The Lie That Killed Comedy for a Decade, with The Babylon Bee’s Seth Dillon

Conversations with Coleman - The Free Press

In this episode of 'Conversations with Coleman,' Seth Dillon, CEO and owner of The Babylon Bee, discusses the satirical news site's origins, its role in challenging media

Key takeaways

• The Babylon Bee emerged as a response to the perceived lack of conservative political satire, filling a void left by liberal dominance in comedy.
• Wokeness introduced an anti-comedy culture that punished humor based on identity rather than truth or satire, exemplified by incidents like Nimesh Patel being canceled at Columbia University.

Main topics

• Origins and growth of The Babylon Bee
• Censorship by social media platforms

Notable quotes

"If we're doing comedy and they're trying to censor comedy, that could actually work out really well for us. It could backfire on them."

"Wokeness was markedly different... it had a totally different approach to humor and comedy, an opposite approach, in fact."

Conclusion

Seth Dillon argues that satire remains a vital tool for exposing truth and challenging power, even in an era of heightened censorship and

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:04) The Speaker 4 (0:05) city moves fast, but your vibe, that's different. Sharper, smoother, more alive. Speaker 2 (0:15) The new Speaker 4 (0:20) Honda City isn't just made to drive, it's made to feel. The new Honda City, all new vibe. Speaker 5 (0:28) Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Seth Dillon. Seth is the CEO and owner of The Babylon Bee, a satirical news site. In this episode, we talk about how Seth came to own The Babylon Bee. We talk about the role of comedy in American culture. We talk about The Babylon Bee's struggles against censorship by big tech companies. We talk about the pros and cons of media gatekeepers. We discuss the rise of conspiracy thinking on the right. and much more. So without further ado, Seth Dillon. Speaker 2 (1:14) The Speaker 4 (1:14) city moves fast, but your vibe, that's different. Sharper, smoother, more alive. Speaker 2 (1:25) The new Speaker 4 (1:29) Honda City isn't just made to drive, it's made to feel. The new Honda City, all new vibe. Speaker 5 (1:39) Okay, Seth Dillon, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. Good to see you. So I am a big fan of the Babylon Bee and of your role in shaping public discourse, explaining the importance of humor, talking about the decline of trust in media, both the importance of guardrails and the era when guardrails went too far. you have a great take on all of these issues at a high level, and you also have tons of experience fielding these issues as the leader of the Babylon Bee, which has been in countless and often hilarious encounters with the censorship complex. Speaker 5 (2:30) Hopefully you can remind some of my listeners about those. And I know they're a couple of years old now, but they're just too funny to not, to not, uh, to not go over. Um, but first, can you tell me a little bit about how you came to, uh, own, own and run the Babylon Bee? What were you doing before that time? Speaker 3 (2:50) Yeah. Uh, it's wild how it worked out. Um, you know, the bee. The Beast started in 2016, so we hit our 10-year anniversary this year. And I wasn't involved at the beginning. It was initially started by a man named Adam Ford. He was doing these funny Christian comics and had developed a little bit of a following on Facebook with his comics that he was putting out there. Speaker 3 (3:20) He saw that there was like this massive gap, this massive void for comedy from a different perspective, you know, comedy from a Christian perspective, a conservative perspective. It was it was long thought that, you know, the sort of secular, progressive, liberal dominance of of comedy was just a given. And they were the funny ones and no one else could do it right. Everyone else was cheesy and lame and. And we get mocked and laughed at for the wrong reasons if they were attempting to enter in from another angle. So he just saw an opportunity there to try something and basically put out like an alternative to the onion that would address the issues from a different perspective. And he launched the Babylon Bee in the spring of 2016. And it came across my news feed the way that it. did everyone else's. I was just a fan of the B.I.C. I was seeing these headlines in my feed, like, you know, funny church jokes, like, Holy Spirit unable to move through congregation as fog machine breaks, you know, silly stuff like that, that was like, spoke to me as a, I'm a pastor's kid. I grew up in the church. And so, you know, those, I connected with the comedy because I knew what they were making fun of it, why they were making fun of it, a lot of alignment in the perspective there. And so. From where I was sitting at the time, after I graduated college, I graduated in 2004, and I got into the internet marketing world immediately. I dabbled in that myself to try to learn it and teach myself how to do internet marketing because I saw these companies that were starting to spend all their money on ads and Google search because it was so much more effective than, you know. radio or TV or putting up billboards. You could run your ads directly on the back of things that people were looking for so that it only showed to people who wanted your products or services. I'm like, this is a great field to get into because it's booming. So my start in business was in that area. I was working for some search marketing agencies. I eventually started my own. Speaker 3 (5:22) I didn't love having a lot of clients. It was kind of like having a lot of bosses. And so I became more entrepreneurial where I was like, I want to get outside of just the internet marketing stuff. I know how to do the internet marketing. So might as well start some of my own businesses. So I became very entrepreneurial and started launching some of my own sites, acquiring other sites. When the beat came across my radar in, I guess it was probably 2017 or early 2018. Speaker 3 (5:47) I reached out really just from the perspective of somebody who loved what they were doing. I thought it was really effective. I thought it was funny. And I just wanted to try to help. I messaged Adam. I