Bully Culture, Bible Adventures, and Boogaloo Skunks
This is the Babylon Bee weekly news podcast special episode for 7/17/2020. In this week's episode of the Babylon Bee podcast, Kyle and Ethan talk about the week's big stories like Christian knockoffs of secular products being bad, people on the right side of history who are on the wrong side of God, boogaloo skunks, and how are current culture is just the free market of people's fists meeting other people's faces. Show Outline Introduction Welcome to The Babylon Bee podcast with your hosts Kyle Mann and Ethan Nicolle, the two funnymen behind a lot of the stuff you read on The Babylon Bee. They're not as funny here as they are when they write satire, so get used to disappointment. Stuff That's Good Stuff that's good update: Kyle is finishing up Avatar The Last Airbender and it's amazing Kyle likes Journey to the Center of the Earth Ethan likes Blood Father Weird News Dog left 'looking like alpaca' after biting pet groomer halfway through haircut Shopper spotted using paper bag as face covering - and others have used knickers Family found man declared 'dead' still alive after breaking into hospital morgue Pizza Shop Owner Thwarts Robbery By Tossing Pie At Suspect Sealed copy of 'Super Mario Bros.' auctioned for a record $114,000 Mysterious 'vampire-slaying kit' including pistol and knife up for auction Stories of the Week Story 1 Man On Right Side Of History Surprised To Find He Still Went To Hell Summary: A local progressive was very careful to only advocate for the most progressive politics and be an activist for all the popular new social justice causes. So, since he was so clearly on the right side of history, he was very surprised to find after he died that he still went to hell. Story 2 Op-Ed: There's No Such Thing As Bully Culture, It's Just My Fist's Free Market Response To Your Stupid Face, Dweeb Summary: Local lunch money thief and wedgie specialist Biff O'Doyle wrote in a recent op-ed that Bully Culture is not real -quote- 'It's just my fist's free-market response to your stupid face, dweeb' -end quote tory 3 Here's What's Problematic With Each Of The NFL's 32 Team Names Well, the PC police have come for the Redskins. But we at The Babylon Bee feel they did not go far enough. There is white supremacy and racism everywhere in the NFL, with every single team in the league having some kind of offensive stereotype in their name. We hereby call on every team in the league to change their name for the following reasons. Topic of the Week Why is Christian stuff so bad? Bee article: If You Like Secular Things, Try These Christian Alternatives That Are Almost As Good Why is Christian stuff so bad? Hate Mail We get a reponse to a sponsored newsletter blast speaking out against antifa and get accused of being Christo-fascists. Subscriber Portion Kyle and Ethan dive into the mailbag! Bonus weird news filled with projectile penguin poop Also mentioned: Ethan Nicolle's awesome animated music video Lunaractive-Mission To The Moon To watch or listen to the full podcast, become a subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans.
In a world of fake news, we bring you up-to-the-minute factual inaccuracy and a heavy dose of moral truth.
With your hosts, Kyle Mann and Ethan Nicole.
This is the Babylon Bee.
Fake news you can trust.
Hi, everybody.
Welcome to the Babylon Bee podcast with your hosts, Kyle Mann.
And who's that?
Oh, hey, it's me, Ethan Nicole, Kyle's sidekick.
He is the what's the guy on DuckTales?
Oh, no, Launchpad McQuack.
Yeah, Launchpad and the other guy.
Strooge McDuck.
It was, I'm messing this.
Tailspin.
That's what I'm thinking of.
Blue the Bear.
Yeah, something like that.
Wait, am I the little kid and you're Blue the Bear?
doesn't make sense wasn't there a I thought they had like that car and then there was a site Oh, maybe I'm thinking of Darkwing Duck.
I'm getting all the duck things mixed up.
You're getting the whole Disney afternoon mixed up.
The whole Disney afternoon is just a swirling mess of the characters in my head.
Disney salad.
Well, we are here.
We survived, though it's rough.
So Dan, our producer, who runs the board back there to make sure everything happens, he's currently crawling across the floor like the horse ran in Stimpy.
I can't fail my legs.
For like that.
Homeschoolers written Stimpy was a cartoon that aired on Nickelodeon.
Nickelodeon, yeah.
Back in the day, and I was not allowed to win.
So I don't know what you're talking about.
It was one of my favorites.
Very influential on me.
And yeah, there's a lot of fart humor.
So that's satanic.
Or at least it was in the 90s.
So Dan is, his back is hurting.
He hurt his back very badly on our forest, our Florida trip that we took.
Apparently he was just in the swimming pool and he kind of just twisted weird.
And I guess he's not good at swimming.
And I think he's just like a hot tub.
But he's on the floor.
He's still editing on a laptop.
I guess he's kind of like laying like this and like.
So we got Dan.
Oh, not Dan.
We got Matt filling in.
He's got a stick and his computer's up here and he's like reaching out and tapping on the...
You see the hands coming.
He holds up the mirror to be able to see the screen.
Well, pray for Dan because his back is really hurting.
So we'd like to see him come back soon.
But yeah, our buddy Matt McDavid is filling in for him today.
So thank you, Matt.
Yeah, Matt McDavid, if you want to thank him for making this happen, if you live in the Inland Empire, go check out Purple Easel.
If you want to have a little painting date night, though you can't with COVID, but you can do online stuff.
You can actually pick up your paints and do a little painting at home with a little class.
And he also has Cool Abra Cigar Shop, which is the best cigar shop that I've ever been to.
Yeah.
So check that out if you want to thank Matt for helping us out today.
Yeah.
What else we got to talk about here before we start the actual show?
Well, I did want to mention that our Babylon Bee best of book, The Sacred Texts of the Babylon Bee, is coming out soon.
We don't know when, but we're thinking later.
Some of the proofs.
We just got our proofs.
Get the proofs, a couple of small corrections, and bam, it's getting printed.
Yeah, there are some hang-ups and stuff.
But yeah, that's coming.
So watch for that.
You can pre-order it on our website right now, which might lock you in at a lower price.
It'll definitely put you in front of the line because what we might do is release it to those people first, and then it could get an official release later.
So if you really want to get it as soon as possible, go to our store and pre-order it.
Yeah, it's awesome.
It's got hundreds of stories, redone Photoshops, just new format, a lot of new content, like funny sidebars and quotes and images and all of that.
So pretty freaking Ethan.
Pretty book.
Ethan blew his brains out working on it for the last, I don't know.
Gosh, we've been working on it for almost a year now, right?
Yeah, I think I put a solid six to eight months into actually constructing the whole thing, and then we've been going through this whole I've spent a ton of time on the cover.
The cover's going to be very Bible-y looking, very biblical, very bibli-y looking.
It will look nicer than any Bible that you own, and that's a guarantee.
A guarantee from us from us to you.
Uh, so anyway, check that out: shop.batmalongi.com.
It's gonna be good, but you know, else it's gonna be good.
Stuff that's good, but now this week's edition of stuff that's good, Kyle.
What's good?
That was the glass breaking.
Well, first, I wanted to do it.
Oh, is that yeah?
We don't always hear the sound effects, yeah.
So, I don't feel like we had them in posts now, so we have to pretend we just experienced that.
I don't feel like we're exploding stuff that's good.
So, stuff that's good is where we talk about stuff is good.
And so, I wanted to first give a stuff that's good update.
Okay.
That we were on the last, we were on the big finale of Avatar, The Last Airbender, me and my kids.
Thrilling, and it's like it's become this great like father and son thing because every day they're like, Dad, are we gonna watch an episode of Avatar today?
Just something that you know is clean and you know, it's pretty good.
There's a little like Eastern mysticism in there and the chakras, there's all the chakra.
I want to talk about chakras for an episode or two, but you know, so you got to be aware of that.
But I don't know if I'm emotionally prepared for the end because it's that good.
It's a great story art, great characters, funny.
Well, you still got the movie.
There's two movies, but the movie was horrible, is my understanding.
The M Night and Sean Malama.
Then you watched the James Cameron one.
That's not, which isn't related exactly, but it still has the word.
That's not, yeah.
All right, and then I, what I wanted to talk about today is I actually uh just finished reading Journey to the Center of the Earth by H.G. Well, or not by Jules Verne, my bet.
And uh, it's uh, it's awesome.
It's just I love it, you read it to your kids or just you read it?
I just read it.
I love pulpy.
