TRIGGERnometry - Babylon Bee CEO: Mocking the Woke Left and Woke Right - Seth Dillon

Episode Date: June 23, 2024

Seth Dillon is the Owner and CEO of the satirical news website The Babylon Bee. With a conservative Christian emphasis, The Bee has been censored across multiple media platforms and in 2022, under former Twitter ownership, Seth accepted a suspension of The Babylon Bee’s account rather than deleting a tweet that satirised trans ideology. The Bee now has over 3.7 million followers on X (https://x.com/TheBabylonBee) and 1.6 million subscribers on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@TheBabylonBee)  Check out the website: https://babylonbee.com/ Follow Seth here: https://x.com/SethDillon  Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc  Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Right now, get up to 50% off with minimum purchase, plus get a free professional measure at blinds.com. Rules and restrictions apply. We're here to speak the truth to a post-truth culture and challenge these bad ideas that we think need to be ridiculed. We shouldn't have to depend on benevolent billionaires to bail us out. The joke was about somebody who was... Rachel Levine was named Woman of the Year. Like, this is someone who's receiving awards,

a white male high-ranking government official. And we make a joke about this person and we're punching down on the marginalized and the oppressed. Make sense of that. You can't. Why is the right now kind of infected with its own sort of woke-mind virus where the same type of tactics are being deployed to protect their ideas.

But to get that reaction from the right is new and kind of surprising to us that people on the right are having that sensitive snowflake response. Somebody's got a pushback on that stuff, and if it means that we get a lot of backlash from the right, oh well. Seth Dillon, of the Babylon Bee,

welcome to Trigonometry. Great to be here. It's great to have you on the show. you are crushing it, making great satire. I see your stuff being shared all the time. And we want to talk about satire and lots of other stuff. One of the things I actually wanted to talk to you about right off the bat is you made a very principal decision, which I imagine would have been a hard decision for someone like you who has a bunch of people working for him. When you were, you were basically, you had a choice about being banned from Twitter and staying banned from Twitter

under the old regime and sticking to your principles or giving in. And you actually did what very few people did, and you stuck to your guns. Tell us about that. Yeah, well, I mean, the details are, I should flesh out like the context for like what actually happened there. USA Today had named Rachel Levine their pick for Woman of the Year. And Rachel Levine is, if you know what that is. We'll have a photo.

We'll have a photo. Okay, we'll throw the picture up. Rachel Levine is a transgender health admiral in the Biden administration. And so, you know, we saw that headline, and it was, you know, that's a comical headline. It's, it's illustrative of how absurd our culture and our world has gotten that you have an adult male who has won an award as woman of the year. Like, that would have been a joke just recently. And now it's, you know, it's like straight out of a South Park episode from like six years ago and now it's happening. So it was a struggle to try to think of like,

how do you satirize something like that? Like, what's the joke that you tell to exaggerate that and make it funnier than it already is? And one of our writers suggested that we just, that we just kind of put our own spin on it where we name Rachel Levine our pick for Man of the Year and just, like, make a true statement about who this person really is, which is provocative in a culture that denies your right

to identify males as a man if they don't identify themselves as a man. misgendering. So Twitter had a policy against that hateful conduct. It's hateful conduct if you misgender somebody. And so we were mindful of that. And so he pitches this idea. And our editor-in-chief, his name is Kyle, responds and goes, dude, you're going to get us kicked off of Facebook and Twitter if we do this joke, you know? And he goes, yeah, I know, L-O-L. So there was that little back-and-forth. And it's actually, it's interesting that that when a back-and-forth like that takes place before you put a joke out there. And you've maybe experienced this yourself.

Like, it used to be like the number one rule of comedy was just to be funny. It was just to elicit laughter, try to get a response. And even to be controversial on purpose, you know, and get a rise out of your audience sometimes. And now you have these rules about what you can and can't joke about. You know, there's prohibit, it's prohibited to punch down on the marginalized and the oppressed and all of these things.

And so you have to be mindful of whether or not you're going to, step on a landmine, get yourself canceled, get yourself suspended from the platform that you use to reach your audience, all of those things. And so I think that conversation that went back and forth, it was kind of like, you know, they were laughing about it. Like we might get canceled for this. We might get deplatform, but it's a very real thing.

This is like, this is how they want you thinking. They want you thinking to yourself. If I say this, I'll have a penalty. So I shouldn't say it. I'll just hold it back. And that kind of soft censorship, that self-censorship, I think is way more pervasive than the hard censorship where they're actually like taking down user content.

It's that soft censorship that's really more widespread and more problematic in my opinion because it's cowardly. It's people who are doing the tyrants work for him by censoring themselves. And so we have a policy against doing that at the B and it really wasn't even really stated explicitly.

It's not like I had a rule written somewhere on a whiteboard, like never censor yourself. It's just kind of like the attitude that we have about all of this stuff is we're here to speak the truth to a post-truth culture and challenge these bad ideas that we think need to be ridiculed and so we're going to do that come what may so we published the joke we published the headline you know the bad momby's pick from man of the years rachel levine and uh and it quickly got uh flagged for hateful conduct and we got a warning notice saying that if we

didn't delete it we would remain locked out of our account they basically locked up they didn't ban us they locked us out of our account. And so within a matter, like, we talked about it back and forth. We were like, what should we do? Do we delete it? Do we not delete it? And we're like, we can't in good conscience delete it. It's a joke for one thing.

It's true for another. We can't take it down. Like, we can't. We just can't do that. So we stood our ground. And yeah, I put out a statement. I'm like, we're not deleting the suite. And we had no idea, by the way.

