On this episode of The Bee Weekly, Kyle and Ethan are joined by Kira Davis! They talk about the Bee fighting the New York Times and winning, the Tolkien Society going full on woke, and also try to figure out what the heck "race-norming" is. As usual, there is glorious hate mail and plenty of weird news. This episode is brought to you by a new Christian fantasy dungeon crawler, Deliverance. Make sure to listen to Kira's podcast, Just Listen To Yourself. Kyle, Ethan, and Kira talk about the week's weird news like how someone mysteriously wrote "Joe Rogan is 5 foot 3 inches tall" in the sky above Los Angeles and how a New York Times columnist who believed Mayor Bloomberg could have given every American a million dollars is now very triggered by American flags. Cows may also now look like Bane but on both ends. They also have another Heroes of the Faith segment this time featuring Aimee Semple McPherson. Kira then asks Kyle and Ethan if they know what "race-norming" is and how the NFL is applying the racist rules that the federal government uses but this time to deny damages and payouts to players suffering from brain injuries. In the subscriber-exclusive lounge, everyone laughs through bonus hate mails, reads some fan mail, go over the week's top subscriber-submitted headlines, and subject Kira to the Next Ten Questions.
Female megachurch pastor kidnapped in traffic to Mexico.
Or was she?
What the heck is Race Norming?
New mask mandate in the works for cows.
All that and more on the B weekly.
Hey, Babylon B fans, are you a huge board gaming nerd like me?
No.
Do you have way too many board games on your shelf already?
But you'd probably back another Kickstarter if the game was that good?
Ethan shaking his head.
But you, the listener, are nodding your head.
You need to check out this new epic Christian fantasy dungeon crawler called Deliverance.
In this game, you are epic angels and your mission is to slay demons and protect the saints.
Ethan said it was just like an action-packed video game, except you have to do taxes first.
In between each time.
Which for me is a positive.
I think that's, I'm like, oh, really?
I want to try this.
I want to do math.
I do.
You get to play co-op with up to four players as epically powerful angels fighting against the demons that hold the town of Falbrook.
So it makes for an epic game night.
What's a dungeon crawler?
That doesn't sound appealing to me when you're like, oh, let's crawl around in dungeons.
Yeah, dungeon crawler.
It's a classic term taken from Dungeons and Dragons.
I don't want to walk in a dungeon with crawling.
Dungeon crawler means you're moving from room to room, clearing them out of monsters.
Oh, you're not crawling.
You're not actually crawling.
It's called a crawl because you move slowly through the dungeon, like trying to get away.
Because you got to do a math in between.
Because all the math.
Okay.
It's an epic game night that ensures everyone's a better friend than they were before.
Aww.
Check it out, Deliverance.
It's live on Kickstarter right now.
It's only live until like July 8th.
So back it now.
And it helps an awesome Christian game get made.
Andrew's a cool guy.
We had him on.
Yeah.
Back it.
Back it.
I think you guys are so forceful about that.
Okay, fine.
You're supposed to say back it, Kira.
Oh, I didn't know, but you guys were just so committed.
You should definitely back it because I've never seen Kyle and Ethan more passionate about a board game.
Well, Kyle.
Oh, yes.
And I'm legit excited about it.
Yeah.
I'm legit.
I believe that.
I believe that.
Hey, we have an interview coming up with a very exciting person you all have heard of named Dave Rubin.
On this Tuesday, it's coming out.
And it was an awesome conversation.
He actually came out in person.
He was here.
We had him on before, but we had to go to his place.
And it was when we were just audio.
So now we had him in the studio.
It was great.
It was fun.
Our second favorite gay guest.
Who's first?
Spencer Claven.
Oh, yeah.
You wearing a shirt?
I'm wearing a shirt today with the heretics.
Yeah.
No, I'm just kidding.
They're neck and neck.
Both favorite gay.
Do we have two gay guy signatures on our door now?
I don't know.
Some could be closeted.
We don't know.
Oh, that's true.
Anyway, the main thing about Dave Rubin is not that he's gay, but that he's a cool commentator on political stuff.
We burned his book, even though it's called Don't Burn This Book.
So we just burned it.
Just to try it.
Just to be contrary.
Yeah.
And if you're a subscriber, you get the whole thing a day early.
So do that.
Nice.
Do it.
Nice.
Hey, we got an update for you guys.
We won against the New York Times.
We sent them a letter because they had called us far-right misinformation a few times, dangerous misinformation disguised as satire.
And they issued a correction last Friday that we are no longer a far-right misinformation site.
We are actually a funny satire.
Congratulations for being funny.
Thank you.
Did they say that?
They didn't say that.
Someone said it.
They said Babylon B is hilarious.
They didn't even add that adjective.
We should have had that in our demand.
Yeah, you should have put that.
You should have made them admit.
They were hilarious satire.
You have to admit that all our writers are handsome.
Yes.
The Times has reread many of the jokes and realized we went over our heads and now we get them and we've been laughing all day.
And we understand that the best guest on the Babylon B is Kira Davis.
That should have been in the brain.
That should have been in the letter.
That should have been in the...
You guys really dropped the ball on that.
We were.
We will send a second letter.
I'm rescinding my applause.
Yes.
I'm rescinding my applause.
But this is huge because now anytime a paper decides that they want to say that the Babylon B is misinformation, because I'll throw that around a lot.
Oh, it's a big deal.
Yeah.
You better think twice.
The New York Times corrected it.
Yeah, it seems like a big deal for them to say, we basically, I mean, they basically are saying we're misinformation.
They put that in there.
Like, why?
Yeah.
It's just take it out.
The idea.
It implies something.
The idea of something.
What did they, what did they call it?
It's satire.
It's far right.
No, it's not under the guise of satire.
Under the guise of satire.
Yeah, they're so freaking scared.
The satire is the little fake mustache.
Yeah, like under the guise.
Oh, they're just trying.
They're making you laugh, but really, what they're trying to do is message to you.
It just is so, it's, it's ridiculous on so many levels.
First of all, the idea that satire is like a cover for anything except humor, but also the fact it's also like everywhere you find humor, there's messaging in it because you're a reflection.
What I'm really trying to convince people to change their minds, I add at the end, it's totally a joke.
Don't take me seriously.
Yeah, their accusation was basically that we wanted to spread fake news.
And so we pretended to be satire so that Facebook wouldn't ban us.
That's essentially what they said.
That is a real far reach.
And it's a big deal because they can the way that this all works is the fact checkers will cite, like the New York Jungle.
The New York Times said this is a misinformation site.
And then the social media guys will check with the fact checkers.
Oh, yep.
New York Times said they're a misinformation site.
And then the New York Times will cite themselves and go back and say, yeah, the Babylon B is a misinformation site like we reported in our last story.
We've been, even though they just made that up.
We finally, we've been muzzled over at Red State since January, really, and it's been a struggle to stay alive.
With the Facebook suppression and all that.
Yeah, same thing.
We've seen the same thing.
Yeah, you guys get it.
I think everybody on the right.
Yep.
Yep.
And so we've had to censor some of the stuff.
Every article we put up gets challenged by the fact checkers.
And we couldn't even write about the fact checkers.
Like for us, that's a story.
That is a story.
And we couldn't even write that story.
But finally, at one of our sister sites, Katie Pavlich at Town Hall was like, I've had enough.
I'm writing about this.
Everyone needs to know the circular nature of this fact-checking stuff that they do.
Yeah.
And people who don't understand what's going on, particularly liberals on social media, will be like, well, this is a fact check.
It's like, you don't even know what the fact checker is not a fact checker.
It's just a big circle.
Well, and then Facebook pays, they will fund the fact checker.