Would it be worth reading to your kids or is it too hard?
Because I was thinking about it, I got it, I bought it, but I haven't they would get it, yeah.
It's just the classic story.
Like, I hate how all the stories now have to have like all the symbolism and meaning, and yeah, you know, it's like, yeah, we're gonna dig to the middle of the earth and see what's in there.
That's the story, that's the whole story.
So, it's pretty cool.
Journey to the Center of Earth and all that cool, pulpy stuff.
I'll probably do 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea next.
Sweet.
What you got?
So, my recommendation comes with the warning that this is a movie that's R-rated.
But this is for my action movie fans.
This movie went under the radar a bit.
It came out a few years ago.
But as a fan of a good, simple 90s-style action movie where it's just a guy with a problem, he's got some dudes he's got to kill because he loves somebody.
Like, those are the best ones.
Like, the Matrix ruined action movies because suddenly became ballet with guns.
And it was a great Matrix was awesome.
It came out, but then, like, every action movie has tried to be there since.
Well, and it had the deeper meanings and the symbols.
Yeah, exactly.
That's kind of what I was saying about the book is: I like that.
It's just the simple story.
That's why I think that's why Taken did so well.
It's just like, yeah, totally.
People, especially dudes, but even my wife liked Taken.
Just that simple story.
You mess with my daughter, I will mess you up.
A guy can get behind that.
Most parents can get behind that, right?
So this movie, Blood Father, it's Mel Gibson.
Think what you want about him.
He makes excellent movies.
But most of his movies are under the radar now.
And this was a lower budget movie, but it's a nice, simple movie.
His daughter is this, I think she's like 19, 20.
She's got mixed up with some drug cartel boyfriend, and they want to kill her.
She tracks him down, and he's this kind of washed-out tattoo artist guy that lives in a trailer.
And he's just defending her from these psycho drug dealer guys.
And it's just a nice, simple, just like action movie.
And so highly recommend it because it's hard to find those because there's a tons that there's tons of action movies that look like they're that, but they're horrible.
This is a legitimately good one.
But a lot of violence, but I don't think there's any sex or nudity in it that I can remember.
It's just a lot of violence, a lot of bad words.
Yeah, I love movies like that.
We just watched the Equalizer movies.
Yeah, the Equalizer is great.
The second one, but this first one was great.
I mean, I think Denzel Washington has made that same movie about a dozen times.
Yeah.
Like something that's kidnapping.
He goes and kills everybody.
Well, I love Equalizer because it's got that great theme of he's defending that prostitute's honor, you know.
Yeah.
If you like that movie, there's another movie called, oh man, oh, it's called Marin Tau.
It's a Philippines movie, I think.
Oh, no, it's not Philippines.
I'm Indonesia.
It's the guys that made.
Oh, man, now we're getting off.
We're going off here.
Avatar.
No, what were the big action movies?
The raid movies.
The amazing action movies.
You haven't seen the raid.
The raid's amazing.
Super violent, but Marin Tao.
He's recommended like formerly.
Yeah, I just recommend like it's Kung Fu.
But this guy, he's from a, he's like, he shows up in the city for the first time ever.
He's from some small farm and he's a kung fu master.
He just sees some girl who's a prostitute getting messed with by these guys and he's like, well, I can't let that happen.
So he just starts beating him up.
And it just goes for the whole movie.
He goes through the entire syndicate just because he stepped in.
And it just like he just goes through and takes out everybody.
I think we like these movies because we feel like we could be that person in a slightly different circumstance.
Yeah.
Like in the Equalizer movies, he's just kind of this jill guy.
I think he had some military past or something, but he's just like, oh, I'm just doing crossword puzzles.
Oh, yeah.
Boom, boom, boom.
And then we all put it like I would totally do that if I was like stronger and braver.
Yeah, if I get some karate lessons.
And I was less of a wimp.
Yeah.
That would be me.
All right.
Check out our stuff that's good.
This has been stuff that's good.
This news is weird.
Ah, weird news.
Oh, I forgot to say.
You're a blood, blood father.
Thank you.
That's all I could think about every time.
That's important.
I read those notes and I said, blood father.
Blood father.
Dog left looking like alpaca after biting pet groomer halfway through haircut.
I read these headlines very robotically because they seem so random.
Like someone just pasted random words in there.
I think they get them from Reddit or something.
Alpaca.
Yeah, basically the dog's entirely shaved, except it has a giant puff of hair on its head, it is unshaved because apparently when it got there, it kept biting the lady.
Okay, so then the groomer stopped doing the haircut and just couldn't do it.
It kept biting her, and she's like, I can't.
They maybe can come in next week.
I guess apparently they thought the dog was scared of her mask or COVID mask or something.
When Gavin Newsome announced, all randomly like, everything closes again.
I wonder if there were people that were halfway done.
Yeah, they went home looking at it.
Getting their haircut.
Yeah, sorry.
Governor just tweeted.
Yeah, sorry.
When I was a kid, my grandpa used to give us military haircuts for summer.
So we all come and we'd sit in the chair out front and he'd like, yeah, come here again.
Shave our head.
But the day that he was supposed to do our military haircuts, I was sitting on like the railing of our staircase that goes up into the house.
And my dad opened the door and the door hit me.
I was seven.
I fell backwards, so I held on, but I went upside down and my head got stuck between the bars that hold up the railing.
So my head's stuck.
I'm upside down.
I'm flailing my legs in the air.
My dad can't get me out because my head's stuck.
So he has to actually knock me out there.
Those kind of that wrought iron metal bars.
So it knocks me out of there.
And so I have two perfect bumps on each side of my head, kind of like teddy bear ears, like right on top of my head.
So my grandpa goes to shave my head.
And every time he hits those knobs, I start screaming and crying.
So he just doesn't touch them, figuring they'll get him later.
So for a couple of days, I had just these two puffs of hair on my head, and I look like a little teddy bear.
It was as a bump like why they coyote gets like yeah, you know, you get a bump and it's like really owie, an owie spot in spot.
That's the medical term.
Anyway, a shopper spotted using paper bag as face covering and others have used knickers.
I just love the word knickers.
So have you used anything weird for a mask so far?
Have you used knickers?
I haven't used knickers.
I did once realize I had to go into a store, didn't have the mask, grabbed my hoodie and I just tied my hoodie around my face.
Okay.
It was my MXPX hoodie.
I had this giant MXPX logo like hanging in front of my entire chestal region walking around the store.
I wonder if you could do pantyhose like Robert.
Yeah.
Probably wouldn't filter out.
Not that they do anything.
The threads seem closer together than t-shirt fabric, which is what a lot of people are using.
Dan, who's on the floor in pain, he just like ripped up a t-shirt and then like created these little strips on it and he ties it around the back of his head and it's kind of like this hanging torn cloth and he has like a ninja turtle thing going on in the back and it looks like he looks like something out of like I don't know the road a Cormac McCarthy novel.
Oh man.
It's hilarious to me.
Well, this is the new normal.
Family found a man declared dead, still alive after breaking into hospital morgue.
Yeah, so apparently, oh, this one's actually worth reading the text of because the family did not believe them, the doctors, when they said that he died.
So they're like, we don't believe you.
We're going to break in.
Wait, so the doctor said he's dead.
So the family of a man declared dead broke into a morgue in disbelief only to find, oh, I just, it skipped.
Oh no, there it is.
Family of a man declared dead broke into a morgue.
It's jumping around with these ads.
The Colombian family found Juan Jose Muñoz Romero, 67, awake with his eyes open after one of his daughters infiltrated the hospital.
Doctors in the hospital in the city of Cinco Dejejo in the Caribbean region of Sucre, Colombia, had declared Mr. Romero dead only hours earlier, but his family couldn't believe it and demanded to see him.
Mr. Romero had been taken to the health clinic with sudden high blood pressure according to reports.
So they say he died just two hours after entering the hospital, but his relatives didn't trust the medics.
His daughter, who has not been named in reports, they said she was not allowed to see her father's body because of coronavirus.
However, she broke into the hospital morgue when the doctors were distracted and they found him breathing and conscious inside.
She told the doctors and they still tried to convince her that he was actually dead and she was just seeing natural reactions when patients die.
But she didn't buy it and he was alive.
He's alive now.
Isn't that insane?
That's wild.
So that's like, well, you don't trust the doctors?
What?
