Nov. 6, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
10:04
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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(dramatic music) | |
| All right, we're back at the National Conservatism Conference. | ||
| And I have a man who is either a truth teller, a conspiracy theorist, or somewhere in between, | ||
| depending on who you listen to, Seth Dillon, the CEO of the Babylon B-6. | ||
| CEO, not founder. | ||
| Not founder. | ||
| Well, who the hell founded the thing then? | ||
| Adam Ford in 2016 founded it. | ||
| He was like a Christian comic artist online, had a little bit of a following. | ||
| And decided there needed to be a conservative satire site, because nobody was really doing that well. | ||
| So, yeah, he started it five years ago, took off like crazy. | ||
| It's pretty extraordinary what you guys have done, because you are now attacked for doing satire. | ||
| Literally, the New York Times and mainstream media go after you for jokes that you make, implying that you're actual news. | ||
| And maybe that just tells you how reality and fiction have combined. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But they print that anyway. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They have an awful lot of corporate power. | ||
| I'd have to Google the word oppressed to fully understand. | ||
| Maybe I'm not quite grasping what oppressed is. | ||
| They have all the power. | ||
| All the power. | ||
| Has that really been the secret to the Babylon Bee's success? | ||
| Is that everything is so backwards and upside down that when I read your headlines, I mean, it's become a joke unto itself. | ||
| You guys basically predict the future. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| With ridiculous headlines that come true three months later. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're not trying to. | ||
| We want it to stay a joke, believe it or not. | ||
| We don't want it to come true because if it comes true then that's depressing. | ||
| It's sad. | ||
| These things are supposed to be exaggerations of the truth. | ||
| There have literally been cases where we will publish a joke and it comes true within hours. | ||
| The same day. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Or the next day. | ||
| What are some that you've, like one or two that you guys have gotten right? | ||
| We did one about, I mean a silly one about how Sales of pants were down because people were working from home in their boxers. | ||
| And then the next day, Yahoo Finance posted about how Walmart was reporting increased sales of tops but not bottoms amid coronavirus. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Silly stuff like that. | ||
| But also stuff like there was a piece about how we were thinking during the Abraham Accords and Trump was there at the Abraham Accords. | ||
| We're thinking, how would CNN cover this monumental occasion? | ||
| What would they focus on? | ||
| And we're like, they'd probably focus on him violating COVID restrictions. | ||
| And so We made a joke about how CNN was criticizing Trump for shaking hands and not wearing a mask during the Abraham Accords. | ||
| And then five hours later, they published almost the exact same headline, word for word. | ||
| So it was almost like they plagiarized our site and got the idea from us. | ||
| But really, we're just kind of in their head. | ||
| We can know where they're going to go with it. | ||
| And so we end up predicting it. | ||
| But, you know, ideally, these jokes would come true less often, not more. | ||
| So you're saying there was something more important happening at the Abraham Accords than Donald Trump shaking someone's hand? | ||
| And not wearing a mask, yes. | ||
| Just endless ridiculousness. | ||
| But that's all CNN cared about. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So it's just insane. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We have a team, yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We need a whole crew to do that stuff. | ||
| I just did some VO for an upcoming Ghostbusters piece that I assume will be out in the next little while. | ||
| Do you sense that maybe we're starting to get some wins in the culture war? | ||
| That things really are kind of turning at some level? | ||
| Things seem to be getting crazier and crazier. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's not that we're dominated by the left. | ||
| We're just quieter than they are. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So they're really loud. | ||
| They exert a lot of power. | ||
| They exert a lot of control. | ||
| There's power on the other side that just isn't exercised because people are so afraid of speaking out. | ||
| So the more we can embolden people to do that, I think the more there will be a swing back in the other direction. | ||
| Well, naturally, I agree. | ||
| And that's why I'm doing this. | ||
| Do you ever worry that you're going to really step in it when the guys are writing a headline or something like that? | ||
| There will be one that you push as far as you can push it, but you'll have really done something That could cause a problem? | ||
| Yes, but not because... Like a legit problem? | ||
| Not because our writers are like bad people who would say something that's really regrettable. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's happened many times. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Last thing, you guys have a book. | ||
| It's the Babylon Bee Guide to Wokeness, is that right? | ||
| Guide to Wokeness, yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But yeah, it was a fun one to write. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Seth, good talking to you, and I realize I didn't ask for your gender pronouns. | ||
| Uh, I don't have any. | ||
| I don't pronounce my pronouns. | ||
| You can guess by looking at me, I think. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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