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Sept. 25, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:07:38

Seth Dillon | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 131

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	We're criticized often for having jokes that are too believable.
	It's like, well, this is the problem.
	It amounts to misinformation because people are believing that your jokes are true.
	It's like, well, whose fault is that?
	Is it the satirist who's trying to stay a step ahead of the truth, or is it reality for bumping up against satire?
	The Babylon Bee's intersection of news and Christian church humor may have seemed more niche at one point.
	Today, it's the most popular satire on the internet, dominating where the onion once stood.
	In our episode, we'll talk about why.
	Our guest, Seth Dillon, bought the bee in 2018.
	Coming from a career in e-commerce and specialized in monetizing web traffic, Seth has led their publication to greater heights.
	At the time Seth purchased the site, they pulled 3 million page views per month.
	Now, they average 20 million page views per month.
	Seth and the Bee are busier than ever.
	They're doing sketches, books, including a brand new one, The Babylon Bee Guide to Democracy.
	Plus, newfound collaboration with the popular account Libs of TikTok, known for its reposts of radical lefty TikToks.
	Mainstream media and big tech often censor quote-unquote misinformation in order to censor those with opposing views.
	Whether out of idiocy or fear, the Babylon Bee is regularly fact-checked for its jokes, leading to the penalization of their social media accounts.
	In early 2022, a joke led to their official Twitter account being fully suspended.
	Seth has refused to remove that tweet.
	The account is still locked as of this episode's release.
	We dive into the adventure of making satire in the current political climate in this episode.
	Plus, Seth reacts to his abortion debate with Joe Rogan going viral.
	We discuss the backlash on conservatives for criticizing the Boston Children's Hospital gender surgery scandal.
	and we ask, is there anything that's too hard to make a joke about?
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special.
	This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
	It's time to stand up against big tech.
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	ExpressVPN.com slash Ben.
	Just a reminder, we'll be doing some bonus questions at the end with Seth Dillon.
	The only way to get access to that part of the conversation is to become a member.
	Head on over to dailywire.com slash Sunday.
	You can click that link in the episode description.
	Use code Ben for 25% off You'll have access to all of the full conversations with every one of our awesome guests.
	Seth, it's great to see you.
	Thanks for stopping by.
	Great to see you.
	Pleasure to be here.
	So why don't we begin from the beginning?
	As they say, it's a good place to start.
	So how do you become a professional satirist?
	How is that a thing that occurs to you or leaps upon you?
	Well, most of our writers were doing something else.
	They were like construction workers, engineers, you know, like they have some kind of day trade, something that they do.
	And then, you know, the Babylon Bee comes along and they see this satire kind of coming at the issues from their perspective and they start pitching ideas to us.
	We get a lot of unsolicited pitches from people.
	And some of them are just, you know, they just have a talent for it.
	You have a knack for it.
	It's something that's very difficult to teach.
	It's hard to teach exactly how to, like, have a satirical take on, like, a real news headline.
	But some people just kind of have a knack for it, and if they find us, that's usually how we find them.
	They come to us, and that's how we've hired a lot of people.
	Our editor-in-chief right now, Kyle Mann, he was submitting headlines to us right after the site launched, and they were really good.
	So it's like, keep them coming, keep them coming.
	So eventually he became part-time, and now he's running the whole team, so.
	It's not like, you can't go to school for it, you can't really be trained in it, so it's just kind of something you have a knack for or not.
	What was the origin point of Avalon Beard?
	You're sitting around and you're like, we need to make a right-wing version of The Onion, or what was it exactly?
	Basically, I mean, yeah, it was, it's like a, it is kind of a right-wing, conservative answer to The Onion because, you know, there's so much, there's so much that the left does in media and entertainment and comedy.
	You know, all the late night shows, SNL, all of these things are dominated by leftist ideology, political ideology, secular progressivism, you could say.
	And so there was nobody who's really doing that well from a Christian perspective.
	There's a real lack of Christian comedy in general, but no Christian satire in particular.
	So Adam Ford, who started the site in 2016, saw that and just thought, hey, maybe there's like a void there that if I fill it, it's going to attract some attention.
	And the site was getting like millions of hits within the first couple months.
	So obviously he was right.
	How do you even come up with the concept of sort of a Christian satire?
	Meaning that the sort of traditional view of Christians, particularly in the media, are extraordinarily sincere, hallmark movies, bad Christian rock.
	How do you actually, you know, merge the idea that there's going to be a subversive humor to a Christian-oriented, because it's not just a conservative political site, it really is Christian-oriented.
	Well, yeah, I think the biggest challenge to trying to conceive of what that looks like is overcoming the problem of, well, how do you, how do you make fun of things from a Christian perspective and do it in like a way that's not like mean spirited, you know, because so much of comedy involves mockery.
	And the question is like, how do you mock people and love them at the same time?
	Um, without being, you know, without being cruel, without just, without, without attacking the person, you know, you're really trying to attack the ideas is ultimately what we're going for rather than like ad hominem, nasty, mean attacks that are just meant to make people feel bad about themselves.
	So I think that's, you know, uh, that's the main thing is just like accomplishing that mission of, of like engaging in mockery from a moral perspective.
	And I think that, um, I think the B has accomplished that.
	I think that, I think that there's this mistake that we've made where we've, we've, we've, we've decided that we're more moral as a society because we make fun of fewer things.
	I don't know if you noticed that, but it's like everybody, you don't want to make fun of anybody because you'll hurt people's feelings.
	And that's not right.
	You don't want to hurt people's feelings.
	And I don't think we're more moral as a result of making fun of fewer things because I think what ends up happening is we end up, we end up affirming and accepting what we should be ridiculing and rejecting.
	And I think there's a moral case that can be made for why we should be rejecting and ridiculing certain things.
	You know, there's, as you know, there's bad ideas that have harmful effects in society.
	But what do we do with them?
	Do we just affirm and accept them because somebody thinks that they're a good thing?
	So, I don't know, I think Christians have a role to play in engaging in that conversation, and you can argue with people, sure, you can refute their ideas or whatever, but you can also mock them when they deserve it, and you can do it very effectively, I think.
	I think in both the Jewish community and the Christian community, just the religious community in the United States generally, which is this problem of niceness as the chief virtue, which is not one of the virtues.
	I mean, there's this sort of idea that has set in that to be Christian means that predominantly it's just being kind of a nice person in the same way that secularists think of the high virtue as just being tolerant or nice.
	And the reality is that the Bible is not known for its niceness.
	I mean, there's a lot in the Bible that isn't particularly nice, not just in terms of commandments that people have a tough time with, but also in terms of the way that you're supposed to treat bad ideas.
	I mean, you are overtly enjoined in the Old Testament to chastise people when they violate.
	You're not supposed to, when it says not to set a stumbling block in front of a blind man, it means you're supposed to chastise them.
	You have to go to the next versus you have to correct your brother, you have to stop him from doing that sort of thing.
	So bringing that back to the fore, I think, is actually something that is really important for religious people of Judeo-Christian persuasion to understand.
	Well, I mean, when you just think of a concept like truth, you know, I don't think it's mean to confront somebody with the truth if they're denying the truth or if they're asking you to affirm something I mean, it may be, you know, there's so many cliches that you can throw out there.
	Like the truth hurts, right?
	It can be, it can be like you say something that, that somebody doesn't want to hear and it bothers them, it grates against them.
	But it doesn't mean that you're a mean person for doing that.
	Ultimately, I think you're doing more harm to that person.
	You care less about that person if you're just willing to say whatever they want you to say to make them feel better about themselves, even if it means affirming a lie, for example.
	So yeah, I mean, I just, I reject the idea totally.
	I agree with you that, you know, this niceness is not necessarily, but now it doesn't mean that you need to be mean.
	Um, or cruel just for the sake of being cruel.
	You know, like putting somebody down for, like, their appearance, for example.
