The Daily Signal - 'Mainstream Media Doesn't Represent Mainstream America,' Babylon Bee CEO Says

Episode Date: July 27, 2021

The so-called mainstream media has lost touch with real America, says Seth Dillon, CEO of The Babylon Bee, a Christian website that specializes in satire. "Whatever you want to call it, the mainstream media doesn't, really represent mainstream America, so I do think that's a misnomer," Dillion says, adding: It comes out in a lot of the conflicts that we have. Like when The New York Times is criticizing us, they're actually using misinformation to smear us as being a source of misinformation. It's all projection that everything that they accused us of doing, they're actually doing themselves. So I think they are probably doing more damage than almost anyone else to this country, just by manipulating the truth and acting like they're the arbiters of the truth.Dillon joins me for a bonus episode of "The Daily Signal Podcast" recorded at Turning Point USA's seventh annual Student Action Summit in Rampa, Florida. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to a bonus episode of The Daily Signal podcast. I'm Rachel Del Judas. Seth Dillon is the CEO of Babylon B. He says that the mainstream media has lost touch with Real America. He joins me today on a bonus episode of the Daily Signal podcast to discuss. Today's interview was recorded at Turning Point USA's Student Action Summit, so please excuse background music and noise. We're joined today on The Daily Signal by Seth Dillon. He's the CEO of Babylon B. Seth, it's great to have you with us on the Daily Signal. Great to be with you on the show. Thanks for having me.

Great to have you. Can you start off by telling us about the genesis of the Babylon B. So many people love it, and I think there are some people who love it, but just don't know about it. So tell us about the Babilon B and how you all got your start. So the Babylon B is a satire site. We're always described in the media as like a right-wing version of the onion. And I guess that's a good way of giving people like a reference point for what we are and what we do, because most people have heard of the onion. And it's kind of an apt description. I mean, we're conservative, so we're doing satire from a conservative perspective. But the site started back in 2016,

since about five years old now. And we launched it because, well, Adam Ford launched it. He's the one who founded it in 2016. And he launched it because there was this massive void on the right for a comedy that wasn't like cheesy, you know. There's a lot of like Christian media that was being done. And he was coming out from a Christian perspective too. And there was just so much like kind of cheesy, silly stuff

that wasn't really punchy or impactful in the culture. And so he saw an opportunity to do satire from that perspective, launched the site in early 2016, and within a couple of months it was going viral and getting millions of page views. So it was clear that there was obviously a huge demand for that type of content, that type of comedy. And he just started building a team of talented people around him who were able to do that very effectively. And it's just been, you know, growing ever since. Can you talk a little bit more about how you do you satire to bring humor to a new cycle that is so bleak? Well, it's not just, you said bleak.

Is that the word you used? Yeah, I mean, most days, yes. Yeah, it's bleak, it's also a little crazy. I'm going to be giving a talk here tomorrow, and I'm going to lead off with a quote from G.K. Chesterton, when he said, the world has become too absurd to be satirized. And he said that in 1911. Wow.

You know, men weren't trying to breastfeed babies back then or competing in the women's Olympics. You know, reporters weren't standing in front of burning buildings and saying the situation was mostly peaceful. I mean, the kind of stuff that you see today in the news cycle that seems like a joke is real. And the project of satire is challenging in that environment. We often hear from people, you know, your job should be so easy in this crazy world

because there's so much to make fun of. But satire exaggerates the truth. And when the truth is crazy, how do you parody something that's already a parody of itself? That's a challenge. So it's actually pretty tough for us. But the bleakness of it, you know, the depressing nature of a lot of, this stuff, the decline of the culture. Those things are sad, and I think a lot of people appreciate the levity we bring to some of those topics. Well, I want to talk about more of that in a little

bit, but I wanted to ask you, as the CEO, do you have a couple of your favorite Babylon V pieces that you're like, these are some of my favorites that we've published and put up for people? I do. I mean, we have like our super viral ones, the ones that have just gone, like, crazy viral. One of those was like, recently was like the motorcyclist to identify as a bicyclist and sets a world record, you know. So it was shared millions of times. Hopefully nobody believed it was true, but it was believable. Some of the ones that get fact-checked, I think it's just crazy, the ones that get fact-checked, they really stick out in my mind. Like, Ninth Circuit Court overrules the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

It's like you can't overrule someone's death, but they fact-checked it. And they cited 15 sources in the refutation of that joke. So that kind of stuff is just silly and sticks out in my mind. But one of my personal favorites was when I wrote a headline on how Democrats were proposing legislation that would make eating at Chick-fil-A hate crime. And that one went viral and got snoped. So it got fact-checked and rated false. And I printed that one out and mounted it on my wall.