No clue that, like, Elon Musk was considering buying Twitter and that he was, that those wheels were in motion that was unbeknownst to us it became apparent to us very shortly after that and he did reach out to us uh not long after that that happened um to confirm that we had been suspended and all of that but anyway that's kind of like the sorry a shorter version as i can tell of like what actually went into that decision-making process and what we were dealing with and trying to decide you know do we do we censor ourselves or not and we refuse to it worked out for us yeah but you know ultimately as i say all the time you know we shouldn't have to depend on benevolent billionaires to bail us out when we, because, you know, the tyrants that

control the public forums are restricting our speech so much. Like, there's got to be an answer to that besides just, you know, some rich guy coming in and saving the day. Sure. And I imagine part of the conversation, at least for most people, would be, well, you know, we were talking before we started, you have a bunch of people working for you, have a staff, you have bills to pay, right? Yeah. Like, how did you work, think about that? because you're cutting, you're being cut off from a pretty sizable chunk of a movie. I maybe didn't think about it enough.

Okay. I was like, it's the principle of the thing. We're never deleting the tweet now. Well, how do we generate revenue? Right. No, it is, it isn't, it is an important thing. And that's one of the other, yeah, that's the one of the other, it's one of the reasons people do censor themselves.

It's like, well, this is my audience. This is my livelihood. This is how I generate revenue. YouTube is one of the biggest ones with that. You know, you don't hear of a lot of creators. You do more now with X now, actually sharing revenue with creators, but it's not like a lot of people were actually, they had a following maybe on Twitter, but they weren't generating a lot of revenue on Twitter. Whereas like on YouTube, for example,

people with popular channels are generating a substantial amount of revenue. They're going to play by the rules to not lose that. The last thing they want to do is lose that. Be like, oh, where do I go now? So, yeah, Twitter was one of our largest platforms, and it was certainly a consideration. I was confident at the time, and we had already kind of set ourselves up where You know, when I got involved with it being in 2018, one of the first things that I wanted to do was make sure that we had a subscription platform in place where we had our readers able to subscribe to support the B so that we wouldn't be so dependent on big tech. When I got involved back in 2018, we were being fact-checked all over the place. We were getting flag for incitement to violence. Just for people we don't know, you run a satirical news website.

Satire site. Yeah, fake news you can trust. So, yeah, we published jokes. I mean, one of the most notable first fact checks we got was a joke we made about CNN. The headline was CNN purchases industrial-sized washing machine to spin the news before publishing it. And it's a stupid joke. It was funnier that it got fact-checked than the actual headline was. Right.

Yeah. And so, you know, Facebook was threatening to take us down for sharing stuff like that. But that was already starting when I first got involved. And so immediately I was like, we need revenue that doesn't come from big tech directly. We need revenue that comes from our readers directly. So I started positioning us to be in a place where if we had to take a stand, or if we got kicked off Facebook, for example, which back in 2018 was driving a ton of traffic for us, we would still be in business.

So I think we were positioned to be, really the only reason, I say this honestly and sincerely, the only reason we were in a position as a business to survive making a decision like that is because of reader support. And did your audience step up in that moment? you see a big surge in subscriptions at that time? Yeah. I mean, anytime you have, if you already have somewhat of a platform and it's newsworthy that something's happened, you know, like these cancellation attempts that happen to guys

that are already popular, like when they try to cancel Joe Rogan or try to cancel Dave Chappelle or somebody like that, it only makes them more popular. It draws more attention that more people want to see their show. They want to see the controversial things they're saying that are getting them canceled. We definitely had a bit of that. Streisand effect happened where we got a boost out of it. We got more traffic. We got more revenue for a brief period of time. But it's a punctuated spike. And that stuff, people get super fired up initially when they see one of their favorite websites has been banned on Twitter. I'm going to

go subscribe. I'm going to go share their stuff, whatever. And then the news cycle moves on and people get worked up about other stuff. And then it's not like you can just ride that for forever. It's just a brief wave. And so very quickly, you know, on the on the backside of that, once that starts to calm down and people aren't fired up about it anymore, it's not a thing anymore, and you have no Twitter account. And so now it's, well, what do we do? So again, very fortunate that Elon Musk was, you know, at the exact same time this all went down was like positioning himself to buy Twitter. I think that's crazy, lucky for us. But also, you know, just the fact that it, that it, that it, played into his equation for dealing, like, he was looking at the town square, as he calls it,

the de facto town square, Twitter, and what you're allowed to say there, what you're not allowed to say. And he loves comedy. He loves jokes. He loves memes. He loves, like, even stupid, like, you know, uh, like, uh, childish, like poop humor and stuff like that. Like, he loves comedy. He's just a funny guy and he's like a lighthearted guy and likes to laugh. And the fact that comedy was like essentially outlawed as he saw it on Twitter and then the Babylon B, which he followed and engaged with regularly. He had already had an interview with us at the end of 2021, so he knew us, you know, us getting kicked off. You know, that was upsetting. He's like,

this sucks. You should be able to make jokes. So, I mean, if we played even a small part in his and factoring into his thinking that, you know, he needed to buy Twitter, then, you know, great. That was not our plan, but we're proud to have said that we stood by the joke that we made, and we stand on the principle that we shouldn't censor ourselves. Isn't it amazing that we've got to this point? I think it's really important that we just take a step back and realize what we're talking about. Yeah. Do you know, just to get a little bit of perspective on this, it's insane. It's absolutely insane. It's very much there is. There is things that you can make fun of, there are things that you can't. And if you do make fun of these

things, your entire livelihood will be damaged. You pay a price, yeah, yeah. And you go, how have we come to this point? Yeah. Didn't used to be like that. And, you know, social media has a lot to do with that. I mean, what do you think is the main reason why things have gotten to that place now where you can't make those jokes? I have my own, you know, ideas about it. But what do you think? Look, I think it's a combination of things. I think it's a combination of an ideology that sees words as violence. I think, you know, this idea of punching up and punching down is insidious. You know, you can't make a joke about this person because that means you're in a position of privilege. And coming from as a stand-up comedian and seeing people within my industry, I just see as people love being part of a mob.

They love to feel right. They love to feel morally righteous. Yeah. And if that means that they can take somebody down who's successful and maybe slightly jealous of, even better. Yeah. I think there's probably another element to it, which is what social media has done on the internet more broadly is it is putting content in front of people who never would have sold that content out. So we basically just found out what happens when you shove jokes in front of the half of the population that don't get jokes as well.

