There is something so delicious about a single, tight joke in one headline that captures the political moment, or even just the banality of our lives. Here are some examples: “Drugs Win Drug Wars”; “Nation Throws off Tyrannical Yoke of Moderate Respect for Women”; “I Have Decision Fatigue, Says Woman Whose Only Decision in the Last 7 Years Was Not Going to Law School.” These headlines are from satirical news sites like The Onion and Reductress. Both are on the political left. For most of Bari’s life, the big political comedy came from the left. Until The Babylon Bee, which launched in 2016.
The Bee is a Christian conservative satirical news site, which may sound like an oxymoron. It did to us. Until we read it and discovered, it’s funny. Often really funny. While everyone else was busy criticizing and mocking the right, the Bee found success by filling a void. The Bee’s distinctive tagline is “Fake News You Can Trust.”
Here are a few recent headlines: “Biden Cancels Aid to Syria After Finding Out Needy Americans Live There”; “Canadian Dentist Now Offering Euthanasia as Alternative to Cavity Filling.” The crazy thing about the Bee is that the headlines are often not just satire, but prophetic. Here’s an example, in 2020, the Bee posted: “Democrats Call for Flags to Be Flown at Half-Mast to Grieve Death of Soleimani.” And now Ivy League students are flying Hezbollah flags and mourning the death of the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. In 2021, The Bee published the headline "Triple-Masker Looks Down on People Who Only Double Mask." One day later, CNBC featured a graphic highlighting the higher efficacy of triple-masking.
While the Bee has garnered fame or infamy depending on who you ask, they do try to be equal opportunity critics, poking fun at the right too. Here’s a 2016 headline about Donald Trump: “Psychopathic Megalomaniac Somehow Garnering Evangelical Vote.” And “Shocker: European Supermodel Who Married Billionaire Reality Star Might Not Actually Be Conservative.”
Still, in the past few years, The Babylon Bee has been the target of online censorship, deplatforming, and media scrutiny. Twitter suspended the Bee’s account in 2022, after it made a joke misgendering Admiral Rachel Levine, President Biden’s head of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. The Bee was later reinstated when Elon Musk took over Twitter, who said, “There will be no censorship of humor.” These days, The Babylon Bee still gets fact-checked by Snopes and USA Today, which perfectly encapsulates our internet age: a parody page getting its jokes fact-checked because people really can’t distinguish between truth and humor.
Today on Honestly is the CEO of The Babylon Bee, Seth Dillon, to talk about it all: the Bee’s Twitter suspension, how he views content moderation and censorship in 2025, the concept of punching down in comedy, and the growth of antisemitism on the far right. Seth also shares how he’ll keep being funny during the Trump presidency and why he believes “if it’s a joke we’re not supposed to make, it is probably the one we should be telling.”
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Don’t know where else to put this, but on Reddit it looks like someone is trying to portray Kyle Mann as a Nazi by taking a still photo of what looks like to be him at Disney. From what I know of him this seems impossible, perhaps a deliberately bad take, but I think it also says something about where we are that this nutty interpretation is being taken seriously by quite a few.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Jewish/s/vxlvWTb5wf
This is extraordinary. One of my favorite podcasts to date. We are entering a new birth of theology. Reason applied to faith. Reason applied to the religious rituals that should lead to faith. I have been a professional philosopher and theologian for over 40 years. My focus is on sacrifice as an attempt to barter with God or gods. Now I think only courageous theologians will defeat the current depravities of the three Abrahamic religions. Islam is by far the sickest of the three; it is the one most entrenched in killing for God, which is theologically absurd.