	You know, stuff like that is just, you're just taking shots at somebody to make them feel bad about themselves.
	There's no, like, redemptive side to that type of humor.
	But, I don't, if you look at the Babylon Bee, you know, you don't really see us doing that.
	The main thing that we're doing is we're confronting, I think, bad ideas.
	Uh, the bad people that are advancing those ideas, um, but not in a mean-spirited, cruel way where we're just, like, trying to hurt people.
	Um, so, you know, I think you can do that.
	I think you can, you can successfully accomplish engaging in mockery of ideas that deserve to be mocked.
	You know, some things, some, some things need to be held in contempt.
	Um, and so, you know, I think you can do that successfully without being mean.
	One of the things that's been kind of amazing to watch is the left has ceded the entire comedic battleground.
	I mean, I remember when The Onion was actually funny.
	And it's been a very long time since The Onion was funny.
	I remember, you know, when it launched and I remember reading it in 2007, 2008.
	And I'd say like half the headlines were funny.
	Now it's a rarity to find a good headline on The Onion.
	And I wonder if that's just because of the cultural dominance of the left is so strong.
	What is there to make fun of?
	And if they don't have Trump to kick around, there's really nothing for them to make fun of.
	Whereas because of their cultural dominance, the left, that's provided you a target rich environment.
	I think, I mean, there's two reasons I would say why The Onion, well I still think The Onion is funny sometimes.
	I think they're really funny when they're going into like their absurd humor.
	You know, they're just making a silly joke.
	I think they're a lot less funny when they're getting involved in the cultural and political commentary with their humor.
	And the reason for that is because the funny stuff, you know, and Joe Rogan said this recently when he was talking about the Babylon Bee, he says, you know, woke stuff is the funniest stuff.
	Wokeness is insane.
	It deserves to be ridiculed.
	There's so much there that's mockable, right?
	And the left doesn't want to touch it.
	They want to promote those things.
	They certainly aren't going to undermine them by making fun of them.
	So they are actually, they've carved out this huge swath of ideas and activities and behaviors that they won't touch from a comedic perspective.
	The ones that do, you look at somebody like a Dave Chappelle who's willing to, or Ricky Gervais, somebody like that.
	Somebody willing to make the jokes they're not supposed to make, they blow up.
	They get so much attention.
	You know, obviously there's cancel attempts to shut them up, but the cancel attempts backfire.
	They become more prominent.
	They get more views on their specials that they're putting out.
	People want real comedy.
	They want you making fun of the things that deserve to be made fun of.
	And by the way you know it's like when you talk about the things that deserve to be made fun of and wokeness and whatever this is like this is what they are always saying that we're guilty of doing is like punching down like we're not punching up or punching down at the marginalized the oppressed.
	Wokeness and all of these ideas are coming from the top down like if you're supposed to be punching up as a comedian you're supposed to be making fun of those things you're supposed to be poking holes in the popular narrative not promoting it.
	And so I love when guys like Bill Maher, for example, notice this and they comment on this and they say, look, you know, these are things that these are things that need to be made fun of.
	They deserve to be made fun of and comedians won't touch it.
	Why?
	I think they're doing everybody a disservice by doing that.
	But they also you know, you also have this problem that you run into the onion runs into it.
	Your jokes have to be tethered to the truth.
	There's got to be like an underlying like There's got to be something in reality that you're joking about.
	And if it's just your narrative that you're using as your platform for the joke, it's not tied to reality and people are going to read that, especially people who don't agree with your narrative, they're going to read that and they're going to be like, that's not funny because it's not true.
	So there has to be truth to the joke.
	So in a second, I want to ask you about, you know, the unsayable truths.
	Some of them have gotten your account banned from Twitter, for example.
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	Okay, so let's talk about the fact that when you say some of these unsayable truths, when you go after the woke, you run a pretty significant business risk.
	So obviously the Babylon Bee account has been banned by Twitter for the great sin of noticing that men are not women and women are not men.
	This is a risk most of us run now on a daily basis.
	The way that I've been dealing with it over at Twitter is I will say that men are not women and women are not men, but I will also specifically use the rules as sort of a way to mock.
	So instead of saying, Elliot Page is a woman, and Elliot Page is in fact a woman.
	I will instead say Elliot Page is the most manly man ever to man.
	There's never been a more masculine man than Elliot Page.
	Like Hulk Hogan, Elliot Page.
	The two most manly men who ever lived.
	But how do you deal with that?
	Because one of the things that you've had to do at Babylon Bee is they obviously knocked your account off Twitter, and you've refused to take down the apparently offending headline.
	Why don't you tell the story of how it got banned in the first place, and then what your response has been.
	I wish we were that prudent.
	I wish we were as prudent as you are.
	Yeah, so USA Today did a story on how Rachel Levine, you know, this transgender health admiral in the Biden administration.
	Like John Paul Jones of health.
	Yes, exactly.
	Named Woman of the Year by USA Today.
	Um, I guess they named several women, women of the year.
	Um, but in this particular instance, they picked a man to name woman of the year.
	And there's this picture, you know, you look at the headlines, there's this picture of this person who's obviously male, but dressed as a woman.
	And there's the headline that says, Rachel Levine is our pick for woman of the year.
	And this is a, a mockable idea.
	You know, like this is first of all, it's a front to women everywhere.
	It's a front to women everywhere that like this person who just like announced that they're a woman is now woman of the year.
	There weren't other people that we could listen.
	Men are amazing.
	We're so amazing in things that we can be women for like five seconds, be the best, or even better, even better women than women are.
	Patriarchy is so good at this.
	It's unreal.
	So we do a joke and we say, you know what?
	Uh, we named Rachel Levine man of the year over at Babylon B. And that's like, That didn't get run by me first before that went out.
	If it had, you know, I might have said, guys, we could probably make this joke without the blatant misgendering, as they call it.
	Because I don't agree that that's misgendering.
	I think it's misgendering when a male person refers to themselves as being a woman.
	Um, but we made that joke and we got flagged for hateful conduct.
	So, you know, they, uh, they want us to basically what happened was they didn't suspend our account.
	They just said, you've got to delete this joke and take it down.
	You know, they, they do this sometimes where they'll say this particular tweet needs to be deleted.
	If you do that, your account will go back to, you know, normal activity reinstatement.
	Um, But they require you to acknowledge that you engaged in hateful conduct, that you violated the terms against hateful conduct by making that tweet in the first place.
	We don't acknowledge that at all.
	For one thing, this is a joke.
	That's the first point, right?
	It's just a joke.
	And why can't we joke about this stuff?
	And for another, it's true.
	Rachel Levine is in fact a man.
	If you look up right now today in the dictionary, which could change tomorrow, you look it up today and a man is an adult human male, right?
	That's the definition of a man.
	So we can't say that.
	We can't even say that fact.
	And the craziest thing to me is when you actually look at the hateful conduct policy on Twitter's website, you go to that page and it starts out with like this tribute to free expression.
	They talk about how they want to be a platform for free expression without barriers.
	Those are their words, without barriers.
	But then you scroll further down, you get to hateful conduct, and they have all this stuff about deadnaming, you mentioned Elliot Page, deadnaming, misgendering, all of these things that you can't do.
	And so, they put you in a tricky situation, especially like as a comedian or humorist, satirist, whatever you're doing on Twitter, where you're supposed to be, like I said, poking holes in the popular narrative.
	That's your job.
	But then Twitter has rules where you must affirm the popular narrative.
	The ideology's baked into the terms of service, so you have to follow the popular Narrative and promote it or just don't say anything at all.
	Those are two choices.
	We either promote it or you stay quiet.
	You can't poke holes in it.
	You can't make jokes about it even which is what we tried to do.
	We weren't making some big statement.
	You know we weren't attacking Rachel Levine as a person.
	We're just simply joking about something that I think deserves to be joked about and if we have free expression without barriers we should be able to do that.
	But the ideology is baked in there.