I think that's probably a part of it as well. Because the people who are going to be a... upset by the B's jokes and not your subscribers, generally speaking. That's true. I mean, there's an element. We do upset our subscribers from time to time too. What I was going to say, you actually do piss people off on the right as well. As we should.

As you should. Yeah, exactly. And we should talk about that too. Yeah, yeah. Why isn't it so important to piss people off on the ride? Well, I mean, you don't want to be pulling punches on your own side if your job is to be a satirist. Like, if you're writing satire, your job is to be commenting on whatever deserves. Ridicule, scorn, mockery, criticism, correction. You know, the vices in our culture aren't all

on one side of the scale at any point in time. So, and I also think it's a very healthy exercise just to kind of examine yourself, your own beliefs, your own motivations, your own potential double standards or hypocrisy, like, and take yourself a little less seriously. than maybe most people are inclined to because it's a healthy thing to laugh at yourself. You know, it's a constructive thing to be able to to say, look, I'm not perfect. You're not perfect. We're all passengers on the ship of fools from time to time, right? I think our culture was a lot healthier, was in a much healthier place, was in a much more unified place when humor was seen as something that was

not just comical and not just fun and entertaining, but unifying. people would get together in a room, you know, the guy on stage would be making fun of people in the audience. He would be trolling them and, like, you know, roasting them right there in a front row. And it was like, and people were throwing back their heads and laughing at themselves. And it wasn't, there weren't people getting up on stage and charging the comedian and trying to slap him in the face, you know. Or trying to get him canceled from the network. Like, if somebody wasn't happy about a joke back then, you know, maybe they would be offended by it, whatever. but they certainly wouldn't, they certainly wouldn't try to take away the guy's livelihood as a result of that.

So that's definitely been a change. But yeah, I think humor being treated is harmful now. It's what you were saying a moment ago about, you know, the punching down thing, which is what we were guilty of with this Rachel Levine joke. That's just wokeness applied to comedy. Yeah. All that is is what it's the, it's the, there are oppressors and there's the oppressed. And the oppressor can do no right. the oppressors can do no wrong. I'm sorry, did I get that backwards? The oppressors can do no right. You said it right. The oppressed can do no wrong. So, so you, uh, you have this weird situation where, you know, so much is joking about people that fall into a specific, uh,

category or set of categories is seen as like this criminal act, this, this egregious act, uh, almost like an act of violence or something against them, punching down is a It's violent, you know, to punch somebody. We're treating it like you've actually assaulted someone when you, all you've done is made a joke. And it's the most insane thing to be thinking to yourself as a comedian, like, okay, I'm up here, they're down here. I shouldn't joke about them. They're beneath me.

You know, like, that's condescending for one thing. And it's also not true that a lot of the people that fall in these categories are, in fact, like, actually marginalized and oppressed. Yeah. I don't think that Rachel Levine is marginalized and oppressed. Well, first of all, the joke was about somebody who is, Rachel Levine was named Woman of the Year. Like, this is someone who's receiving awards, a white male high-ranking government official and receiving awards. And we make a joke about this person and we're punching down on the marginalized and the oppressed.

Make sense of that. You can't. And it's also, as well, it's deeply patronizing because what you're effectively saying is these people can't take a joke. Yes, exactly. And that's more offensive to me. Like, if you were to, if you were to tell me, look, because of you certain characteristics about who I am, maybe my religion, maybe my race, whatever, that you don't want to joke about me. And you're going to be hands off because I'm, what, what am I too fragile to take the joke?

Like, I would be more offended by that than any joke you could tell at my expense. That's deeply offensive, I think, to tell somebody, look, you're too delicate, you're too fragile to handle comedy. And you think as well, like a lot of these, you know, know, let's call them, at one point, marginalized communities, produce some of the greatest comedians of all time, because part of comedy is being an outsider. I don't think it's a coincidence that some of the greatest stand-up comedians

in the history of the world have been either Jewish or black. Right. Because it's that outsider eye. It's that ability to be on the outside looking in, but also as well, it's that ability that you're tough, you're resilient. You live a tough life. So what are you going to do? Are you going to cry or you're going to laugh?

Right. Right. It's not just, you know, a racial thing either. Like overweight comedians, for example, you know, and joking about their own issues that they struggle with their weight. You know, like they've been made fun of a lot. And they're up there leaning into it and making fun of themselves even while they're up there. And that's, I think it's a healthy thing to have that kind of mentality.

It's a great thing that comedy does that. It's a way of dealing with any adversity that you might be facing and flipping it on its head and seeing the funny side of things. But it is also unifying. To see humor as harmful instead of healing, I think, is a mistake. And so our culture has really gone off the rails and treating comedy in that way. So coming back to that, we asked you why you think that is. Then you asked us, we gave you a bunch of our reasons. Did you want to add anything to what we said?

Or does that kind of cover it, do you think? I think that kind of covers it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we went all over the place on that one. Yeah. Do you see the pendulum starting to swing back now, where we had, before we had, you know, the craziness and the nonsense? Whereas now you start to see different voices pushing back, becoming, Chappelle was always successful, but Chappelle wasn't canceled for the closer, which for me was a seminal moment in all of this stuff that we're talking about here. because it was the power of one person, his success, his audience, Netflix stood by him, and as a result of that,

I think things calmed down a bit. Do you think we're starting to see the pendulum swing back? Or for once in my life, am I being overly optimistic? I like to try to be optimistic about this stuff too. I do think, to some extent, the pendulum is swinging back, largely because people are, there's an audience for, real comedy. There is an audience for humor. There's an audience for truth. And so when people are willing to say what they think, to challenge the narrative, you've seen a lot of that with like Joe Rogan's show.

