THE BEE WEEKLY: Pokémon Fraud, Tacos in Space, and Is This Racist?
Managing Editor of The Babylon Bee Joel Berry is in town for this Bee Weekly to talk with Kyle and Ethan about Pokémon fraud possibly resulting in 20 years in prison, how tacos in space are a terrible idea, and how to tell if stick figures, starfish, and traffic lights are racist. Learn how to be woke with The Babylon Bee Guide to Wokeness. Kyle, Ethan, and Joel read YouTube comments, answer a subscriber dare, and talk about The Babylon Bee's banger and bomb articles of the week. Then they talk about the week's weird news like cocaine hippos now being considered people, a teacher of the year punching a student, and bats are now winning awards that rightfully belong to birds.Adam Yenser joins the guys to play a new game: Is It Racist? Of course, they read the latest of The Bee's everflowing hate mail. In the subscriber lounge, they read mail from a subscriber who almost lost her job because of The Babylon Bee, a fan who is beginning to tell Kyle and Ethan's voices apart, and a man with a vulgar email address telling The Babylon Bee how to be Christians. The guys dig into whether more things are racist and then Joel Berry answers The Next Ten Questions.
First, New Zealand Sportswoman of the Year was a male, and now their bird of the year is actually a bat.
QAnon supporters have gathered in Dallas to await the return of the late JFK Jr.
They've been wrong so many times, maybe this time they'll be right.
NASA astronauts make the best space tacos ever to get the worst diarrhea ever.
Florida's Teacher of the Year arrested for punching a student, but incredibly she did it over Zoom.
A court has ruled that Pablo Escobar's hippos are people.
Hungry, hungry people.
And is everything racist?
We're going to do a deep dive on the internet to see if there's anything that's not racist, and then we're going to make it racist.
All this and more on the Bee Weekly.
Welcome everyone to the Bee Weekly today.
Ethan and I, your usual hosts, are joined by Joel Berry, who's the managing editor of the Babylon Bee, usually located somewhere in the Midwest.
The deep, yeah, the deep dark forests, mysterious forests of the Midwest.
I have emerged into the sunlight of California to be with you guys.
Well, welcome, Joel.
It's nice to have you.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you.
It's pleasant.
Great to be here.
Joel is joining us for a special reason because our Babylon Bee Guide to Wokeness books are out, and all of us worked really hard on this along with Gavin, who will probably make a comment about Star Wars in the background at some point if we get a fact wrong.
He's definitely sighing or groaning right now.
Let's get as many Star Wars facts wrong as possible during this.
We did a live stream yesterday and Gavin was arguing with people about Dune in the comments, which was fun.
We're going to talk about this book a little bit more later and we're going to see if things are racist and that'll be a lot of fun.
But you can get this book on Amazon now, so go check it out.
Please do.
Quick note if you're wondering who Gavin is.
If you watch our fictional character support group animated sketch we did, right at the end, Gavin walks in.
He makes his appearance as a cartoon character and cracks the video.
Just as he did as we were writing it.
And he played himself.
Gavin too did a lot of great work on the book.
He did.
He did some incredible illustration work.
So he's very talented.
A lot of the funny illustrations we would try to praise Ethan for.
He's like, eh, actually, I didn't do those.
I said, I told Gavin to do that.
Right.
That's delegated.
That's how he takes credit.
I delegated it.
Leadership.
Very, really good leadership there.
Hey, we got some comments on our GK Chesterton Weekly special last week.
GK Chesterton.
That's a very special episode.
Which was so much fun.
If you haven't watched it, go back and watch it.
It was one of the best episodes.
Even if you don't know who Chesterton is, just get on board.
You'll get on board with Chesterton.
Sardis the Yard Dog1227 says, these guys remind me of my Rhett and Link days.
But instead of losing their faith, they defend it.
So better.
Yeah.
So it's like Retin Retin Link.
Depending on your opinion of that.
We're like Retin Link, except we're not going to hell.
Well, hopefully.
Well, I feel if you're going to be Retin Link, you guys got to be doing a lot more eating weird food.
Yeah, you got to eat like we dabbled with a dead rat inside of it, microwave marshmallows or something.
I don't know.
You got to like deep fry like a McRib.
Is that what they do?
Yeah, stuff like that.
Maybe after I lose this weight, just go all out.
Yeah.
We try to do eating segments, and he's like, I can't have any of them.
We could do a really overly healthy eating.
We could have.
Let's try some Barack Health Foods.
Yeah, a diet where everything you eat has no calories.
Air.
Let's try different types of artisan water today.
Jess Edelin says, Babylon Bee is one of the many puzzle pieces that led me to abandon atheism and become a Christian.
I'm all in now.
Thank you.
Are you serious?
Dude.
Got another one.
It's amazing.
Partially.
We were one of the puzzle pieces, so I don't know how big a puzzle this is.
It's like 5,000 pieces.
5,000-piece puzzle.
That's not that impressive.
But if it's like a 24-piece paw patrol puzzle, maybe we were one of like the corner pieces, too.
That's important.
Essential piece.
And is he missing any pieces?
Because that ruins the whole puzzle.
Hopefully he's got them all.
So Jess, or Jez, or however you say that, burned his or her fedora and then picked up a V-Neck or whatever.
I don't know what you get when you're a Christian.
Acoustic guitar.
Acoustic guitar.
Got to goatee like this.
Unless Jess is a girl, and then that would be weird.
You burned all your rock CDs, get some newsboys.
That's it.
Well, that's exciting.
Yeah, that's exciting.
I do hate getting people to ask me that a lot.
Like, have you ever converted anyone to the Batman?
I'm like, well, it's usually more complex.
Like, someone doesn't watch Batman B podcast.
No, I haven't.
Well, what is it?
What did Alex say?
Alex said, y'all inspired me.
He must be from the South.
Should I read this in a Southern accent?
I don't know.
No.
Y'all inspired me to read Orthodoxy and The Man Who Knew Too Much.
Now I can say I've added them to my collection along with C.S. Lewis and Bunyan.
Awesome.
Another Chester conversion.
Well, you know, I credit you guys with that too.
You know, I was a Lewis fan.
I loved Bunyan.
You know, Chesterton was new to me, you know, and so like many, I think I can credit you guys with getting me into.
We have more Chesterton converts than actual Christian conversations.
Congratulations.
That's true.
It's very sad.
I think that's one of the B's lasting legacies.
But we're beefing the Christians up with some Chestertons.
That's right, man.
Do we have a copy of Ethan's book handy?
Hey, we can pump my book.
So if you're wondering what's this Chesterton guy, my book's out too.
Oh.
He just almost threw it on the ground.
Chesterton's Gateway.
This is 14 essays with introductions and helpful footnotes by Ethan.
And I would like to especially recommend the audio version where you get Ethan's voice pouring into your ear like space diarrhea.
And it's awesome.
Warm.
I really like how casual your footnotes are.
Usually you read a footnote in a word academic.
He goes like, I think Chesterton's talking about this, but yeah, you get the idea.
That's fantastic.
But I've actually got emails to people like, just having you say like you don't get it, or there's parts you don't get, or it's okay to get past this part and not get it.
It's so helpful.
And every Chesterton book is like, yeah, it's scholars, and it's always read by a British guy who sounds all smart.
So this is like a nice dumb guy Chesterton book.
So it makes you feel safe.
It's a gateway drug.
Yeah, man.
Oh, my God.
I was laughing at all these.
There's a Snyder cut reference.
Yeah, not your typical footnotes, for sure.
And the audiobook, actually, I insert the footnotes right in the middle of the audio.
So it feels like I'm reading Chesterton right to you.
This is such a perfect sentence.
I guess this isn't a real footnote.
Just carry on.
That's just what Chesterton needed, though.
It seems so inaccessible to a lot of people.
He can be hard to read.