	They smuggle it in there.
	So the comedian is really handcuffed.
	They're not able to really do what they're supposed to do.
	You have to promote the popular narrative or shut up.
	And obviously, this is applied to the Babylon Bee.
	Also, you work with Libs of TikTok.
	and lives of TikTok, they keep trying to ban lives of TikTok over and over and over.
	Eventually, I assume they will succeed in the banning of lives of TikTok for the rights of, actually just putting up videos of people who are of the woke persuasion on TikTok.
	That's literally the crime.
	Which demonstrates once again, for a lot of these social media outlets, it really is just about propagandizing.
	If you even, if somebody puts up a video to draw attention to themselves, and then you repost the video with a quote from them, they'll be like, no, that's not the type of attention We want the type of attention where you celebrate us, not the kind where you actually quote us.
	That's the, that's the real problem.
	Well, cause it draws criticism, right?
	You, you take that thing like a family friendly drag show, uh, can put out a flyer and promote it and they'll promote it on social media.
	And it's fine to do that, but they're promoting it to their own audience.
	They're promoting it to people that are not going to complain about it for the most part, but then somebody picks it up and shares it with lives of Tik TOK and lives of Tik TOK posts it.
	Don't even have to be with any commentary attached to it.
	It can just be this is happening.
	This is an event that's happening and here's the flyer for that event.
	Well, that's additional promotion for the event by the way to a much larger audience than they would have gotten anyway.
	But it's just like that's unacceptable to them because it's being promoted to an audience that actually takes issue with the event itself and objects to the event itself.
	That's a big conversation to have about whether or not, you know, are there certain things that we're not allowed to object to?
	That we're not allowed to find objectionable?
	Can we not find it objectionable that minors are undergoing hysterectomies for what they refer to as gender-affirming care?
	Like, we should be allowed to object to that without somebody saying that our objection amounts to a call to violence or harassment or something of whoever it is that's engaging in this activity.
	You can criticize behavior.
	You can dislike the behavior without wishing death upon the person who's engaged in it.
	You just want them to stop.
	It would be nice if hospitals, which are in fact performing hysterectomies on underage people, healthy minors, Who don't need hysterectomies.
	They are doing that.
	It would be nice if they would stop.
	You know, just simply saying, I think they should stop doing this does not amount to a cult.
	But that's their tactic.
	You know, the tactic is you've got to try to say, we don't like this speech, so we have to try to find a way to put this speech in violation of the speech code.
	And the way we put it in violation of the speech code is by pretending that and by acting like it is somehow threatening.
	But you know, there are deep ideological roots to all that, obviously.
	The kind of cult of personal authenticity that the true you is how you feel on the inside and any sort of imposition on that, including from reality itself, is bad for you.
	And therefore, the goal of civilization is basically to reflect back at you what you are what you are feeling about yourself.
	And if you're not accepted, then this amounts to an act of violence.
	It amounts to an act of subversion of the real you.
	And so it's all of our jobs to just sit and cheer like seals as you change your pronouns every five seconds while promoting the transing of the children.
	That sort of deep ideology is baked into the cake of a lot of what they're doing.
	Well, it's problematic, though, because if you have this standard that you apply to Libs of TikTok and you say, look, if you just if you simply report on the fact that a hospital said on a recording that they will do these procedures for children under 16, which Libs of TikTok recorded and put out the recording as proof, you know, that the hospitals are saying this.
	Simply reporting on that, you know, you treat that as though it's incitement to violence or something like that.
	Well, then isn't all reporting incitement to violence?
	Like anytime you report on something, imagine, let's say, let's imagine a scenario where, um, staffers at the hospital were sexually abusing minors, right?
	And that gets out somehow.
	Somebody leaks that to the media and the media reports on that.
	Does that mean that the hospital is like inciting by, I mean that the media is inciting violence against the hospital?
	Of course not.
	They're doing their duty by reporting on something objectionable that's happening at the hospital.
	They're telling the truth.
	So, yeah, I just think it's, if you take that standard and you apply it everywhere, then you have to shut down the whole enterprise of journalism.
	Like, you can't report on anything.
	So they pick and choose though, as you know, you know, they don't apply these standards evenly.
	And so that's the point is you got to continually point out to people, look, they're engaged in these kinds of crazy double standards.
	And these rules that they're applying to us, if you applied it to them, they would have to be banned too.
	So in a second, I want to ask you about how, you know, the Babylon Bee standing up in favor of the possibility of telling jokes about, about just absolute madness, how this has drawn kind of a unique audience, including some very famous people.
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	When you started Babylon Bee, I doubt that you thought that people like Elon Musk were going to be giant fans of Babylon Bee, and yet Elon Musk was, for a brief moment in time, it appeared that he was going to be the savior of Twitter.
	He was going to come in, he was going to flip a switch, suddenly all of the shadow banning of accounts was going to stop.
	accounts like yours were going to come back online.
	He pretty much openly said that one of the reasons that he was getting involved is to stop the kind of censorship like the censorship of the Babylon Bee on Twitter.
	So what do you know about how Elon Musk became a fan of your site?
	Because it's pretty wild.
	I mean, he started engaging with our content out of nowhere.
	You know, every now and then we'd have an article, like someone would like screen grab it and send it to us.
	They'd be like, Elon Musk just commented on one of your articles.
	You know, he started commenting on them.
	He shared them a couple of times and they started following us.
	So and then I think the onion started picking at him and making jokes about him.
	And so to troll the onion.
	He was like giving a nod to the Babylon Bee and commenting under their articles and saying, have you checked out the Babylon Bee?
	They're great.
	They're even better, you know?
	So he was kind of using us to troll the onion for a little while.
	But he's been a fan of the Bee for a little while now, and he actually sat down with us for an interview on our podcast.
	Which is unique.
	He never sits down with anybody on the right side of the aisle.
	It's hard to get him to do that, yeah.
	But yeah, he was like, yeah, if you come to Austin, you know, I'll do a sit down with you.
	So we talked with him for a couple hours and that was a wide ranging discussion, by the way, but it was fascinating because we talked some about speech.
	We talked about wokeness.
	You know, he described wokeness, um, as being divisive and exclusionary and hateful, uh, and how it's like an excuse for people to be mean and cruel, well armored and false virtue, which I thought was a great way of putting it.
	He turned to us and he asked us, he's like, well, what do you guys think about it?
	And I'm like, Can't beat that.
	That was a pretty good way of putting it.
	He cares a lot about the mind virus of wokeness, like he was just describing, and the ability of others to push back on it and debate this stuff.
	Like, you should be able to have these debates.
	We shouldn't have one side that just wins by default because everybody on the other side has been silenced, suppressed, throttled, suspended.
	So yeah, he refers to himself as a free speech absolutist, and he thought it was pretty outrageous when the bee was locked out of our account.
	So, you know, we were hoping for a little while there that something was gonna happen.
	Maybe it still will.
	I don't know if he's gonna be forced to go through with the deal.
	It'll be interesting to see how that all plays out.
	I'm not sure.
	Yeah, I think it's gonna be difficult to see him having to be spending $45 billion on a company that's market cap is not even remotely close to that.
	I mean, man, the multiples, I could go all day on this.
	The multiples for that company right now are 160 times, their P.E. ratio is 160, which is just, I'm sorry.
	Yeah.
	That bleep bloony, but in any case, the other person who- He said it wasn't about money, though.
	That's the thing.
	Right.
	For him, it was not a financial deal, where he's like, I think Twitter's a great investment.
	I don't think he was thinking of it in those terms.
	He's thinking of it in terms of there's a problem here.
	No one's dealing with it.
	Congress isn't dealing with it.
	Courts aren't dealing with it.
	The public square, if it exists today, is digital, right?
	He calls it the town square, the digital town square.
	That's what he thinks of Twitter as being, Facebook as being, like these big tech platforms are in fact the town square of the modern age.