So that's one of my personal favorites. Sometimes you have to wonder, this is satire. These people are fact-checking satire articles. It's just something else. It is a little silly and insane. And it's okay. if they fact-check satire and just say, hey, this came from a satire site. The problem we've run into is the many times they fact-checked us and not just rated it like satire,

but rated it false and then we get penalized for that. Like we're spreading fake news. You mentioned this a little bit earlier, Seth, but what is your perspective right now on, so you're right satire, and so much of what we see right now in news, we would think, wow, this seems like it should be satire, but it's not. What are your thoughts on that? Just the escalating nature of where we're at right now in general in this country, but also in society as a whole.

Well, it's a little disconcerting and alarming, I think, that so many of these stories should be satire and aren't. We actually launched a whole new site about that. We have a spinoff site called Not the Bee. And that kind of came from this trend where people were sharing stories that were really insane, like hard to believe insane, and they would say something like,

this is not the Onion or this is not from the Babylon Bee. This is real. So we launched a site called Not the Bee. that just kind of features those types of stories and offers commentary on those stories. And really the intent of that is to draw the absurdity of these things and mock how ridiculous the world has become. If I could sum up like the project of what we do, our mission,

what we're trying to accomplish is, we ridicule bad ideas. That's like the most distinct way I can put it. We ridicule bad ideas. I know it sounds like kind of negative to say that. Like we ridicule, we ridicule. But I think that's a moral good in a society that's lost its way. to this extent that's praising things that are terrible that are evil and denouncing things that are good and true.

In that context, you know, mocking and ridiculing bad ideas before they can take root in people's minds and hearts, I think, is a noble thing. Well, on that note, one of your recent pieces had something to do with what's happening in Cuba and you all headlined it. You just don't understand socialism like, I do. It says college freshman to man who escaped socialism on a raft. And so given what's happening in Cuba, right now and the affection that a lot of young people have in this country for socialism and around

the world, what are your due thoughts or perspective to share with them, maybe so that they can take another look and be like, what's coming out of Cuba right now is the natural end of what happens in a communist country? Well, I think so much of that perspective, like where they're coming from, it stems from ignorance. It stems from them really not knowing what's been tried in the world and the hardship that a lot of people are going through that are living under these conditions. and these systems. So, you know, drawing attention to that and highlighting that, I mean,

that's another one of those bad ideas that we're trying to ridicule, you know, just expose how it hasn't worked and how it's hurt people. And if we can do that in a humorous way, it's a little bit more disarming than if we just try to get into an argument with them and arguments toward both blue in the face, mocking it, ridiculing it, making it look stupid and silly. Young people respond to that. You recently did a video for Craigue called Killing Comedy. Can you tell us about that? Yes. Yeah, they had asked me to do a video. talking about, you know, basically the attacks that we faced as like conservative satirists,

which is just, you know, so different from what you see. The left has always been very good at doing satire, doing comedy, and they never faced these sort of attacks where people are trying to get them deep platform from misleading people on purpose and stuff like that. So I talked about in that video a couple of ways that the left is making our job harder. One of them is by making the world insane. And the other way is by trying to censor us and try to shut us up. And they've been do that by calling this fake news. They do it by saying we punch down a target so we should be leaving alone. So they try to malign us and misrepresent us. And so I talked about those issues and what that means for satire. Big picture. What is your perspective on mainstream media today?