And if you're going into it with someone who's in the same boat with you, like, hey, you know, yeah, he's tough to read for everyone.
But if you chew on it, take it a sentence at a time, you'll get a lot out of it.
I noticed that, what's the word in the Nicene Creed?
Homo damn.
Homo?
Homoogius or something?
I could not figure out how to say that.
So you say it in the text, and then you go to a footnote and you say it again and you like laugh while you're saying it.
You're like, homo.
Like in the footnote on the audiobook, which is like awesome.
It's just so good.
Well, it makes like I got into Chesterton and then I got a Chesterton group together pretty quickly after and that helped a lot in that conversational element.
And I wanted the book to have that feeling of like, there's a conversational processing element.
Yeah.
Anyway.
We're promoting our new book, The Guide to Wokeness.
Yeah, you can buy Ethan's book, but first you have to buy this one.
Yes.
You get woke with this book and then you can wake up with Chesterton.
And you'll get unwoke.
That's right.
They're leaving each other ill woke.
Hey, we've got an interview show coming up with Eric Metaxas.
It was one of the best shows we've ever done.
One of the best conversations we've ever had with any guest ever.
That's saying a lot.
Oh, Kyle wasn't there.
He wasn't there, so I don't know.
But yeah, I asked him point blank, why'd you become a right-wing nutjob?
Oh, just right.
Why'd you become a Trump?
Why'd you become a man?
I want such a Trump sellout, man.
Did you ask him about when he punched that guy?
Oh, yeah, he talked about that in the subscriber portion.
Oh, man.
Gotta listen.
I didn't know about that.
Yeah, he brought that up.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, that was a great video.
Everyone was horrified by it.
I thought it was great.
It's like he just punched that Antifa guy in the face.
Oh, man.
Hero.
So check that out.
And if you're a subscriber to the Babylon B, Babylonbee.com slash plans, or you're a YouTube member, you'll get that a day early.
Right?
Do YouTube members get it a day early?
Yes.
Yeah, YouTube.
If you're a YouTube super fan, you hit the smash the join button.
You can be a super fan, and then you can get it a day early.
And you get extra content and extra content.
It's longer.
And Eric Metaxis tells a punching story.
Otherwise, you'll get it on Tuesday.
So please tune in for that.
And that's a lot of fun.
Hey, we have a subscriber there today.
Hey, you, do you want to be woke?
I know I do.
I wake up every morning thinking I really want to be woke.
That's fantastic because I have a product that meets that exact need that you just articulated right then.
It's a new book called The Babylon B Guides of Wokeness, and it teaches you how to be woke.
My entire life, I've asked myself, how are these kids these days getting so woke?
And I know that there's got to be an instruction book out there, but there isn't until now.
Now there is.
Because this book teaches you how to be woke so you won't get canceled, so Twitter mobs won't come after you and ruin your life.
You get to know how to choose your pronouns, your gender.
Buy this book so that you won't get canceled.
You can order it today.
This is Subscriber Day.
This is from Richie, and he says, I'm on the fence about subscribing.
I need to get one question answered on the air before I go all in.
In Lord of the Rings, they burglarized Gollum's house and stole his ring.
He's the victim here.
Granted, Gollum had done some bad things in the past, but he's still the rightful owner of the ring.
That's debatable.
Much like if I steal the neighbor kid's candy, that doesn't give you the right to burglarize my house and eat it.
So aren't the Hobbits the true villains?
So how did Gollum get the ring in the first place?
He just found it in a river.
He murdered his friend.
Well, he murdered his friend to take it.
Yeah.
So I would say saying he's the rightful owner is a little sketch.
Is it okay?
Do two wrongs make a right, Kyle?
No, but Bilbo, I don't think it's praising Bilbo's action in taking the ring, but also Bilbo didn't really steal the ring.
He took it first, just finding it, right?
And then later realized, oh, this is this guy's ring.
And then he kind of tricked him in the riddle game.
And you don't want, it's like you find like an atom bomb or something, and then you realize later that it belongs to a terrorist.
You're not going to be like, I should give it back.
You know, he is the rightful owner.
Yeah.
Although I don't think Gollum was really a terrorist.
He just wanted to say that.
Well, I'm just saying, like, you don't want to give a psycho like Gollum that power back.
You don't want that guy to be invisible.
The guy that wants to murder you and eat you like a fish.
Yeah.
So what's the dare here, though?
I don't understand.
What is he daring?
He just wants to answer it.
He just wants, oh, I got you.
Okay.
I've seen the argument online that Pippin is actually the true hero of Lord of the Rings because he throws the stone down the well, which wakes up the ballrog, which kills Gandalf, which makes Gandalf come back as Gandalf the White.
Defend Ministirth and save the day.
Well, I think that kind of the overarching messages of Lord of the Rings is that they're really, I mean, none of them are really heroes.
You know, they all make bad decisions and listen to them are forced to make choices with what's given to them with the time that's given to them, right?
You know, even Frodo in the end made the wrong decision.
And God, there is no God in this uniform universe.
But it illustrates how God.
No guy in these.
Alouvatar, man.
Alouvatar?
Alouvatar.
Alouvatar is the god of the.
That sounds like a crazy instrument you could play.
I play the alouvatar.
I really shred my alouvatar.
Heresy jar?
Hey, we've got a Babylon B banger of the week.
Oh, by the way, you have to subscribe now because we thoroughly discussed that.
Richie.
We got a Babylon B banger of the week.
Banger of the week.
Oh, this is the one everybody liked.
Secret Service agent spotted carrying diaper bag because Joe Biden himself.
That part's not on.
I thought that was supposed to be satire.
I thought this was supposed to be a joke.
We've got a sketch that will probably be out now, right?
Where we do it.
Maybe today, hopefully.
I don't think it's by the time you read this.
By the time you watch this podcast, it'll be out.
So you'll get to see this.
Joel was in a sketch.
Yeah, I played the Secret Service guy with the diaper bag.
You had to change Joe's diaper.
Yeah.
That's stuff.
I think you guys were hazing me now that I look at it in retrospect.
You guys made me change an old man's diaper and then you threw milk on me.
That was my first day here in the audience.
It's not actually for a sketch.
We're not actually going to have a sketch never in air.
We got a Babylon Bomb of the Week.
You guys didn't like this one, or you just didn't notice it.
Bomb of the week.
Sad trombone.
Church adds helpful sports ticker for following scores during service.
You know, I think this is because people were just too convicted by them.
So you guys that say the Babylon Bee needs to do more Christian jokes, you don't even share them.
Yeah, you don't like them.
Shame on you.
And that's clearly the funniest joke ever written.
It is true.
And so the true bomb of the week is you.
When you come across Christian satire on your Facebook news feed and you don't share it, God sees that.
Yeah.
You know, I think you're sharing.
99% of people won't share.
Will you be the 1% who will?
We start putting those memes out about Jesus.
You make Jesus cry.
You will share this Babylon B story.
Jesus sheds a tear every time you don't share a Babylon B article.
About Jesus?
About the church?
About the church.
Heresy jar.
All right, let's do some weird news.
I'm on board.
This news is weird.
What's going on in wacky New Zealand?
New Zealand.
Those keywords, those darn keywords.
Is it really still new?
There's always up to something.
At this point.
So many things that are called new, we should change it to just Zealand.
Or the medium.
Medium Zealand.
Old Zee.
Moderate Zealand.
Middle-aged Zee them.
New Zealand Bird of the Year controversy after contest is actually won by a bat.
This is the country that made their woman of the year a man.
This is like one of our Babylon Bee transgender jokes, one of the two jokes we have.
Like, bat identifies as bird to feed all the birds.
Classic.
We all high five and smoke cigarette.
I feel like what about the slippery slope that conservatives have warned about?
We've been warning.
First, you're saying that it's making man into a woman.
Now birds are bats.
What's next?