You guys were just on there recently, right? He's challenged a lot of narratives on his show. He's faced cancellation attempts. And Spotify has stood by him and his show's only gotten more popular. And the audience just grows and grows and grows. And so there's a real realization that, you know, you will be not just in raging, but cutting off your access to a large audience of people by just selecting, you know, what can and can't be said and heard. So I think that to some extent, what I referenced as the Streisand effect that we benefited from earlier, communicates to some of these platforms that, you know, this backfires. And hopefully they're starting to see that because it does routinely and regularly backfire.

So that's one thing. But I also think that people are, you know, some people have put it like waking up from woke. Elon Musk has put it that way. I don't know who was it, who it was that said that originally. But like this, there is a bit of a trend, I think, in the culture to reject this idea that we have to go along with just whatever, no matter how insane it is. at some point, you know, like parents at schools are hitting a wall where they're saying, look, there's certain things we just can't tolerate. Like, we're not going to tolerate the kinds of books that you're wanting to put into the classroom that have pornography in them. Like, that's my line. Like, I'm not going to stand for that.

Like, there are a lot of these things where there's overreach has happened. And some of these things that we make fun of at the Babylon Bee are so insane and so absurd. It's hard to tell what's satire and what's not that people are really starting to resist that. And so I am optimistic with you that, yeah, the pendulum is maybe swinging back the other way on some of that stuff. Because there's always these people who, even in the worst times, you go, how did they get away with that? South Park is the ultimate example.

Oh, yeah. Great example, yeah. Family guy too. Yeah. Yeah. And you go, how do you get, because I'd love to get your take on this. Is it because it's a cartoon? Is it because the writing is just sublime?

Or is there something else going on? probably being a cartoon helps yeah i think that that helps it like and i don't know exactly in what way it helps maybe because it softens a little bit and takes it away from like it being associated with an actual real person who's making the joke there's one step removed from the person who wrote it excuse me um they also they take aim at a lot of the people that the left wants them taking aim at regularly. South Park mocks Christian conservatives all the time. They are aligned on a lot of issues and spray their bullets in a lot of different directions. And so it's not like they're just hitting one side over and over and over again relentlessly.

That probably helps a little bit. So there's some balance there. But they do go so far and so hard at times you wonder how do they get away with that and not get canceled. Have there been any cancel attempts on South Park? Like, has the left ever gone out in arms and, like, said, we have to get rid of them? No, I've never known this. And the other part of it, which makes me really think is, like, how did you get this approved? Yeah. How did you get this? Yeah. Well, by who? You mean, like, the network? By the network, yeah. You know, so when you do, you know, one of their episodes on the trans athlete and the guys are clearly roided up dude with an incredibly deep voice. Yeah. I mean, it's hilarious, but you go, who approved this? And well done, sir, if you're watching.

Thank you, but... That came, didn't that come though a little bit ahead of all of this stuff where it's like now it's actually happening? Yeah. Like it hadn't yet happened. And so maybe it was still mockable then because it hadn't yet happened. Like if they did the joke today, like would it fly today? I don't know. It all depends on who's, you know, the decision makers.

The decision makers at Twitter at the time that we made this joke, it was no, this is punching down. This is off limits. And maybe it's because they're generating as well. Look, money always talks as well. Make people would argue, well, look at Disney and whatever else, but money does talk. If you've got this cash cow, which is an absolute juggernaut, and they are producing content, and it's going great, and you're making, and it's one of the few things on your network, which is actually making money because TV is collapsing as we speak.

That's what I'm saying. Netflix stood by Chappelle. Well, Chappelle has, like, the most watched specials on the platform. Like, why wouldn't they stand by him? It would be very foolish not to. This is one of the things I think the left has done, it's interesting because there's a bit of a contradiction there where money always talks.

It's felt like they've been so dedicated to the principle of the matter, like it's a moral crusade for them where they're willing to sacrifice money to advance a lot of these things. Like Target was willing to implement a bathroom policy that was controversial, even if it meant their stock would plummet because it was the right thing to do. You've seen that happen with Disney too, you know, like a lot of these pushes. And sometimes it pushes so far,

they get so much backlash that they like, they only, they have to reverse course, but only because they were really forced to. But it does seem to be with the bigger ones, the juggernauts, like you're saying, there's enough momentum there that they see like, this is something that we can't stop. We have to keep this going because it's making us money. Yeah. And it's also as well, because you look at the late night shows and you look at these comedians, Stephen Colbert is a perfect example.

Great comic. And there'll be people who disagree. But when Stephen was at his peak, he was wonderful. He was funny. He was incisive. He was incisive. He was biting. He was satirical. And you just see him a couple of years ago dancing around saying the words, the vaccine, you know, tequila. The vaccine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you're going, you're destroying your own product with this. Right. Right. Which is, look, great for you, great for us. But you go, is this, are you aware of what you're doing? I always wonder with stuff like that, like, when you are, if your job is to be a comedian and you're taking whatever, like, the popular narrative is, and you're just promoting the hell

out of it aggressively, like, how do you not see how you're, like, derelict in your duty? That you're not trying to make fun of the things. Like, the cultural and institutional power is at your back, and you're applauding everything that they do. when you're going for, you know, someone called it claptor from your audience instead of just straight laughter. Like, I don't understand,

I don't understand how comedians find themselves. I much prefer when people ask me, like who my favorite comedians are. I'm like, anybody who's willing to make the jokes they're not supposed to make. Like, those are my favorite comedians. I love hearing jokes like that. Like, I love the one.

It's a simple joke, but Bill Marr was doing a, um, a monologue, I guess you call it. You know, he does his, his monologue before he opens it up to his panel.