Yes.
To then come back and say, oh, yeah, it's fake.
And then we can ban them.
Yeah.
It's wild.
It's crazy.
So anyway, big thanks to our subscribers for funding that.
Thank you.
You guys have poured out your support to make sure we can fight off more attacks like this.
You guys want to do some weird news?
Yeah, what's weird out there?
This news is weird.
Someone in Los Angeles spent several thousand dollars to spell out Joe Rogan is literally five foot three in the sky.
Is he literally five foot three?
People were saying he's actually like five foot eight.
So it was even strange.
Look at that short.
But I don't have a high chair, maybe.
You gotta, if you're not on the, you gotta check out this video.
I'm sure they'll put it up on the screen.
It's bizarre that someone just took one of those skywriters.
Yeah.
And they used to, you know, they used to write it like by actually flying in circles, and now they just have the one that like types it out behind the plane.
Oh, really?
They got like a cool, yeah.
It's like a like they kind of like, you know, like a firearm.
It's all programmed now with a computer.
They just kind of spell it out.
I've seen those.
Is there any indication that it's one of his friends that did it?
That sounds like a prank.
You know what I mean?
That's why he's not even in LA anymore, right?
Isn't he in Dallas or whatever now?
Who knows?
Maybe his friends in LA and just thought it would be funny.
I don't know.
I didn't hilarious.
Crazy ex-girlfriend.
Yeah.
Maybe, but then I would go a lot worse than he's literally five foot three.
Well, maybe the Skywriter place is like, we can't write that in the sky.
Oh, yeah.
They keep down.
Send him like 30 ideas.
They're like, yeah, we'll go with the five foot three thing.
What's bizarre to me is if you're going to lie about his height, like, why not go real short and just be like, he's four foot.
Yeah, he's three inches tall.
You know, it's just a weird insult.
The more you talk about it, the deeper the mystery gets.
Right.
It's a mystery.
Yes.
It is a real mystery.
Can we call the skywriting company and be like, who put that order in?
This is Kiera Davis from Red State.
We should hire Greg Kating, we had on, is a detective.
He's an investigator.
We should just go in there and be like law and order.
We'd like to see your records.
Yeah.
Bomb bomb.
Was that law and order?
Is it the bum bomb?
Yes.
Okay.
Did you know that that bum bomb is actually an amalgamation of about 85 different sounds?
Really?
Yeah.
Yes, I actually read a full sound.
I read a whole essay on how they developed the bomb bomb.
That actually interests me.
Yeah.
The Tolkien Society hosts token diversity seminar, including topics like Gondor in Transition, a brief introduction to transgender realities in the Lord of the Rings, and destabilizing cis heteroamatonormativity in the works of Tolkien.
This is genuinely hilarious and scary at the same time.
I saw this Rod Dreyer on his little American conservative, his little son.
On his American Conservative on the American Conservative site, which is a great site you should check out.
Huge site.
He reported on this.
It's not five foot three.
And I thought, is he trying to write satire?
Like, it read like someone was trying to write conservative satire, like, oh, Tolkien was woke.
And here's all the Tolkien topics.
But it's real.
It's very sadly real.
And I just tried to click on it.
Okay, let's see.
So here's some of the papers.
The problem of pain portraying physical disability in the fantasy of J.R. Tolkien.
Applying traumatic stress and ecological frameworks to narratives of displacement and resettlement across cultures in Tolkien's Middle-earth.
Pardoning Saruman, the queer, in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.
Okay, I want to hear that argument.
I might sign up for this just to see how do we go about justifying pardoning literally Satan.
I guess because he's Saruman the many colored, right?
I mean, that's the queer.
He represents projecting Indian myths, culture, and history onto Tolkien's works.
Yes, of course, naturally.
Tolkien's dwarf women and the feminine lack.
This is something that my girlfriends and I talk about all the time when we're out for drinks.
Representation of women in the dwarf community.
No.
Oh my God.
Orcs.
Anything with orcs?
Is there anything with orcs?
No, nothing with the orcs.
Fantasy would be a place you'd want to go to escape from all this garbage.
Yeah, exactly.
Did you read this one?
Did you see this paper?
Something mighty queer.
Destabilizing cis hetero ammonator.
That's the one he tried to read.
Okay, that's what you tried to read.
Amatanormativity.
Amatonormativity.
I looked it up and it was like making marriage normal.
Like that's wrong.
Is that what that is?
Yeah, marriage being the tradition or the expectation.
You guys, pray for this country.
Pray for us.
What is going on?
This is an abomination.
And it's also sad.
It's also really sad that you would have to, that you would be so desperate for validation in your modern age that you have to backdate everything, like back woke everything.
So going back and inserting stuff into this.
This needs to become.
You're just coining.
Back woke.
Back woke.
Yeah.
Kira Davis.
Ret woke.
What are they like?
Retcon.
Ret woke.
Yeah, retcon, the woke.
It's just like, no, Tolkien was not.
Tolkien was not worried about your heteronormativity, cisgender.
Nobody gave a ring.
He was ignoring it.
Then read something else.
Do you know what I mean?
Or just write a this isn't a book for you then.
Right.
It's not a book for you.
This isn't a book series for you then.
Just go find.
Find your own thing.
Make your own thing.
Write your own thing.
Right?
I've read one of the commenters on that in Twitter said, you know, Tolkien was, he thought Vatican 2 was too liberal.
He was one of those.
Oh, you know, that's too liberal.
You know, that's the downfall of the Catholic Church and all that.
So he would not have been.
Yeah, I heard that he like, he, I heard he like really had an issue with C.S. Lewis marrying this woman who I think was divorced or something like that.
Oh, really?
Oh, yeah, I heard about that too.
Yeah.
He's very conservative in his values.
Yeah.
As far as I know.
Yeah, of course they were.
Yeah.
And C.S. Lewis kind of was too.
I mean, there's no doubt that either of those two men would be like just completely losing their minds in this modern day and age.
You can't go back.
It's like everyone tries to go back and make Abraham Lincoln gay.
You know, stop backwashing.
No more backwoking.
It's like backwash.
But he's a linguist, right?
Like he had like, he'd write these amazing languages and things like that.
So he could come up with some great genders.
Oh, he could for sure.
And he would name them cool things.
They'd have cool names rather than like, what are some of the ones?
Like aid, cis, gender, normal.
He would come up with really cool names.
Yeah, not like Gondor.
They'd just be called Gondors.
Okay.
You got the next story, Kieran.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I wasn't ready.
Sorry, I was to tell you to be ready.
Be ready at all times.
Yeah, Abza.
I really like having you guys tell me what to do.
It's my favorite thing.
You've got the lobster diver story.
Oh, dudes.
Dudes.
Yeah.
So, real sorry, a lobster diver swallowed up by humpback whale off the coast of Massachusetts and spit out 30 seconds later.
This story is downright biblical.
And when I read this, I actually, when I first read this online, actually was eating dinner with my family.
And like most people, I only look at my phone while I'm eating dinner with my family.
And I was like, you guys listen to this.
And everybody was immediately horrified.
So veteran lobster diver Michael Packard was about 35 feet underwater off the coast of Massachusetts when he was swallowed by a humpback whale.
Packard estimates he was trapped inside the mammal for approximately 30 to 40 seconds, which must seem like an eternity.
He says he had scuba gear on at the time and was breathing while inside the whale.
After the whale spit him out at the surface, his boatmate helped him out of the water and headed to shore where he was taken to a hospital.
He suffered minimal injuries.
I read more of the story and what he said happened was he thought he felt a thump, like a very firm thump, and then everything went dark.
And he actually thought he had been attacked by a shark.