My question, though, is this a bat identifying as a bird and open about it?
Or was this a bat like disguised as a bird and no one's?
I mean, they say this bat is feathers on him and make him try to pass him as a bird.
They say this bat is the size of your thumb, a wingspan of about a human hand.
So this thing's more of a bug than a bird, really.
It's true.
Sounds like a pretty pathetic bat to me.
So it was a voting contest where they had the public vote for it and it won with a 3,000 vote lead.
Apparently it's endangered or something.
So they're trying to raise awareness.
So they thought maybe bird privilege.
Yeah.
And then it'll live more.
I like this quote.
It's just because they're ugly creatures.
Or bats.
I like this quote.
There's only two bat species in New Zealand.
So having bat of the year would not have been very exciting.
Do they have that contest?
Once again.
It's a very neck and neck competition.
That's great.
When I went to Australia, I saw one of those massive bats.
It's like a size of a chihuahua or bigger than a chihuahua.
Like in the wild?
Yeah, like we were walking through the town on the tree that was just like hanging upside down, like, you know, like Dracula sleeping.
And we're all crowded around it.
Like, we thought it was a fake thing.
Like, and we're all talking about it.
And all of a sudden, its eyes go and look right at me.
It's red eyes and teeny, tiny little pupils.
And then it opens its wings up like the, you know, big enough to give you a big old hug.
And it just flew off.
Then it gets a dragon bat.
It was crazy.
Yeah.
Can we get a story time with Ethan Nicole song?
And I feel like we haven't done that in a while.
Yeah, it's true.
He's never boring and he's never dull.
It's story time with Ethan Nicole.
Yeah, our stories.
Tell someone about the urine.
QAnon, they're back.
QAnon support supporters meet in Dallas for the return of JFK Jr. and the Trump reinstatement.
And then they all drank some mysterious liquid out of a giant chalice.
They all went to be with Trump forever.
So they gathered right where JFK was killed, believing that JFK Jr. is not dead and will return to begin the reinstatement process for Donald Trump.
What?
Why would he do that?
That's bizarre.
Yeah, I want to know more.
You know, I think this was probably another Lincoln project sting operation.
Tell me about that.
What happened to this Lincoln Project thing?
They dressed up as KKK or something?
Yeah, well, supposedly.
They claimed responsibility for it, like how ISIS claims responsibility for everything.
Yeah.
But it wasn't clear if they actually had anything to do with it or not.
So this group of they're supposed to be like social justice, right?
But they claimed responsibility.
They were trying to, so they were trying to frame Glenn Young, the Republican candidate.
They had these guys dressed in like MAGA hats with tiki torches.
They posed outside Glenn Young's bus and they chanted, we're for Glenn Young over and over again.
Okay.
And this is in Charlottesville where the United Rights is the first time.
And the media was all gathered like they had been telling, you know, tipped off.
Yeah.
You know, they all were all taking pictures and they started tweeting, you know, look what just happened.
And people started doing, you know, their internet sleuthing and found out that these were dem activists.
Well, the best part is that there's five of these supposedly white supremacists.
One of them is black.
Okay.
And one of them's a girl.
And she's like, she kind of looks like she's trying to look like a guy, like she's wearing shades and a hat and she's like a dress shirt.
And it turns out they all work for like Virginia Democrats.
Yeah.
But then the Lincoln Project took responsibility.
And they were like, actually, this was us.
We were trying to make a point about it.
Good job, guys.
Way to go.
This is a teachable moment in America.
We dressed up as Hitler to show that Trump is bad.
Are we?
Are we the baddies?
Are we the baddies?
Maybe it's time to ask yourself that.
So it's just JFK thinking that's not going to happen.
JFK Jr. is going to be Trump's vice president.
How old would he be now?
He wasn't that.
I mean, well, he was like...
Oh, he was a younger guy, right?
In the 70s or something.
JFK Jr.
So he's the guy that's the son of when the guy.
Yeah, he would only be 60.
Okay.
601.
Man.
So he was going to rise again?
Like he was going to come back.
They say he never died.
He lives on that island where Tupac and Kurt Cobain and them all live.
They're all hanging out with us.
Yeah.
Having the craziest party ever.
Amelia Earhart.
Oh my gosh.
I want to go to that island.
And I guess Norm McDonald probably lives there now.
So it's the funniest place on earth.
Four went out for Norm.
Want to tell us about astronaut tacos?
Okay.
Astronauts harvest green chili peppers to eat the best space tacos yet in NASA first.
I don't know if it's first.
That sounds really messy in space.
How do you do that?
So it was the first time.
So they actually grew chili peppers in space.
Yeah.
And then they made space tacos.
Is there sunlight in space?
Do they have to create how do they do that?
Well, there is sunlight in space because the sun's out there.
It is out there.
There's probably more sunlight.
There's starlight.
Yeah, you don't have the atmosphere.
Sure.
It's better than your.
But the thing I wanted to talk about is meat.
Do they have meat in the future?
They said they had fajita beef, rehydrated tomatoes, and artichokes.
So the chilies, the only thing that was grown in space was the chilies.
There's no space cows for the space beef.
So we'll get there.
Yeah.
I think space tacos a little, eh.
They were space chilies.
They were assembled in space.
They were assembled in space and eaten in space.
And then they were diarrhea in space.
Yeah.
It does seem a little dangerous to eat tacos on the International Space Station.
That seems like a lot.
Don't those astronaut suits have like a poop chamber or something?
Because they can't just get out of them.
Yeah.
They do.
No diapers, diapers, right?
They do a Joe Biden.
Can those things handle taco out?
I don't know if they're built to.
Fallout.
I meant fallout.
No.
Can you imagine just like, yeah, you're in space and you got the stuff like floating in your helmet because it just went out.
That was disgusting.
But I assume.
But they also have a toilet.
Like, they don't have to.
But it's just if they happen to be out on a space.
Like getting out of that suit.
It's got to be a lot of fun.
Oh, crap.
Yeah.
The taco bell is hitting.
Yeah, this is happening.
There's like some kind of like bolt thing.
Get off here.
Alan Rynch.
I don't know how to get out of a space suit.
It's got to be hard.
So a Florida teacher of the year, or the Florida Teacher of the Year, I guess, was arrested for hitting a pupil who criticized the award.
Caroline Lee struck a female student and gave her a bloody nose for criticizing her getting the award.
And she kicked the student.
Donkey.
Called her a flowerbedding bee.
Wow.
That's CBs and flowerbedding.
Okay, so who gave this award to the teacher?
Florida.
Florida gave this award.
What are they judging?
I think it was before the punching.
If this is the kind of teacher that would call a student that an effing B word.
Well, the student criticized her because she used the N-word while reading John Steinbeck's of Mice and Men, which is really bad because that word's not even in the book.
She just likes to spice it up.
Well, in that case, then, yeah.
She used the N-word while reading red fish, blue fish.
One fish, two fish, redfish, bluefish.
Great.
So, yeah, this was a county, Duval County Public Schools had named her.
So this kid, she was a county's teacher of the year.
Did she lose the award?
Sorry, I'm interrupting Joel.
Yeah, that's my.
Well, did she punch the girl while she was up on stage with the trophy in her hand?
Or did she jump into the audience and just start wailing?
Say this off in one moment.
She was just removed from the classroom and will not return.
I think the judicial punishment.
Or did she get to keep the award?
Or did she get replaced with another award?
Right hook.
Best year.
Punch.
Turning your award right now.
Wow.
That's insane.
Hey, a court has ruled Pablo Escobar's cocaine hippos are legally people.
So here we go.
We got stuff going on.
Men becoming women.
We got bats identifying as birds.
Now we have hippos becoming people.
This is what happens.
What's a cocaine?
When the left is in charge.
They call them his cocaine hippos because he had a ton of hippos.
So hippos weren't native to that area.