He was doing a monologue on the rise and the trans trend among young people. And he was talking about how we just, you know, we can't just affirm whatever kids want. That's insane. Like, the world would be filled with cowboys and princesses if you just made kids whatever they wanted to be, right? And he goes, when I was a kid, I wanted to be a pirate, but thank God no one scheduled me for pegleg surgery and iron. you know and it's like it was amusing and his audience did laugh i was impressed that his audience laughed but like i was more impressed that he told that joke because this was maybe a year ago i think when he did this monologue maybe not even quite a year ago and it was a joke that was chipping away at the

validity of an idea that never should have been taken seriously in the first place which is what jokes should do right they should poke at those things but he was telling it at a time when it was considered hateful conduct to tell jokes like that. You know, this is recently when he, when he told that joke. And so I see, I see jokes like that is not just, you know, it was mildly amusing, but I think it was profoundly important in the sense that it was challenging a prevailing narrative that everybody, including on his own side, this is on his own side where this is being pushed. And he was willing to say, uh, this is absurd and insane. And I'm going to laugh at it. So, So whenever someone's willing to do that, I'm like, that's the comedy that we need right now.

Well, Bill is a very important voice. And one of the things he's done, you mentioned being surprised by his audience laughing at the joke. Yeah. One of the things he's actually done, and you can see it, is he's taking his audience on a journey with him because he's recognized the threat of this woke ideology. Yeah. And he's now talking about him more openly. And there are a lot of people in his audience that also recognize. And by the way, probably some that don't like him talking about it and now don't think he's progressive enough or whatever and go and watch someone else.

But from a comedy and especially satire, which is what you do perspective, that's really what satire is. If you stop doing that, then you're not doing the thing that you signed up to do. Exactly. Right. Yeah. You're becoming like a guardian of the narrative. Yeah, exactly. Instead of like someone who's poking holes in it.

Exactly. Yeah. Which is why I was really interested in the fact that you pisses. your own audience off and you talk I've seen, you know, you and I are tweeting the same stuff about kind of like the snowflake around the right that exists as well. Talk to us

about that because it seems very controversial to raise, but I see an almost mirrored situation to some degree in terms of how sensitive people are becoming about their sacred cows being slaughtered. For sure, I'm seeing that too. Yeah,

I think we were talking about like, what's the name for the woke mind virus on the right? Well, I call it the woke, right? Some people have taken to that. Other people freak out. You can be friends of mine. You know, I don't know if you, how you say it. But tell us more.

Well, this is interesting. I mean, like, when you think of woke, when you define wokeness as like this sociocultural Marxism and like being awake to social injustice and trying to be an activist who corrects that problem by addressing systemic imbalances and all of that nonsense, like, that's not what the right is doing. No.

So that word doesn't really work, but it works in the sense that it's like... the same type of tactics are being deployed to protect their ideas, I guess. Well, this is great that we're having this conversation, because I'm still thinking about this so we can flesh it out. What I would say is completely agree with you about, like, Marxism and stuff, obviously. Well, what I would say, the woke right is characterized by is, number one, obsession with victimhood. We are the victims, right?

And both sides have a pretty good argument that they can make that they are victims. You know, if you're a black person in America, it is a fact that, you know, throughout history, your ancestors would have suffered. And that generational stuff will be passed down. I think that's a fact. Now, is it true that white men are now being discriminated against an employment? Well, we know that DEI is discrimination against them, against Jews, against other successful minorities.

So it's true that there is that going on. But this obsession and wallowing in your own victimhood, number one, hyper-sensitivity to jokes and criticism, number two. And also there's a lot of kind of people don't think about left-wing conspiracy theories as conspiracies, but the idea of institutionalize this and structural that, these things are kind of conspiracy theories, really. There's things that no one can find any evidence for, really,

but they are put forward as a thing you're supposed to accept. And I think on the right, there's a lot of conspiratorialism of that kind going on as well. So I guess that's why. Those things are all mirror image. Yes. That's what I mean. when I say it's mirrored. Yeah, and the humor thing, we've experienced that with, you know,

whenever we, and this didn't used to be the case. This is a new thing. That's what I'm saying. If you go back to, like I mentioned, I got involved with the bee in 2018, we did not have this problem. We were, we were regularly, so the bee was launched as a Christian satire site. So it was your trusted source for Christian news satire. That was the tagline initially. And there wasn't really anything like that. Right. And a good percentage of the jokes were targeted at Christians. This was self-deprecating humor, largely. Ah, I didn't know that. Yeah, a lot of the evangelical Christianity, culture, church culture stuff. It was a lot of jokes inside jokes that you would know if you're in that world.

Jokes for Christians about Christians. Yeah, yeah. One of the first headlines that caught my attention was Holy Spirit, unable to move through congregation as father. machine breaks. It shows this, you know, this cloudy auditorium or sanctuary where you, like, you can barely make out the stage. And, and, you know, just like inside jokes that you would get, you know, depending on what kind of church you go to and whether or not you're in that world. But it was a lot of self-deprecating humor, a lot of humor aimed at our own side. And, you know, when Trump was was in the rise politically and won, you know, there was a lot of Trump jokes and a lot of making fun of Republicans for basically idol worship and, you know, like putting, basically treating Trump as their

savior. And so there was a lot of challenging the right in addition to, of course, mocking the left and some of its insane ideas. That was always there. And the right always handled it well, appreciated the fact that it was, this is a satire site. This is what they do. They make fun of everybody. Like, that's their job. Like, there was this understanding of that until very recently. I'm trying to think of like when it really, when it really changed, but probably most notably in the past a year or so. Like, this is very recent where now, you know, if we make a joke about, you know, a favored candidate and one of their, like them flip-flopping on a policy or position or something like that,

like the reaction to it is you can't joke about that. This is, it's harmful to the cause. You're subverting. you're it's detrimental we're not going to win the election if we do this it's this hyper sensitive that's not funny uh the carry lake campaign came at us with a joke that we did about her when she kind of flip-flopped on this uh Arizona abortion law and they told us that our joke wasn't valid satire that's not valid satire and so then you know we mocked that response and you know our audience kind of piled on and there were a lot of people who saw that for what it was but but to get that reaction