And so he was feeling around and he realized, oh, I'm in like a whale.
I don't know how he figured that out, but he said he could feel the whale trying to swallow.
And he thought, well, this is how I die, which I'm trying to imagine like the abject terror of like you imagining how you die in the intestines of a whale.
Like, how is this going to go?
Right.
Is there acid that burns me up?
Or will I just drown?
Or does the, will the muscles crush me?
Like, just the thought of that.
And then he said the whale surfaced, shook its head a couple times and literally spit him out.
Did it like launch him?
I don't know.
I know what they didn't say.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
His friend in the boat just sees him.
That's what I like to imagine that it came out on the blowhole.
Like, that's the idea.
Well, if he had just gone to Nineveh in the first place, none of this would have happened.
I mean, is it insulting that we all like, it's nice to not die, but like the fact that you got spit out like you're gross?
He's like, oh, that's kind of hurts.
It kind of hurts.
Like, you know, he probably cleans himself and tries to be appetizing.
Well, that's, you know, another sign of God's creation is that there are a lot of scientists, evolutionary scientists who posit that the reason why we've been able to stay on top of the food chain is because humans don't really taste that great to most animals.
So that's another, you know, like God is a great designer.
He doesn't make us like crappy tasting.
We're disgusting.
Evidence of design.
Yep, evidence of design.
Evolutionists.
We are gross.
Hey, a New York Times columnist, Mara Gay, was really disturbed to see pickup trucks and American flags.
On Long Island.
She was driving through Long Island or something.
And she said, I was on Long Island this weekend visiting a really dear friend, and I was really disturbed.
I saw dozens and dozens of pickup trucks.
With explicatives.
Explicatives.
Expletives.
Against Joe Biden on the back of them?
Trump flags?
Oh my gosh.
What?
And in some cases, just trigger warning for our listeners.
Just dozens of American flags.
Dozens?
Which is also just disturbing because essentially the message was clear.
It was, this is my country.
This is not your country.
I own this.
And so until we're ready to have this conversation, this will continue.
People will continue to put up flags until we have this conversation.
Wait until you see what's about to happen this July 4th.
Oh my.
Flags everywhere.
Everywhere.
Everywhere.
Like everywhere you go, even at the grocery store.
It'll be just buckle up.
Listen, Mara Gay, I want to remind everybody, Mara Gay is the opinion editor at New York Times, and she is the one who went on national television with Brian Williams to discuss Mike Bloomberg's budget for his presidential campaign and had the nerve and intelligence to say that of the $500 million that Mike Bloomberg spent on his campaign,
he could have taken that money and given every single American a million dollars.
This is that one.
Remember?
Yeah, I remember that.
This is the opinion editor of the New York Times.
So she's on the concocted that math.
Yes, that was her math.
And then Brian Williams was like, it's really quite amazing.
Yeah.
They did a whole segment on it.
And then the next day when we ran it, because that was a big story.
That one earned me a lot of classes.
Classic.
I happened to be watching it right when it came up.
So I happened to be one of the first people to grab that clip and put it up.
I made that connection later and I was like, holy crap, that's the same girl.
And I'm like, it all makes me happy.
We should be worried for what's going on at the New York Times.
I mean, we started the show with some news about what happened here at the B, but look, just on a more serious note here, this is the paper of record.
It still has a reputation as, no, not the Babylon B. Babylon B is actually satire.
Oh, okay.
It's hilarious.
Hilarious satire.
It's hilarious satire.
And this is the paper that a lot of people still look to as authoritative on the information that they send you.
And this is the caliber of people that are running the paper.
You know, I mean, I think that that is important to know.
I don't like to be insulting that.
You guys know that I don't like to judge people.
We can't say anything about her.
I'm going to say this about Mara Gay.
She's completely incompetent.
And it's embarrassing that she's in that position.
When people criticize her and she's gay.
When people criticized her for her math, she said this was a kind of racism.
And people said, well, making fun of her.
Yeah.
You are welcome to say anything you want about her.
Yeah, right?
It's a kind of racism.
If you guys point out that I'm an abject idiot, that's racism.
She said, Bloomberg spent $500 million on ads.
The U.S. population, $327 million.
He could have given each American $1 million and have had lunch money left over.
And Williams said, it's an incredible way of putting it.
It's an incredible way of putting it.
And she said, it's true.
It's disturbing.
Yeah.
It is incredible.
It's disturbing.
Incredible.
Oh, gosh, Mara.
And now she's triggered by flags.
And this is the opinion editor at the New York Times.
I mean, she has one of the most influential journalistic positions.
And it tells you a lot about the type of news you're getting.
Is this like, honest to goodness, people, liberals, look at this woman and listen to what she says?
Is this the type of person that your authoritative news is coming from?
It's ridiculous.
And we're all supposed to look away and pretend like there's some kind of genius or intelligence coming out of this person's mouth.
Because why?
Because she's a woman and she's black.
She's a moron.
She said it.
What she said.
Yeah.
We didn't say it.
We didn't criticize Mary Gay.
None of this would have been in a show if we hadn't had Kira on screen.
Welcome to our new segment.
She said it.
Kira.
We like to allow it.
She said it.
We like to give voice to women of color.
Yes.
That's what I'm saying.
You guys are good people.
That's going to be a we sit back and when you're at the gates of heaven and St. Peter's, like, what did you guys do?
You'd be like, we gave voice.
Yes, yes.
A black girl.
We gave her voice.
We gave it to you.
We allowed her to be able to.
You would have had no voice and were for us.
We platformed you.
St. Peter will be like, well done, well done, my good and faithful servant.
I don't think it's Peter that says that.
Oh, no.
Okay.
I think it's Peter.
People now want cows to wear masks to fight global warming.
Yeah.
So the University of California recently found that a single cow.
Oh, the University of California?
That's shocking.
Is that where that came from?
Yeah.
Shocking.
They found that a single cow can produce 220 pounds of methane annually.
Man, that's almost that's, I mean, I still weigh more than that, but that's oh, you know, that's a lot of pounds.
And 95% of that comes from the cow's burps.
Those are heavy burps.
Okay.
So this Zelp Limited, Zelp, a UK startup, has developed a mask that they claim can reduce methane emissions by 53%.
And it's a burp catcher.
And it also turns the methane into carbon dioxide.
It can be, it can detect the cows and heat.
That's perfect.
As well as act as a GPS.
So like the cow's lost.
Like, where's where's the mask?
Where's Bessie?
She's in New Jersey.
I don't know.
Why are they adding all these features onto this mask?
But it's only $80 a cow.
That's pretty good for a crazy cyborg mask that makes does all this stuff.
This feels like the Homer car.
Like they're just adding more, like a little horn and a cup holder.
Why does it need all this?
Can you talk to the cow?
Calm down, Bessie.
Bessie, come in.
I feel like now are there going to be like libertarian cows that resist and they're anti-maskers?
And then you're going to have a lot of fun.
It seems like making an animal wear a mask for like four years.
That's what it says they last four years.
That's a lot.
Wearing a mask non-stop.
And being a cow is probably already not that great.
Yeah, and you're going to get killed.
I mean, we're against, we're for eating animals, but not being cruel to them, right?
I mean, that's.
Well, there's also a proposal from the environmental crowd to capture.
I'm sure you guys have probably already covered it here in the Babel MB to capture cow farts.
Right.
So now we're talking about putting a device on both ends of the cow.
Like, who really is the monster here?
Just walking around.
What are we doing?
I imagine the cows are all going to look like Bane on both ends.
Are they now going to moo like that?
Oh my goodness.
And they fart.
Sorry.
That's my Bane fart.
Okay.
You know, if the Bane mask was on your butt, and then you farted.
