Seth Dillon, co-founder of The Babylon Bee, joins Tucker Carlson to expose how satire now mirrors reality—like their 2023 vaccine-collapse parody later confirmed and California’s 2020 electric-car mandate. Fact-checkers like Snopes initially flagged the site as misleading, yet real events outpace jokes, blurring truth and comedy. After Twitter banned The Babylon Bee for eight months over a "misgendering" joke about Rachel Levine, Dillon refused to delete it, calling it censorship. Musk’s Twitter restored them, but legal threats and platform bias persist. They mock fact-checkers for targeting satire while ignoring false claims like Biden’s border failures, arguing free speech is under siege by tech giants and media elites who police narratives—proving corporate media’s collapse left only satire as the last honest voice. [Automatically generated summary]
When was the last time you're reading the news in this country and thought to yourself, this can't be real.
This has to be a parody.
It's been more than three days.
You haven't been reading the news.
It's reached the level where it's almost impossible to tell the difference between what's reported as facts by the news media and what someone with a dark sense of humor has made up.
Well, we thought this was exactly the moment to speak to the man who makes up more news than anyone in America, Seth Dillon.
Because it turns out, and we went through quite a few examples, that the Babylon Bee's parody stories have come true in dozens, scores, nearly 100 cases.
I'm going to put three on the screen and get your reaction to them to kind of set the stage.
To announce you as America's most accurate profit.
So let's go in order here.
This is from January 2023. Here's a headline.
Experts say they don't know what thing is causing everyone to suddenly collapse, but it's definitely not that one thing.
Let's go to the news story.
Something has been killing American young people in sharply rising numbers, but it's not vaccines!
I mean, we're getting accustomed to it at this point.
But, you know, I think it's probably the most common misconception people have is that when the world goes really wild and insane and there's crazy stuff happening, that it's easy to satirize that.
It's easy to make fun of it.
It's actually the opposite.
We find that it's...
The way that I put it is, imagine if your job is to write jokes that are funnier than what Democrats are doing in real life.
I mean, you can kind of see around the corner with this, especially when you're trying to think to yourself, well, what is the next insane thing that they could come up with that they haven't already come up with?
You just throw that out there and see what sticks.
Some of these ideas are too outlandish for a joke, but they do actually happen in real life, so people don't realize they're a joke.
So you have these things.
We'll publish a joke that's clearly a satirical joke, but everybody thinks it's true, and they share it as if it's true because they're so used to seeing almost satirical headlines in the real news.
So reality is at fault for that.
It's not that our jokes are too believable.
It's that reality is too close to satire.
We get fact-checked all the time.
We've been fact-checked dozens of times.
Snopes has fact-checked us at least 20 times, 20 plus times.
They used to say that we were misleading people on purpose with these jokes because they were believable and people were sharing them as if they were true.
Again, not our fault.
I think that's the fault of reality being too close to satire.
I think, honestly, one of my favorites that got fact-checked was our joke about Trump saying that he had done more for Christianity than Jesus himself.
That was your headline.
That was the headline.
Trump, I have done more for Christianity than Jesus.
I mean, in your experience, do the fact checkers, which are, I mean, again, clearly at the very least influenced by the intel agencies, do they play any constructive role in our public conversation?
And so what they're doing with fact-checking is they're very selective.
First of all, they're super selective about what they fact-check, and then the fact-checks themselves often get the facts wrong on purpose.
And so they're not guarding the truth and saying, okay, there's this problem of misinformation and we're going to prevent it spread, and we're going to do that by having objective people look at what the facts are.
Whatever the popular lie is that they want you to believe, yes.
The claims around that, you have the press secretary for the current administration saying that Biden has done more to secure the border than any other person.
That's a straight-faced claim from the press secretary.
Fact-checkers haven't touched it.
It has not been rated false.
Now, Governor Abbott in Texas was talking about how this administration currently has basically an open border policy.
And that got fact-checked and rated false.
So the challenges to the narrative are fact-checked and rated false.
The narrative itself, which isn't true, is allowed to go unchecked.