You don't trust them.
Are you anti-science?
These guys seem to be anti-science.
Yeah, a little anti-science there ninjaing around our morgue.
This is literally the Monty Python sketch where in Holy Grail when they carry the dead guy out.
And he says, I'm not dead.
And they're like, oh, you know, he's totally dead.
And they throw him on the pile of dead bodies.
I wonder what gave it away when she's looking at the doctor's eyes, like Larry David.
And he's like, your father has passed.
And she's like, no.
Okay.
No.
Well, Larry David always accepts it.
And he goes.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
Oh, yeah, but he doesn't really believe it.
That's true.
But then they break in later.
That's what it had to do.
Break in later.
It was my turn.
Pizza shop owner thwarts robbery by tossing pie at suspect.
They mean pizza pie.
Have you ever called a pizza pie?
I've never called a pizza pie.
No, this feels very New York.
It must be a New York thing.
Yeah.
But apparently this guy had a machete.
The owner told troopers that a man with a machete approached him demanding money.
He said he told him he didn't have any, and he threw a pizza at him, causing the machete-wielding man to flee in a car.
I'm amazed that he didn't.
Well, if you've ever seen Ninja Turtles, you throw a pizza at a guy with a machete, they cut it up in the air, and then all the pieces of pizza land on the plates.
This is true.
If he knows how to use it, he isn't science.
Clearly, he doesn't know how to use it.
That's why he ran when he got hit.
If you don't believe that's what would happen, then you're anti-science.
Do you have any stories about getting hit in the face with a pizza, Ethan?
When I worked at a buffet restaurant, we used to throw food at each other and it kind of escalated.
So it'd be like a bun.
You know, we kind of me and the cooks would be the dishwasher, they'd be the cooks, and we'd sneak attack each other.
It got out of hand one night.
If your pizza overcooks, you can't serve it on the line.
So we had had a pizza overcooked, which means it was all brown on top, which means the sauce is boiling inside.
Like it's literally boiling and bubbling in there.
So the cook comes out across the room and goes, Ethan, I turn around.
He's got the giant paddle or whatever they call it that holds the pizza.
He flings it at me and it just he thought I'd dodge it.
It directly hit me in the face.
It was hot.
And it was burning my face.
So I had one of those pie power sprayers that dishwashers use.
I immediately just sprayed my face off and it hurt very bad.
That's all I got.
So did you have like a perfect triangular big circle?
Yeah, but I'm thinking like maybe they come apart or something and then you've got pepperoni.
Yeah.
You know, there's just like a red kind of.
Luckily, I had the sprayer in hand.
So I immediately, the moment I saw it coming, I was thinking when it was coming at me, I'm going to have to spray my face because this is going to burn me because that's boiling sauce on there.
You're very familiar with the boiling sauce when you work with pizzas.
Anyway, I worked at a pizza restaurant too.
Did you say Mama Mia?
Oh, no.
No.
You don't just.
This was like a trucker buffet.
Oh, okay.
A sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. auctioned for a record $114,000.
It's video game news for you.
I need to read this.
Yeah, it's apparently the highest price ever paid for a video game.
Unless somebody, I don't know if anybody's ever given their life, but as far as money goes.
Yeah, I know there was one game called Track and Field, I think, that was always the record for the most valuable video game.
Yeah.
That's a lame game to get that much money.
Wow.
I don't know why.
Is it Track and Field?
Oh my god, I don't think anything else interesting to say about that except that, oh, that's cool.
Well, I'm trying.
Okay, so this is the original Nini S game.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's the original from like 85.
What's crazy when I think about Mario is that I remember when it came out and how far games have come in our lifetime is insane technology-wise.
Well, and actually, if you go back and play Super Mario Brothers, what's amazing is how good of a game it is.
It is.
Oh, yeah, it's really funny.
Because if you play other games from that era, they're all horrible.
Just all, they're all terrible.
You know, we always think, oh, back in the 1980s, the games were great.
No, they were awful.
You remember Super Mario Brothers because it was the only one that was fun.
Yeah.
Like at the time.
My dad mastered Mario Brothers to where his morning devotional was he would recite entire books of the Bible by memory.
So he would just be speaking Flippians from memory the entire book and then he would play Mario Brothers and he would beat it multiple times without mushrooms.
So you could just be a little Mario and defeat the entire game that way multiple times through.
Goodness gracious.
Yeah, that's this thing.
Mysterious vampire slaying kit, including pistol and knife up for auction.
So this is just kind of cool.
This thing has a pocket-sized pistol, a 19th-century copy of the New Testament, pliers, rosary, a bottle of shark's teeth, an ivory-robed wolf carrying rosary beads, a blue file with mysterious contents, a silver-bladed pocket knife.
Inside the lid is an oval enamel painting that depicts the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Origin unknown.
So that's a frock.
Somebody's got some money, wants to buy that vampire sling kit.
So was it supposed to be old?
Is that why?
Yeah, it's old.
Oh, I see.
Nobody knows where it came from.
It's probably just a joke thing, but it's still cool.
But it's old.
The game I was thinking of was stadium events, not Trekking Field, and it's worth $25,000.
That's nothing.
Yeah, nothing compared to that sealed copy of Marlbrothers.
So we're going to buy this Vampire Sling yet?
If you guys want to.
Seth maybe could.
CEO.
It'd be nice for our new office.
Yeah, it's got religious stuff.
19th century New Testament.
I guess you don't need the Old Testament to fight vampires, just the New Testament.
It's valued at up to 3,000 pounds.
I don't know what that translates to.
Why would you just, I mean, that's a heavy amount of money.
Seems like a lot, yeah.
It's like a ton and a half of money.
Yeah.
1.5 tons.
Okay, well, let's move on to stories of the week.
Let's do it.
Every week, there are stories.
These are some of them.
Well, here's an interesting story.
A local progressive was very careful to only advocate for the most progressive politics and be an activist for all the popular new social justice causes.
So since he was so clearly on the right side of history, he was very surprised to find that after he died, he still went to hell.
Crazy.
It's the right side of history, but...
Still in hell.
Seems messed up.
Yeah, it seems like that would be a catch-all.
If you're on the right side of history, then you're good to go.
Yeah, the right side would mean heaven.
Yeah.
Stamp.
I always try to figure out what that means.
You're on the right side of history.
That's something that implies that there's a stick apart there.
Yeah.
It implies an objective moral standard.
Right.
And the people who say that don't typically subscribe to some kind of objective moral standard, or at least wouldn't say that it comes from God or the Bible or something like that.
There's a great Jonah Goldberg wrote a book called The Tyranny of Clichés, and he takes all these clichés that are lobbed at people.
It was actually a book that didn't sell very well, so I recommend it.
But there was a chapter on this saying.
He does chapters on all these different sayings.
So this is from an essay that he wrote.
In domestic politics, people, mostly liberals, tend to say, you're on the wrong side of history about social issues that are breaking their way.
It's a handy phrase, loosely translated as, you're going to lose eventually, so why don't you give up now?
Philosophically, the expression is abhorrent because of its Marxist twang, to borrow historian Robert Conquest's phrase.
The idea that history moves in a predetermined, inexorable path amounts to a kind of hallmark card to Hegelianism.
Marx, who ripped off a lot of his shtick from the philosopher Hegel, popularized the idea that opposition to the inevitability of socialism was anti-intellectual and anti-scientific.
The progression of history is scientifically knowable, quoth the Marxist, and so we need not listen to those who object to our program.
Later, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and others would use this reasoning to justify murdering millions of inconvenient people.
It was a God is on our side argument minus God.
I like that last line.
Oh, the last line because, yeah, you hear the you're on the wrong side of God is what the you know, the kind of hardcore fundamentalists would say.
You just take God out and you go, you're on the wrong side of history because what is history?
History is whatever we're going to do or did.
It's a strange mix of objective morality and totally subjective.
Like whatever happens.
What history are we talking about?
Whatever happens, whatever, whoever wins writes the history and says, hi, you were on the wrong side of it.
And it's like, well, duh.
I mean, isn't that how it works?
I also find it really short-sighted, like really myopic of saying, like, if you go against the cultural trends of the last 50 years or the last 25 years, you're on the wrong side of history, bub.
Yeah.
You know, like, let's look a little farther back.
Let's look 2,000 years back.
Yeah.
All the way to creation 6,000 years ago.