Okay.
Got it.
I understood it.
Good.
Good.
This is what's one of mine.
You're up.
You're up.
All right, guys.
LA nun to plead guilty to stealing $800,000 from school to pay for a gambling habit.
Not that kind of habit.
Ethan's been waiting all day.
Oh, I get it.
He's been waiting all day to make that joke.
Retired nun Mary Margaret Cruper has admitted to embezzling about $835,000 in donations, tuition, and fee money from St. James Catholic School between 2008 and 2018.
Cruper, who was the school principal for 28 years, controlled accounts at a credit union, including a savings account for the school and one established to pay the living expenses of the nuns employed by the schools.
This is what the U.S. Attorney's Office says.
And in her plea agreement, Cruper acknowledged diverting money to pay for personal expenses that included credit card charges and large gambling expenses incurred at casinos.
She could face up to 40 years in federal prison.
Dang.
Wow.
Wow.
So how big did she win?
Did they suspect like she pulls up and all right, guys?
Continue.
You're supposed to just talk past me.
I'll make little jokes that nobody notices, and then I'll see people comment on them in the comments.
We actually have a, we have in our mailbag, in our mailbag this week.
I got my fan base in there in our mailbag this week in the subscriber portion.
Someone comments on that.
So we're going to talk about that.
Ethan's little jokes.
About the side jokes, yeah.
Side jokes.
Bonus.
Bonus.
Okay.
Okay.
Well, I'll say this.
This isn't actually the first time I've read a story like this.
Gambling among nuns and priests is actually much more common than people think.
And I'm not sure.
I'm not sure that if you take them as a subsection of society, if it's any more common than in any other group, but people forget that nuns and priests, being a nun and being a priest is a vocation.
You're just a person, you know?
And so, and gambling is actually pretty popular among nuns, I think.
So I wasn't totally shocked to hear this.
And I just think it's a funny image that we have in our mind, but they're just people too.
All the nuns standing around the crafts table.
Lucky seven, man.
She'd probably argue the issue wasn't black and white.
That's a none joke.
Google Trends analysis reveals each state.
Thank you, Patrick.
I got it.
I love the delayed.
Patrick laughs.
I think he was laughing because I just blew right past you and ignored him.
No, he's laughing at my joke.
Yeah, right.
It's brilliant.
Yeah, Google Trends analysis has revealed each state's most misspelled word.
And quarantine was a popular.
This is the best.
Really, this is a lame article because most states like received or which the, yeah, well, not the, but I'm sure it's separate.
It's misspelled a lot, but they just excluded it.
Because when you're just typing real fast, I think it's mostly people searching.
I just count on Google to I mistype all the time and it's like, well, who cares?
Google's going to figure it out.
I'm like, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I think they basically are searching how to spell a word and they get it wrong.
But this is funny.
The most common misspelling of quarantine was corn teen.
Quarantine.
Quarantine.
Teenager made of corn.
Quarantine.
So they've been thinking, why are they talking about quarantines?
It sounds like what they would call their prom queen in like Iowa.
Yeah, the quarantine.
Miss quarantine.
2018.
And then she'll have to, when she gets a hit show on NBC, she'll have to apologize for being quarantined.
I have to apologize to everyone.
I was the quarantine in 2018, and that was associated with the KK.
In 1682, band U.S. Olympian blames pork burrito for positive stereo tests.
Sure.
I do that all the time, too.
It can lean to a false positive for Nandrolone.
Nandrolamadaga.
Nandrolone.
Something.
Pig organs.
I guess she ate a giant pig organ burrito.
Yeah.
Give me the pig organ.
From some Mexican food truck.
Though I read she actually did document what she ate around the time to make sure just to be safe.
So she actually had documentation of what she ate.
She has a receipt from the food shop.
And there's a specific kind of food where it has pig organ meat that's in this burrito, which sounds epic, like a pig organ burrito.
Wow.
Apparently, it doesn't sound horrid.
I mean, if it's true that she ate this pig organ burrito, like she submitted all this stuff, did like a lie detector test, had her hair tested, tried to do everything she could, and they still did not accept her explanation, held up the ban.
And so she's out.
Can you imagine if just from eating a pig burrito, you just got your entire life's work is gone?
I've eaten some burritos that almost would be worth it.
Yeah, that is a question of was it worth it?
Because it could have been a good, really good burrito.
It would be terrible if it was worth it.
Yeah, I didn't find that the answer.
That's the key question.
That is the key question.
There's this Mexican place in San Diego that does something called the Huicho Loco burrito.
And it's a giant California burrito.
And then they fry two taquitos and stuff them inside.
Wow.
Yeah.
We got to do that on our food segment we're working on.
Yes.
I don't like burritos.
What?
Why not?
It's just a meal you can hold.
Oh, I know.
It's like a meatley in a rat.
It's a swaddled meal.
Can you just boo me?
It's a swaddled meal.
Jerry dare you.
Like a baby.
I want to like burritos, but I think this is a very California thing that I never picked up when I knew the Midwest.
It's Mexico.
Yeah, but it's California.
But even we have Mexicans in the Midwest, but burritos are not nearly as prevalent.
I've seen them, but here it's like everywhere you go, even if you go to a meeting, there's breakfast burritos.
It just burritos.
I wish that was the case.
Burritos are the greatest.
Do you guys want burritos for lunch?
I could eat a breakfast burrito every meal.
No, no, yes.
We have an order.
Do you people see how they just, they're going to order.
I just said I don't like burritos and now Kyle's going to order burritos.
Can you order burritos to kids or something and get a salad for her?
Yeah, what do you want?
What do you want?
I don't want a salad.
Is there any Mexican food you like or do you just hate all Mexican foods?
No, I wait.
Mexican food.
I like nachos.
Yeah.
I'm not, you know, I have a very bland palate.
I just love that a burrito.
I'm not going to apologize for it, Kyle.
Not going to apologize for it.
It's bundled and swaddled.
I would like it.
I would like to like it.
I just can't.
I don't like it.
It's called El Rodeo Mexican Food, and it's in La Mesa.
If you live in La Mesa, check it out.
Advertisement.
The Huicho Loco.
Get it.
Okay, Huicho Loco.
I want to try that.
My husband loves the dosa.
We'll go try it.
Whose turn is it?
I think it's yours.
It's my turn.
Big story here.
It was a big one.
Golden Retriever gives Woodchuck a ride to shore in Massachusetts lake.
You keep getting Massachusetts stories.
Yes.
A woman visiting a Massachusetts lake with her dog captured video when the canine picked up an unexpected passenger in the water, a hitchhiking woodchuck.
A hitchchuck.
She says she wasn't sure if the woodchuck was in some kind of distress or just lazy.
My money's on lazy because I think the woodchuck just thought it was a log or something.
It was just like, I'll just rest on this log.
And then it looked and it started looking at him.
It's like, it has a face.
Really short.
You can watch the video.
Maybe the woodchuck is like me.
Like, I'll do anything for a party story, you know?
I'm a woodchuck and the friends dared him.
He dared to go get on a dog's back.
There's a dog.
It's going to bite me.
Like, now they're totally out of control in the water.
They can't do hardly anything.
You just get on his back.
He's helpless.
Yeah.
The story, the news guy, if you watch it, there's like a news report.
Like a news reporter actually went out to talk to this woman about the dog writing, giving the woodchuck a ride.
And then there's like, I guess there's a moment where they touched noses and they called it the they gave each other a kiss.
Like they really embellished it and added it like you know, there's some real bonding going on.
It was a real cute local news story kind of thing.
I wonder how that news reporter feels about the story.
Were they excited or were they like this is this time I read?