the right is new and kind of surprising to us that people on the right are having that that sensitive snowflake response and why do you think it's happening uh well um some of it has to do with with the fact that um well i think a lot of it is rooted in there's some insecurity uh that comes along with there's insecurity fueling responses like that to jokes about your own ideas. If your ideas are, for whatever reason, indefensible or difficult to defend and articulate, then mockery that exposes them for what they are, I mean, how are you going to respond to that? Rather than having like a rational response and saying, or in a meaningful defensive response, it's to have this, you know, outraged response where you try to say that this shouldn't have

been joked about in the first place. I think that signals insecurity. but I don't know. I'm trying to figure that out. I'm trying to kind of work through like where does this, why is the right now kind of infected with its own sort of woke mind virus where there are almost like these cult-like attitudes where there are untouchable people that they follow and anything that they might contradict themselves all over the place,

but the people will follow them wherever they go. And one minute they're cheering on A, and then the next minute they're cheering on not A. And it's like, these two things contradict each other. But because someone told you that you should be supporting it, you've just changed your whole worldview. Like, that's just wild and insane to me. But there's a lot of that happening on the right.

And some of the right's response to the left, I think, has been an equal but opposite reaction to the way the left is treated the right. There's been a little bit of that. And I guess maybe to expand on that, And it's like some of the attacks, we talk about, you know, the victimhood mentality. There are people who have been beat up so much. White men, for example, or white Christian men, you know, may have been so, maybe feeling so

like the jokes, they're always the butt of the joke. They're discriminated against by all these, you know, these mechanisms that are in place to write past wrongs are now committing current wrongs against them. And so their response to that is to get, is to be irrational and angry and racist and be the caricature that the left thought of they were. You know, like back when Trump was first elected, you know, the caricature was that Trump was going to lead all these neo-Nazis and like basically reign as Hitler as an authoritarian. And that like wasn't really what happened. But you do see now this rise in like anti-Semitism and and, uh, it. the grippers and the neo-Nazi hatred and everything on the right.

And it's like, and it comes under the banner of Christ is king. And it's like, well, wait a minute. Is this like, this is like the caricature that the left had of the right. And now it's like manifesting itself. And why is that? Is it, it's like a self-fulfilling thing that, you know, they were accused of this. And now they're owning it and becoming it. That's really interesting.

What's interesting to me with the, you see, I see those, what happened on the left is certainly my conception of it. Feel free to disagree. was the sensible left simply didn't say anything when the crazies went crazy. And that's why I'm worried about what's happening on the right because I think that's exactly what's happening. The crazies are going crazy and crazier,

and no one wants to be the one to go, I don't think Macron's wife is a man, or whatever that particular thing is that is now the new thing that everyone on the right now suddenly has to believe because one person said it. Do you know what I mean? Yeah.

I think there seems to be just an element of, and also the other thing you add on top of that is, if it's wartime, if this is truly about the survival of Western civilization, if the foundations of our society are being taken apart, then the instinct is to go, well, this isn't time to, like, look at our own flaws. Now is the time to, like, go out and fight and win at any cost, and we'll deal with that side later. Do you know what I mean? Yeah.

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But I don't know. I mean, the right is certainly failing to... You did maybe, okay, so maybe an example of like what you're talking about where they weren't holding their own side accountable or whatever. There was the whole never-trump movement, right? Yeah. You had the never, the right was at war with itself over Trump, right? And then that's kind of gone away.

And there's a lot of support now for Trump on the right. You know, he's, he trounced... It's his party now. It's his party now. He trounced the competition. in the primaries and he's and he's the guy for this for this round um the never trump thing didn't it was like shooting a BB gun at a freight train it wasn't going to stop this this whole movement right um but there was that effort there was an effort for the for people on the right to try to

hold the right accountable to like you know standards that they felt were important to try to maintain. There is right now, I think I agree with you that there's a lot of crazy stuff being said and a lot of weird ideas being floated and the conspiratorial thing and all of that. You got a lot of that stuff going on. And there are, it's like people are afraid to step into that because they don't know like what kind of reaction they're going to get. Like, because the crazy side actually has a wild amount of support. It's insane. Like, do they actually? Do they actually or does it just feel like it every time you open Twitter? Yeah, that's where I think is most people are a little bit misunderstanding.

Twitter is definitely not real life. It's not reflective of real life. It's exaggerated there for sure. But it is true, though, that you can have a personality, you can have somebody on the right, adopt crazier and crazier positions over time and still maintain their audience and their support. And it's not like people are just shunning them in like. large numbers and saying, no, this person's gone off the deep end. We're not going to continue to follow them.

They follow right along. So it is the case. I agree with you that, you know, Twitter exaggerates things. And there's bots and there's trolls and there's swarms and mobs. And when you go out and actually talk to people, I go all over the country and I speak at events. And I see people all over the, like real people in the flesh and talk to them. And they're much more sane and reasonable than a lot of the discourse and stuff that you see on the internet. but I do think there's a weird thing going on where the right is not checking itself

yeah against this stuff they're not and that is one of our responsibilities and it's one of the reasons why I dig in and and you know the more people can get as mad at us as they want to be but we will continue to to mock and make fun of whatever deserves it even if our own side is upset at us like that's what we should be doing that's what we need to be doing there have to be what people willing to to just stand for the sake of rationality, reason, truth. Consistency? Consistency, exactly.

