Late last year at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s annual Restoration Weekend event, Seth Dillon, CEO of the wildly popular, controversial satire site Babylon Bee, gave a keynote speech and knocked it out of the ballpark. He was entertaining and inspirational, a great Christian conservative culture warrior doing courageous work defending our First Amendment rights and skewering the idiotic madness of the left’s agenda.

I made sure to invite him on the Freedom Center podcast I host called The Right Take, where I have conversations with important conservative thinkers, writers, pundits, and storytellers about the intersection of politics and culture. On January 11^th, the man behind the Bee, “the definitive source of fake news you can trust,” appeared on The Right Take and did not disappoint. His insights into, and tales of fighting, the culture war were such that I thought it worth posting an excerpt from our conversation in case you missed it or just don’t like listening to podcasts. Check it out below.

Mark Tapson: Seth, welcome to The Right Take.

Seth Dillon: Thanks for having me.

MT: I know you’re a busy guy and – I’m sorry, I don’t mean to assume your gender – so I’ll get right to it. In the book Rules for Radicals by the late, left-wing strategist Saul Alinsky, rule number five reads, “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There’s no defense against it. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating.” Now, the left has wielded this weapon successfully against its political enemies for decades.

But the right has gone much of that time with no counterpart. I mean, in recent years, our side has had Greg Gutfeld, and he’s basically been it. Meanwhile, the left has had every late-night talk show host, basically the entire entertainment industry aligned against the right, with no real heavy-hitting pushback from our side until the Babylon Bee came along. And I think one of the important things the Bee has done for the culture war is that it’s proven that the left can dish it out, but they can’t take it, can they?

SD: They don’t like to be the object of mockery. There’s a number of reasons for that. I think that one of the reasons they don’t like mockery is because mockery does effectively undermine their ideas and their arguments, and they don’t like that, so they try to put a stop to it. We see them behaving like tyrants all the time.

Tyrants never like to be mocked. They don’t like to be mocked. They don’t like to be ridiculed. They’re hyper-sensitive to those things because they realize that when they’re made to look like fools, they’re taken less seriously. And their power is eroded by that. And so, you know the left has a hard time with it.

They do enjoy comedy. They do enjoy making fun and ridiculing but they do definitely have a hard time taking it. That’s very clear. And they’re not very good at comedy and mockery right now because so many of the things that deserve it, that warrant being made fun of, are the things that they’re completely unwilling to touch. They won’t even go there and touch those issues because it’s politically incorrect to do so. It’s considered hateful or harmful to joke about these things. And so they’ve set up their own rules about what you can make fun of that prohibit them from actually making fun of the things that most deserve it. So they’re not the funniest comedians anymore. And there are people pushing back and it’s good to see that.

MT: Yes. Yeah, I think nothing frustrates and infuriates progressives quite so much as when the tables are turned and they’re the butt of jokes. They completely fall apart and they have to push back in, as you alluded to, this kind of totalitarian manner where they do things like actually fact-check the Babylon Bee. They try to smear it as a far-right misinformation site, which is what the New York Times labeled you. You actually threatened legal action against the Times for that defamation. Can you tell us about that, how that all went down?

SD: Yeah, you know, it’s weird that we had to do that. We did feel that we needed to do that. It wasn’t like we don’t like to take ourselves too seriously. If we can, we respond in humor to things. The problem there with The New York Times describing us as a far-right misinformation site that just pretends to be satire is that if credible sources, and for whatever it’s worth, they’re considered a credible source – if credible sources start describing you in those terms, then you really, you become very vulnerable on these social media platforms. You end up with sites like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and all the rest looking at you as a threat to their community, that needs to be put down. And so our business was actually jeopardized by those mischaracterizations.

You know, on the one hand, we want to, we would love to just mock the New York Times and, and make a joke of it and laugh at them for taking comedy too seriously or something like that. But on the other hand, it was like, well, if we, if that’s all we do about this and this narrative is allowed to stick when it’s false and damaging, they can actually put us out of business. So we did retain a law firm and sent them a demand letter and we were going to sue them for defamation if they didn’t retract that and they did retract it. So that was an important thing, an important step I think that we took in just defending our business. I would have preferred to never have to do that, but I don’t really think that we had a choice.