I got to get to the big time.
I'm sick of these local stories.
I went to school for six years.
Roundhog Day story.
This is a taxatani film.
All right, our final weird news story is that a Norwegian man did a dead hang for 16 still 16 minutes to break a world record.
A dead hang.
I read this story wrong.
Yeah, me too.
At first I was skimming and I thought I read Norwegian man hangs 16 people dead.
Oh, I didn't realize that.
That's kind of what I was.
I don't think they give out world records.
I thought that it was about a guy who'd hung himself and then he beat the record for how long somebody had been hanging until even their body was found.
That was my second interpretation.
What do you guys think they give out Guinness Records?
But what's a dead hang?
That just means relax.
Yeah.
That seems like you could do that longer than 16 minutes.
No, you try it.
It's hard.
It's very hard.
Yeah.
I know I couldn't do it.
My arms are.
You know, they do that in like Vegas and they're relaxing.
They'll give you money if you can hang on the bar for two minutes.
Oh, really?
Like when you're walking down the street, most people can't do it.
No, I've never done it.
What if you're a little light person?
Like, you know, well, this guy got malice.
This guy has cerebral palsy and he's in a wheelchair.
So he must just be bulking up his arms all the time.
He probably doesn't have a lot of leg mass.
Yeah, he said he worked out a lot.
The article said he worked out a lot.
And dead hang was part of his workout routine.
Dead hang.
He's trained for 10 hours a week on the dead hang to do this.
I accept that this guy is a real record holder.
Well, yeah, you don't want to disparage the cerebral palsy community.
The dead hang is really hard to do.
So the wheelchair community.
Yeah.
That would seem like if I was going to break a physical world record, the one where I don't have to do anything, just hang on.
It just seems like the alive hang would be harder.
We're going to get a bar in here and we're going to see how long Ethan's.
I'm not saying hang.
Yeah, I'm sure I can't.
I'm heavy.
My arms are chicken arms.
No, I know.
Sounds less impressive than any other kind of hang.
It's just dead.
That's all I'm saying.
What are the other kinds of hang?
Well, I don't know.
Is there an alive hang or like a lively hang or just a tense hang or you know trying to get up their hang?
I don't know.
I don't know these hangs.
I'm not a hang guy.
We should move on.
We have established it.
We're just hanging out.
He's not a hang guy.
All right.
I'm not a hang guy.
Let's do some heroes of the faith.
And now it's time for this week's Heroes of the Faith.
But first, Ethan's going to cough.
And we want to remind you to become a Babylon Bee subscriber so Ethan can afford cough medicine.
Yeah.
And support us in our fight against censorship and attacks from places like the New York Times and stuff.
And you get some cool stuff for jumping into the Babylon Bee community.
Yeah, not to mention our bonus podcast.
You get bonus podcasts, free.
You get a book discount in the store, free book right now.
Just we got a cool comment section where everybody fights to be the first commenter.
Nice.
Like Reddit.
It's like Reddit, except we actually encourage it and they do it ironically and they do it and they try to act like they're first, but then actually miss it.
So then you have like 10 people that say first on every article.
This would not be a selling point for me.
It's great.
Some people like it.
Some people like it.
It's like a game.
It's an inside joke.
Yes.
And you are not on the inside of the joke unless you subscribe.
There's a lot of inside jokes in the B community.
You got to get in there.
It's a fun community.
On the inside.
Comments, headline forum, premium articles.
We got bloopers, extended video, and you get the interview show a day early.
So lots of cool stuff.
Sign up.
Wakele.
Babylonbee.com/slash plans.
Talking about how great the subscription is.
Ethan's like, meh.
I have to tell you.
It's only that.
Lots of people saying first a bunch in the comments.
It's funny.
It's before you guys go.
I like that it's like satire of comment sections.
Anyway, before you go on, Kyle, I have to tell you that one of my subscribers to my subscription community, which is at Dave Rubin's website, davisnation.locals.com.
That's where you can find me.
I mentioned I was going to do the B today, and this person, I'm not sure if it's a man or a woman, sorry, said, Am I a nerd because I subscribe to the BB podcast only to listen to their Lord of the Rings podcast?
They said they don't listen to anything.
They don't listen to the regular podcast to see anything else.
Oh, which by the way, we're on a little hiatus.
It's coming back soon.
I take that personally because I'm not involved in that at all.
Well, me too.
They weren't even saying like they were turning into me when this is a person in my community.
That's true.
I just brutal man.
That's for the Lord of the Rings podcast.
Hey, Lord of the Rings podcast.
Oh, yeah.
Lord of the Rings podcast.
If you subscribe to the Babylon B, we have a Lord of the Rings podcast.
We're doing a read-through.
It's fun.
We're on two towers.
So we have this crazy story for you on Heroes of the Faith today of Amy Simple McPherson.
She was the founder of the Four Square Gospel Movement, which is really popular out here in LA.
Yeah, I only heard about this for the first time reading the story.
Really?
Four square churches?
My dad went to a four square church.
It was real popular out here, maybe West Coast.
I don't know that it's spread.
I mean, it is, you know, it is everywhere, but it's, I think it was concentrated around here because this is where she established her church.
She was kind of the Benny Hen of her day.
She drove around doing tent meetings.
Early on, her and her husband sold her their house and lived out of something they called the gospel car.
It's like had the gospel on the side, and they would drive her car and it was a car.
Okay.
And then her husband decided, you know what, I don't want to live out of a car anymore and divorced her.
And she remarried and then immediately fractured her skull and visited Europe.
And then she was reading the newspaper and she saw that her husband was doing a cabaret show with a bunch of half-naked women.
A bunch of fluzies.
And he was labeling himself as Amy's Man.
Amy's Man.
Hey, come see the Amy's Man show.
Oh.
And how did she fracture her skull?
I don't know.
It just is like she had an accident and fell or something.
A lot happens in this story.
Keep tracking up.
So she started driving around in a convertible preaching out of a bullhorn out of the back of the car after they got divorced.
So she drives in bullhorns at the same time.
I think she would drive Park and sit in the trunk or something.
I was thinking like Blues Brothers.
No, no, no, no.
So finally, she moves to Los Angeles, raises enough money to build a giant megachurch, the Angelous Temple.
And she performs faith healings, speaking in tongues.
And a lot of the stuff you think about mega churches today, like they do a big play or they have like all this crazy sermon illustrations.
That all started with Amy Simple McPherson.
She invented that?
Well, pretty much like doing a big show as part of the deal.
She would get Hollywood actors to come in and costume and do all kinds of performances.
Okay.
One time her plane crashed in front of her whole congregation.
Was that on purpose or on accident?
The plane?
Crashing.
That was an accident.
Okay.
So then the next Sunday she does like the plane crashes of your life and she tells this whole thing.
I felt like she was preaching and the plane crashed behind her and she just turned it into an illustration right there.
Time she got a traffic ticket, and then the next Sunday she dressed up as a police officer for the sermon and gave this whole sermon about breaking God's law and all this stuff.
And now she didn't deserve to get a traffic ticket.
She gave about 22 sermons a week into a packed house of 5,000 attendees in LA.
This was huge.
This is 1920, 1910s, 1920s.
That's why women shouldn't be preachers.
They need to quiet down a little bit.
Exactly.
Look what happens.
This is what happens.
Hey, shock too much.
She said it.
You'll have to go back.
You need to be a B subscriber to hear my opinion.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, you exactly.
I think that was one of my first appearances.
It was amazing.
I'm now the Alec Baldwin of the Baba on B podcast, Tom Hanks.
So this is where the story gets weird.
Oh, this is where it gets weird.