This is an excellent article.
I think there's some great dialogue in here.
You can read it?
Oh, yeah, I am going to read it.
You said you were going to read it.
Oh, yeah.
You were talking about Goldberg, so I was confused.
Oh, yeah, the Babylon B article.
Man on right side of history, surprised to find he still went to hell.
Well, this can't be correct, he said as he looked at the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.
I did everything right.
I was an activist for all the good causes, and I screamed at all the bad people online, and sometimes in person.
I know it's crazy, right? said Satan.
I love Satan's name.
You are on the right side of history.
All the history books will say so.
To the world, you're a really great guy.
I think you're Al Pacino.
I think I'm picturing him smoking.
Yeah, he's just sitting there.
So why am I here?
He asked.
Does that God guy know how this is going to make him look?
Yeah, well, he really doesn't follow or care about politics, Satan explained.
Well, that's wrong, Olson said.
There are a lot of important issues out there, more important than all that Bible stuff God focuses on.
Yeah, you're preaching to the choir, dude, Satan answered.
Know what I'm going to do?
He said, I'm going to start a protest.
Satan nodded.
Sure, you do that.
Is there any place to get poster board around here?
No.
No.
That's it.
I love that Satan would completely agree.
Like, yeah, he's not into politics.
What a jerk.
So out of touch.
Preaching to the choir, bro.
Yeah.
I'm on your side, man.
All right.
Next story.
Local lunch money thief and wedgie specialist Biff O'Doyle wrote in a recent op-ed that bully culture is not real, quote, it's just my fist-free market response to your stupid face, dweeb, end quote.
So this was.
It sounds like you had a lot of bottled-up bullying issues from your past.
Did you ever get bullied?
Did you ever get bullied, Kyle?
There was a period in like fifth grade where there was a small group of like jerks that decided they were going to pick on me.
And they never really did anything.
It was just like, hey, you know, you're a nerd.
And then one time they said, we're going to jump you, man.
We're going to jump you.
We're going to jump you.
You know, it was always like, was that like?
It's taking on a different meaning, I think.
Is it?
I don't know.
I don't know.
There's two meanings.
I thought it meant like sneaking up on you and then like beating you up.
Yeah, I got jumped.
And so then I remember after school one day, they're all, there he is.
Get him.
But I was just like standing where all the kids are and they're like, and they run up and they grab my backpack and they're like, ah.
That's it.
And then they just like.
Did they find anything good in there?
Nerd.
No, they didn't even take my backpack.
They just pulled it and they're like, okay.
So they didn't like force eat dog poop or something.
And they're like, okay, well, nerd.
And they walked away.
That was it.
That was all the bully.
When I was five, I had a bully named Butterworth.
Is that his real name?
Yeah, his teachers, his mom was a teacher at the school, and her name was Mrs. Butterworth, which is one of the syrups that is not problematic, apparently.
But he just threw rocks at me.
So I remember it's like in the playground and I felt something hit me in the head and I turned and looked and then all of a sudden I saw there's Butterworth and then another rock hits me in the head and I fall over.
And then he just threw another one at me and walked away.
Are we going to gloss over the Butterworth name?
I just love Butterworth.
Was it his first name?
His last name is Butterworth.
All I knew is because I didn't know who he was.
I didn't remember.
Because I was in kindergarten.
He was a lot older than me.
He's huge to me.
To me, he looked like an adult.
He's probably like 10 or 8 or something.
I just remember my mom pointing him out one day and saying, that's Mrs. Butterworth's son.
Isn't that funny?
The syrup.
And I was like, oh, I didn't know that there's a syrup.
I'm five.
I don't pay attention to syrup names.
And later I was like, oh, that is pretty funny.
Mr. Butterworth.
But I had another bully that called me Butterball on the bus and then he punched me one time because I'm fat.
So he called me Butterball and he got the whole bus to like chant Butterball at me.
Butterball.
It was like something out of a bad sitcom or like a 90.
Yeah, that's the thing about all the bullying scenes that you see in shows.
Hey, nerd.
But they are.
And they bully on the traches.
So Charles M. Blow, funny last name, kind of like Butterworth.
Of the Maryland Blows, the Massachusetts Blows.
Is that a sports team?
No, I'm just like he's of the Blow family, the famous Chuck Blow.
The famous Blow family from Massachusetts.
I don't know if there is one.
The Blows.
But he basically wrote the same op-ed that we published.
Inspired this.
But with a few words swapped out, he said, once more, there is no such thing as cancel culture.
There is free speech.
You can say and do as you please, and others can choose never to deal with you, your company, or your products ever again.
The rich and powerful are just upset that the masses can now organize their dissent.
Furthermore, even if you're a public figure, you're still a person.
You are still going to make mistakes like other people.
You just have to take your knocks for it.
Lord knows I have.
But you can't complain.
You did it.
There are consequences for your actions.
Learn and move on.
People don't complain about the celebrity culture that allows them to amass wealth and influence, but they whine and moan about cancel culture that threatens to take it away.
Do you people not see how craven and comforted this makes you look?
I don't know if he sounds like it.
I take issue with parts of that.
I mean, most of it.
There's a lot to break down.
Yeah.
Well, for one thing, he makes it sound like this is just people freely choosing not to buy a product.
And that's not what's happening in cancel culture.
A lot of times, the people that are attacking the company and calling the bosses never shopped there in the first place.
They're just, they saw one guy, this guy online.
They don't like what he said.
So then they call his bosses and want to destroy him.
And also, like, because of how they voted or whatever, it's like, it's not a thing.
He says down, oh, you messed up.
You just got to make up for it.
It's like, you have the freedom to vote how you want in this country.
Like, that's not messing up.
Yeah, there's a few elements there, right?
Because, yeah, it's not the customers of the company.
It's someone who's never heard of the company before in their lives until they see some tweet and start calling.
And then the other thing is, who's deciding what's right think and wrong think in this cancel culture system?
Right.
Because you saw that guy who got canceled for a paper he wrote in the late 80s where he was talking about women in combat roles.
I think it was the guy who was an executive at Boeing.
Okay.
And he had written a paper back in the late 80s saying, questioning whether women should be in combat roles in the military.
And he resigned and lost his job because it was like.
Those are the worst crazes that you can't question.
Like it's just.
Well, and we're still debating and we're still debating women in combat roles.
It's still a legitimate discussion.
It's just so it's not only is it people not a mistake.
Yeah.
Not only is it consequences for people that are fairly inconsequential.
We're not talking about celebrities here, right?
Most of the time.
Yeah, so sometimes it happens.
Celebrities are usually cancel-proof.
That's a thing.
Sometimes it happens with celebrities, but a lot of times it's the guy that works at freaking Walmart or something.
Yeah, they weren't viral.
They were on a video and now they're getting attacked.
And this was inspired by, I just want to mention Philip on Twitter, who saw this.
I retweeted and said, I can't remember what I said.
I made some comment about Charles Blow's tweet here.
And he replied and said, Ethan, you got to do a Babylon B article about how they say bullies are not really bullies.
It's just a reaction to the acne on your face or whatever.
So I told him I'm going to do it.
And I told him I did it and he loved it.
Thanks, Philip.
Great idea.
I totally robbed you of it and wrote it, but he liked it.
What do you think about the argument that it's like, this is just the free market working?
Because on the one hand, that's true, right?
Like they're often not trying to get the government to do something.
They're trying to get the market to respond and they're trying to go to the crowds and say, look at how terrible this person is.
Stop buying their products.
Or, you know, your employer shouldn't employ you anymore.
And so on the one sense, that's true.
But on the other hand, just leave the legality out of it.
And think about the morality of like trying to destroy someone's entire life by getting the whole crowd to turn against them.
Well, that's the weird thing about being an American is you don't share any blood or any history.
Like you just, you join America.
There's a set of ideas you're supposed to believe in.
And one of those ideals is freedom of speech.
And there's a huge chunk of people right now that don't agree with that.
So I think if you have those values, you don't, you know, you let people speak their mind.
You don't, you know, I just going and trying to destroy their life, because that's what you're trying to do when you go to their work and make them this figure online that if their future jobs Google them, they're going to be destroyed forever.
You know, it's really sick.
So I do think it comes from the shifting morals of the country.
It's scary.
I don't think they know what they're what they're charging towards.
I don't think they know.
I don't know if they really want this.