	So if free speech doesn't exist there, then it doesn't exist anymore.
	So what do we do about that?
	And he's just thinking in terms of, well, I have the resources to do something about it, so maybe I should step in and do something about it.
	I applaud him for that.
	No, for sure.
	I mean, it's been fascinating to watch as he turned from a person who was the great hope for humanity into a cartoon villain almost overnight.
	And it had to do with the fact that he decided to fight back against wokeness and that he basically suggested that merit ought to be rewarded and that we shouldn't decide based on equity concerns, left-wing equity concerns, how to construct companies or how to do science.
	It's been amazing to watch the morphing of him in the public view according to the media.
	Again, like three years ago, Elon Musk was the guy who was going to take us to Mars and he was going to make all of our cars electric.
	He was gonna be- He's fighting climate change.
	Exactly, he's gonna create a tunnel in the San Fernando Valley to the city, like the whole thing.
	And now, of course, all he's known for is being an evil Twitter troll who goes on yachts and talks with Seth Dillon.
	It's pretty amazing to watch that flip.
	Yeah, he's now considered a far-right extremist just because he's not far left.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Which is just, you know, Joe Rogan's in the same boat.
	Yeah, I was about to ask about Joe.
	So, obviously, I'm pretty friendly with Joe.
	I've been friends with Joe for a while.
	So, you were just on his show pretty recently, and it really blew up.
	There are a few issues that you guys got into that were really fascinating.
	So, first of all, it is fascinating to see the dynamic that the left has about Joe, because Joe is clearly not a right-winger.
	I mean, I keep saying this over and over and over.
	Joe and I agree on maybe 35% of things politically.
	We both are very much in favor of free speech.
	Both of us dislike wokeness.
	He likes guns.
	Yeah, exactly.
	He likes guns.
	He works it out.
	And there the similarities kind of end because when you get to, you know, kind of social values or when you get to fiscal values, I mean, he endorsed Bernie Sanders.
	When he gets to that sort of stuff, there's just wide divergence.
	But because Joe is not hard left, he's now been characterized as kind of one of us.
	That's the way that the political narrative works these days.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	He doesn't like that, by the way.
	I toasted him when I sat down, I said to my favorite far-right extremist.
	He's like, I've never even voted Republican.
	Like, not once.
	So, yeah, it's unfair, those characterizations.
	And, you know, I think he cares about that maybe a little more than he should.
	Because he wants to try to find ways, when you're having discussions with me, he has to try to find ways to disagree with you.
	I did feel like maybe that was happening in R&D, maybe not, but that he was looking for an opportunity to disagree with me, because if he agrees with Seth Dillon on too many things, then, you know, Then obviously, he's too right-wing, right?
	So he's got to have an issue to disagree with me on.
	And in our interview, the main thing that came up that we butted heads on, I think for the most part we agreed on a lot, because we were really focused on free speech and censorship.
	We were talking about what you and I were just talking about, the Twitter deal and deleting the tweet and Elon Musk.
	And, you know, he's going to come down on the side of, you should be able to make these jokes, you should be able to have free speech.
	But we got on the subject of abortion somehow, and I don't remember, I'd have to go back and watch, I don't remember exactly how it started, who brought it up, me or him, but that was where we kind of butted heads.
	Yeah, and that was the sort of situation that went viral, and I thought it was a great example of how media coverage diverges, because everybody who's on our side of the aisle, everybody who's pro-life, was like, this is a great exchange for Seth.
	Like Seth did a really good job of explaining pro-life position.
	He didn't back down.
	He didn't get shy when he was asked about the edge issues.
	Because you know, the pro-choice side, they like to argue the edge issues as opposed to arguing the 99% of actual abortions, which are elective in nature.
	Instead, they like to argue rape or incest or life of the woman.
	They like to argue all those edge cases.
	And you really didn't back down on, for example, rape and incest.
	And so people on the right were like, this is great.
	And then the way that was portrayed in the left-wing media is look at this extremist Seth Dillon and how Joe Rogan really would shed it in.
	And that really wasn't what the conversation was.
	You're right, though.
	It's the emotional argument.
	He tried to bring in the most emotional case he could think of.
	And he has a daughter who's a teenager, and brought his daughter up as an example of, if my daughter were to get raped and get pregnant, do you think you have the right to tell her that she's got to keep that baby?
	And, you know, I think it's very disingenuous if people on the left are going to use those examples as their argument for why abortion should just be available on demand.
	Because what percentage of pregnancies happen in those circumstances?
	We have a 14-year-old who's been raped.
	It's a very, very small percentage of pregnancies.
	So even if you have somebody, let's say for example, I had conceded the point and said, okay, Joe, you know, she should be allowed in that case to get an abortion.
	Then we have to have, now let's have a conversation about all the other abortions.
	Now what about those?
	It's not rape.
	It was consensual sex.
	You know, they didn't use any kind of contraceptive.
	And so you have a baby and you're not ready to have a baby.
	Is that okay?
	If it's not okay then, what is your argument gonna be in those cases?
	And of course, they usually end up going off into something about some kind of self-defense argument.
	That it's gonna be a financial burden.
	Or it's gonna, I have bodily autonomy and I don't choose to give up my bodily autonomy.
	It's a threat to my bodily autonomy.
	So it's always like this, I have to defend myself against this thing that's coming into my area and it's gonna mess up my whole life.
	And so, then you're on much shakier ground when you're trying to make that case, because do you really have the right to use lethal force against a threat of that nature?
	You know, it's not a threat of imminent death or great bodily harm.
	It's just a baby, you know?
	A baby, not a bomb.
	Who happens to be yours, by the way.
	Who happens to be yours, genetically yours, you know?
	So, they're on much shakier ground there.
	That's why they prefer those edge issues.
	They have such emotional weight to them.
	So I think it's important that when we engage in those conversations that we not give an inch and we say, you know, it is an emotional argument, but you can make a very dispassionate non-emotional response.
	Like I did.
	I just laid out a syllogism for him and just told him, you know, if it's wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human life, then it's wrong all the time.
	Right, and I think that that's what took a lot of folks aback, both on the right and the left.
	Number one, you're very clear about it, so for the right, that's unusual.
	And on the left, that's never an argument that they actually confront.
	It is fascinating when you argue with people about abortion on the left, how they just refuse to see that, like the actual personal interest of the child as even a factor in the consideration.
	Because once you take that into consideration, it completely shifts the math.
	So instead it's just like this thing does not exist and we're gonna pretend it doesn't exist and then we're gonna talk about bodily autonomy in the same way that you would about taking a vaccine.
	Or we're gonna talk about the burden on you as though we're talking about whether to take a job or not.
	As soon as you eliminate one of the interests in the conversation, the conversation becomes incredibly simple from the pro-choice side.
	And so for you to sort of say that, I think a lot of folks on the right were obviously very excited about that.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And you know, there's other contexts too where you can really draw out how insane the reasoning is.
	And this didn't come up in my discussion with Joe Rogan, but it's come up since then.
	I've got people in my DMs sending me messages saying, you know, well if you're against the death penalty, I mean if you're for the death penalty, You know, they try to bring the death penalty for criminals into the conversation about abortion and try to say that, you know, you can't be against one and for the other, you know, like you've got to be like it.
	That's just totally erroneous.
	The death penalty is for people who are like convicted of murder, you know, like some egregious crime.
	They're like, they're guilty, you know, and a baby is innocent.
	They haven't committed any crime.
	And so to suggest that for some reason they're against the death penalty before abortion, they have compassion inverted, right?
	Like we should reserve compassion for people who are innocent, not people who are guilty.
	And yet that's what exactly what they do.
	You know, they flip it on its head and they're like, Oh, well, we should let violent criminals off the hook, but babies should be met with lethal force.
	Um, you know, those are just, those are just wild arguments.
	So anytime you confront those types of arguments with like a reasonable response, rather than an emotional response.