At the height of her fame on May 18th, 1926, she went for a swim at Venice Beach and completely disappeared.
She was supposed to give a sermon that day for her mom.
So her mom filled in for her and said, well, she's with Jesus now.
And so it sparked all these rumors that she had died and everyone freaked out.
And this was like one of the first big media frenzies over a celebrity mourning for days.
The newspapers really fueled the whole thing.
It was headlines all over the country.
So suddenly she was real popular in LA and all of a sudden she became like this national, like the most well-known woman in the country in the 1920s.
And we've never heard of her.
I've never heard of her.
That's bizarre.
That's a wow.
That is crazy.
So there were rumors of a conspiracy that she had planned this whole thing.
Randos from all over the country were calling in McPherson's sightings and the detectives were saying that one day they got 16 different sightings of her all over the country.
Letters were pouring in asking for ransom, but they were all fake.
Claiming to have kidnapped her.
Yeah.
And so no one could find her for a whole month.
Wow.
She's gone.
Until this is where it gets crazy.
Okay, this is where it gets crazy.
A month later, she staggered across the Mexican desert and approached a Mexican couple and collapsed in front of them.
So she appeared across the Arizona border in Sonora, Mexico, and she claimed four people had held her hostage in a shack in the Mexican desert.
So she says while she was at the beach, someone came up in a car and said, can you pray for my sick child?
She went to their car, they chloroformed her, threw her in the back, and took her to Mexico.
Okay.
She said she cut her cords with a tin can lid and then just walked outside and saw a mountain and said, That's north and followed it until she like 20 miles across the Mexican desert until she got there.
Eating scorpions and snakes on the survived cactuses.
On the train ride back to LA, a man came up and said, Hey, I just saw you in Arizona last week.
Many others came forward claiming to have seen her all over as well.
And when she arrived back in Los Angeles, 50,000 people were there to greet her at the station.
That's insane to me.
Isn't it crazy?
Is this real?
So grand juries were called in to investigate her disappearance.
People were saying there's no way she could have walked across the desert.
They said they found tire tracks that had just dropped her off right there.
They said that her shoes were fine and her clothes were fine and she wasn't in any state of disrepair like she had walked across the desert.
They couldn't find the shack she was talking about.
And this is where the story gets good.
Oh, is this okay?
This is where it gets crazy.
Investigators eventually found out that she was having, probably having an affair with her radio operator, Kenneth Ormiston.
Oh, Kenneth Ormiston.
And right around the time that she disappeared, he had rented a house up in Monterey.
And multiple witnesses said that they had seen her move into the house shortly after her disappearance.
And then the prosecution were trying, they were trying to convict her of doing conspiracy and hoaxes and all this stuff.
And the prosecution couldn't get the witnesses to agree.
They kept losing evidence.
And Ormiston claimed, then had his defense.
No, I was having an affair with a different woman, not her.
And the prosecution found slips of paper that she had written on at the cottage during this time, but they were mysteriously lost.
And the prosecutor found this out in the courtroom and he was so mad he picked up a bar stool and he threw it across the courtroom.
And she was never convicted of any wrongdoing.
Wow.
And this is where it really gets good.
Oh, this is where it gets interesting.
The kidnappers continued to contact them through a blind attorney.
So they were talking to a blind attorney.
Literally, the guy can't see.
The guy can't see.
Right.
So it's Daredevil.
Yeah.
It's Daredevil.
And he's blind, so he can't rap them out to anybody.
That's why they contacted him.
And the attorney announced he had conclusive evidence that the kidnappers were real and he was going to reveal it.
And then he died in a car accident.
Oh, that's bad luck.
Why is he driving?
I assume he was in the passenger seat.
Several ransom notes were sent to the temple.
Some were fraudulent, others, it wasn't proven if they were genuine.
And we know, we just to this day have no idea what happened.
Do you say genuine?
Did you say genuine?
Genuine?
Just carry them.
Genuine.
Wow, so we never know what happened.
That's the same movie right there.
I actually went online while you were recounting that, and I looked up the Angelus Temple because I was like, is that still in LA?
And it still is LA.
It still is a four-square church.
I don't know if the building itself is historical.
I mean, obviously, it has a very LA church, mega church look to it now.
But yeah, it was like pretty, it looks pretty evangelical.
She has a mansion in, she had a mansion in Lake Elsinore that I drive by every day.
It's a big castle up on the mountain.
Yeah.
So, how did you find this story?
I heard about it years ago.
And when he said we're doing Heroes of the Faith, I was like, this is the perfect one.
So she did eventually die of a drug overdose in like 1944, if I remember right.
But the Angelus Temple is still there.
It's on Glendale Boulevard.
But it's hard to overstate how popular she was at the time.
She was like the most well-known celebrity woman in the country, like Hollywood star status.
Yeah.
And just disappeared.
It's so crazy.
Yeah.
It would be like Joel Osteen disappearing.
Yeah.
And then four weeks later comes stumbling out of the Mexican desert.
Like that's how crazy this story is.
That is bizarre.
And it's weird to think too, like just on another note, like the perception of that time would be that like women were so oppressed.
Right.
Yeah.
But to have like there's a super megastar pastor woman that of this caliber at that time.
Yeah.
That she was doing.
It doesn't line up exactly.
I'm not saying that they weren't oppressed in some ways, but like that's history is always more complicated.
Well, the 1920s, it was like jazz and women were getting popular.
No, the women's movement really started in the 20s.
I mean, if you think about it in the form that we a lot of people, we always look at history as if it's sanitized, but it's not.
I mean, you look at the look at the bohemian movement and some of our greatest poets and philosophers were of a, were in the in the 1700s, in the 1800s, forming communes and saying, you know, well, we don't, we shouldn't just be limited to marriage.
We should be sexually free and we should live together and as one.
And I mean, the idea that that somehow everybody was just perfect and buttoned up.
And I mean, if even if you look into the history of black people in this country, I don't know if you ever had the opportunity to see 12 years a slave.
It's a really good movie.
It's tough to watch.
Like, I can only watch it once, but it's like Passion of the Christ.
Yeah, yes.
Great movie.
Can only watch it once.
Same, but it's an artistic achievement, it really is.
It's an excellent film all the way around.
But it's based on a true story, kind of like this story that you just read, Kyle, that got lost in the annals of time.
This wasn't a story that anyone had told, but it was a kind of a little pamphlet that was available on Amazon.
And then the writer, John, John Lee Hancock, I think that's who wrote it, picked up this book and was like, oh, but anyways, if you read it, it tells a very Story of another experience that black Americans were having at the time in some places in the north, which was that there were entire towns where black people just lived with white people as part of the society where they were.
The gentleman in this case was a violinist and he was a homeowner.
And there were pockets of life in America at that time where black people and white people did live together and did do business together.
There was no such thing as segregation.
They really blended their lives and it wasn't a big deal.
Now, obviously, it was a big deal in other places because this is a story about a man who was kidnapped back into slavery.
And it wasn't like that everywhere, obviously.
But I remember reading, I went to read the actual story, and I remember saying to a friend of mine, you know, this shows us that everything is more complicated than we think.
We have the sanitized view of history at this point in our lives.
We look back and we think it's perfect.
But it's complicated.
There's some of this and a lot of that.
And, you know, the relationships between, even when we look back in the Bible, the relationships between men and women, there are a lot of people who will tell you, like, oh, women were oppressed and they were just things.
And the Bible is an anti-woman tone.
But again, the relationships and leadership positions and everything, it was complicated.
It was way more nuanced than we give history credit for.
Seems like every generation thinks they're act three of the story of the world.
That's a good.
So everything, you know, we've learned we've got the good guys and the bad guys and they turn on this simple, you know, good guy versus bad guy thing.