If it ever flips on them, which it always does, right?
One guy's head gets cut off down the road, that guy's head gets cut off.
And then, you know, that's kind of like the French revolutions seem to go.
Yeah, I guess I'm just thinking like this, this argument about the free market is interesting because I don't think anybody's like we talked about dystopian novels where it's the culture that turns against the idea of free speech before the government.
And that's just as dangerous.
Oh, yeah, totally.
So we're not saying like.
I think it'll happen first.
Yeah, I don't think it's not the government.
Yeah.
That's what I think.
I mean, I believe in capitalism, but I believe in it only with the addition of you have to have, as a Christian, I mean, God's law, truth, good and evil.
I mean, a belief in what is good, what is bad.
Like, you have to have some sort of integrity that comes from somewhere else.
It can't just be driven by money.
If everything is driven purely by money, you're still living, can be living a completely evil and vapid culture that self-destruct.
Well, the PC police, as it were, have come for the Redskins.
Washington Redskins.
That's sad.
I don't think I want to live in a country where we can't name our team the Redskins.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I don't care that much.
But we at the Babylon Bee feel that the PC police did not go far enough.
There's white supremacy and racism everywhere in the NFL.
Every single rife.
I like using that word.
Sorry, go ahead.
Literally dripping.
Dripping, rife, bulging.
Packed to the gills.
Yes.
With oozing.
Literally, that's we've landed on it.
Oozing with white supremacy and racism.
Every single team in the league has some kind of offensive stereotype in their name.
So we hereby call on every NFL team in the league to change their name for the following reasons.
I like the recommendation that the Redskins become the no-skins.
It's just a guy that's just be a guy who's completely flayed of all his skin.
And you can't tell if he's black or white or any, you know, he's just, we're all underneath, we're all a bunch of blood and meat.
That's the dream, isn't it?
Yeah.
Then all of us just cut off a mask off one day.
He's running around with like little bits of like arteries shooting up, squirting blood everywhere.
And he looks screaming in pain.
It shows how human we are, all are.
That was the symbol of one of the houses in Game of Thrones.
Oh, yeah.
With his skin flayed off.
Flayed off.
I don't know the word fillet.
I always think of fillet as like a fish when you like.
Oh, it's fillet.
Fillet.
Fillet.
F-L-A-Y.
Fillet is like, what's different?
No skin.
I figured they were related.
Or fillet is a particular type of slicing or something.
I don't know, like thin slicing.
You know how to fillet a fish.
Is that fillet a fish or fillet a fish?
Fillet.
Fillet.
What's fillet mean?
It is a boneless cut or slice of meat or fish.
That's fillet.
That's fillet.
Okay.
And then flet.
You should have done this before the show.
It's to peel the skin off a corpse.
Ah, a corpse.
Ew.
Or carcass.
Hmm.
Okay.
Fillet.
Peel it off the car.
Flay.
Flay.
I wonder how those words ended up.
So Bobby Fillet, that's his name?
Rough.
My name is Bobby.
Peel the skin off a corpse.
Hmm.
So, yeah, I don't know.
You want to read some of these?
Arizona Cardinals, too religious.
Atlanta Falcons celebrates one of the cheapest Smash Brothers characters.
Baltimore Ravens, named after the Disney Channel show, That's So Raven without the POC person of color protagonist permission.
Buffalo Bills.
This one's obvious.
Bills are an evil byproduct of capitalism.
Dalla Dalla Bills.
No Bills in Socialists.
And Buffaloes are meat.
They don't want meat.
No meat.
Carolina Panthers.
The Panther was appropriated wholesale from Wakandan culture.
That's true.
Chicago Bears.
Murderous Bears should never be celebrated.
Cincinnati Bengals.
Just sounds racist.
We're looking into it.
Cleveland Browns.
Brown?
Are you talking about skin color again?
Whoa, Brown?
What?
This sounds like white fragility to me.
Dallas Cowboys.
Whoa, whoa.
A mutant half boy, half cow is tragic.
Shouldn't be used as a mascot.
We're talking hamburgers.
We're talking meat eating.
We're talking male masculinity.
There's a lot of things wrong with a cow.
We just think somewhere out there there's a kid who's like a mutant and he like somehow just was born with this deformity and looks like a cow and he's got butters and everyone teased him his whole childhood.
Cowboy, you're a cowboy.
He's like, you guys want some milk?
And then every time.
Get out of here.
Every time he goes to Walmart and he sees the cowboy jerseys hanging up at the front, he's like, you think when he has cereal, he just kind of milks it himself?
Denver Broncos.
Horses have been subjugated and enslaved for millennia.
Detroit Lions.
Lions are not vegans.
That's a good point.
Green Bay Packers glorifies the butcher as meat packers, and then meat causes global warming.
You got to go a couple steps through this one, but the problematic stuff is still there.
It could be the Green Bay Impossible Meat Packers.
Oh, yeah, that's Beyond Meat Packers.
Beyond Meat Packers.
Houston Texans.
That's real?
Texans?
I don't know sports.
Celebrates the most racist state in the union.
Indianapolis Colts.
Obviously, the name glorifies guns.
Right.
Jacksonville Jaguars.
Jaguars are different by evil-rich billionaires as they run over poor people.
The martini cell phone.
Kansas City Chiefs.
That's obvious.
I mean, they're obvious.
Yeah, they got to change that.
So we suggest switching it to the Kansas City wise indigenous tribal elders.
Are they going to change that?
Or whites, for short.
We got a friend who's a firefighter, and he said they're changing that in firefighting.
They're not going to call them chiefs anymore.
Yeah, they're disgusting calling them.
So are they going to be the wise tribal elder?
Wise Indigenous Traveler.
It's whites.
Oh, white.
Got it.
Yeah.
That's the joke.
Las Vegas Raiders celebrates the Raiders of the Lost Ark, which featured prominent Nazi imagery.
Los Angeles Charters.
We don't think anyone who's ever faced down a line of charging riot police would find this name even the least bit funny or clever.
That's a trigger word.
Los Angeles Rams.
Are we reading all these?
Yeah.
Okay.
Dodge Rams contribute heavily to the climate crisis.
Miami Dolphins.
It's a painful reminder that we live in a world where SeaWorld still exists.
Minnesota Vikings associated with patriarchy-dominated Norse mythology.
New England Patriots.
Patriots.
New Orleans Saints goes against the constitutional principle of separation of church and sports.
New York Giants.
Giants prefer the term persons of height.
New York Jets, the burning of jet fuel contributes to global warming.
Philadelphia Eagles.
Eagles are a well-known Nazi symbol.
Absolutely.
USA Today revealed this to us.
Yeah, fact-check, Eagle.
Fact-check, true.
Nazi, true.
Pittsburgh Steelers, steel contributes to global warming.
San Francisco 49ers.
I mean, this is an obvious one.
The gold miner mascot harkens back to the days of Manifest Destiny and the destruction of Mother Earth.
That just sounds like a derogatory term.
You're just a 49er.
Or even niner, like niner.
Yeah.
Such a niner.
I don't know what 49ing is, but it doesn't sound good.
Seattle Seahawks, birds are unable to give consent to have their name used as mascots.
Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
This one's actually okay because the Buccaneers were probably just stealing bread to feed their families.
Buccaneers, they're like pirates, right?
It's discriminatory to call them like criminals.
Buccaneer.
Tennessee Titans reinforces the harmful idea of power structures and male-dominated hierarchies.
And the Washington Redskins.
Nothing wrong with that one.
I think that one's fine.
That one can stay.
Yeah, it's color.
That's weird.
You can say people of color, but you can't say color plus skin, I guess.
Yeah, I don't know.
I can never track all the terms.
You can't track it, right?
You can say that skin has a color, but if you say a color.
You can say the color, but you have to capitalize it or something.
I don't know.
I can't keep track of everything.
It should be like people of some color that I can't distinguish.
One of these shades.
Nope.
Don't even.
You could pull out the color wheel and like warmer.
All right.
Well, we're going to move on to our topic of the week where we're going to discuss why Christian stuff is so bad.
And so good.
And bad.
And now, the Babylon bees topic of the week.
All right, we published an article this week.
If you like secular things, try these Christian alternatives that are almost as good.
And this was kind of a throwback.
This was inspired by the time that I worked at the Family Christian store.