MT: And the left also tried to shut the Bee down on social media. Twitter, for example, locked the Babylon Bee’s account after it awarded the title “Man of the Year” to transgender Health and Human Services Secretary Rachel Levine. That came after USA Today actually named Levine one of its Women of the Year. Twitter said it would restore the Bee’s account if you deleted the tweet. And what was your response to that?

SD: Yeah, which I find very interesting because so much of the conversation around censorship – you know, you think of this as being a situation where they take down content that they don’t like. And that’s the typical way you think of censorship. But there’s a lot more censorship that happens than that. In a lot of cases, they rely on you to censor yourself. They realize that if they can put enough pressure on you and you become afraid that whatever you’re going to say is going to get you deplatformed, you might actually not say it in the first place. And so that’s what I call soft censorship. There’s a ton of soft censorship happening.

In this case, I think they went beyond censorship to what I would describe as subjugation, where they were actually saying, “Look, you need to bend the knee and submit and admit that you did something wrong and take this down yourself.” And they required us to check a box and admit that we engaged in hateful conduct. And my immediate reaction to that was “No, I don’t think that we should do that.” And that might be costly because it means that we’re going to lose access to our Twitter following, but I just I felt really, really uncomfortable with the idea that we were supposed to be the ones to delete the joke and admit that we had done something wrong. You know, we didn’t do anything wrong by making that joke. For one thing, the truth that Rachel Levine is a male, which is a man, you know, a male person, is not hate speech. It’s just the truth. Whether you like it or not.

And you’re going to end up with people censoring themselves in the end. So we felt like it was necessary to take a stand and say, “No, we’re not deleting it.” Even if that means we never tweet again. And we had, by the way, no view or expectation of Elon Musk coming in and saving the day and unlocking us. We had no idea that was going to happen.

MT: I was just about to ask you that, actually. How did Elon Musk enter the picture and change the game for the Bee in terms of Twitter?

SD: Well, he was kind of standing by on the sidelines and observing what was going on with these platforms and how they were engaging in really heavy-handed moderation and trying to control narratives. And he saw it as problematic, deeply problematic, and was positioning himself to do something about it before this ever happened to us. And then we got locked out because we refused to delete this joke. And he reached out to us and said, “I heard that you guys were suspended, what happened?” And we explained the whole thing to him. And he was like, “Man, that’s crazy that they’re trying to make comedy illegal. Maybe I just need to buy Twitter.” And we thought he was kidding. We didn’t think he was being serious. We had no idea that he was actually making moves behind the scenes to do that anyway. But he was seriously contemplating it.

And he thought it was outrageous that we got locked out. So that was when we first heard from him, was after that incident. And then he made his bid to buy the platform and then try to get out of it. And then they sued him to keep him in it. And it ended up finally going through. And he sent us a text on day one, actually, when he first took over as CEO and said, “Do you want the Bee restored? There will be no censorship of humor.” So he was very intent on getting the Bee back onto Twitter and making sure that people like us – you know, we often get credit as if this was solely about the Bee. The Bee was the main reason why Elon had to buy Twitter, to set the Bee free. Of course, he cared about setting the Bee free. He was very open about that himself. But I think what happened to us was just one example of the type of censorship that he saw as being deeply problematic for our culture and society.

Specifically because, you know, we need the freedom to be able to push back on bad ideas like wokeness which he describes as a threat to civilization, a dire threat to civilization. So he wants to see people be able to respond to those things and so it wasn’t just about the Bee.

MT: It’s been said many times in recent years that we live in very satirical times. What is the challenge for Babylon Bee writers when our daily reality now is indistinguishable from satire? I should mention that you do have a website that covers real news that reads like satire called Not the Bee. Sometimes, in terms of the headlines, I have to check to make sure whether it’s the Bee or Not the Bee, but what is the challenge when reality is literally indistinguishable from satire?