And they're the redemption at the end that's going to storm the castle.
Everyone thinks they're on the right side of history.
Yeah.
I appreciate you being able to take an insane story like that and turn it into a teaching moment.
That's literally my job.
I do this every day.
My podcast is just listen to yourself with Kira Davis and you can find it wherever you listen to your podcast.
We should try to come up with the most random topic and see if she could turn it into anything.
I can turn at no, you guys, I have 12 years of media training.
I can turn anything into anything.
That's why I never work when I when I go on shows like Fox, people will be like, I don't know how my husband especially is very nervous in front of people.
He's like, I don't know how you do it.
Like, what are you talking about tonight?
Well, these are the subjects they gave us, but they're never the subjects that when the cameras turn on, that, oh, everything changes.
So I never even, okay, this is maybe what we're talking about, but we'll see.
He'll be like, does that make you sick to your stomach?
Like, don't you get afraid?
I'm like, no, because I don't need to know what I'm talking about to sound like I know what I'm talking about.
I know how to do that.
So that's a good skill to do.
So if you ever want to test me sometime.
Hey, Kira, what the heck is race norming?
Can you explain that to me like I'm a white five-year-old?
I'm so glad you asked, Kyle.
Race norming.
I don't know.
Race norming is something that I just found out about.
I read an AP story.
I'm reading your red state piece right now.
Okay, don't read it.
Tell me, okay.
Tell me if I just by the term race norming, if you had to guess what that means, if you had to apply something.
Trying to run faster than Norm McDonald's.
Okay.
Okay.
Race norming.
So maybe like normalizing something for race.
Okay.
Like normalizing equity, race, stuff, equality.
And you say the NFL is admitting to it.
So what could the NFL do?
Like, it's like they're normalizing what?
I don't know.
Standards of inclusion or something.
I feel like whenever normalize is used, that means what they're saying is this is a reality I really don't like.
We need to normalize.
They want to denormalize a thing that's just a thing that as if somebody insidiously made it happen.
We can't normalize that.
Like we talked about earlier, the denormalizing of the family, I think.
Yeah.
Or no, marriage.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So what is race norming?
Were we close?
Is anything like a matter of normativity or is that what's called?
No.
Race norming is a practice where the NFL, you may recall, has established this billion-dollar fund for concussions where they denied the concussion.
So you could, as a player who has been injured, you can apply for this fund.
Well, black players are saying they're being denied at a greater rate than white players for compensation from this fund.
And the NFL, as their defense, says we use a practice called race norming, which is meant to, you're not going to believe this.
It initiates the measures the cognitive abilities of black players at a lower level than white players so that because they're saying the cognitive abilities of black people are less than white people.
And so when you're measuring how those cognitive abilities have been damaged, you start them out on a lower cognitive level than the white people.
So basically, black people are dumber than white people.
And so it's harder to prove that they have brain injuries.
That is race norming.
You're doing this in the name of trying to compensate for.
Yeah.
So here's what, so here's, here's what happened.
The NFL is saying this is a legitimate policy that they're using this policy to deny, right?
They're saying this is a legitimate policy.
No, this is why this is a crazy story.
The AP dropped this story a couple of weeks ago, just real quietly.
It was, I was like, what?
It was, it said the NFL agrees to stop using race norming.
I'm like, why isn't the left all over this?
This sounds crazy.
This sounds like made for Black Lives Matter.
So I do my research.
Well, it turns out that race, the reason why the NFL is using this as a defense and the reason why this hasn't gained traction is that race norming is actually an official government policy established by the Carter administration.
And it was meant to help, quote, even the playing field for black people to get more jobs in government because black people couldn't test into the jobs in government.
And so what the Carter administration said is, well, maybe it's because black people aren't as smart.
So what we have to do is we have to measure them by different standards.
So we have to understand when we grade their tests that they're taking these tests, they don't have the same abilities as white people.
So we have to lower the bar in grading.
They're starting out behind the eight ball in intelligence.
And so in order to even the playing field and even the scores, right?
This is an official government policy that we still use today.
Sorry to bang on the table.
I know that's a good idea.
While the NFL is having like Black Lives Matter jets fly over and Black Lives Matter blimps, they're doing that.
Yeah.
That's not just them though.
So you're saying like this is like a thing that's hard.
No, as far as I know, it's still implemented in government testing standards, as far as I know, in federal government testing standards.
So what the NFL did the KKK come up with this because this sounds liberal tolerance.
No, are you some kind of racist?
No, this is so the NFL used this and that was their justification, right?
That was their defense at trial because there's two players that are suing them and that was their defense.
They're like, this is a government policy and we're just using this same thing.
So yeah, and I couldn't understand why.
And I could only find like a couple of articles on race norming.
And it was by liberal sports writers, but it was really quiet.
It was really quiet.
No one has been really talking about this, but this is like a huge deal.
Basically, the NFL is saying that black players are too mentally retarded to have brain injuries.
That's the NFL's argument.
Like they're already as dumb as a guy with a brain injury when they start the football.
That's right.
They're like, no, you're already that dumb before you come in.
I got a brain injury.
No, that's just how you do it.
No, we can't prove it.
Basically, I did a whole, I did an episode on it.
If you want to go look it up on my podcast, just listen to yourself.
But I was so like blown away that this wasn't a huge like to me, it sounds like tailor-made for the woke crowd, right?
Like, this is hello, this is actual racism.
There's actual racism and nobody's and everyone's just and that's what the two liberal articles I read said about it.
Well, this, these are they pulled the good intention stuff, and I'm like, how can you even be okay with that?
Like, this feels like something that 100% of people are bored with this except the five KKK guys that are left.
You could all like link arms and be like, yes, this is bad, right?
Yes.
But I also love that it's that unintended consequences thing.
Like they start with a problem, you know, that like the black community is not testing well.
So then they lower the standards for the test and it all kind of comes back around.
Yeah.
And here we are.
Not why aren't black people meeting the educational standards and how do we change that?
They're doing that across the country now with AP courses, right?
We're seeing that New York's having this big fight.
Florida already had the fight and I believe lost some years ago with their at least K through 12 math courses where they've lowered the bars for black students or removed AP courses because black students get into those courses less.
And it's like, how is this equity?
How is this justice?
I know how it's equity.
How is it equality?
Which are two different things.
How is this justice?
It's like instead of addressing the problem, which is black people aren't achieving to these standards that other kids are, instead of addressing that problem, they're like, oh, well, we just have to make other kids dumber.
And then it's so ridiculous.
It's like, I don't, sometimes I'm just like, is this real life?
Like, sometimes I have to call my father-in-law who's like, why is this person I know?
And he's the reason why I'm conservative.
And sometimes I just have to call him and be like, am I crazy?
Like, just tell me, am I crazy?
Do I need to stop doing this?
Am I in the wrong business?
Do I have this whole thing wrong?
Because I look around me some days and I just feel like I'm the last sane person left.
Right.
I don't know.
This blew my mind.
And I have been screaming bloody murder about it for about two weeks.
I just cannot believe that this is not a good story.
That's wild.
I don't even know what to make of it.
Yeah, that's, and it's not, it has nothing when you guys guessed what race normal is.
Yeah, I don't know anything.
You're like, well, it's got to be some kind of equity thing or equality or bringing, you know, you, it sounds.
Yeah, I was my honest guess was something like normalizing black people being more prone to play football or something or an NBA or something, a basketball.
It's that black people aren't smart enough to be brain injured.
That's race norming.
And it's an official policy of the NFL.
And the other thing is, why wouldn't the left jump on this?
Don't they hate the NFL?
Don't they hate Roger Goodell?