And we actually had a poster that told kids, if you like evanescence, try Barlow Girl.
If you like.
Yeah, what?
If you like Limbiscuit, try POD.
Blink 182?
Yeah, MXPX.
MXPX.
Although they kind of relationship with MXP.
Reliant K.
Yeah, MXPX would be a complicated relationship.
Although they were better.
MXPX is better than Reliant K.
I disagree.
Oh, absolutely.
100%.
Way better.
Oh, man.
Well, I mean, musician, actual music, musicianship.
Well, they're cheesy, though.
There's some cheesy songs.
I can't stammer like it.
I can't stand the guy's voice, is my problem.
Yeah, he's a little, yeah.
He's got that nasally thing going on.
A little nasally.
But that's punk.
I had a bit of a pop punk bug.
I like pop punk.
I like the harmonies.
I like it too.
I'm just, you know.
But I like they're good.
Anyway.
But yeah, I've listened to them for forever.
As a young Christian who could only listen to Christian music, which was a boundary I put on myself.
My parents never really put that on me.
Yeah, Reliant K was good within that window.
When we were growing up, my brother was like the one who was almost pushing the boundaries of like, can I buy this secular album?
My parents would be like looking at it.
I don't know.
There's a couple of dams on this album.
Can we say that?
I don't know.
I'm like, it's in quotes.
Two D-words.
I'm talking about the Hoover Dam.
There's two references to the Hoover Dam on this album.
So there's two, you know, bad words on this album.
And I kind of talk about, okay, you know, you're 14.
I think you can handle this one.
And I think I kind of went the other way and I'm like, I must only buy Christian music.
You know, so like you, I was more self-restricted.
Yeah, I did it when I was like 19 or something.
Like I just, yeah, I burned everything and started over.
Yeah.
I really bought into that.
I thought that it was going to cleanse me.
I remember I got into some friend's car and we turned on a radio and we were waiting for her.
Ran to the house to get something and she actually had secular music on all her stations and i'm like, so I went and I changed them all to air one.
I changed all her presets to air one.
That was a weird word for that.
That's crazy, that's hilarious.
It's some kind of you guys, you pathic impulse, I guess.
I don't know.
You got like it's like punked, but like the righteous version or something.
You're just, you're sitting there waiting and she presses number three and you're like hey, wait a minute, air one, you just got Jesused, Jesus juke, the old Jesus juke.
I don't know.
I don't know what it is that makes Christian stuff so bad or why we always feel like we have to knock things off.
Yeah, I think uh, it is like this combination of capitalism and Christianity.
I think yeah, like a consumeristic thing.
Right, because we like to create a product.
Why you need, you need this.
Yeah, you are.
You are incomplete without this, which is built into Christianity already.
So it's like oh, there's Jesus, but you can also say plus Jesus, you need this and uh, and it creates this.
Uh, and also, it's really convenient because you're like, you got to burn all that and buy a bunch.
Start over, buy all this that we make and, and many people sell a rat and it's like okay, it's preaching yeah which yeah, people go to art for preaching.
Yeah, I guess we don't see ourselves as Christians that are like we're Christians, that we're in a world and the world has all this stuff and we participate in it and and we can use discernment to say this is something good I should participate in or this is something bad.
But instead of doing that, we just like look at everything the world has and we just copy it and then we take it into our own little world and make it our own.
We have bands too.
Yeah, we have movies.
When I was in my rock band, I made a song called Mission To The Moon.
It was about, did I tell of this?
I don't think so.
There's actually a youtube video of it.
You can see it's fully animated.
It took me a full month to animate.
Uh, it's about a guy who these aliens come to him and they tell him that uh, the earth's gonna end and so they've created a new place to live on the moon, for earthlings to go and live and uh, but it's his job to tell everybody.
So then he wakes up in the morning he like writes up plans for a rocket ship and just takes off for the moon by himself.
And then when he gets to the moon, he sits up there in a little tower and he just yells at the earth and tells everybody, but it's from the moon, and uh, and then he just watches the world explode.
But that was kind of my young I was like 20 when I wrote it, I think but um, my analogy was just that, you know you, we box ourselves in as Christians.
We like to create a safe little moon paradise that we live on, where everything's safe and Christian, and then, like from inside that weird little world we've created, then we're kind of telling people, oh yeah, come join us.
You know it's like yeah yeah, it's not, it's a marketing thing.
You see, you know you, you guys have music, we have music, check it out, it's almost as good.
Yeah, it's a shortcut to righteousness right, to just like, be like.
Oh yeah, I have Jesus approved music, so therefore I am good.
It's kind of like the uh, right side of history thing right yeah, I was on the right side of the cd aisle yeah, I was kind of thinking that there is some analogy, like when I was saying as a kid, you know, i'd go and change everybody's presets to Christian music or like yeah, there's this weird judgy thing of like yeah hey, wait a minute, you listen to secular music and we have to have that label on everything, secular sacred secular, sacred.
We like teams, we like labels.
Yeah, I mean, everybody does.
It's just a Christian version.
Okay yeah, that's true, because you know, when people buy a product, they're not buying the product, they're buying the identification with that brand.
Right, you know, this is something that that marketing has looked into and all the research looks into is like Someone buying a Pepsi is buying the fun of drinking a Pepsi.
I'm not buying a Pepsi.
I'm buying the choice of a new generation, you know, or whatever.
Like whatever it makes you feel, if it's young or rich or successful, that's what you're buying.
So as a Christian, it's like I'm looking for ways to feel approved by God or something.
I'm looking for approval and I'm looking for that sanctification and the validation that I'm growing in my Christian faith.
And so I can buy the product to validate my identity as a Christian rather than just having the identity in Christ and I listen to a little secular music or whatever.
It's not that big of a deal.
And we all want, not just Christians, we all want a very simple way to go, me good, they bad.
Like I see my teenager going through this right now.
She's discovered the social justice stuff and it conveniently makes her good, them bad.
And if you try to like give her any alternate facts or anything, just to open her mind to it, she doesn't want to open up to it because it's nice to be in that place where like, I have this stuff.
I am part of this club.
I am good.
They are bad.
The guy with the secular music is bad.
I'm good.
The guy that smokes is bad.
The guy that doesn't smoke is good.
Like to have these bonus commandments.
Charles Spurgeon said that when people, when they were asked why he smokes, you know, I don't add another commandment.
There's already 10.
There's no thou shalt not smoke commandment.
Actually.
But yeah, and now that you're talking about it, I'm wondering if there's a connection to cancel culture where you have trouble consuming media from someone who disagrees with you.
And I like all the leftists that are suddenly discovering this.
I might have to consume media from someone I disagree with.
Really?
Yeah.
Welcome to the club.
Yeah, welcome.
Like we've been doing that for decades.
And we've learned to make peace with it.
People are burning J.K. Rowling books or whatever.
People have a Harry Potter tattoo, getting them removed because she's a TERF or something.
She disagrees with me on this one minor thing, even though she's entirely in my political camp and believes everything I believe.
There's one little thing.
And there's just like intellectual purity that must be maintained.
So they're buying, yeah, it is that they are consuming to reinforce their identity and to identify with something.
And it's like, oh, they disagree.
I can't partake in that.
That's how I felt growing up.
And this wasn't any fault on the part of my parents or my church.
This is just me being a self-righteous little jerk.
But is there a good side to it?
I think so.
I mean, I wasn't exposed to a lot of terrible things that other people were exposed to.
Well, and I think it inevitably brought out artists that may not have been discovered in a secular market.
I think there's artists like Five Iron Frenzy who I don't know if they would have, who knows?
If they, you know, some of these smaller, a lot of the bands I like that run tooth and nail.
Like I've been listening to Stretch Armstrong again after a while, Craig's Brother, these small punk bands that were, you know, they never made it that big, but because of Tooth and Nail, they were on the on the map.
They were in Christian bookstores and stuff.
And so I mean, like, there's, there's good stuff that comes out.
It's not, once again, this is what we're arguing against.
Black and white.
This is good.
This is bad.
Yeah, there is a gray.
And I think there is good that comes out of it.
I was listening to Slick Shoes the other day, their Wake Up Screaming album.
It's just like, this is pretty good pie punk.
Like it's as good as something that you hear in the guy was like 12, I think.
Yeah, he was pretty young.
I mean, I used to go to high school, like doing homework while he was touring.