SD: I think that that’s a common misconception: that it’s not a challenge. I think the common misconception is that there’s a lot of low hanging fruit or, it’s a target-rich environment, as people say. And there is truth to that. There is a lot to make fun of. But if you really think about it, how satire works is, it uses mechanisms like, basically a method of caricature, where you’re exaggerating things that are real in order to make a point about them. And that can be exceptionally difficult when what you’re exaggerating is already so exaggerated.  I quote GK Chesterton all the time, who said back in 1911 that the world has become too absurd to be satirized. And what he meant by that was, it’s already a caricature. So what are you supposed to do with that? You know, like you can’t, you can’t parody a parody. It’s an impossible task. And so that is a very challenging thing. You end up with a situation where the headlines themselves read like satire. So how do you what do you do with that? And then if you do manage to pull it off, and you make a joke that exaggerates something in a in a funny and insightful way. you end up with reality bumping up against you 10 minutes later, you know, and the joke becomes true. And then you have like a long list of what we call fulfilled prophecies, uh, piling up. So I think it’s honestly challenging. It would be, it would be easier to be doing our job in a world that was a little bit less crazy.

MT: I understand that you keep a spreadsheet taking note of how many times Bee headlines have actually predicted reality. How many instances have you logged so far? And can you name one or two favorite examples?

SD: Yeah, I think we have, I think there’s like 96. I’d have to go back and check, but there’s new ones popping up all the time. So we’re getting closer and closer to that number of 100, which will be a big deal when we finally cross that threshold, but yeah, I mean, there’s just a bunch of examples. We’ve made jokes about how Gavin Newsom was U-Haul’s Salesperson of the Year, because he’s driving so many people away from his state. And then you literally will have a headline in Fox Business. It came out like two months, I think, after we made that joke, Fox Business ran a story about how you all had literally run out of trucks because people were fleeing California for States like Texas and Florida at such a high rate. Stuff like that happens all the time. So, you know, there’s it to varying degrees of accuracy, you know, there will be some real headlines that almost verbatim match the joke that we made.

And then at other times it’ll be like at least similar enough where we consider it close enough that we can consider it a full prophecy but there’s really funny ones like I – honestly one of my favorites is a joke that we did about Donald Trump where we joked about him claiming to have done more for Christianity than Jesus himself, and that was a great Trump joke because it’s the kind of thing that you could actually expect Trump to say because he’s got this big ego and he says these crazy outlandish things.

And we made the joke back in 2018 and it got fact-checked and made it false because he didn’t actually say that, but it went viral because people believed it did. And then in 2021, I think it was towards the end of 2021, he went on a radio show and claimed to have done more for Christianity and religion in general than any other person in history. And so he basically said the same thing that we said in our joke. He just did it three years later and after it had been fact-checked already and read it false. So I think headlines like that are hysterical because you get both the fact-check and the fulfilled prophecy angle.

MT: Yes. And I should point out that the Bee isn’t averse to poking fun at the right also, in addition to the left, which I think is a good thing. One recent headline, for example, shows a picture of comedian Dave Chappelle, and the headline reads, “Black guy becomes instant conservative star after saying one thing conservatives agree with.” And you’ve made some jokes at the expense of Trump, like the one you just mentioned. You’ve taken some brutally funny shots at the prosperity gospel guru Joel Osteen.

What is the reaction from conservatives when the Bee does that? Because my sense of it is that we have a better sense of humor about ourselves than the left does.

SD: Yeah, generally speaking, that’s true. I think a lot of times it does catch people by surprise when they’re suddenly the target of a Babylon Bee joke. They’re like, wait a minute, I thought we were friends. And they can be, you know, bothered by the friendly fire. But I do think generally speaking that conservatives are a little bit more lighthearted when it comes to that. You don’t generally hear people on the right talking about how, you know, anyone who criticizes them needs to be deplatformed or silenced, have their voice taken away. It’s just not a conservative reaction to speech that we don’t like. Our reaction tends to be, well, you know, if I don’t like what you’re saying, I can ignore you or I can refute you. I could even ridicule you in return. So I do think that it’s not as much of a problem on the right.

But we don’t try to go easy on the right, either. As you mentioned, we do make fun of targets on the right all the time and I think it’s very healthy to do that. It would be irresponsible of us really if we weren’t doing that. And it’s funny, there’s lots of things that conservatives do that are ridiculous and hypocritical and foolish and so it deserves mockery too. That’s a healthy exercise and one thing that’s important for everybody left and right is to just take themselves less seriously.