He bought them because you know how when you get really rich, you hit that point of being rich that you just buy exotic animals.
So he wasn't giving the hippos.
He had cocaine.
He ate hippos, probably.
That's what I was picturing.
I would do a bunch of hippos hopped up on cocaine.
He got tons of money, cocaine.
Why not?
Just throw like a little throw pillow-sized cocaine package in their mouth and see what happens.
Like the next experience.
Maybe he threw his prisoners to the cocaine hippos, like a den of cocaine hippos.
Man, that's terrifying.
I want to get exotic animal rich someday.
Yeah.
What would you get?
You've already got a parrot.
Yeah.
You're already one of those weirdos.
My wife wants a raccoon.
I've always wanted a raccoon.
I want possum.
That's not really exotic.
Yeah.
But to get like a nicely bred one that's not going to have a bunch of issues.
A nicely bred possum?
Yeah, like a one that's bred by possum breeding.
With like good, strong haunches and shiny fur.
Good loins.
You know, like a good teeth.
Good bloodline.
Can you imagine?
It's like the ugliest thing in the world.
Can you imagine like a possum show and they're like judging the length of the nose?
Here's my sad possum story, right?
That my dog was killing.
He's never boring.
He's never dull.
It's story time with feet and nickels.
Yeah, stories!
Tell us a lot about the urine.
I got home one night and my dog was like, had a my little, my daughter freaked out because my dog had a baby possum and it was shaking it by the neck in our house.
Flower bed.
And so like we got it and it was alive.
And so I'm like, I'm going to have a pet possum.
I named Ollie after my character in my book.
And I got up cage and I went and I ordered a bunch of possum food online and I found out it was real.
They have it.
And looked up all the instructions and I was like trying to like pet it and be nice to it.
And then the next day it was dead.
So I have two bags of possum food.
So I think, I guess our dog was more successful than I realized.
Yeah, yeah.
So that's why it didn't really react much to me.
It was in like a state of state of dying.
His spine was severed.
Not playing dead.
Oh.
I would get a monkey, I think.
Yeah, I've always wanted monkeys.
That would be cool.
Or gorilla.
Oh, a little dangerous.
I just like the idea of sitting on my estate with my newspaper and going, like, I should buy a tiger.
Yeah.
It just seems like a cool level of wealth to be at.
Because, okay, so the hippos, they bred.
So they went from eight to like 80.
They've been breeding.
And I guess they're just eating up the land.
Because hippos are vegetarian.
So imagine how much plant life you're going to get to stay that big.
Was he breeding?
Breeding him on purpose or just letting him go at it?
Well, they've been living there ever since.
Like he's gone.
So they're just naturally throwing hippos.
The big debate was like, some people wanted to just kill him off because they're just destroying the environment.
Invasive species.
And then other people are like, no, we have to give them sterilization.
And so in order to get sterilized and they wanted to find the perfect sterilization that's the most humane, I guess they had to become counted as people for that.
Wow.
That's weird.
Makes you wonder if they could have cocaine lake cow bacon.
Remember lake cow bacon from the last episode?
I don't.
Remember the guy wanted to make bacon out of hippos?
Oh, yeah.
It was late cow bacon.
That was a real thing.
From the early 1900s.
Yeah, early 1900s.
Oh, God.
He never took off.
But this would be cocaine lake cow people bacon.
Because they're people.
Because now they're people.
I would think hippos would make great livestock for food.
I mean, there's a lot of meat on those things.
There's a lot of meat there.
Yeah.
Or at least a lot of fat.
Hippo jerky.
A man fraudulently received COVID relief funds.
And then he spent $57,000 on a Pokemon car.
Relatable.
King.
King.
I don't understand.
Why would you do that?
So he's facing charges of wire fraud because he got the COVID-19 business relief funds and he spent it on $57,000.
Pokemon.
So whoever wrote these notes, you didn't even bother telling me which card he bought because I was very interested.
It's a Pokemon.
It's like some little animal.
You know, it's like some kind of element.
I'm going to guess Charizard.
It might have some foil on it.
It's like the only Pokemon.
I don't know.
It's Charizard.
Ultra-Rare.
It's a Charizard.
It was 1999 Pokemon Base Number 4 Charizard Holographic First Edition.
Is this like NFTs or something?
I don't understand this.
Pokemon cards, man.
Well, it's like if you get the one that was the original one.
The original, yeah.
Like there was one set that came out and they had a holographic Charizard.
They never made it again.
It's the rarity.
20 years in prison?
He faced it.
They say 20 years in prison and 250 grand in fines.
Holy moly.
Wow.
I hope that Pokemon card was worth it, buddy.
I don't know if NFT is like even related, but I so I don't even know what NFTs are, but I have a buddy who's like all crazy about them.
And so he made, I told him, fine, you want to make a set of XCOP NFTs, go for it.
And he did it.
And I finally tweeted about it.
And like, I guess there's a group of people that just searched the word NFT.
And they like just like started just tearing into me like I was the worst person on earth for saying for having NFTs.
Oh, yeah.
But if you like NFTs, get an XCOP NFT.
I sold one and it made it all worth it.
So I think the real reason he's getting charged with all that is because he faked having this business.
He wasn't supposed to get the funds at all.
He said he was the owner of a business with 10 employees and he wasn't.
Gotcha.
I'll bet you there's a lot of that.
But I think they caught him.
They were alerted to it because he had this massive expenditure.
So if you're going to defraud the government, don't buy a giant Pokemon card.
A woman has sued Kellogg for $5 million saying strawberry Pop-Tarts need more strawberries.
Illinois woman is suing Kellogg for $5 million in damages, claiming the company is misleading consumers by selling frosted strawberry Pop-Tarts that barely contain any strawberries.
She said the so-called strawberry toaster pastries contain more pears and apples than actual strawberries.
How is this $5 million worth of damage in her life?
I mean, like, how has this hurt her to where she needs to be compensated?
He says, like, $5.50 a box for about 12 of them.
Has she purchased 5 marks?
However much worth is actual strawberry in there, you deduct that from that.
So maybe it's like $5.
And then if she's eaten a million boxes of Pop-Tarts, then yeah, she's owed $5 million.
It's a class action suit, so she wouldn't get the whole thing.
Oh, it was just like every Pop-Tarts user will get like three cents a check in the mail at the end of it.
That kind of thing.
And punitive damages and all that.
It contains 2% or less of ingredients, which is dried strawberries, dried pears, and dried apples.
I'm just picturing the tort, you know, those ads.
Have you eaten a strawberry Pop-Tart in the last five years?
You might be entitled to damages.
Compensation.
I mean, I think there is something to be said for the false advertising.
You have pictures of strawberries in the bike, say strawberry, and it doesn't have strawberries.
So I kind of understand juicy strawberries on the cover.
But I also think we all just need to come to an agreement and an understanding as a society that if you're eating like this boxed snack product, it does not have anything that it says on the cover.
Yeah, right.
There's nothing.
There's even strawberry flavor.
I don't think that's just chemical.
It's something they created.
No one should get any nutritional value out of it.
Raspberries aren't blue, right?
Yeah.
So I guess it says Starbucks faced backlash several years ago as more consumers realized their pumpkin spice lattes didn't contain any pumpkin.
I think I read they actually ended up adding some pumpkin to it just to say we're going to throw a bunch of pumpkin in just to appease people that are like they're basically like the Gavin of lattes.
Yeah actually, there's actually no pumpkin than this pumpkin spice latte.
That's so funny.
I I, when I was back in sales, I I visited a pumpkin spice factory once and uh, saw an entire warehouse and it's like big bags of dog food with like big pellets of this pumpkin spice.
That's where it ships out on trains.
Um, because couldn't you say, get a chicken spice and then you just use the spices that you?
I guess they have that poultry seasoning.
Yeah, poultry seasoning.
