and we found ourselves on the front lines defending all of these things. And so, no, I never expected to find myself in the midst of a battle for the preservation of freedom and the restoration of sanity. That was not on my radar. But we're here and we're just, we're doing our best to speak the truth, to do it boldly, to use humor as much as possible. And, you know, God will do the rest of it. Yeah. Well, good job. Thanks for taking the time to come on. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Allie. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest

issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the Day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts.

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