	You know, I think it carries a lot of weight.
	So in a second, I'm gonna ask you about the typical left-wing response to this sort of stuff, which is, well, you must be saying this because you're religious, right?
	That's really the next move.
	We'll get to that in just a second.
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	Okay, so we're talking pro-life issues here, and one of the things that I find happens a lot when I debate these issues is you'll make a bunch of dispassionate, non-religious arguments, and then somebody will come back and say, well, this is just because you believe in the Bible.
	Yeah.
	Did I even cite the Bible?
	Have I mentioned God anywhere in this conversation?
	But it is incredible how there's this sort of emotivism that goes on where when people start to lose the argument, they immediately ascribe a motivation to you.
	You hate women.
	You must be doing this because you're a Bible thumper.
	It can never be just Maybe the argument is convincing on its own.
	Maybe there's an actual natural law argument in favor of preserving the lives of the unborn, for example.
	Yeah.
	And I did mention that, you know, uh, there are a lot of atheists who are pro-life.
	Um, the argument that I gave, I laid out a syllogism for him.
	It didn't cite a Bible verse, you know, it just, it is wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human.
	So, uh, that's not, that's not, I think we all agree on that.
	You don't have to believe in the Bible to believe that that premise and that argument is true.
	It is, you know, to suggest that this is a religious argument when we're talking about, you know, when does life begin?
	That's a scientific question.
	You can answer that question by looking at a biology textbook, not your Bible, right?
	And that's what I was really challenging him on was when he was saying, look, you know, so are you saying that when, when fertilization happens, you know, in, in this, you have this like developing life form that at that precise moment, some kind of magic happens, some kind of miracle happens where, where, you know, the life suddenly becomes valuable.
	Yes, absolutely.
	That's, that's the place where, where you have a distinct new life coming into existence.
	Otherwise you have some arbitrary place along the line in this, in this new humans development where you're suggesting that they suddenly become valuable.
	That's more of a religious conviction than anything else.
	That's much more of a faith belief that I can just pinpoint a time on this chart, you know, where it becomes valuable based on what.
	And if you go back to where life begins, you're using a scientific argument as well.
	You know, obviously there's a moral reasoning there.
	It's a human life and you're ascribing value to it.
	But that's the place where it makes sense.
	It actually makes rational good sense to say that this is a new life and that this is where the value comes into play.
	It's not some arbitrary thing that you're just picking out of nowhere.
	So one of the things that's been kind of fascinating is in the aftermath of the overruling of Roe v. Wade, so long as we're on this topic, there's been a lot of argument inside sort of conservative circles over how Republican politicians ought to deal with the issue of abortion because I would say, you know, roughly speaking, 20% of Americans are in the hardcore pro-life camp.
	Maybe 10 to 15% of Americans are in the hardcore pro-choice, up till birth, three months after birth, kill it, do whatever you want, you know, camp.
	And then everybody else is sort of in between to varying degrees.
	It seems like if there were a consensus, it would be somewhere in the 10 to 12 week range is where the American consensus seems to be.
	A lot of Republican politicians You know, who overtly say that they are pro-life, then may back off of that in the public square.
	And this has driven a lot of ire from the pro-life side.
	I get it on a sort of passion level, but I think it also mistakes what the job of a politician is to do, which is get as much as you can.
	Meaning, you know, if you never win an election, you're not implementing anything in the first place.
	And so the idea of saying, I'm pro-life, the bill that I propose to put forward is, for example, at 12 weeks.
	And then we're going to get people used to that.
	Then we move to 10 weeks.
	Then we move to eight weeks.
	To me, as a tactical matter, that may be a better tactic than simply coming out and saying we're going to ban it right away, we're going to ban all of them if that's bound to lose.
	What do you make of that?
	Well, I would agree with you.
	I mean, well, if, if whatever you're proposing is going to result in fewer elective abortions than the previous laws, then that's an advance.
	It's, you know, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're moving to protect at least some of the life that you want to protect, which I think is better than failing to protect any of it.
	Um, so certainly, certainly better than nothing.
	And then, like you said, you know, you can kind of, Move from there, you know, and get more restrictive and preserving life down the road when it's more appropriate, when it's more popular.
	You have to pick your battles, right?
	I think it's better to accomplish something than not accomplish anything at all.
	So if you go too hard and you just go straight for the band, you've got to have a band, no exceptions, no anything.
	I totally understand.
	I would argue for that.
	I think that you should argue for that, but I agree with you that something is better than nothing, for sure.
	So to go back to the comedy for a second, as I was saying before, it's very fascinating how the fact that you guys are funny has opened all of these doors to people who disagree on these sorts of issues, and it's actually allowed for conversation on these sorts of issues, because there's been a vast gap that's emerged in American life where people literally refuse to appear on the same camera with people who are of another political ilk.
	I'd say that it used to be a lot easier on this show to book people who were of the opposing political viewpoint than it is right now.
	Now it's very difficult.
	People are so scared of even being in the same room that if, as it turns out, you are in the same room as somebody who disagrees with you, they may actually try to generate a boycott against your company because of your essence, because your very presence, as it turns out, in the podcast movement.
	You're dangerous.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Massively dangerous, super scary, like a weird sort of shadowy Presence lurking in the HVAC system.
	But you've been able to open a lot of these doors through comedy, and it feels like that's where the left is losing.
	You mentioned Dave Chappelle, who's clearly not a right winger.
	You mentioned people like Louis C.K., who's clearly not a right winger.
	There are a lot of people out there who are suddenly having conversations because the left has gotten so censorious and so terrible that suddenly this lane has been opened up.
	Yeah, I think comedians...
	Comedians have a unique way of approaching the issues where it can be, if not necessarily unifying, I think unifying is the wrong word, but humor and comedy can be very disarming.
	And I think that there are people on the other side of the aisle who you can slip a joke through.
	You know, I love the way GK Chesterton put it.
	He said humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle.
	I like that.
	I think it's true.
	I think that sometimes it can kind of slip past your defenses and you can end up dealing with an issue that might be really upsetting and cause a lot of strife and division if you talk about it seriously.
	But with humor, you can approach it from a different angle and it's maybe not quite as upsetting.
	I think it's part of the reason why, you know, you can get across the aisle with humor easier than you can with other things.
	And we have had, you know, we've had examples of people.
	We did a joke about how a motorcyclist identified as a bicyclist and set a world record.
	And it's just a silly identifies as joke, you know?
	We do a lot of those.
	In fact, we're often criticized for only having one joke because we've made jokes like that so many times.
	But it's a joke that bears repeating, right?
	But somebody actually reached out, a couple people did.
	We got emails from people who said, you know, like, this actually helped me see this.
	Issue like as it is like it's unfair. This isn't right that we have biological males and women's sports and And your article kind of as silly as it was help me see that we get feedback like that sometimes I think that's you know I think it's one of the I think it's one of the strengths of comedy is that is that it?
	You know somebody might be willing to share that article, but they're not gonna just say Males shouldn't be in women's sports But they might share that article, and that article might actually make a point that gets through.
	So, one of the taboos that you've touched on a bunch, obviously, is the trans issue, but there are a bunch of other taboos from the left that you guys have been pretty fearless in securing.
	What do you see as the sort of big taboos that are out there that you've spent a lot of time and effort sort of going after?
	Oh, uh, I don't know.
	I mean, the gender thing is such a big one.
	Some of these things are hard to joke about.
	We were talking about abortion a minute ago.
	Like abortion's hard to joke about.
	It's very hard.
	Like yeah, yeah, good luck sitting down and writing a funny abortion joke.
	I mean, it's just not a funny topic.
	We have managed to, I mean, there's been a couple of times, we did one about how, you know, Planned Parenthood came to Bill Cosby's defense saying that sexual assault was only 3% of what he did.
	And like, you can do that where you're like, Planned Parenthood is the target, you know?