Like the principles of the matter rather than just simply whatever's popular, whatever's going to gain power. Like, okay, this is the way to win, so we need to adopt this position. What are you talking about? Like, okay, I'll be principled once you give me power. That's not how it works. We've heard that before. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So I think, I don't know, not to put too much responsibility on the Babylon B's shoulders, but, you know, somebody's got to push back on that stuff. And if it means that we get a lot of backlash from the right, oh well. You know, it's interesting because in the UK, I used to see comedians eulogizing, you know, your Bill Burr's, your Chappelle's, your rocks, and going, oh, they're my favorite comedian. And then they wouldn't push it out. They wouldn't even take the first step along the path. Now, I know it's a very difficult path, and you can make a quite coherent argument that it's actually far more difficult in the UK, if not nearly impossible. But you want to say to

these people, look, if this is what you aspire to be, if you aspire to be rock, if you aspire to be Chappelle, I mean, a great example is Norm MacDonald. So many comedians love Norm MacDonald. When he was working at SNL, his producer said to him, you were doing too many O.J. Simpson jokes. Stop doing And he went, okay, and then he went out and did more and got fired. But that's why he's Norman McDonald. You know, it takes, if you want to be great, it takes that. Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. And it's certainly not the best thing for comedy to have somebody telling you,

like what jokes you should and shouldn't be telling, especially somebody who's like, at the corporate level, you know, like dictating how the comedy should play out. Like, let the comedian tell his jokes and be and the comedians themselves, if they find themselves in a situation where they're too restrained and go out on your own and do your own thing. Like, there's an opportunity to do that now. And people need that. So, yeah.

Do you feel it's a great time for satire or do you feel it's a difficult one? Because people always used to say when Trump first got elected, oh, this is a great time for satire. And for a lot of people, it was like, yeah, but these jokes are getting novel. and it's kind of, it's hard to satirize someone that kind of, who draws that intensity of reaction anyway. We're obviously, certainly looks from the outside, you tell me, you live here, we're going into a pretty heated election

and this year is going to be pretty crazy. How do you feel about, you know, comedy, the state of comedy, the state of satire? I think it's probably the most common misconception about the bee is that, and doing satire right now is that it's easier than ever because of how insane everything is. It doesn't really, it's, on the one hand, yes, it's true,

it's a target-rich environment there's a lot to make fun of. On the other hand, like, depending on how you're making fun of it, like if you're trying to exaggerate, if you're trying to caricature something or parody something by exaggerating it, it's difficult when it's already exaggerated. That was the challenge that we had with that Rachel Levine joke, was like, how do we take this to another, like, how do we, how do we parody it?

that. Like, it's difficult because it's already funny. It's already funny. And so, like, one way of putting it is, like, and this is, it's a politically charged way of putting it, but I say, like, imagine if your job is to write jokes that are funnier than what Democrats are doing in real life. It's a challenging thing to do. Or imagine if your job is to write jokes that are funnier than a Kamala Harris speech. I mean, her speeches are hysterical. They're absolutely hysterical. We did a little comedy sketch about how her speechwriter. We profiled her speechwriter, and it was like the six-year-old boy. It's like, you know, it's just, it's ridiculous.

So I think on the one hand, you know, these guys, like Biden is absolutely a caricature of a president. Like, he's not, it is literally comical listening to him speak and the things that he says, you know, to say, to see him stand there trying to read the teleprompt. and say, you know, four more years, pause. And he reads the things that he's not supposed to read. You know, like, that stuff is really comical and really hard to make fun of other than just simply quoting what he said. So there are, it's definitely challenging.

It's challenging, but it is at the same time, you know, if you find the right angle, you find the right way to cover these people, like a lot of times, like Trump jokes, like one of the best ways to make Trump jokes is to, like, joke along with him rather than like attacking him. Like I think a lot of the left's jokes about Trump aren't funny because they're they're coming from a place of like literal hatred. They hate the man. And so they just want to bash him, which isn't really that funny. But if you can kind of like put yourself in his shoes and think like him a little bit and then like put words in his mouth,

like one of our one of our more popular jokes that we did about Trump was a headline about how Trump claimed to have done more for Christianity than Jesus himself. And it was just just it was just this like playing off of his ego and the kinds of outlandish things that he says. And people believed it was true. Like it would crazy viral because they thought it was true. And then it got fact checked and rated false. And then like two years later, he goes on a radio show and says he's done more for Christianity and religion in general than any other person in history. And so it actually happened that he, you know, it's like he was fulfilling the prophecy. those kinds of jokes that like get into his

into his voice and his way of thinking and kind of like lean on who he is, those can be very funny. Yeah. Oh, for sure. There's a lot of opportunity for comedy there. Well, right, because, and this is the thing about left and right and not, you know, needing to be made fun of both sides is everyone has things about them that are naturally funny

or naturally observably kind of different to other people. You know, for example, when I was opening for Jordan, I would make, I would talk about how we have. this debate on stage and we ran out of time. We couldn't finish the discussion because we only had two hours, right? And it's a joke about the fact that he speaks for ages about it. You know what I mean? And his audience appreciates. And he does. He goes on and on. Right. But it's not, it's not to say that I hate Jordan Peterson. I just one of the people I respect the most in the world, but it doesn't stop him from having certain features that make him different from other

people, which is where humor comes in. And your point about Trump is, even his, I don't think even his like kids or his wife would deny he's got a big ego because it's obvious. Yeah. Right. And so that's kind of where humor is supposed to come at it from. Yeah. But I think you're right. I mean, one thing you said really made me think is like so much of left-wing humor what it

became. And it's actually one of the reasons we started trigonometry when we would stand-up comedians in the UK circuit is it stopped being making fun and it became like seething hatred disguised as a joke. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and I just, I don't think that's a healthy way to make fun of things. Yeah, if we all loathe this person enough, maybe we can laugh about how much we loathe it.

Like, that's not really like where comedy doesn't come from that place. That's right. And that's where the claptor comes from. Yeah, that's where the claptor comes from. It's like, I agree with this hateful point. He's so terrible. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's just, you know, there's an audience for that, obviously.

There's people who want to see that. I wouldn't call it, I wouldn't call it, comedy. You've got to call it something else. I don't know what you call it. Trevor Noah. Yeah. You know what? I always have to say this. Trevor Noah used to be a great comedian. Yeah. You go and watch a set at Live of the Apollo. It's brilliant. But this is what happens when you go into the space and that's all you do. Yeah, it can break your brain. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's, yeah, the comedy has to come from a place of, you know, it's going to sound cheesy to even say this. I I hate putting it in these terms, but like, a comedian, like, loves humanity and, and, and, and it wants to, wants to see people laugh and be happy.

