Seth Dillon, CEO of the Babylon Bee, details how the New York Times falsely labeled his conservative satire site as misinformation before retracting after legal threats. He highlights instances where their jokes predicted real events, like Walmart's pandemic sales and CNN's Abraham Accords coverage, arguing the left spreads predictable narratives about marginalized groups. Dillon critiques "punching down," noting corporations wield power to deplatform critics, while describing his 25-person team's focus on quality over quantity. Promoting his book, The Babylon Bee Guide to Wokeness, he frames it as a satirical rebuttal to progressive ideology, exposing the irony of media attacks on humor that mirrors their own misinformation. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, well it's not, you know, it's a disingenuous attack.
I mean, the people at the New York Times, they've profiled us, they've interviewed us, they know that we're not some malicious organization that's like pretending to be a satire site to mislead people.
They printed, in their exact words, they said we're a far-right misinformation site that sometimes traffics in misinformation under the guise of satire.
And I just, you know, the irony is comical.
They are literally spreading misinformation about us while complaining that we're spreading misinformation.
So they're doing the very thing that they are complaining about, essentially.
But, you know, we got a retraction from them.
We fought back.
We threatened them with a lawsuit if they didn't retract it, and they did five days later.
So, you know, that kind of stuff, hopefully we're seeing an end to that.
But there are new directions that are going in with, like, trying to stifle comedians who are making jokes they don't want you to make.
Dave Chappelle is a great example of how you punch down, they call it punching down, which is making fun of protected groups, marginalized groups, they say.
I mean, for so many reasons, it's ridiculous.
Think about it.
These people, these marginalized groups, have the will and the power to punish you and deplatform you if you say something they don't like.
That doesn't sound like oppression to me.
It sounds like they're the oppressors in those situations.
Five hours after we published that, they did their own headline from that angle.
So it's predictable is the point.
They're very predictable.
The left is super predictable in what they're going to be upset about, what they're going to focus on.
So a lot of that is just being in tune with where they're going.
But the other side of it is just they are turning reality into literally a parody of itself.
Yeah.
Tucker Carlson was just talking about this the other night with this whole thing with these immigrants being handed $450,000, or at least the ideas being floated out there that they should get $450,000 for coming across the border illegally because their families were separated.
And he's like, this is so absurd.
When you read headlines like this, you have to ask yourself, is it The Onion?
Is it The Babylon Bee?
Is this really real?
And we wake up every day to those kinds of headlines and then have to exaggerate that to do satire.
Can you tell me a little bit about the company that you guys have built because I've obviously met the guys a couple times and I've done a podcast and it seems like just a good group of people that are trying to have some fun and get a point across but like how big is the company and you know all that kind of stuff.
So you've met the guys out in Southern California.
We have an office out there.
We also have an office here in Southern Florida.
That's kind of more like the corporate headquarters.
We do a lot of the business stuff here, you know, marketing, ad sales, business development, stuff like that.
And then they're handling more of the creative stuff, you know, writing these scripts for sketches and animations and doing the podcast and all of that, interviewing guests.
So the team is a little divided.
We also have people who are kind of floating around out there like as contractor writers throughout the country.
So, small team, 25 plus people.
Not all of them full-time.
So it's very small, you know.
We're like a... just super productive.
With satire, it's interesting.
You don't need to be like a news organization.
We don't have to be like Fox News, publishing a new article every two and a half minutes throughout the whole day.
We can publish five or six good pieces.
It's quality more than quantity.
People can only handle so much satire anyway, right?
But yeah, we are growing, though, as we try to get into new media and start doing things like video and animation.
From my perspective, I'm encouraged in the sense that I think that that really breeds and produces pushback.
You know, that pendulum swings, right?
you go too far on one extreme and people tend to think, okay, this has gotten insane.
And it starts to infect a lot of areas of people's lives.
It starts to affect their children and their livelihood.
And from an economic perspective, but also from an ethical perspective
and these social issues, parents with young kids are starting to become concerned
about a lot of the progressive ideology that's being shoved down their throats
and what it's doing to them.
So I think that there are gonna be wins, especially as people are emboldened.
I brought up Dave Chappelle a minute ago.
You know, if you've got people willing to say the things you're not supposed to say and make the jokes you're not supposed to make, it will embolden other people to do that.
And then you'll have those numbers increase of people who are not afraid anymore and aren't self-censoring anymore.
Because that's one of the biggest problems we have right now.
I think it's primarily, and there is a concern, the primary concern would be that we handle a hot-button issue irresponsibly, where maybe the joke that we're trying to make isn't well understood and not well received and misunderstood, so that people think we're saying something we're not saying.
Or people will assume that because of the angle we came at the joke, oh, we must be racist, or we're sexist, or whatever.
Sometimes we play into that a little bit, but you've got to be careful because on certain hot button issues, if you deliver the joke poorly, or if it's not a well enough known issue, we have to debate this all the time internally, like, do we want to make a joke about this because we know about this, we've had our ear to the ground and we've heard about this, but is it broadly known so that when we put it out there, people will understand the context?
So those are considerations we have to take into account.
But there's no malice in the hearts of the people writing these jokes where they're trying to go too far and hurt people or something like that.
If you want to know how to be woke, if you want to know how to make skin color the most important thing about everybody that you meet, buy The Guide to Wokeness.
It's going to be available on Amazon, all the major bookstores.
Obviously we'll put it on our store as well, on our website.
Kyle Mann, our editor-in-chief, and Joel Berry, our managing editor, drafted it together.
So it's awesome.
I mean, it's very timely right now with critical race theory and wokeness being a big thing.
It's on the upswing and it's being pushed everywhere.
You know, and this is why it's always so crazy that we get accused of punching down, right?
I say we're punching back, not down, because conservatives really have been on the ropes in the culture war for a very long time.
If anything, we're in the fetal position, like trying to defend ourselves from getting kicked in the head or in the gut.
So, you know, the Guide to Wokeness is just punching back a little bit and having fun with the silliness and absurdity of this progressive ideology that's being shoved down everybody's throats.