	And they're trying to suggest that they only, you know, it's only 3% of their business, this abortion stuff, so it's not a big deal.
	Well, what if Bill Cosby made that claim, you know?
	So jokes like that can work, but it's, those are tough topics.
	Um, I think right now it's anything related to wokeness.
	Anything related to wokeness.
	That is the, To use Musk's phrase again, the mind virus that's like taking over like crazy.
	It's got us thinking that it's like that we can have three-year-olds who are transgender, you know?
	And that they need to go down this path of taking these hormones, puberty blockers, chemical castration, and going through these surgeries, gender-affirming surgeries.
	These ideas are so toxic.
	They're so crazy.
	The critical race theory stuff that's getting into the schools, all that stuff.
	Everything, basically everything that you see on libs of TikTok, those are the things that Babylon Bee is really, you know, primarily focused on skewering the most because those are the most outrageous things that are having the worst impact on society, I think.
	So in a second, I want to ask you about, you know, whether we've actually moved beyond the point of satire and parody because the left is so far around the bend that you basically Only have to do what Libs of TikTok does, but from a comedic standpoint, you just repeat the things back that they are saying, and they act as parody.
	I'll ask you about that in just one second.
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	Okay, so let's talk about the fact that as politics gets more radical and insane, it may become harder to write jokes, because how do you actually write jokes that are sort of better than what's happening right now?
	You can't write something funnier than what Democrats are already doing.
	Like, I mean, look at a Kamala Harris speech.
	You know, just read her speech verbatim and it looks like something that came from like a Simpsons episode or something, right?
	You know, her just going on and on.
	It's the predictive tech mix.
	Yeah.
	I mean, like if you're entering into Google and then whatever is the next word is the thing that she says.
	It actually works pretty well.
	Exactly.
	Biden the same way, you know, like all the gaffes and then the shaking hands with the air and it's just having the notes, note cards with very large font saying sit in your chair and, you know, like remember your name.
	Like this kind of stuff is so out there, you could never imagine that it would be real.
	And so I do think, you know, I complain all the time, like not that we have a hard job, we have a great job.
	Making jokes on the internet is fun, and it's, you know, there's tougher jobs out there.
	But in an environment where the world is so insane, the project of satire is to exaggerate the truth.
	You've gotta go a step beyond the truth.
	You've gotta be more outrageous than whatever's happening in the real world.
	And so that is challenging, because we'll do it successfully.
	We'll make a joke, we'll make a joke like, like Trump claims to have done more for Christianity than Jesus himself, right?
	We'll make that joke.
	And it's funny, and it seems like something Trump would say.
	And then three days later, he actually said, well, in this case, it was like two years, I think, before he actually said it.
	But that one, I love that one because the left shared it like crazy, Snopes fact-checked it, and then two years later, he went on a radio show and said that he's done more for Christianity and religion in general than any other person in history.
	And so he actually took a step further than the original joke.
	So yeah, it's just a matter of time.
	You know, even silly jokes like we did one about how amid coronavirus, pants sales plummet as everyone working from home, you know, and it's a guy sitting in his computer in his boxers, you know, like working.
	He's got a nice shirt on, but he's in his boxers.
	And it's just, you know, it was silly.
	It was a dumb joke, like, you know, nobody sees you from the waist down when you're working at your computer unless you're Jeffrey Toobin over at CNN.
	And so the next day, literally the next day, Yahoo Finance does a story saying that pants sales are down at Walmart, but tops are up.
	So more people are buying shirts, less people are buying pants.
	It's a real headline one day later.
	Like, it's just, and that's a silly example, you know, because that was probably just coincidence that we happened to nail that one.
	We have a spreadsheet.
	We're tracking them.
	We got 76 of these jokes that we've made that have come true.
	And so trying to stay a step ahead of reality, it actually is challenging.
	And it's really sad.
	Like we are, we're, we're criticized often for having jokes that are too believable.
	You're, you know, it's like, well, this is the problem.
	It amounts to misinformation because people are believing that your jokes are true.
	It's like, well, whose fault is that?
	Is it the satirist who's trying to like stay a step ahead of the truth?
	Or is it reality for bumping up against satire?
	I think it's reality's fault.
	I mean, that brings us to the fact-checking of it.
	So you have famously been fact-checked for telling jokes, which is an amazing thing.
	First of all, the actual joke is the fact-checkers, because they are terrible at their jobs.
	They are.
	It is astonishing how bad they are at their jobs, especially because now the basic formula is, if you say something true about a Democrat, it's missing context.
	And if you say something false about a Republican, it is true.
	That's the basic way that it works.
	But you guys are overtly a comedy site.
	And how many times have you been fact-checked?
	You've been fact-checked by Snopes.
	Dozens.
	I don't know.
	I mean, it's totally crazy.
	And then they'll ding you.
	I mean, it's not just that they fact check you.
	It's then the social media companies use these in the same way they would use it to ding Daily Wire.
	They use it to ding your ability to reach people on things like Facebook.
	Well, you've been fact checked false four times.
	Yes, you're a satire site.
	How's that even applicable?
	No, we're an unreliable news source now because we've been fact-checked so many times.
	I would say, you know what, we're more reliable than a lot of actual news sources.
	Look how many of our jokes came true.
	They should be tracking those and using those as like the examples to counterbalance the fact-checks that were rated false.
	It's just like some of the jokes that have been rated false are so dumb.
	It's like Ninth Circuit Court overturns the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
	Like jokes like that.
	USA Today cited 15 sources to refute that joke.
	And Facebook paid for it.
	You go down to the bottom and it says this was paid for by grants from Facebook.
	So it's like Facebook pays people to sit there and read dumb jokes like that.
	You can't overturn somebody's death.
	That's not a thing.
	And they rate it false.
	They don't read it satire.
	They read it false and then they ding us and say, yeah, you're spreading false information on this platform.
	It's really, you know, you see it more honestly in some of the reporting that's been done.
	You read like the New York Times and they did like a write up on us.
	One of their technology reporters calls a far-right misinformation site that sometimes traffics in misinformation under the guise of satire.
	So they're ascribing these motives to us, you know, like we're pretending to be satirists so that we can write these really believable, not true stories that are dangerous and harmful and get them to go viral and spread everywhere so that our false narratives prevail and get out into the open.
	We actually got a retraction from them for that because we threatened to sue them if they didn't stop Slandering us like that. You know, it's these smears are just stupid. But yeah, the fact checks they're not honest And the reason they're fact-checking us, you know, I don't think it's that I don't think that the Babylon B is like in anybody's crosshairs where it's like they're singling us out for you know The B needs to be taken down or something like that It's, it's that there's, they're really threatened by the truth.
	Honestly, it's just, it's the joke about Rachel Levine.
	There was truth to that joke and they don't want anybody saying the truth.
	So it just happened to be us.
	We were the convenient target for, you know, it wasn't like they singled out the Babylon Bee.
	Anybody can say that stuff on there and they'll get taken down.
	Um, so, you know, with the fact checking, it's a similar thing.
	It's like our jokes are inconvenient for the left because there's so much truth to them.
	The point that they're making is effective.
	Um, and so, you know, they can't handle, they can't handle seeing that prevail.
	But like the examples though, like CNN purchasing an industrial sized washing machine to spin the news in, you know, before publishing it, like these jokes are so dumb and they're getting rated false.
	It's like, Come on.
	And as I said before, it's almost impossible to surpass the fakeness of many of the mainstream media outlets, and meanwhile, they're not getting, I mean, this weekend, there was two separate CNN stories about a story that didn't happen.
	There was this Duke volleyball player, black Duke volleyball player, and she claimed that she was called the N-word multiple times at a game with BYU, at a match with BYU.
	Never happened.
	And it's never happened, right?
	There's no evidence of it.
	They've gone through every piece of tape.
	They took out the announcer's audio at the game so that they could just listen to the crowd noise to see if they could identify anything.