Mainstream media? Yes. Mainstream media. Legacy media, whatever you want to call it. You know, the mainstream media doesn't really represent mainstream America. So I do think that's a misnomer. You know, it's just, it's so, it's so, it's, it, it, it's, it, it, It comes out in a lot of the conflicts that we have, like when the New York Times is criticizing us, they're actually using misinformation to smear us as being a source of misinformation. It's all projection. Everything that they accuse us of doing, they're actually doing themselves. So, you know, I think they are probably doing more damage than almost anyone else to this

country just by manipulating the truth and acting like they're the arbiters of the truth. They are completely shaping narratives and telling a story and have no regard to the truth. whatsoever for the truth. And I think that's very dangerous. So we try to take them to task as much as we can. What about your perspective on conservative media? What is conservative media doing well? And what would you say is some constructive criticism for conservative media? I think conservative media is doing a lot of things well. You know, organizations like Turning Point USA and Prager You that you just mentioned and, you know, some of these conservative powerhouses like Daily Wire and Blaze Media and stuff like that are reaching very large audiences, reaching a lot of young people, generating billions

of views on videos that speak truth to culture. So I think that a lot is being done right. In fact, a lot is being done better than what the left is doing. But I think that one of the things that we do that is most detrimental to our cause is we feed into this kind of tyrannical censorship and cancel culture by censoring ourselves to some extent. You know, there's a lot of stuff that we hold back on. There's a lot of things that people don't want to publish or say on these social media networks and sites because they're afraid that they're going to get penalized. It's not going to get shares or it's going to end up demonetizing their page or getting

them de-platformed or something like that. Those types of fears, you know, when we feed into, when we cave to that pressure to censor ourselves, we're doing the tyrant's work for him. And I think that's one of the things that conservatives need to realize is we need to speak, like, truth boldly and unashamedly. And if we get banned for it, we get banned for it. But that'll just make our voice louder, honestly. Every time that they've tried to suppress our voice, they've amplified it. That's so incredible.

And I want to just mention this and talk about this a little bit more. There are so many people, as you allude to, and I think this was specifically mentor for people in their workplaces where they feel like they can't talk about their values or where they stand on policy because they'll be fired. And that's where we are right now. state of play and politics and society, advice thoughts you have for people who maybe are in a job right now or they feel like they can't say anything, what sort of advice would you have for them? People hate the advice I give on this subject. They hate the advice I give on this subject because I don't tell them, you know, just go along to get along. I tell them, look, if you're not willing to risk anything for your right to say what you think, like there have been people who

were willing to lay down their lives for freedom. And we're not willing to like risk being reprimanded at our job or losing our Twitter page. You know, like, we have to be willing to risk something and lose something to preserve our freedom or it'll be taken from us. Like I said, when you censor yourself, you're doing the tyrants work for them. When you speak boldly, you encourage other people to do it too. And if a lot of people, imagine you have a company where there's, you know, half the people are conservative, but none of them will speak their mind.

Imagine if they started to. And they didn't do it one by one, but like, all together, you know, we're willing to, like, stand, like, you can't fire half your company. I know that myself. I couldn't fire half my employees right now. It would put me out of business. So, you know, they really, you're playing into their hand when you do that when you silence yourself. So I know it's a risk. You risk losing your job. A lot of people have, you know, wives and kids, and they need to be able to support them. But, you know, there's a lot of places hiring right now. You can find work someone else if you have to. I know it sounds brutal, but people have to start standing up and speaking the truth.

What advice do you have for people who work in media? As someone who works in media constantly, it can be a very draining job because the news cycles of our present and media just in general is part of our daily life, whether we like it or not. So what are some ways you stay grounded and you stay focused given your job of being steeped in this all the time? Well, for us, I think it's easier than for other people because we're not having to do a lot of like serious commentary and like grapple with these issues and like dig in and all. and argue with people, we're making jokes. Like, I make jokes on the internet. So I think that it helps when it's very lighthearted that way. You know, for us, we're bantering back and forth

in our Slack channels, just tossing around ideas and riffing on ideas and iterating on each other's headlines and stuff like that. For us, I think it's a lot easier that we're looking at from that perspective of we're trying to make people laugh. Well, Seth, thank you for joining us on The Daily Signal Podcast. It's great having you with us. Thank you.

The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. It is executive produced by Kate Trinko and Rachel Del Judas, sound design by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop. For more information, visit DailySignal.com.