cold DM'd him on Twitter, and I was like, dude, if you want an investor or something, I'd love to kick in some funds to help you grow this thing. And at the time, it was basically he was essentially a one-man operation. He had a WordPress blog, some Google ads on the site for a little bit of monetization, but it wasn't doing a lot. It was just starting to get a lot of viral traction. but it wasn't really a business yet. And he was already in talks to sell the B to somebody else. And so he kind of, you know, he didn't really blow me off, but he politely declined to continue a conversation because he was working on a deal. That was with the Daily Wire, actually. But that ended up falling through, and Daily Wire backed out sort of at the last minute. And so he reached back out to me, and he's like, If you still want to talk, let's meet, but I'm not really interested in an investor. I want somebody to take it over. And the primary reason for that, his main concern, was really twofold. He didn't like the attention that he was getting. He struggled with the anxiety of the press inquiries and people paying attention to him personally. He didn't want that attention on himself. But the main thing was that the bee was starting to get fact-checked and censored on social media. And social media is the way that the bee does business. I mean, we put our headlines out there. We share them. They go viral. People click on the link to read the article, some of them anyway. A lot of you don't. Shame on you. But the ones that do keep us in business because the traffic comes to the website, then we can monetize the traffic. And so that was really the basic business model before we layered on subscriptions and books and, you know, all the other stuff that you can do with merchandise to monetize. Speaker 3 (7:37) So his concern was that the gatekeepers, the ones that control the public discourse, we were kind of sitting there in a time where social media was taking a lot of the blame for Trump getting elected because the rampant spread of misinformation allowed people to see and hear things that the media didn't want you to see and hear. And I mentioned the Daily Wire a minute ago. You know, the Daily Wire was booming in that early era. They launched in 2016 as well and were taken off like wildfire on social media. There was a ton of concern that conservatives were spreading misinformation by speaking freely on these platforms. Adam felt the pressure and saw that this wasn't going to last. So I ended up taking it over at that time. It wasn't like against my better judgment or something. I'm like, okay, well. If this isn't going to cost me an absolute fortune and bankrupt me to do it, I want to do it because this is a lot of fun. I love it. I think it's great. But I also see this as being a fight that's worth fighting. I don't want to just cave to this. I think if we're doing comedy and they're trying to censor comedy, that could actually work out really well for us. It could backfire on them and work out really well for us. And I think I was right about that. So you mentioned this assumption that liberals had Speaker 5 (8:52) cornered the political satire market. And, you know, so you're someone that's, you know, you mentioned being the son of a pastor, right? And so you're from the opposite section of the country as me. I'm from the blue liberal. You know, I think I literally met one Republican growing up in my first 18 years of life. So I grew up in the era where where Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were back to back. late night making fun of Bush and Republicans and Christians every night and were genuinely funny, felt like they were punching up rather than down. I mean, at minimum, they were punching at the president of the United States, multiple wars going on that were getting less and less popular by the day. Lots of sort of shows of piety and faith that could be held up. in the same way that Babylon B sort of does with making fun of megachurch culture, and it's the clear distance between that and the actual principles of Christianity. And I would have assumed at the time that there just isn't really a conservative equivalent of this that's going to actually make me laugh deep in my belly. Then wokeness came around, and... My life context changed from normal old school liberalism to suddenly I'm at Columbia University and like everything is there's a whole new philosophy. Right. And I've written about this in my book. I've talked about on the podcast numerous times. But there was a distinctly unfunny aspect to wokeness that didn't exist in the old school liberalism. The old school liberalism loved to mock sacred cows, probably loved to mock Republican and conservative sacred cows more, but in general had a spirit of free speech and humor and making fun of things and understanding that if you're making people laugh, you're probably exposing a truth that ought to be exposed, right? And so reflexively, old school liberalism reflexively sided with the comic over the censor in any given scenario, right? And Wokeness was markedly different, and it traveled alongside liberalism, but had a totally different approach to humor and comedy, an opposite approach, in fact. And the most hilarious story I remember is... the Nimesh Patel story. Do you remember this? I don't Speaker 3 (11:30) know Speaker 5 (11:30) if you paid attention to this at the time. It was like 2018. Remind Speaker 3 (11:33) me. Speaker 5 (11:33) This very good comic, Nimesh Patel, Indian guy, very successful comic, came to Columbia University to do his act, and he made the following joke. The joke was, you know how I know being gay isn't a choice? So already it's like a liberal premise. You know how I know being gay is not a choice? Because no black person ever woke up in America and you said, you know, this black shit is just too easy. I'm going to add gay to it. Right. That was the joke. Yeah. So it's in every sense, it's a liberal premise. It's a it's a liberal punch line. It's also a well-written joke. He got yanked off stage for making that joke at Columbia University. And. the woke like student leaders that yanked him off stage couldn't even explain why what he had said was wrong. It was just like something vaguely about he used, he talked