	This woman had suggested that every time she served, that she was being hit with the N-word, and they couldn't find a single instance of any of that happening.
	There were two separate segments on CNN talking about how terrible it was that this thing, I guess, didn't happen.
	And it's amazing.
	How could people be so tolerant of a thing that didn't happen?
	They're in search of things that didn't happen to get angry about.
	And then meanwhile, over at the New York Times, there'll be an entire article about how a white jogger gets murdered by a black guy.
	But we do not talk about race under any circumstances.
	It's completely irrelevant here.
	Okay, fine.
	I mean, you want to say it's irrelevant there?
	That's totally fine.
	But this is where it's relevant in a case where it didn't happen?
	Well, the demand for hate always exceeds the supply with them, right?
	So they're always looking for it.
	Any story that they can latch on to and try to get some mileage out of in promoting a narrative that causes more hatred and division, they'll do that.
	And if it ever gets corrected, the truth ever comes to light, then it's like, shh, don't talk about that.
	We want that narrative to stay out there.
	Um, what just happened recently with Libs of TikTok was so egregious where, you know, this, the report on hospitals that we're doing where we're looking at these, you know, these gender affirming practices that they're, that they're doing on healthy minors and exposing this stuff.
	It's like, where's the concern for what's actually happening at these hospitals?
	The hospital can put out a press release and say, no, we're not doing this, but we have their staffers on recording saying they do.
	Like, that's something to dig into.
	Let's figure out if it's actually happening.
	But there's no questions that are being asked.
	They're just, the media's upset that we talked about it in the first place because that was dangerous, you know?
	This is the broader thing that drives me up an absolute wall because, you know, I comment on politics for a living.
	And so, when the left will promote a person or an idea, and then they'll say, it's really important, it's super important that you notice this idea, and then you notice the idea.
	And they say, what are you even noticing it for?
	Why are you even paying attention to this thing?
	It's the biggest mind grew in the world.
	It's terrible.
	I mean, a couple weeks ago, they put AOC on the cover of GQ.
	They're making her a famous person.
	It's indistinguishable from a cover of Jennifer Lawrence at Vogue or Meghan Markle at the Cottage.
	Indistinguishable.
	But you're obsessed with her if you notice it.
	Do not notice it.
	Absolutely you are 100% not allowed to notice it.
	Why do you even care?
	Why do you even care?
	Why are you even paying attention?
	It's like, well, because you're flashing a billboard outside my window at three o'clock in the morning with neon lights, that's why I'm paying attention.
	It's not my fault that you guys are doing that.
	But that's the game that they really love to play.
	And they play that game with you guys a lot, where you make a joke about a thing like, well, why are you even noticing it?
	You shouldn't be noticing it.
	That's bad that you're noticing it.
	And it's good that it's happening.
	Right.
	It's always, it's not happening, but it's good that it's happening, and it's bad that you're noticing that it's happening.
	Yeah, it's happening all over the place.
	And what made this story, going back to the hospitals thing, so crazy was that We did have evidence, you know, directly from the hospitals, their own website, these recordings.
	And then I put up, you know, this bomb threat comes into one of these hospitals.
	It comes into Boston Children's Hospital, and they're trying to blame lives of TikTok for this bomb threat.
	I'm like, well, for one thing, our followers are concerned about children.
	That's why we're worked up about this.
	Like Libs of TikTok is objecting to mistreatment of children.
	We're not going to be inciting violence on a children's hospital or calling for that.
	And our followers aren't going to do that either.
	This is probably a leftist who's like, you know, these hoax loving leftists who, who, who want these things to be happening so that they can try to blame the right for whatever they want to stick them with, you know?
	So, I put out a reward.
	A reward.
	$20,000 cash reward for information leading to the arrest of the person who called in that threat.
	And guess how much the media covered it?
	Not at all.
	Not at all.
	Fox?
	Maybe?
	Like Fox, PJ Media, Daily Wire?
	Nobody else is covering that story.
	Nobody else wants to.
	You know, Taylor Lorenz wrote a piece at the Washington Post, a hit piece on Lives of TikTok, after that reward was out there and didn't even mention it.
	You know?
	So, the dishonesty that's there in just trying to cover up anything that is inconvenient while promoting whatever is convenient, regardless of the truth, but we're the ones spreading misinformation?
	It's just insane to me.
	The fact that they're using misinformation to smear us as being sources of information is just egregious, and it is a mind screw, as you put it, and it needs to be pushed back on.
	I mean, to be fair to Taylor Lorenz, it's possible that due to her advanced age, she couldn't properly see or actually hear what was happening in the news, and so maybe she just missed it.
	That's a possibility.
	She's going to talk about this too.
	Why are they so obsessed with me?
	Why are they obsessed with me?
	It's all the same dumb game over and over.
	So we've talked about some of the things you're not allowed to talk about on the left.
	But one of the things that's great about the Babylon Bee is that you'll also make fun of stuff on the right.
	So you guys have hit me.
	There have been a bunch of headlines making fun of me.
	They're all really funny.
	I don't care.
	In fact, I wrote those. I appreciate that.
	You're just putting that out there.
	Like, that's, they're funny.
	Like, that's funny stuff.
	But there are things on the right that you're also not allowed to say.
	The Babylon Bee is pretty fearless in saying, kind of crossing taboo lines on the right.
	What do you think right now are sort of the big taboo lines on the right that you're not supposed to talk about?
	Well, things that we're not supposed to criticize.
	I mean, it all depends on who your audience is.
	There's certain segments of our audience that consider Trump off-limits.
	You can't make fun of Trump.
	He's the one true president and king and must reign forever.
	Some of these issues, like when you get into things like COVID policy, election denial, you know, things like that.
	I just think anybody who's kind of on the, maybe the, not necessarily the fringes, but like the people who are promoting the wildest ideas on either the right or the left.
	They all deserve to be mocked.
	So we don't hold back.
	If there's somebody on the right who has a bad or a silly idea, or is hypocritical, we're happy to go after them.
	And sometimes it's just in good fun, and sometimes it's because it really does need to be dealt with.
	And so we're happy to do that.
	I mean, everybody's deserving of it.
	Cause we're all at some point, as you know, like passengers on the ship of fools at some point, we all deserve the mockery.
	So, um, we try not to hold back and, uh, and avoid certain issues that are going to upset people on our side of the aisle.
	Um, because.
	The self-examination I think is healthy, you know, like taking, taking your things, whatever your stances are, whatever your beliefs are, whatever your side is really pushing for and examining it and holding it up to see, like, does it really like hold water?
	Does it really make sense?
	Is it really good?
	I think it's a healthy exercise and just being able to laugh ourselves is a healthy exercise.
	You know this idea that the idea that like we We take ourselves so seriously that a joke at our expense is so hurtful and damaging that, you know, we should shut up that person forever.
	They should never be allowed to talk because they made a joke at my expense.
	We take ourselves so seriously.
	I think if we had, if mockery, like I said before, I don't think we're, we've improved morally because we do less mocking.
	Um, you know, we've, we've now gotten a situation where people, if you use the wrong pronouns to like address them, they break down crying on Tik TOK and like, And, like, have a nervous breakdown and need to see a therapist because they were, you know, the wrong pronoun was used in a conversation.
	Like, the sensitivity that's there, the narcissism that's there, like, these are things that, and I'm not calling for bullying.
	I'm not saying that people need to be bullied.
	I'm just saying, like, like the fact that that we're so hypersensitive and unwilling to even laugh at ourselves and take a second look at some of these ideas is not a healthy place to be in.
	I mean, it's something Jonathan Haidt has talked about, is when you create an oversensitive society where there's a premium placed on being offended, where you get rewarded for being offended, what you're actually doing is creating mental illness among people.
	Right.
	Because one of the key methods that you use to, for example, defeat depression, if you're trying to have therapy, is cognitive behavioral therapy, which is where you have a chain of thoughts and it leads to a depressive outcome.