I, when I taste pumpkin spice, to me that is the the, the most like inauthentic flavor of coffee or anything like.
Taste it on like somebody approximated the taste of pumpkin and spice.
Yeah, it's pumpkin vanilla.
Yeah, because if it tastes like just straight pumpkin yeah, you're just bit into a pumpkin.
No, I have not.
It's not pleasant.
There's just not much flavor there.
I do it all the time, absolutely wonderful.
Hey, we're gonna talk about racism, all right.
Well, faithful Babylon bee fans, we have our new book out, the Babyl Bee Guide To wokeness.
If you don't know, this is kind of um very uh, illustriously illustrated.
What's the word I was.
Dr. Seuss or something?
Very colorful, vibrant, beautiful.
Heavily illustrated.
Heavily.
Look at that.
Prolifically.
We'll throw some graphics up on the screen so you guys can see all the cartoons and stuff.
Done in the style of a field guide telling you how to be woke.
It is out now, and it's just been a lot of fun.
Real fun process.
We've been reading it, just laughing at our own jokes for the last two days.
Well, it was really fun.
We said this on the live stream the other day, but we put this together in such a kind of, I don't want to say rush because that makes it sound like it's a crappy product.
It's awesome.
But we pulled out, we pulled like super long days for many, many weeks to get this thing out.
And so some of it was such a blur that I opened it up and I'm like, who came up with this joke?
I don't remember writing this joke or that joke.
And some of them we just don't even know where the came from.
We figured that the publisher would edit it, but they just let everything through.
They just let it all through, which, yeah.
Yeah.
Which is always a weird experience.
Yeah, kind of the idea for the book was, you know, people love our infographics, and I wanted to make a full book that feels like that.
It's just a thick infographic.
You get to just dig through and laugh at all the pictures.
Stickmen are funny.
Stickmen are funny.
That's the lesson here.
If you're really bored and need something to do, you can read the text.
Yeah.
These guys wrote that.
Great Christmas present.
Great thing to throw on the coffee table at Thanksgiving, especially if you have liberal relatives coming over.
It will bring the family together and unify everybody.
Yeah, and we even got confirmation from one professor at a Christian university who's using it to lead discussions in his class.
So it's officially a scholarly work now, I think.
Yeah.
Be able to get it peer-reviewed or something.
One weird thing is I've seen a lot of kids picking this up.
I heard a few people I talked to say, like, oh, my kids grabbed.
Adam Ford told me his kids grab it off the table.
Dad, what's a microaggression?
And my kids love flipping through it because they love Ethan Stick figures and all of that.
So that's great.
So we thought we'd play a little game to kind of celebrate the release of the book and to constantly remind you to purchase it.
And that, well, oh, by the way, we'll have links to purchase the book in the show notes and in the description if you're on YouTube.
We're going to play a game called, Is It Racist?
Hello.
Please purchase things from our store.
We make stuff, you buy it.
We make things, you buy things.
There is B on thing.
Oh, look.
Fantastic product.
B. Very shiny.
Great cost.
Excellent quality.
You buy now.
Buy now.
Shop.babylonbee.com.
Repeat.
Purchase Tumblr today.
Is it racist?
Maybe Adam could set up this game for it for sake.
According to the fantastic book, The Babylon Bee Guide to Wokeness, part of being woke is that you have to be able to explain how anything is racist.
You can find any topic at all and call it racist.
So we have a list of random topics here that I will give you guys.
And you guys will Google them and we'll find out if anyone has called this racist before.
So then you search the word racist, right?
Yeah.
So just put in, I'll give you an example.
We'll do a practice one.
So the first one here is ice cream trucks.
So if you put in ice cream trucks, racist.
So give each one of us a different one.
So this is this test.
This will be our test one.
And then we'll find out if anyone on Google, anywhere in any article, has ever called that topic racist before.
So which one are we doing?
Oh, my.
Poor spill.
First thing.
Sounds like we have a.
An ice cream truck to jingles racist history.
I think I heard about this turkey in the straw.
Oh, that's right.
So that's the ice cream truck is racist because the song that's playing is a racist song.
Oh my god.
Bigfoot.
Is that actual song Turkey and the Straw Races or it's like the same tune as an old racist song?
It's the second one, yeah.
It's the same tune.
So the turkey in the straw tune came from a song that used to have racist turkey and the straw tune.
Then And then Turkey in the Straw.
Yeah.
Well, that's funny because I remember the ice cream truck I grew up with that came down our street didn't play this song, but it played, what is it, Dixieland.
Sure, that's racist.
It's got to be a lot of fun.
Yeah, that's also racist.
I thought you were going to say my ice cream truck was just racist.
They would only say white.
It played Hitler's speeches.
Just an overtly racist ice cream truck.
I like the Washington Post headline for this one.
The ice cream truck has a troubled past.
I didn't even finish.
The ice cream truck has a troubled past.
And you can still love it.
Yeah, it's okay.
Like they're like telling you it's okay.
I love it.
I like that new headline.
And then I think some rapper or hip-hop artist recorded a new ice cream song after that story.
Go to get it ice cream.
Yeah.
It's a public domain song.
They're not going to pay him royalties, right?
I don't think ice cream truck guys have the money to say it.
Look, I respect him for that.
Just it's a way to get money.
They got to pay me every time they drive the ice cream truck around.
Does the, I mean, do we have a copy of the new ice cream song?
Let me see.
How many obscenities?
I forget who it was that made it.
Does that sound familiar to anyone else?
I don't know.
Ice cream.
There's a new song.
So he was trying to catch it.
Rizza.
Rizza recorded a new ice cream truck jingle.
Thank you.
Wu-Tang Clan's Rizza composes new ice cream truck song to replace Turkey in the straw.
Is he giving it out for free?
That I don't know.
Because that would be the true.
Yes.
Yes.
I think he did make it public.
He wanted them to be able to use it.
Yep.
Yeah.
Okay.
I wonder if they're using it.
Yeah.
All the energy that is spent on finding things that are racist and then correcting it.
Let's do it.
It's going to be like a Pavlov thing now with kids every time they hear Wu-Tang Clam.
They're going to want ice cream.
Wu-Tang sounds like a type of ice cream.
All right.
So we'll start going through some of these topics, and then our goal is to find one that is not yet racist.
It has been covered.
And if it is not racist, then you guys can try to actually write and publish an article legitimately that says why it's racist.
So we have to come up with why, and we'll get it submitted to you.
And we'll follow up on a future episode if we were able to.
All right.
So here's our first three topics.
Kyle, the Waze app.
Joel, going to the gym.
Ethan, chairs.
Chairs.
Let's find out if those things are racist.
Oh, man.
So just it'd be just Google that word and then the word racist and see if articles come up.
There is an article I found.
Can a chair be racist?
See, it's very easy to find these things because someone somewhere has already found it.
It's a top result.
How about outrage over a photo of Dasha Zukova, editor of Garage magazine, sitting in a black woman chair has settled into a more measured rhythmic online debate.
What is a black woman chair?
I have to subscribe to find out.
The black woman chair is behind a paywall.
That seems racist in itself.
All right.
Do we have any other hits for?
So the Waze app, I got one from ACLU, and it says, is your turn-by-turn navigation application racist?
Here's their argument.
So the interweaving of social media and geo-navigational applications could exacerbate the problem.
Applications like Waze rely on users and social networking connections to share travel information and suggest particular routes.
It's easy to imagine very subtle judgments among loosely connected social groups having a large influence on where drivers and pedestrians are directed in their travels.
I guess it's so far everything has been racist.
You know, when Google tells you the route, and I just saw this morning, my Google Maps, it says, this is the most fuel-efficient route.
I'm going to tell you how green you're being.
So soon it's going to be like, this is the most just pro-justice route.
Oh, my God.
Sure.
Least racist route.
MLK Boulevard as much as possible.