about black and gay and he's not black and gay. Right. So you can't talk about that. Right. Right. They were yanking like a liberal joke off this day. That's, that was the level of anti-comedy that, that. is inherent to wokeness. And that's right around the time that Babylon Bee came out. And so I guess my point is that like something about the nature of humor here, humor, it like, it, it gravitates towards ideologies that cannot make fun of themselves or that, um, that, that, that hold themselves too seriously, that create sacred issues you're not allowed to talk about. Speaker 4 (13:11) And Speaker 5 (13:11) therefore with the rise of wokeness, opened this enormous vacuum in the market and this opportunity to make fun of it, which I think the Bee stepped into. Speaker 3 (13:25) Yeah, those are all really good observations. I think what you're describing there is a very, it's almost like when you're describing wokeness, it sort of has these religious qualities to it, the self-seriousness, you know, the sacred cow mentality. These are things that can't be touched, they can't be made fun of. It was Chesterton who said, the test of a good religion is whether or not you can joke about it. And I think, you know, Part of the reason why there's a strong resistance with the woke ideology to humor is because they want to insulate it from criticism. And I think mockery is one of the most effective forms of criticism. It's really kind of a tell of like this insecurity, this inability or unwillingness to deal with challenges, direct challenges. It's a lot easier to just say you're not allowed to challenge this. This is the way that it's going to be. and you'll pay a price if you do try to challenge it. If you try to criticize it, even in jest, you're going to pay a price for that. That closes off, it heads off debate and discussion rather than inviting it. And there's only a couple of reasons why somebody might want to do that. And one of them is that they just feel so threatened by the debate, they'd rather not have it. So I think, you know, wokeness really suffered from that. And it's obvious, I think, to me, at least. why it suffered from that and it's because it's grounded in the air you know a lot of these ideas uh being promoted by by the woke left at the especially at the time that you're talking about Speaker 3 (15:01) were things that were kind of like just funny on their face, but also just completely indefensible. I think a lot of the radical gender ideology stuff is just, it's so absurd and so crazy and so obviously flies in the face of reality that you can't have a debate about it without looking really silly. And you certainly don't want to tolerate mockery because it just invites that mockery. And so there was a lot of incentive. There was a lot of just kind of built-in... Speaker 3 (15:28) desire to have a shield around these ideas so they couldn't be challenged. So, and then the comedians, you know, what was so disappointing to me about the comedy at the time, because I think, you know, comedy used to be really great. A lot of it was sort of like, it wasn't just that the leftist dominated comedy for so long. It was, it was that comedy for a while, you know, in the 80s and 90s. There was a lot of willingness to make fun of everybody. There was a lot of self-deprecating humor. There was not so much self-seriousness where the audience would get up and storm out if they heard a joke that offended them. People kind of understood that the project of comedy was to get you to look at yourself and examine yourself sometimes and even be willing to laugh at yourself. And we sort of lost that understanding with Wokeness. And then the comedians played along with it and started going for what somebody, I don't remember who coined the term, but somebody called it claptor. where they're going for this kind of applause of affirmation instead of laughter from their audience. I Speaker 5 (16:24) think it was Speaker 3 (16:24) Jeff Speaker 5 (16:24) Maurer who came up with that term, I think. Speaker 3 (16:26) Was it? Yeah, I don't remember. Former comedy writer. Yeah, it's Speaker 5 (16:31) a Speaker 3 (16:31) great observation that you saw so much of this with the late night stuff, you know, the audience would applaud instead of laugh, which I thought was really interesting. It's like, so, and of course they applied pressure. to other comedians where you'd kind of pay a price if you try to poke at this stuff, which produced this sort of cancel culture thing where certain jokes became off limits. And a lot of it was under this, you mentioned the punching up versus punching down dynamic. A lot of it was presented kind of in those terms. Humor began to be treated as if it was this. this powerful weapon that could be used for good or bad and can be very harmful if it's directed at the wrong targets. And that was sort of the excuse to steer the humor away from the things that they didn't want to be joked about and make sure it stays directed at things that are okay to joke about. And I really rejected the way that they framed the whole thing because in our case, we were accused of punching down someone. The Babylon Bee is not funny. The Babylon Bee is immoral. The Babylon Bee is a bully. Because they punch down, they don't punch up. And that's not what comedy is about. They're sitting there in this position of power and they're punching down at the marginalized and the oppressed instead of challenging the powers that be. And the whole time I'm sitting there thinking, well, I have two main issues with that. For one thing, when you're a comedy writer or a comedian, a satirist, stand-up, whatever it is that you do, however you're approaching it, you want to be thinking about what's actually funny, what deserves to be mocked when you're writing a joke. You don't want to be thinking about, you know, you know, maybe I shouldn't joke about those people. They're beneath me. That would be punching down. I mean, it's such a condescending thought to even have, and that's not really what comedy is about anyway. And I reject the idea that what we were joking about through those years and continue to is the powerless. You know, like Dylan Mulvaney or Rachel Levine. You know, Rachel Levine is a white male, high-ranking. was a white male high