Yeah, I mean, you know, and at its best, I mean, the Christian world produced these guys like Five Iron Frenzy that you feel like they weren't really happy being in the Christian space.
And I don't think it wasn't like we're ashamed of our faith.
Yeah.
It was just like, we want to make music.
We don't want to be a product.
You know, Five Iron Frenzy is singing about slaughtering of the Indians and stuff, you know, slaughtering of the Native Americans or whatever.
They would sing about these topics and consumers.
I always love a good old Indian slaughtering.
I always love Indian slaughtering Scotsa and that's what really makes you want to skink them.
Can you call them Indians?
That's why I said I changed it and I said they to Americans.
Sorry, Rhys Roper.
I think it's Indigenous Peoples now.
I think they've changed it again.
As an Indigenous now, I don't know.
Because Americans.
But you have these guys.
I mean, Switchfoot, I think, is better than any secular band to me.
Well, they absolutely are.
That's an extreme statement.
No, I mean, like you to you.
They make music.
They make art that's like top five band for me.
Okay.
Top five.
Switchfoot.
I'll let you have that.
And my wife probably agrees.
Yeah.
And it's something where it's not this, it's not this tame Christian sound and music.
It's like, we just want to make music.
And I think as Christians, we always, you know, we eat our own and we go, oh, you want to become secular?
Oh, you're a sell-off.
I don't know.
Yeah.
I think that that really does a disservice to some great art.
Yeah, I think it's more that I'm fine with Christians making Christian products.
It's the this is holy, that is not approach.
Having that attitude.
Marketing it that way, I think is evil.
Like I've seen, you ever seen those?
There's like ads that are on like the, well, you couldn't see them because they're on the radio, but there's ads for like Christian healthcare or whatever.
It's like share programs.
Healthcare as God would want it.
It's really like, what?
Like you're not, I'm not a Christian if I don't get your health care or whatever.
That kind of stuff bothers me.
Yeah, and you know what's funny?
I hear that those programs, I know some people that use those and they really love it.
Yeah.
Because they actually are like writing a check.
That probably worked for some people that it's this weird sharing thing where like you actually write a check for another Christian's bills that month.
Like you don't send a company a $500.
Are you advertising for them?
No, no, I've just heard about it.
I don't even know what the name of the company is.
But like you don't write a $500 check to the company.
You're like, hey, Bob in Minnesota got over me.
And you write Bob a check and you send it to him.
That's kind of how it works is you're sending it.
I'm like, oh, that's cool.
I like that.
I like that concept.
But yeah, if you're using it to judge people, like, oh, you use it.
Yeah, I think those work well for us because my wife's type 1 diabetic.
So we'd be just needing a good check every month from everybody.
Send them in.
Keep it coming.
Come on.
Yeah, keep it sending it.
But yeah, I didn't necessarily just want to talk about music.
I mean, we knock off everything.
I remember at the Christian Bookstore, we had a PC game section.
Yeah.
And there was this game called Katakumin or Katekuman, however you want to say that.
As a spice.
It was almost an exact real-life version of that game on The Simpsons where he's like shooting.
They go over to Flanders' house and they play a video game.
You want to play Bible Shooter, Bible Blaster, or whatever?
And they're like shooting people and turning them into Christians.
It's like, but it was like dead serious.
Dead serious.
You walked around with a Holy Spirit gun, which is a sword of the spirit.
And you blasted these blue beams out.
And if you hit a Roman guard, he would like and you hit him enough times and he just falls to his knees and goes, and this light comes down from heaven.
Hallelujah.
I love what it does.
Hallelujah.
I was showing you yesterday.
It's like absolutely hilarious.
It looks like satire.
It looks like satire, but it was dead serious.
We sold it in the Christian bookstore.
They made a sequel to it, I think.
It was just like, this is bizarre, you know.
But I was like always interested in like, I wonder if I could buy a good Christian video game.
I never did.
I always thought that'd be a cool game where like it's like Grand Theft Auto, but you're in a normal world and you can put on your demon goggles and you can see what else is going on in the spirit world around everybody.
Yeah, like to fight them.
Like Frank Peretti, this present darkness video game or something.
That would be pretty cool.
I never read it, but yeah, sure.
It's our idea.
Patent pending.
Let's do it.
Or we're going to make it.
Redemption cards.
I played Redemption Cards.
Is that like Magic the Gathering?
It was a Christian knockoff of Magic the Gathering.
And it was kind of interesting because you actually had to shuffle in demons into your deck.
So you had to build the good side.
The whole point was there was souls in the talk about this before.
I think we might have.
There were souls in the middle of the table, and you had to save the souls before the other guys saved the souls.
So you actually like had a Satan card and these different demons and it's like doubt.
I played doubt and now you didn't save him.
You know, it's like, is this really Christian?
Like trying to stop people from saving souls?
Testaments.
You remember testaments?
Mints?
Testaments?
Testaments.
That's a mint you eat?
At the front of the Christian bookstore, there's like all these Christian candies and one of them.
Christian breath?
Testaments.
And yeah, I think they were mints that had like a little Bible verse on it.
Does that have the Bible verse about it being a pleasing fragrance?
Probably.
Probably.
Oh, man.
That's bad.
What about that bread?
They got that Ezekiel loaf.
I remember the Ezekiel bread.
We got it a couple times.
Grono.
Does it feel like you're eating something better than they took the list of ingredients back from Ezekiel or something?
And it's like Bible bread right here.
But I don't think that was that passage.
I don't even remember the passage.
Was it prescriptive?
Is it telling you you must make this bread or was it just describing something he made?
I don't remember.
You can make beef jerky called burnt offering or something like that.
The burnt off.
The burnt off.
Meat sacrificed barbecue place.
Is Lord's Gym really a Christian?
Is that a Christian thing?
Lord's Gym?
Like Jesus' work?
Yeah, so the Gord, was it not Gourn's Gym?
That was from Veggie Tales.
Gold's Gym.
Gold's Gym, yeah.
Gourn's Gym was a joke in Veggie Dales.
This is how far I'm into Christian culture.
I'm thinking it's a parody of a Veggie Tales thing, which is actually a parody of it.
Yeah, so they did a parody of the Gold's Gym shirt, and it was Jesus.
There's not an actual gym called Lord's Gym.
I'm imagining a t-shirt.
And he's doing a push-up with the cross on his back.
It says the sin of the world.
And he's like, lifting up the sin of the world.
I think I may have told this.
I got asked to draw like a buff Jesus one time.
Did I tell you about that?
Did you do it?
Yeah, because the guy was like, because I was like 10.
Oh.
So I could not draw muscles to save myself.
I could barely, it's terrible.
Like, oh, yeah, lumps go everywhere.
And so this guy, when I was on softball team, I very barely played sports with him a few times.
The coach, who's a bodybuilder, he was actually part of the power team in our area.
And he comes up and he goes, hey, we got a local power team.
We need like a sweet t-shirt design.
And what we need is what we need.
And he's like, I want Jesus on the cross.
I'm doing two piece signs.
And then I want him like super ripped.
So I tried to draw in my 10-year-old understanding of the human anatomy, Jesus with like, you know, however many abs I gave him.
And I just gave him this giant 24-pack shacks.
Yeah, just hideous looking.
And they used it, I guess.
Because he was like, I'll pay 20 bucks.
I'm like, 20 bucks.
That's more than you make an art now.
And then, yeah, they're wearing these shirts and they're ripping phone books in half for the Lord.
I'm Googling old power team shirt to see if we can.
Oh, but it would have been local, just local to Coos Bay, Oregon, which would probably not show up in the first six months.
No, but like maybe someone is cleaning out their garage and they're selling it on eBay.
I mean, how incredible would that be?
Coos County Power Team.
Yeah, that would be amazing if you found it because I would love to work out.
I didn't find a regular power team shirt.
So let's talk about the power team.
Have you ever seen that?
Ripping up phone books for Jesus.
I remember we would come on TBN or you'd be changing the channel and you'd see these guys ripping phone books for Jesus.
Were they still around?
I can't even figure out what they're doing.
What's the secular version of that?
Yeah, I guess it's just bodybuilding?
Just bodybuilding, right?
That's a lot more fun.
Or kind of like a Harlem Globetrotters type thing, like you get these guys, athletes to do these cool stunts or something.
I wonder why we never did a spiritualized version of monster trucks.