It’s a very healthy thing from a mental health, spiritual health, you know, it’s just, it’s way healthier when we’re able to actually laugh at ourselves and our own shortcomings, rather than acting like we’re always just completely above and beyond reproach and never do anything wrong. And, you know, one of the ways of kind of examining ourselves is to be willing to laugh at ourselves.

MT: Absolutely right, I totally agree. This is kind of a big picture question about politics: What is your take on the state of our culture today at large and where is it headed? I know that you’re a free speech warrior. Do you see losing that right as the biggest cultural threat that we face today?

SD: I do. There are a number of threats. I think wokeness in general as an ideology is a huge threat. But the way that the woke narratives are advanced by stamping out voices of dissent, that’s even scarier because it’s not just that wokeness is out there, it’s that wokeness is being insulated and protected by the most powerful institutions so that it can’t even be criticized. I think that’s a great example.

You know, you’ve got the joke that got us kicked off of Twitter was a joke in defense of women in truth. It was a joke about how a male person is a man, no matter what they say, no matter what they feel. A male person is a man and that’s just a fact of reality. And we aren’t doing women a service by denying that fact of reality. We aren’t doing ourselves a service by denying the truth. And so having the freedom to push back on bad ideas that have damaging effects in our culture and society is absolutely, absolutely crucial. We can’t fight these things successfully without our voices. And so I think free speech is really the issue of our time, for sure.

MT: I think you’re right about that. I think we’ve been seeing some conservative victories though in the culture war lately, and you and the Babylon Bee are partly responsible for that. Are you optimistic that the right can turn that ocean line or the culture around and steer it back toward the shoreline of sanity? Because I do know a lot of conservatives who say, you know, it’s over, the left owns the culture. You know, it was great while it lasted, but the American experiment is over. Are you pessimistic in that same way, or are you more optimistic that we’ve got the momentum now?

SD: Uh, I’m not sure optimistic is the right word. I’m hopeful. I don’t, I think optimism kind of carries with it this idea of expectation. Like, I expect things to work out for them. I don’t know that I necessarily expect them to, but I hope they do. I’m hopeful that people – and I do see a lot of this, by the way, I see a lot of really reasonable people who generally tend to be sympathetic to progressive ideas, I’m seeing people waking up to – we talk about this concept of, and Elon Musk used these words recently. He said people are waking up to woke. You’ve got what happened over at Harvard and these other Ivy League universities, the response there to the unwillingness of these presidents of these schools to come out strongly against the anti-Semitic stuff that was going on in their campuses. And the way that some on the extreme left have gone so far as to even defend terrorism, like Hamas’s behavior where they’re actually slaughtering women and children and raping and beheading them. And that’s being defended under this woke moral principle that for the oppressed, all things are permitted. I think a lot of people are seeing this stuff and they’re realizing.

Many of us realized it back when, you know, BLM riots were happening in cities were burning to the ground and people were defending this as being like some righteous thing. It was like a good thing. It was, well, these are for the oppressed, you know, violence is their voice. They don’t have a voice otherwise. You know, you saw a lot of that happening back in 2020. People weren’t really getting up in arms about it yet. They weren’t really waking up to the dangers of woke yet. It hadn’t really affected them and their lives yet.

But there’s been more extreme examples that have happened where literally you have terrorism being defended and you have kids being targeted. You have kids being targeted with like these drag shows and these gender transition surgeries and the indoctrination that’s happening there and the high rates of these kids getting sucked into this stuff and buying into it and demanding affirmation and so many people wanting to give it to them and even take away parents’ rights and separate them from their parents to do this.

There are people who are seeing this stuff for what it is and how extreme it is. All that to say, I am hopeful that the extreme nature of these things will wake up a lot of reasonable people and there will be so much fierce pushback on it that we will come back to some semblance of sanity. I am hopeful and I’m seeing evidence that there’s indications that we are going to potentially move back in the direction of sanity in response to how extreme things have gotten.

It’s hard to ever – you know, you never want to underestimate the depravity of man, that’s for sure.

Check out the rest of the conversation on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.