What about going to the gym?
Is going to the gym racist?
Boy.
There's so many results.
Yeah, so we have this article here from Club Industry.
Here are voices, the impact of systemic racism in the fitness industry.
Imagine a world where you are a health club member paying for amenities such as shampoo in your locker room, but the shampoo provided doesn't work for your hair.
I admire the way they got in the gym being racist.
Because the shampoo is a lot of people.
Do gyms typically provide shampoo?
I've never been to a gym that provides shampoo.
I like the connections.
If they were to provide shampoo, they probably would provide white people shampoo.
Yeah.
Therefore, gyms are racist.
Oh, man.
Oh, my God.
All right.
What are our next three?
You know what else is racist?
The chalk that you put on your hands for the, it's all white.
It doesn't match your skin till actual.
Did you say that or did you make that up?
What's that?
Did you say that?
No, I made that up.
It sounds plausible.
It sounds like something they didn't say.
All right.
Next three topics.
Kyle, you have Getting Diarrhea.
Joel, Palm Trees, and Ethan, SpongeBob SquarePants.
I appreciate you not saying, Kyle, you have diarrhea.
That's not for me to know.
That would have been a great clip to save.
Kyle, you have diarrhea.
Oh, I forgot to type.
I forgot to type it as a racist.
I just want to say that.
You're just googling diarrhea pictures now.
Get off Google Images now.
Oh, my God.
SpongeBob SquarePants.
This is from New York Post.
SpongeBob SquarePants is violent, racist, whitewashes U.S. history, says a professor.
How does SpongeBob white...
Because he's gay now, but apparently he's still not woke enough.
That's not good enough.
An academic journal, University of Washington anthropology professor Holly M. Barker drew parallels between the children's cartoon and the past use of the Marshall Islands for American nuclear testing.
SpongeBob and the other characters in the long-running show live in an underwater town called Bikini Bottom.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, the U.S. military moved natives off a constituent island of the Marshall Islands named Bikini Atoll so as to test nuclear weapons in the area.
Bikini Atoll and a number of its neighboring islands remain too contaminated for habitation today.
So one fan theory has it that SpongeBob and his collection of weird and wonderful friends are the result of mutations caused by radiation on Bikini Atoll above them.
We're getting there.
Natives were removed from the island above where SpongeBob lives.
And SpongeBob is a result of radiation.
A sponge was there and it came to life.
So if there was no racism, there would be no SpongeBob.
Yeah, they're a product of racism.
Wow.
Deep.
That is some brilliant.
That is an amazing thing.
She went through all that.
I mean, because we're not even, we scratched the surface and she wrote this up at college.
That's a lot.
That's a lot to get out of.
There's a lot.
Okay, so I did.
So Kyle, you have diarrhea.
Correct.
And I also was assigned a diarrhea topic.
So is getting diarrhea racist.
This is interesting.
I have two different articles saying it's racist for two different reasons.
So one of them is kind of your standard, like people of color have less access to good treatments for this stuff.
So diarrhea is racist.
Okay.
What's the title of the article?
It's Diarrheal Disease Has a Racism Problem.
And my favorite part is at the end of the article, they try to connect it to George Floyd.
Wow.
In the wake of George Floyd's murder and myriad other racial injustices, here at the Defeat.
This is a website that's all about diarrhea.
Defeat Diarrhea team is recommitting to educating ourselves about these patterns and to break the cycle of diarrheal disease and poverty in all communities.
Do they have a ribbon?
Like, you know, all the different brown ribbon ribbon.
That little brown ribbon.
So that's one reason.
Now, why else is diarrhea?
Slate has an article called Slate.
I have an article called Gastronomic Bigotry.
And the subtitle is, Do you think an ethnic restaurant caused your food poisoning?
You might be a little bit racist.
Wow.
That's crazy because the Mexican food place up the street here gave me food poisoning and diarrhea two weeks ago.
And now everyone else here still eats there, and I won't because I got racist diarrhea.
You might be a little bit racist.
Yeah.
So you eat tacos and you're like, oh.
Exactly.
Wait, wait, wait, no, no, no.
I can't say that the shirts.
Every time I had diarrhea, I was like, oh, those Mexicans have a bigoted colon.
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
Do you have one?
No, it was Joel's.
Yeah, well, mine are palm trees.
And I have the top result here is from an article from the Desert Sun.
Long ago, these trees were planted for racist reasons.
Oh, that's got to be on the palm trees.
And now neighbors want them gone.
Wow.
Let's see.
Denzel.
Why were they planted?
They were planted with.
I suppose I should have been ready for this.
I was too busy laughing at yours.
They were originally planted to block off the historically black neighborhood that was next to affluent white neighborhoods.
So it was kind of a wall of separation there.
It's really hard to get past palm trees.
Yeah, it was like dense.
Redlining with palm trees.
Wow.
I have to throw quickly, I need to throw credit where credit is due.
Our buddy Trevor Anderson had suggested that we do this segment a long time ago, Googling whether a thing is racist.
And I'm like, it's going to be boring to watch us Google.
But we figured we'd came with kind of the spin on it.
And man, this is great.
I don't know if we call him something.
Googling diarrhea is never a fruit basket or something.
This is incredible.
We love you, Trevor.
All right.
Here's three more.
I just added this one at the last minute because you brought up all the stick men in the book.
So let's, Kyle, Google whether stick men are racist.
Joel, you have Twinkies, and Ethan, you get Starfish.
Starfish.
Yes.
Is that one word or two?
I think it's one.
You know what you kind of to expect, but it still just blows you away when you see it.
And you never expect what angle it's going to be.
You always think, like, I'm sure it's going to be something it's always like an art for you almost to find racism and things.
It is.
Wow.
I'm struggling one.
So it sounds like you got to hit first, Joel, with Twinkies.
Okay, yeah.
So we ate a bunch of racist snacks and ranked them.
That's for medium.
Twinkies were included in that.
So using food as a racial metaphor here from NPR, Twinkies and other food items are used to describe the idea of being one race on the outside and another race on the inside.
So it seems like, you know, if you're white on the inside, that's a Twinkie.
I've never heard Twinkie.
I've heard Oreo.
I've heard Oreo, but maybe that's other races, but I've heard Oreo for like when black people act white.
Other black people call them that.
Okay, so it says it says oh, yeah, it says like a slur for Chinese Americans.
You're yellow on the outside and white on the inside.
People who are like if you're an Asian Republican or conservative, you get slandered as a as a Twinkie.
That's awful.
I'm in a bit of a Twinkies are racist, darn it.
I'm in a bit of a process here because I found we found two tricky ones.
Did we find things that aren't racist?
Stickmen or Starfish?
I did find A link on Facebook that somebody shared like eight or nine years ago that says, mine was stick figures, by the way.
Warning, black stick figures are racist.
Warning.
Watch out.
But I can't, but the link has now been taken down.
So I can't.
How can you tell?
Is that just if you color the face in black?
Because like most stick figures are.
It is kind of, it's like black face, isn't it?
I mean, but it's like, but how do you know if a stick figure is black?
Is it just that you would shade in because the body was always like on a white white out?
Yeah.
You'd have to make like on a black background a white stick figure.
Let me see what I can do.
So there, there is something, somebody did make that argument at one time, and I can't see anything more than the short article preview.
It would seem that we need some more scholarly work in that field of stick figures, maybe an updated paper.
I would imagine it'd be easy to do it because of the hangman game.
You would draw a stick figure, and I feel like that could very easily be this.
Absolutely.
What about Starfish?
Where can we find something not racist?
Yeah, I think we might have found.
The only thing I found is that they have a term for businesses stark, they use the term starfish where, like, that's not the only thing you found.
There's a sexual innuendo on there, but you don't want to say it's the Babylon.
Well, I was trying to see if there's anything on earth in the dictionary.
Yeah, well, that's not even a racism, though.