Is that how brain damage works?
Like if you're already dumb, then you can just damage your brain up and like you don't get dumber.
It feels like it would still take it feels like it would still take you.
I would love to see the tests that they would do before you joined the NFL.
Okay, we need to get a dumb rating out of you to make sure that when you damage your brain a bunch, we'll find out if you're any dumber.
Actual medical professionals were using those standards.
I want to know what they're doing.
Yeah.
These men had to be examined by actual medical professionals and given this race norming diagnosis.
Like, yeah, they should be suing the pants off the NFL.
But shame on the mainstream media for leaving this alone because it proves the futility of liberal policy when it comes to race, which is it's always, I say this all the time.
It's always trying to correct a lie with another lie.
And you can't fix a lie with another lie.
The lie that black people are dumber than white people cannot be fixed with the lie that, with a lie that you have to lower the bar for black people.
Or it can't be fixed by the lie that black people are smarter than white people.
You know, you can't fix a lie with a lie.
And right now in mainstream America, there's a whole group of people who are asking us to repair the lies that we've been living with with just more lies.
And no wonder everyone's so confused.
So I said, they're always trying to find out.
I was still trying to work it out in his brain.
So race norming is bad.
It's bad.
Okay.
Got it.
All right.
Yes.
Okay.
I got it.
Race norming bad.
Yes.
I've got it bad.
I have brain damage.
Here we go.
Hate mail.
Yay, hate mail.
Great.
This is fun.
So we sent our demand letter to the New York Times, and we informed our newsletter subscribers, hey, we're going to be sending this letter to the Times.
Please support us.
Blah, blah, blah.
And this guy replied.
Okay.
And he said, holy hacksaw.
You've actually sent a threatening letter to a news outlet because they stated how they perceived you.
I will say that you've managed to fall into the same douche baggery that I actually visit your site to avoid.
What the guys?
Short syndrome getting worse?
Short dock syndrome.
He didn't say that.
Donk.
Donk.
Donkey.
Yeah.
Thanks for watching.
I'll answer the question.
Answer the question.
Are you going to answer the question?
Answer it.
I do think that if you look at it as like purely that we're just like that we're just like litigious and we just want to attack the New York Times for insulting our pride.
And I think some people think that's what we're doing.
That's the concern.
I think people do need to understand that like what we talked about before, they cite themselves circular citations where they use this when they say authoritatively that we are, you know, we are, what is it, far-right misinformation under the guise of satire?
That becomes a citation that is used in a fact check that is used to shut us down on Facebook.
So that's why anytime that's said about us, we have to come after it.
Let me read.
So Jezebel, the feminist website, Jezebel.
Related to the anti-fan of Jezebel, actually.
They wrote an article about us a couple of years ago, and they said, Snopes is fighting with a right-wing humor site with satire that's so unfunny it reads like fake news.
So that's a headline we obviously disagree with.
But we didn't sue Jezebel because who cares?
Let the feminists say we're unfunny.
That's kind of a compliment coming from a feminist.
But agreed.
When you have a big newspaper like the New York Times, like the most popular newspaper in the world.
The paper of record.
The paper of record?
Yes.
Say that you are a far-right misinformation site that is tricking Facebook by saying you're satire.
That is a problem.
That's bigger than just a perception thing.
It's much bigger because then it flags your site.
People don't understand how much you depend on Facebook and Twitter, just those two, to get, I mean, not you, but like all of us in this industry, just to get our, it's about reach, right?
That's why people, when conservatives complain about losing followers on Twitter, it's not, I mean, I'm sure some people are just big-headed about it, but it's not about the follower count and you feeling special.
That's your reach.
The amount of followers you have represents your reach.
So what Twitter is doing when they when they shave off your followers is they're limiting your reach.
And it's the same way with what New York Times was doing, getting Facebook to flag it as a problem.
You get the red flag.
Facebook's fact checkers, which are just paid by Facebook, now have this red flag on the satire site.
So now every article you put up gets fact-checked as problematic and now gets booted off Facebook.
There goes your reach.
But also, I don't know if this email was real because there's a bunch of people out there who are just concerned trolls who just will, they're of the opposite ideology, but they'll show up on your site and they'll be like, you know, I'm a committed conservative, but I think it, but you're not.
You just think I'll listen to you if you know, if I think you're on my side.
But there is a whole crop of, I think on the right, a whole crop of elitist conservatives that are popping up right now to tell us that we shouldn't be pushing back at it at anything, that we're just, you're just like the left.
Or I like to make the left live by their own cancel culture rules.
I hate cancel culture.
It should be gone, but it's not going to go until we make them follow their own rules.
So if someone needs to get canceled over there, that's not my problem.
Yeah, don't stand up for anything.
Don't fight back against anything.
They're private companies.
They do what they want.
That's how we got here.
That's how we get people.
People are starting to complain about critical race theory and people pushing back.
Conservatives complaining about us pushing back.
That's very anti-conservative.
Anti-free speech is the one I heard over there.
Oh, guess what?
We can ban Marxism in our schools if we want to.
That makes sense.
Like, this is America.
But it's the whole idea that welcome to she said it, the new section here on Second Hand Babylon B.
But that this is.
We need to do an overlay of me and Ethan going like this.
And it's just, she said it.
It just ticks me off when I hear stuff like that.
I'm like, this is how we got to where we are, where we have no say in the culture and no control over the culture.
Because every time somebody stepped up, there would be some high-minded conservative out there who would be like, this really isn't our battle.
We're not these people.
Everyone should have free expression.
Well, if someone else's free expression is actually breaking down the very fabric of the most successful society in America, that's a problem.
Fight back, people.
We don't have all the time in the world.
And you can free express against it, right?
Yeah, right.
It's like controlling speech and say whatever you want.
Don't say anything.
Anyway, sorry, that guy's a hater at the end of the day.
You know what?
I know I'm going to run out of time here.
Short donkey.
Short syndrome.
That's the sardines.
So is the idea.
And he says getting worse.
So that means that the idea that like you don't like little man syndrome?
Donkey.
It's too short, so you have to send a legal letter to the New York Times.
Yeah.
Like, what's the connection?
Oh, big guy.
I don't get the, like, I've never understood that.
Well, that's the way to prove that you have a vacation.
Donkey.
You send a strongly worded letter.
I'm going to send a letter to the New York Times and everyone will know.
Right.
Sign short.
You know, you might still have, I don't know.
I don't get any details.
But we will reveal more details in the subscriber portion, which we're going into now.
So we're going to do in the subscriber portion today, we're going to talk more New York Times drama, subscriber headlines of the week.
Two bonus hate mails today, and we have a letter from the mailbox.
This really is a mega episode.
Mega episode.
See you there.
Let's do it.
Cure Extravaganza coming up next for Babylon Bee subscribers.
Did my daughter tell me the other day?
Um, I texted her and I ended the sentence with a period, and then she was like, That's aggressive, mom.
Aggressive?
Yes, she's like, Why are you being so aggressive?
And I'm like, What are you talking about?
Like, I just said, Come, can you come put your dishes away, please?
It's like you ended it with a period.
You use punctuation.
My husband hates the office, he cannot watch any show where anyone is in any kind of uncomfortable.
It is hard to watch some of those super awkward ones.
Oh, uh, Scott's Talks.
Oh, can't watch the talk.
Wondering what they'll say next?
The rest of this podcast is in our super exclusive premium subscriber lounge.
Go to BabylonB.com/slash plans for full-length ad-free podcasts.
Kyle and Ethan would like to thank Seth Dylan for paying the bills, Adam Ford for creating their job, the other writers for tirelessly pitching headlines, the subscribers, and you, the listener.