And I actually like the way that Twitter now acts as handling false claims or misleading claims, because what they're doing is instead of trying to shut anybody up, you know, the community notes thing where they tag a note on it.
But it's the best feature of the platform, by the way.
It's so entertaining when people get noted and it's, you know, they make a ridiculous claim.
Biden's been noted a bunch of times.
Even Elon's been noted a couple of times.
So you share something that's either from a, you know, a dubious source or you make a claim that's, you know, obviously false and a community note gets attached to it that offers context, readers added context.
Right.
That's at least more speech in the answer to speech that's disliked.
It's it's it's a rebuttal that's that's prominently set up next to whatever the claim was.
I like that a lot more than, OK, Snopes rated you false.
So we were looking at this headline and thinking to ourselves, what do we do with this?
Like, what is the angle here to make a joke out of what's already a joke?
This is already a joke.
And women should be offended.
Everybody should be offended that a male person is winning this woman of the year.
But the only thing that we could think of to say was, okay, well, how about in defense of women insanity, we just simply say the Babylon Bee's pick for man of the year is Rachel Levine.
You can have your account back if you delete the tweet with that joke attached to it.
But you have to delete it.
They didn't take it down.
They wanted us to delete it.
And check this box that said by deleting, you know, when you delete this tweet, you acknowledge that you violated the rules, including the rules against hateful conduct.
I mean, it's standing on the principle that not only do we think that this First of all, it's a joke.
Second of all, it's true.
This is a male person.
Referring to them as a man means an adult human male.
So there's truth to it as well.
So the idea that we're not allowed to speak the truth and that we have to censor ourselves and admit that we engage not just in a falsehood but something that was hateful.
Yeah, I think that there's a moral objection to playing any part in that.
So, yeah.
So that was really the ground that we were standing on.
It wasn't just like, oh, let's get some publicity by refusing to do it.
This was a costly decision, by the way.
There was nobody in the world at that time knew that Elon was positioning himself to take over Twitter.
And we didn't know that if he did, that he would end up restoring us.
So it wasn't like we had any kind of fallback for that.
It was just our Twitter audience was going to be inaccessible to us if we didn't delete the joke.
And we deliberated about it for like five minutes and we're like, no, we're not doing it.
So, we sat in Twitter jail until Elon took the reins and was like, bring back the Babylon Bee.
So when people say, well, how costly was it to be off of Twitter?
Well, I mean, we weren't getting engagement from people like Trump or yourself or Rogan or Musk.
On Facebook or Instagram, it was happening on Twitter.
That's where we got engagement from people with big followings.
That's how they knew about the bee, and that's how they engaged with the bee.
So once we were sidelined from Twitter, we were basically out of the conversation.
That's where the conversation was happening.
So it was a big cost to us, not just monetarily, but just being relevant.
We weren't relevant anymore.
So, I mean, the way it went down was really crazy, because obviously Elon was...
Wanting to make a move to buy Twitter.
When he first found out that we were suspended, he reached out to us and he's like, is this true?
Are you guys really suspended?
That's what I'm hearing.
At first, he actually reached out to our Babylon Bee account and we couldn't respond to him because we were locked out of it.
So we're like, we can receive the message, but we can't reply to it.
So we're like, Elon Musk is trying to message us and we can't get back to him.
Yeah, so we couldn't even respond.
So eventually he found our editor-in-chief's account and was able to message him and get in touch with him.
So he really made an effort to find you guys.
Oh yeah, he was trying to get in touch with us to figure out what was going on.
Because at the time, unknown to us and anybody else, he was already buying Twitter stock and he was kind of positioning himself, looking at Twitter as like a potential acquisition.
And the reason he wanted to do that is because he was concerned that there was a lot of censorship and people weren't allowed to speak freely on the platform anymore and that something needed to be done about that.
So then he finds out that the B is suspended and he's like, are you serious?
This is ridiculous.
You should be able to tell jokes.
So, yeah, so we had a conversation with him about, you know, how insane it was that we were kicked off.
And he's like, why don't you just delete the tweet to get back on?
And we're like, I don't think we should.
I don't think we should have to.