So, yeah, like a business that you try to chop part of it off and it grows back.
So, like, this idea that you have to destroy the whole thing.
So, they use it as a symbol.
But, is that racist or something?
I don't think it doesn't mean that the actual animals have any racism.
Wow.
So, yeah, the only thing I found, because some lady wrote a book called Starfish that's about social justice.
So, that kind of messes up the results because it's a bunch of reviews of her book.
Oh, I see.
So, I'm having a tough time finding the animal.
Yeah, I struggled with the stick figure one because there was a result early on where someone drew a racist stick figure on somebody's backpack or something.
Oh, so that specific stick figure was racist, but it wasn't that all of those figures are racist.
That's the only result I could find for a while.
Well, do we want to count Starfish and you guys have to write an article about how they're racist, or should we try to find them that has no hits whatsoever?
Let's do it.
We might have to do a starfish.
Let's do a few more, and then we can decide which one we want to make racist.
Next up, we have turn signals for Kyle, chess for Joel, and napkins for Ethan.
Oh, yeah, I saw this one coming.
Yeah, this was chess is black and white, so it feels like that's this is kind of easy because they're saying like that uh cops will take turn, you know, you don't turn your turn signal on, and they'll use that as an excuse to pull over a black signal.
Oh, so turn signals on.
I did not necessarily see that one coming.
This one, though, is about traffic signals, but this is the unintentional racism found in traffic signals.
Just because something doesn't use an offensive mascot doesn't mean it can't reinforce a broken system.
Wait, is that about the flashing white man?
Like that when you cross the street, yeah, because I feel like that's great because that makes traffic signals and stick figures racist because that's a white.
Oh, this is a white stick figure.
I know we're like describing all these in detail, but this article is amazing.
A few months back, I was walking with a friend, her daughter, and my twin sons.
My friend is white, and I'm not.
Something I'd never given a second thought to until we reached a crosswalk.
Remember, honey, remember, honey?
Remember, honey, she said to her daughter as we waited for the light to turn green, we need to wait for the little white man to appear before we can cross the street.
Triggered.
I realized that white people like to exert control over nearly everything everyone does, I thought.
But since when did this literally include trying to cross the street?
That's me.
I'm sorry to get serious here, but that's really sad.
How do you do a black light?
In New Zealand, it's not green.
White.
How do you live lights?
You know, like seeing it everywhere.
It's so sad.
This is true in New Zealand.
I know this because I was there and because it came up in the article earlier, and this reminded me of it.
In New Zealand, it's a green flashing man, and at some intersections to promote safety, they have a man in a green suit that dances and walks you across the street.
Turnip.
All right, so turn signals racist.
Turn signals racist.
Kachina.
Chess.
Racist.
Chess, of course.
Super racist.
This article from The Conversation.
Strangely enough, this is the same publication that did the, initially released the study about how the Babylon Bees articles always deceive people.
That's a really reputable chess racist.
The name of the article says, why does white always go first in chess?
Johann Lowenthal, a British master, put forth one of the first proposals of record to give white the obligatory first move.
Wow, on page 84 of the Congress's proceeding, then it goes in.
Yeah, they're trying to deduce whether this was done for racist reasons or not.
I always feel like they're just two good contrasting colors to tell apart on a game board.
Black and white, yeah.
Damn.
And then napkins.
Napkins.
Well, I did find an image where these guys said that they were given racist napkins, and the white guy was given white napkins, and the black guy was given black napkins.
Save that and put the picture on the page.
Yeah, I already said that on the podcast.
Okay.
That's interesting because isn't one of the big complaints about white privilege that mandates don't match our skin tone?
So you would think that that's what don't you want the black walk signal for the black guy and the white walk signal?
Isn't this what they want, right?
Right.
But they're racist either way.
That's what I'm confused about.
I also have to comment that in checkers, black goes before red.
Oh, so checker is more progressive than chess.
Yeah, but they go before the, ah, never mind.
All right.
There was also something with McDonald's where this guy is suing McDonald's for racist napkins, I guess.
Imagine heading to a local Mickey D's to order your usual meal at Deluxe Quarter Pounder and looking down with dismay to find that you only received one napkin.
There's simply no way you'll be able to wipe the grease from a quarter pound of juicy beef from your face with only one napkin.
You step up to the counter to ask for more, but you refused and handed only a sight of racism.
This is what one California man alleges in a $1.5 million lawsuit.
One side of racism.
On the shame by McDonald's and a hefty burden to bear.
He's been unable to work ever since.
Turnip.
Supersize my racist.
Oh, he's black.
Before COVID, they used to leave the racism out.
Now you have to ask for a five.
It's in the little free package.
Catch a little bit of racism, please.
Just a dash.
According to his lawsuit, Webster Lucas, who was black, then retorted, I should have went to eat at the jack in the box because I didn't come here to argue over napkins.
I came here to eat.
That's when Lucas says things got racist, claiming the manager, a Mexican-American, mumbled something about you people.
Oh.
Oh, no.
You people.
I actually, the napkin one reminded me about the racist soap dispensers.
Do you guys remember this one?
Yes, I do remember that.
Automatic soap dispensers.
They can't see black skin when it's like under the electric eye.
It seems like it'd be clear because bathrooms are all white.
Well, it's like because it reflects the light off, so it bounces off lighter tones better than Dr. Jones.
Yeah.
So do we find anything?
So was Starfish the only one we?
Starfish was one.
There is one more on this list.
Does somebody want to look up hippos?
Hippos.
Let's all do hippos.
Hold on.
Let them do hippos.
I thought of one that I want you to do, G.K. Chesterton.
G.K. Chesterton.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, that's going to be fun.
I want to see how many ways people have called him racist.
So I mean, the first result is Dolph the fascist hippo.
What?
It's a fictional character on a Danish television show.
Dolph.
And is he racist?
The fascist hippo, I guess.
He's a large fascist hippopotamus, usually armed with a baseball bat.
Wow.
There's different cartoons over there.
And also, there's a comment about Disneyland's jungle crews with the racism, but I don't think the hippos are specifically indicted.
Is the jungle cruise racist?
Because I love that ride.
Yeah, the junk crew is racist.
Oh, because the head natives, the natives, yeah.
Although there is this hippopotamus used an analogy by Senator to promote racial profiling.
So a hippo was used for racial ends.
Wow.
Oh, here's okay.
So why are Hollywood's animated movies full of racist stereotypes and they don't like the hippo in the Madagascar franchise for being racist?
Oh, really?
Oh, really?
So there's multiple reasons the hippos are racist.
Yeah, it sounds like.
So I think we're stuck with Starfish.
Sounds like the Chesterton racist?
Oh, did we find out if you're not?
Yeah, I mean, there's also, there's, well, people don't like that he criticizes Muhammadism.
And then also there's this whole slur, not slur.
What's the word?
Sloop?
No.
Essay.
Lie.
Oh, anyway.
Slander, lie.
Slander, yeah.
Like he's that he's anti-Jew.
I think Dale explained that to us, or was that at our group?
He was at our group.
They have a whole explanation on the website, chester.org, that goes into the history of the people that kind of started this rumor about Chester that he's anti-Jew.
He was actually given awards by Jewish organizations and stuff.
So it's unsubstantiated.
I think we found Starfish is the thing that has not been called racist yet.
So now you guys have to write a few reasons starfish could be considered racist.
This brainstorming.
The thing that comes to mind is not specifically starfish, but like snorkeling being white privilege.
Yeah.
It's like the obvious one.
I'm sure we're snorkeling.
It's a very white privilege thing.
You see a lot of articles written about the racial disparities and any kind of outdoor recreation, national parks.
Yeah, I just Googled Snorkeling Racist, and there's a Is Diving Racist article, and there's the Blue Planet statement on racism in the dive industry.
The dive industry is racist.
We've got to think of some way.