It seems like people just kind of accept that monster trucks are already Christian.
Well, we do, because like at the Crusades that they do down in Anaheim.
Wait, what, Crusades?
Yeah, well, that's a problem.
Let's talk about that later.
But yeah, you know, that's how they get everybody into the Harvest Crusade and all that.
It's like monster trucks, bikes, and then a sermon.
There's a sermon at the end.
But can you call it a monster truck?
I don't know if God appreciates monsters.
Angel trucks.
How about are there good monsters in the Bible?
Can't remember.
I think they're all bad.
What?
Behemoth trucks?
Yeah, Leviathan trucks.
Something like that.
Yeah.
Nephilim trucks.
Nephilim trucks.
We're crushing each other.
So are the real question is: are we part of this problem?
Oh, the Babylon B.
Yeah, we're just a knockoff of the onion.
That's true.
We're almost as good.
Though we don't purport that you're Christian if you like the Babylon B, but you are not if you read the onion.
That's true.
So that's my main issue.
I don't care if Christians have their thing.
And that's kind of why it's weird to me when people are like, Babylon B, you shouldn't write politics or just make Christian jokes.
Like, isn't that what we make fun of Christian bands we're doing here?
You know, it's like just being in this little Christian ghetto.
Right.
Yeah, that's something I like about the Babylon B is we do, we branch out of that and just do whatever we find funny.
That is kind of unheard of.
They want that packaged Christian package.
Not from us.
You're not getting it.
No sir, Bob.
Bucko.
Well, would you like to read some hate mail?
Let's do it.
All right, so this is a little complicated, but we sent out.
I don't know if Matt knows how to work the flowerbed button.
Matt, do you know how to work the flowerbed button?
Which one is it?
There might be a little guide there.
Can you see the guide?
Try pushing a button, see what you get.
Try pushing a button.
Just press a button.
Nope, that's not it.
That's not it.
Oh, they're all going at once now.
Don't worry about it.
We could add it in post.
We'll add it in post.
We'll do it live.
You have to turn the little volume knob next to that button's down.
It'll go back away.
There we go.
We'll do it later.
We'll put it later.
Dan will do it on the floor.
In pain.
Okay, so this was a response to our newsletter.
And occasionally we send like an advertisement to our email list.
You know, so someone will pay us whatever and we'll send out this.
So I don't remember who it was.
We sent this thing that was like, we need to stop Antifa.
Some political ad about anti-antifa, which we're for.
We are pro-anti-anti-anta.
Wait.
We are pro-anti-antifa.
And so this person was very mad that we sent this email.
And he says, you're a right-wing scumbag.
Flowerbed.
Off, you boogaloo skunk.
Favorite part.
Hiding behind a satirical paper in order to infiltrate via email your Christo-fascist neo-Nazi dogma.
A lot to unpack there.
What's a boogaloo skunk?
Yeah, that was the one thing we were trying to figure out.
A boogaloo skunk.
So we figured.
It sounds like a band name, the boogaloo skunk.
It's like a ska band or something.
Yeah.
Total ska band.
Opening for five iron friends.
It's bad.
Boogaloo skunk.
Because you stink people out.
So skunk.
Boogaloo is a type of music.
I don't think so.
I looked up.
Well, yeah, but that's not, I don't think that's what they're referring to.
Googaloo.
But is that what we're going to go with?
If you Google Boogaloo, it's a new far-right.
Oh, wait.
It changed.
Yesterday I didn't say that.
Did you say Google Boogaloo?
Google Boogaloo.
If you Google Boogaloo.
Boogal Boogaloo.
It's a fast dance of Afro-American origin performed by couples and characterized by dancing apart and moving the body in short, quick movements to the beat of the music.
Let's try it based on that description.
They like when ones are like, can they come in?
Like that?
Yeah.
We kind of had to say that.
Yeah, that was good.
But this other thing says it's a far, what?
It's a new far-right slang for Civil War.
The word Boogaloo once represented a fusion of people and cultures.
It was both a musical sound and a dance.
Now it's favored on the far right as shorthand for an uprising against the government.
Yeah, this was coming about a lot when Ralph Northam was threatened to take threatening to take away a lot of the guns in Virginia and stuff.
People were like, here comes the boogaloo.
The boogaloo.
So there's like some Civil War guy used to tell us Confederate have flags and they're all meeting and they're like, boys, the boogaloo is coming.
The boogaloo is on.
That's the word they came up with.
Those would be called boogaloo skunks.
Those are the boogaloo skunks.
Those are the boogaloo skunks.
Maybe they have a band, maybe they have like a bluegrass band called the boogaloo skunks.
The boogaloo skunks.
I'd probably like them if they weren't so racist.
They probably are.
On the plantation, they throw this big party and this big boogaloo party.
Having a big old, yeah.
So before they go acoustic boogaloo.
Before they go overthrow the government in the boogaloo, they have the big party that night, like the big boogaloo party.
That's your bluegrass?
That's a boogaloo.
It's not bluegrass.
It's boogaloo grass.
Boogaloo grass.
Why don't you Google Boogaloo grass?
It's gotta be.
That's gotta be real.
Are we ready for this next hate mail?
Are we still talking about boogaloo skunks?
We're learning a lot.
I don't know what Christophas is.
There's no boogaloo grass.
Okay, guys.
It's up for grabs.
That style of music is a whole genre.
Reserve the URL.
Boogaloograss.com.
The far right has ruined it.
It sounds like weed, a kind of weed, though.
Boogaloo grass.
Yeah, that could be.
Try this dank.
Some of that dank blue boogaloo grass.
This is from a friendly sounding guy.
His name is Flowerbed, but it's spelled out.
That's also his email address.
Crazy.
I just wanted to complain about something.
The onion did, does.
It's so much better on original.
But I have to commend you when I get fooled or schooled.
You flowerbed.
So it's half critical and half, we gotcha.
Like, oh, I have to commend you because you fooled me.
I feel like we should branch out from the flowerbed and have ones that are specific to the word.
To the cuss word.
Yeah.
Well, I got Dave to do like dolphin, maybe carrot.
I can't remember what else.
There's a bunch, but we always.
Flowerbed kind of stuck.
Flowerbed's the one that stuck.
And yeah, it's funny because Ben Howe came up with flowerbed.
He just got canceled.
Yeah.
Yeah, so.
If he had only flowerbedded his tweets.
Yeah, he should have flowerbed those.
He wouldn't have gotten canceled.
Poor Ben.
People could just, I mean, it's weird because he's from the company that Rick Wilson's with, and Rick Wilson's canceled.
And that guy goes off.
But I guess he's on the right side.
Did you see that picture where he was sitting by the Confederate flag and the South will rise again and also from years ago?
Is that what Ben said?
Oh, no.
Rick Wilson.
Rick Wilson.
Oh, really?
Is he fine?
And you know, he's not canceled.
I don't know.
They like him too much.
He's enough anti-Trump.
He's anti-Trump.
Like Ben Howe's like, yeah, I like Trump, but he's not.
He's not as far as Rick Wilson.
You need to be all the way on that side.
Wait, I don't want to slander him.
I want to Google Rick Wilson.
Oh, yeah.
So there was a picture of him with a Confederate flag.
Hmm.
He looks kind of like Mike from Breaking Bad a little bit.
Oh, he had posted pictures to Instagram sitting by a cooler that had the Confederate flag on it and the words the South will rise again.
Just sitting next to a sticker?
He was like at a party.
He was at a party.
Rick Wilson was.
He didn't burn this party down.
And there was like a cooler sitting next to the Confederate body.
The South will rise again.
He's like, that would be enough to cancel some other people.
Yeah, I actually don't care.
I mean, if you want to hear that, but you know.
Cancel.
Cancel.
Speaking of cancel.
Speaking of canceled, you are canceled.
Because this show's over unless you're a subscriber.
And then you're not canceled.
Yeah, because we got some more stuff to talk about.
So on our subscriber portion, we're going to answer some email.
We're going to talk about what it's like being two shy, introverted guys doing a podcast.
We're going to have a little retrospective, a little walk down memory lane of the last full year of podcasting for the Babylon B. We're going to talk a little bit about what the future holds.
Sounds emotional.
Let's get the Kleenex ready.
It's going to be the Boogaloo, kids.
It gives me the Boogaloos.
Bye, everybody.
Goodbye.
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