Like, that's why he does what he does. He wants to tell jokes to elicit that laughter. And it's, and it's like, it's love for your audience that makes you want them to laugh. And it's also love for your audience that, that allows you to kind of see their, you know, the things about them that are funny, the things about us, as a lot of. humans that are funny and draw them to the surface, like, in a way that, like I said before, is healing rather than harmful. Like, it really is. It genuinely is. And I think comedy rightly considered comes from a place of genuine affection for humanity and not just disdain for people you don't like. And you can even, like, when you're laughing at people that you don't like,

oftentimes you're laughing at the ideas that they are advancing and ridiculing their ideas precisely because you think those ideas are going to be harmful to people. And so you subject them to scorn and ridicule and mockery, which sounds so negative. But it has this like the upside of it is that if you can tear down an idea and make it seem foolish because it is, then it won't be taken seriously, which is something that you do. if you actually care about people. If you care about people in their well-being, you will mock that which deserves mockery.

And, you know, going back to your point about the left bee when they do satire and they attack people like Trump, it's angry and vitriolic. The reason that it doesn't get laughter is because in order to be funny, you've got to be playful. If you think about the original type of performances, let's think about plays. What's it would call?

It's called a play. The original actors were play years. it comes from play. If you're not being playful, then you're not being a comedian. Right. It's impossible. Right. And that's why, if you're angry, people just go, ugh, because you're not being playful. You're not being fun. You're being something else. And that is a very different emotion entirely. Yeah. Well, listen, man, it's been great having you on the show. You do some great work.

I hope more people check out the Babylon B. We are going to go to locals in the second to ask use questions from our supporters, but before we do, always end with the same question, which is what's the one thing we're not talking about that you think we should be? Well, to some extent, I think we did to actually touch on it. Because it was on the tip of my mind when you mentioned that we were going to be addressing that. It was like, this, the way that the right, and we didn't get into a lot of specifics. So maybe it's time to get into some specifics, but the way that the right has adopted some some really terrible ideologies and advance them the way that the left has advanced them.

And the way that that's being accepted and not challenged, I think it's something that we do need to be talking about more. One example of it is Christian anti-Semitism. Christian anti-Semitism. I don't know if you guys have seen the rise in Christian anti-Semitism. But you've got Nick Fuentes now returning to Twitter and X. Sorry. Don't want a dead name. And this army of people that are listening to the ideas that he's promoting and some of the more mainstream people that are adopting some of these ideas and are going out there and saying literally engaging in hatred of an entire people, you know, villainizing and vilifying the Jewish people basically as being corrupt, deceivers.

Christ killers, they run the world, they're trying to, you know, destroy everything, and they do it all under the banner of Christianity, as if that's what Christianity teaches. And I take personal offense to that because I myself am a Christian. I run a Christian satire site. That's what we were talking about earlier, you know, your trusted source for Christian news satire. And the Christian religion is worship of the God man, Jesus Christ. God came to, in, human form as Jesus to redeem the world from its sins. And by the world, what's meant by that is Jew and Gentile. Everyone. Anyone can be saved by placing their faith in Jesus Christ. That's the fundamental teaching of the gospel or the Christian message, right? And so to see the Christian religion being hijacked by people who want to hate on Jews and using Christ's name to do it, which, by the way, Christ was a Jew. And to be Christ, is to be like the word Christ it's talking about the anointed one it's the Messiah you know who is who has fulfilled the Jewish prophecies for who would come to save his people like there's all kinds of

inconsistencies and incoherences in it but it's it's really crazy to me to see the right at war with itself right now there's really the Christian anti-Semites at war with you know Christians who don't believe that we should hate Jewish people and and these people the Christian anti-Semites are finding themselves aligned in a lot of ways with these pro-hamas protesters, you know, who are cheering along what happened on October 7th because they're aligned in their hatred of the Jews. Like, why are we not talking about this? Why is this not something that's like, like, mainstream? Let's have a conversation about this and deal with this and try to figure out like why these ideas are taking root and why they're flourishing on the right. Seth, it's been absolutely

pleasure talking to you. Oh, so we're not going to talk. about it. Well, I guess the question is, I don't really know what to say because I am a little bit conflicted because I don't know how much of it is this online stuff. And I just, I see so many things that get a number of likes and retweets that I don't believe is real. Maybe that's being naive. Maybe I'm sitting there going, I don't know anyone who voted for Trump and then he get selected. Yeah. But I somehow feel that there is a, when I see what happens in reality, when I talk to people from different walks of life, I don't get the sense that our society is now being overrun by left and right wing anti-Semites. I think there's something happening on campuses,

which by the way has been happening on campuses for a long time. I don't think it's good. I think it's quite clear that Israel is not being treated in the way that I, which I, other belligerent nations would be treated in the same situation. But again, that's not particularly new as far as I'm aware. And then this... What is new is seeing the right act like the left in that way, which we already touched on to something. Yeah, yeah. And that, I think, is a product of why I always opposed the left going crazy.

It's not because I'm on the right. And we keep saying this, but no one believed this. It's because it was quite clear to me that if the left is allowed to push further and further in this direction of chaos, the people on the other side would want to respond in kind. And people who are openly say this, right? Well, if they're going to cancel us, we're going to cancel it. And they just, that's happening.

But I guess you probably know more about this because the whole Christian thing is much bigger in the US than it is in the UK. It's kind of pretty secular at this point. There are Christians. There are not many Nick Fuentes is in the UK, to be honest. So it's not. So you tell me if there's anything else you want to say on that.

Oh, no, no, I was just raising it as something. It's something we do need to talk about it. Yeah. No, well, we'll continue talking about and we'll have people on to talk about as well. Now, head on over to locals where we ask Seth your questions. On a recent Bill Maher appearance, Dom Lemon revealed for the 753rd time that he's both gay and black. What accomplishments of yours would you say compared to his? This podcast is brought to you by Carvana. should feel like one less thing on your list. Not one more.

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