The Starfish specifically, though, I guess we could come after Patrick.
Patrick is a starfish.
He's on that racist show, SpongeBob.
Oh, here's maybe Starfish are racist.
They're not actually fish.
Okay.
I don't know if that helps.
I'm just looking up interesting facts.
We're spitballing here.
We're spitballing.
What else?
What's kind of dermatologists?
What else maybe that is?
Maybe.
So they're wearing fish face.
They're culturally appropriating fish or using all have five arms.
Does the arms grow back?
Yeah.
Is that a thing?
They regenerate.
Look at that thing.
They can regenerate arms.
Wait, is that technically a sea star, right?
Yeah.
Protected by.
Oh, I wonder if you search sea star racist.
It might find.
Let's do this.
No, I don't see any.
Surfing is racist.
Surfing confronts sports racist past after George Floyd's death.
Oh, my God.
Turnip.
This is so exhausting.
Just insane.
All right.
Well, I guess we have some homework to do, guys.
Nice.
The moral of the story?
Everything is racist.
They don't have blood.
Sea stars don't have blood.
Interesting Ethan still in this.
All right, you guys have to write a scholarly article about how starfish are racist, and you have to include as many interesting and fascinating starfish facts in it as possible.
Did you know that the sea eat with their stomachs inside out?
There's got to be like something about how they stick with their group and like they don't associate it with other species.
I think that's going to be the angle to take.
I was also wondering if there's a thing that birds are racist, but it's because of the way they're named.
Like certain stars.
Like the Audubon society.
They have like they're named after either like racist researchers the naming could be or just the idea that since all animals like they have like those Latin like scientific names Yeah, maybe there's something where it's like white Western people imposing their view on all the like on all the ways we name animals Okay, so I think you're on to something here because we can go to the etymology of the name starfish and we can kind of figure out who named it and then we can go after him.
Yeah, dude, that's the way to do it.
It says it was named by a French somebody.
So he's racist.
He was super racist.
I'm sure he was racist.
Gotta be.
The scientific name Asteroidia was given to Starfish by the French zoologist de Blanville in 1830.
Oh, everybody was racist.
Oh, dude, 1830.
Freaking gold mine.
De Blanville?
De Glanville?
Oh, I hope he had slaves.
Is it?
Okay, Wikipedia.
Here we go.
Oh, look at it.
Look at that guy.
That guy just looks like a racist.
Look at that racist.
Look at that scowl on his face, that white old man white smile.
I'm going to Google his name in racism.
We're going to make the connection.
We're doing this right now, right on the podcast.
Yeah, this is happening live.
Natural history.
So he lived.
Okay, he was born in September 1777.
He died in 1850.
So he would have died right before Darwin did his whole thing, his whole racist thing.
All right, guys.
Oh, he rejected evolution.
Oh, he was a critic of basically racism ideas.
Oh, my God.
He also coined the term paleontology so we can make a connection there.
Pale, pale, white, white.
He named the study after being pale.
All right.
We're going to figure it out, guys.
The Confederate flag has stars on it.
Uh-oh.
Listen to this, man.
So the star is a symbol of hate because it's on the Confederate flag.
Starfish.
And they're starfish.
I like that connection.
Now, you got to put this all together and get it published.
Yeah, I know.
Yeah.
Is it better to make one strong argument and a bunch of supporting, or to be like, and it's also on the Confederate flag?
Yeah, build your case.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Okay.
Buy our book.
It's got lots of hilarious stuff like everything you just listened to, but in book form.
And hey, I think after that segment, what we really need is for our viewers, our listeners out there to help us do your research.
Figure out how we can make Starfish racist.
Help us add to our scholarly work that we're going to release.
And do your own research.
Think of some random things and let us know in the comments you found other things that are racist that you'd never know.
Yeah.
Instant mashed potatoes, erasers, chipmunks.
You know, just go crazy.
It's the right thing to do.
Or rather, the white thing to do.
I would love to start an organization called the Make It All Racist Project.
We have the internet.
The Foundation for Making Everything Racist.
We can get funding.
Yeah, get funding.
We need a clever acronym or something.
Anagram?
Acronym?
The Magic School Bus is brought to you by the Foundation for Making Everything Racist.
Brought to you in part by.
It'd be a more honest name.
So now what are we doing?
Hate mail?
You know what the worst thing in the world is?
It's when you're laughing at something and really enjoying it and you're not paying any money for it.
That sucks.
You feel really guilty.
You're like, man, there's all these people that are giving their lives to making this stuff.
And, you know, that's their whole job.
And I didn't even give them any money for it.
Now you can give us money.
You can become a Babylon Bee subscriber and ease that guilty conscience.
Go to BabylonB.com/slash plans.
And for a limited time, you can insert the promo code podcast.
And you get 10% off.
It's not 7%.
It's not 8%.
It's not 9%.
It's not 11%.
It's not 12%.
It is 10% off your subscription.
So go to BabylonB.com slash plants and subscribe.
That's what enables us to continue making all the amazing content that you enjoy 24-7 right into your brain.
I really miss Adam Ford.
Hate me.
We got an email from Rod Pipe.
My real name?
Rod Pipe.
That is a fake name, Rod Pipe.
Seems fake.
That sounds good.
Rowdy Rod Pipe.
I usually don't read last names, but I assume that's fake.
Rod Pipe, inventor of the pipe.
That's Bob Pipe.
Bob Pipe, yeah.
He's the CEO of Pipe.
And his wife, Beth Pipe.
So Rod says, your content is bad, low effort, like great school.
I understand the intent, but it's like you are all just simple.
You don't seem to understand how satire or humor work.
Sad.
Oh, he even put sad in there.
It's my line, man.
No good.
I like simple humor, man.
I don't know.
Yeah, I think that's what they don't get.
Some people just like that.
I mean, not me, but yeah, these guys love it.
You shouldn't try to be too clever with your jokes.
That's true.
I don't like sophisticated humor.
I don't like it.
I think it's an elitism in comedy that's true.
Babylon really gets into their skin.
Yeah.
The funniest thing is someone falling down the stairs or getting a pie in their face.
A man chasing his hat.
That's right.
The simple stuff.
And Braydon, get that reference.
Get my book.
Get over yourself and laugh, Rod Pipe.
That's what I say.
That's right.
Your name's Rod Pipe.
Your parents knew how to think of humor.
Wow, that was savage.
Oh, absolutely brutal.
Hey, we're going to go into our subscriber lounge now.
We'll talk about the book a little more.
We got some subscriber emails, subscriber comments.
Should we just for the fun of it?
Could we Google a few more things in the subscriber parsing bonus?
Because that was really fun.
Yeah, let's go.
Just a few more.
Maybe we can find a random word generator and whatever comes up.
There you go.
Okay.
I wonder if we Google our own book if people have already started calling it racist.
I'm sure.
I'm sure.
We have subscriber submitted headlines of the week.
We have bonus hate mail.
And we're going to ask Joel the 10 questions or the second 10 questions if he already answered the first 10.
We have a crazy story, too, about one of our readers who shared one of our videos and almost lost their job.
Cancel culture style in their school.
Pretty crazy.
If you want to learn about that, smash the join button if you're on YouTube or go to babylonb.com slash plans and subscribe and join us in the subscriber lounge.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
This person's a public educator.
So we'll call this person Peggy.
And somebody tried to cancel them for sharing one of our Babylon B videos.
And now we're going to move on from our heartwarming moment to some bonus hate mail.
Advice.
Is this home decor racist?
The unbearable whiteness of milk.
That is so stupid that it made me laugh.
Thankfulness is the key to happiness.
What is one song, movie, band, etc., that you are ashamed to actually like?
If you do nothing, the trolley will proceed, causing the deaths of the five newsboys.
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.
Until next time, this is Dave D'Andrea, the voice of the Babylon Bee.