	And so the therapist is supposed to sit there and say, well, is that really reasonable?
	Should you really go all the way there?
	Right, exactly.
	Is that feeling justified?
	And that's a question you're never allowed to ask in today's politics.
	Is that feeling justified?
	You have to say, no, no, no.
	Every feeling is justified.
	Every feeling is legitimate and just—well, maybe not.
	Maybe that feeling is coming from a super dumb place, and you should really reconsider whether you ought to be having that feeling in the first place.
	And that's really what comedy is supposed to do at its best, is to say, you know, you're being very offended about a thing that you really shouldn't be very offended by.
	But again, I think that's why there's so many people who Refuse to even engage with the business of comedy because to give up the possibility of being offended, even if it makes you a better person, is to give up your power in this society.
	It's not good to do what you do when someone tells a joke about you or what I do when someone tells a joke about me, which is laugh.
	You're not supposed to do that.
	You're supposed to immediately come back with, how could you say that?
	How dare you?
	You're attacking me.
	I can't sleep at night.
	It's just terrible.
	And I'll say how terrible it is and how you're trying to stifle me on the cover of GQ.
	And that's the most deserving thing of mockery now, is that kind of behavior.
	Comedy's supposed to be offensive.
	That's really the whole point.
	Like, every joke that's made from a stand-up comedian stage has someone that's the butt of the joke.
	Something is the butt of the joke.
	Like, that's what makes it funny.
	Like, it's the job of the comedian to be... You're supposed to squirm a little bit, right?
	And be a little uneasy.
	But with a healthy understanding that We're not perfect.
	We all have our things.
	And some of these stereotypes that exist are in fact rooted in reality and they're funny.
	It's okay to laugh at them.
	Like we all have those things, whatever community we belong to, we have those things.
	Um, and, and the idea that there are certain communities or certain people groups that should never be joked about and others who you can not just joke about them, but you can call for violence against them or hate them and, and smear them with terrible attacks and names.
	That only reinforces in practice inequality.
	You should be able to joke about people indiscriminately.
	That's the way of treating them equally.
	It's not just that we should be able to joke about people indiscriminately.
	The idea that the Babylon Bee, for example, punches down when it makes these jokes, and you know, for people who aren't familiar with that terminology, you know, the punching down thing in comedy is like, you're making fun of people who have less power and privilege than you, right?
	You're making fun of people who are supposedly marginalized and oppressed, and that's a no-no.
	You're not supposed to do that.
	But you've got to, in order to, in order to think as a comedian to avoid making fun of people like that, you have to think of them as being less powerful and privileged and more marginalized than you.
	You have to get in, you have to get into this mindset that says, you know what?
	I shouldn't joke about those people.
	They're beneath me.
	And it's just so condescending and terrible to have thought, like, you should only be thinking, like, is this joke funny?
	You know, is it funny?
	There's something that occurs to me in the moment.
	That is that, and now I'm going to say something that is likely to get us both canceled.
	And that is that the, I wonder if as society moves away from sort of traditional masculinity in certain ways, that comedy just inevitably declines.
	And the reason that I say that is not because women can't be funny.
	There are some very funny women.
	But because the way that men tend to interact, like when you're with your friends at a ballgame or something, half of your conversation is just making fun of each other.
	After conversation is just ribbing the hell out of each other and ripping on people and and telling jokes about each other and When women go out to brunch with each other, that's not really what they're at least not in my personal experience That's how my wife interacts with her friends. They don't sit around like ripping on each other. That's what dudes do, right?
	When you're at a poker game, you just rip on each other and make fun of how dumb you all are.
	And it's a sign of masculinity to be able to brush that off.
	If you're a really offended guy with a bunch of other guys, everybody looks at you like, what the hell?
	What's wrong with you?
	You don't go cry in the bathroom.
	Right, exactly.
	And so I wonder if, as a society, we've decided that masculinity itself is something that's bad.
	Masculinity is toxic and dangerous.
	We have to tell fewer jokes.
	Jokes are too aggressive.
	Jokes are nasty.
	Jokes are mean.
	And so we really need to kind of wipe that, we need to wipe that away a little bit.
	I couldn't disagree more.
	I think, you know, I think the way, the way that I put it, and I think it's an important point that people need to keep in the front of their minds is that the absurd has only become sacred because it hasn't been sufficiently mocked.
	There's so much that's, that's mockable, including the idea, by the way, that masculinity is a bad thing.
	That's a mockable idea.
	There's a lot of good that comes from toxic masculinity.
	Men need to become more like women.
	What even is a woman, Ben?
	What is a woman?
	These ideas are so mockable.
	We have to attack them.
	Ridicule them really honestly, it's it's it's a moral good to do that Because otherwise they're gonna they're gonna flourish they're gonna become pervasive They're gonna actually get picked up and believed by you know kids are so susceptible to these things you know young people are so susceptible to these ideas because they're they don't have like a They haven't figured out their worldview.
	Like they don't have a solid foundation under them, like theologically and philosophically to be able to ward off bad ideas.
	And so they can soak up these things that don't make any sense and think that they're reasonable.
	But if we were making fun of them more, I don't think that they would be so susceptible to them.
	I think they would see them for what they are, which is insane and stupid and even funny sometimes.
	And then they won't take them so seriously.
	And we'd all be better off for that, I think, ultimately.
	There's a point you talked about a little bit earlier that I want to get back to for a second, and that is that if you want to do good humor, you actually have to target something that's true about the other side or whoever you're making a joke about.
	You can't target something that's just narratively false.
	And that occurs to me in the context of late night comedians who have just fallen completely Completely off the map in terms of comedy.
	I mean, you cannot watch Stephen Colbert's show and get from there to the idea that this is comedy.
	It's just not.
	I mean, Jimmy Fallon used to be somewhat funny.
	He is no longer funny at all.
	I remember when Stephen Colbert was funny, when he was a correspondent on Jon Stewart.
	And it feels as though the comedy is just not present anymore.
	I mean, Jimmy Kimmel is more of an MSNBC host than he is a comedian.
	And that's because he spends all day making jokes about things that are just not true.
	I mean, it's kind of amazing.
	It's the propaganda.
	It's going for the applause of affirmation rather than the laughter of amusement.
	And you see it all the time in the stand-up.
	They'll be doing their opening monologue or whatever, and the audience is clapping.
	They're not laughing, they're clapping.
	This propaganda that's being preached from the stage, and the audience is agreeing with it, and it's not actual comedy that's happening.
	It's a very strange and bizarre thing.
	And I think that the only way that they're gonna start getting laughs is if they tell jokes that are true, for one thing, that aren't rooted in a narrative, promoting a narrative, and attack the things that are actually worth attacking, mocking.
	They're training their audiences to go along with this idea, too, that these things are untouchable and they shouldn't be joked about.
	And I guarantee you that some of them have now reached the point where if they do make some of these jokes that are unacceptable, their audiences are going to walk out on them.
	Or they're going to throw something at them.
	Or they're going to walk up on stage and slap them in the face.
	There's actually physical threats of violence now against comedians for making jokes.
	That's how sensitive people are now.
	You see how Chappelle got attacked on stage?
	We saw what happened with Chris Rock getting slapped by Will Smith.
	And some of these smaller comedians, I read a story in the New York Post recently about their smaller clubs.
	These comedians are having to pay security to come with them to make sure they don't get attacked on stage.
	They can't afford that.
	You know, like they're not getting paid a lot at these smaller clubs, but they're having to pay for security to keep them safe while they tell jokes.
	It's just a wild place to be in.
	So you're either safe because you're not actually telling jokes or you're in danger because you are.
	So, in a second, I want to ask you a few final questions, starting with your favorite joke.
	I want to ask you what your favorite joke is.
	If you'd like to hear Seth Dillon's favorite joke, you have to be a DailyWire member.
	Go to dailywire.com slash sunday.
	You can click that link in the episode description.

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