And he's like, well, no, I don't think you should have to either.
So fast forward a little bit.
I mean, we were on a roller coaster there for a while because he was, you know, he made an offer and then he tried to get out.
He tried to back out and say, oh, you know, you guys misrepresented your numbers.
There's all these bots.
I don't want to buy bots.
I want to buy real users.
And so he was trying to get out of the deal.
Maybe he bit off more than he could chew and was like having cold feet about it.
Come to find out, we actually didn't get restored for another month because he started, you know, he went into the meetings with the trust and safety team and they're like, you can't just restore people.
You can't just...
Break the rules.
There's rules.
We enforce the rules.
If you break the rules for one person, you have to break them for everybody.
Yeah, so this idea, the punching down, like the number one rule of comedy should be funny.
It's to be funny, right?
When a humorist or a satirist, a comedian, is sitting down to write a joke, they should be thinking to themselves, is this joke funny?
Not, am I... Am I going to be making fun of someone who supposedly has less power and privilege than me but can actually get me punished if they're offended by my joke?
Jimmy Kimmel is a talented guy, and I don't think he's an evil person or something, but he's made this deal where he just serves power and attacks anybody who challenges power.
How can...
Honestly, how can he look in the mirror and say, I'm doing something honorable?
Obviously, the low IQ, the up-talk at the end of every sentence, the ersatz glasses, the theatrical fake glasses, the made-up stats, the fake concern for some group that she knows nothing about at all,
and then under all of it, the desire to press harder with her boot against the neck of ordinary people and to shut them up on behalf Of her boss is the people who run the world.
And what's the most effective kind of criticism there is?
I think it's mockery.
Which exposes foolishness for what it is.
So it makes perfect sense to me.
I honestly, I was mistaken about this.
It's something I admit I was wrong about.
Early on, when we first started getting fact-checked and we first started having these issues with censorship with the Babylon Bee, it was my belief that these were humorless scolds who just didn't think our jokes were funny.
And they thought they were offensive and they were being hypersensitive.
I eventually learned and came to realize that it's not humor.
Humor is a vehicle for truth delivery.
They don't like the fact that the narrative is being challenged in a way that's effective.
And so they have to shut you up.
And so that's what it's about.
It has nothing to do with them being in the school.
And it has nothing to do with being offended.
This whole thing, you know, the hypersensitive, the people getting up in comedians' faces or charging the stage to slap them in the face when they make a joke they don't like.
The, you know, don't bring your speaker to our campus because we need a safe space here and this will offend people.
It's all fake outrage because they've learned that fake outrage...
Can be used as a tool to bludgeon you into silence and submission.
I mean, that's just, it's a very obvious continuum.
But I would also say, and I want to ask you this, as the target of people like Brandy Zedrosny.
Wouldn't you rather be the target of an explicitly fascist regime, where it was aggressive rather than passive aggressive, where some guy in a funny mustache got up and said, you're going to jail, instead of having someone in fake, complex glasses telling you you're endangering trans people?
Honestly, wouldn't you rather, and I'm being only half facetious, deal with the North Korean security apparatus, where they're like, say that and we'll kill you.
It's super straightforward, and they're not going to lecture you about trans lies.
I mean, do we have as much reach as we used to have?
No, but I mean, we still have a platform.
I've never been an advocate of let's go create new platforms and do our own thing because then you're just creating a new echo chamber where people who agree with you are on that platform and there's not interesting conversations happening there.
So I am wanting to stay in the conversation where the conversation actually matters, these prominent platforms that you could call the public square of the modern age.
of the modern age.
And I think that we have a hopeful outlook when it comes to legal recourse there, too.
I mean, you have these laws that were passed at the state level, but in Florida and Texas, that make it illegal for these platforms to engage in viewpoint discrimination.
And the Supreme Court is now going to hear these cases because, you know, one of them was rejected by the 11th Circuit, one of them was upheld, the Texas one was upheld by the Fifth Circuit.
So the Supreme Court's going to make a decision on whether or not these companies can engage in politically motivated viewpoint discrimination.
And if they can't, then we're legally allowed to be there.