Dec. 18, 2023 - The Tucker Carlson Show
36:45
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| 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. | ||
| Who runs Babylon Bee, and he joins us now. | ||
| Seth, thanks so much for coming on. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| So we're really talking to you today not as the proprietor of America's premier humor site, but as a prophet, as our own Isaiah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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! | ||
| They don't know what it is, but they know it's not vaccines. | ||
| They know it's not vaccines. | ||
| They can rule that out safely. | ||
| So when you see the news story that confirms what you thought was a pretty out-there joke, what's your reaction? | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Imagine if your job is to write jokes that are funnier than a Kamala Harris speech. | ||
| No, it's totally wrong. | ||
| I mean, it's challenging. | ||
| It's actually very challenging. | ||
| So you really want to live in like Amish country where everything is like orderly and neat and sensible. | ||
| That's something fun to pivot against. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| So, I don't know. | ||
| We see this stuff happen where I'm used by it on the one hand. | ||
| And on the other hand, we're like, this is... | ||
| It's crazy that satire can't stay satire for more than a few hours in a few days. | ||
| I don't know what the shelf life of your pieces is. | ||
| Let's throw up another one. | ||
| This is from September 2020. State with no electricity orders everyone to drive cars that run on electricity. | ||
| And there you have Gavin Newsom, who's the governor of what state? | ||
| California. | ||
| California. | ||
| Here's the news story. | ||
| California is told not to charge electric cars days after gas car sales ban. | ||
| How'd you see that coming? | ||
| It's comical. | ||
| In some sense, we're just reporting the news when we're doing this stuff. | ||
| You see it happening. | ||
| You see the madness happening all around you. | ||
| You call it out, and next thing you know, it's actually in the headlines. | ||
| But I guess the joke is you see the implications of the news? | ||
| Yeah, the joke is that you can kind of see around the corner. | ||
| I think it's easy to... | ||
| You can kind of guess at what people are going to go to next. | ||
| What's the next logical step here, given where we've... | ||
| What is Kamala Harris' line about where we've been and where we're going or something? | ||
| The line she keeps repeating all the time. | ||
| And wherever you are, you are. | ||
| And wherever you are, you are. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I mean, eventually it's going to come true. | ||
| How long are your story meetings? | ||
| Well, it's a constant meeting. | ||
| It's an ongoing meeting. | ||
| It's just, you know, pitching ideas all day long. | ||
| So we just pitch them back and forth. | ||
| Based off that, we read the headlines. | ||
| We read the real headlines. | ||
| And then we exaggerate them a little bit. | ||
| You know, we do this little caricature of the headlines. | ||
| And then that's when they come true. | ||
| Are you getting to the point where no idea is too outlandish for a joke? | ||
| Well, I mean, I guess part of the problem is... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Do they know that you're a parody site? | ||
| They do. | ||
| They used to attribute nefarious motives to us. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| But they would fact-check them. | ||
| Regular ridiculous jokes like, you know, AOC goes on The Price is Right, guesses everything is free. | ||
| That's a good joke! | ||
| Ninth Circuit Court overturns death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. | ||
| You know? | ||
| They're silly jokes, they're funny jokes, but sometimes people believe that it's true because you could actually see somebody doing this. | ||
| Who came up with those two? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| We don't actually put the name of the author on the article, so I'd have to go back and look. | ||
| They're clever enough. | ||
| We have a very, very sharp writing team. | ||
| They're very good at this. | ||
| Super good at this. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But he kind of said that at some point, didn't he? | ||
| He did. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| So we made that joke in 2019. It got fact-checked shortly thereafter because it went crazy viral. | ||
| And then in 2021, I think it was 2021 or 2022, he said he'd done more for Christianity and religion in general than any other person in history. | ||
| So it's hard to tell sometimes. | ||
| Are people reading our website and getting ideas for what to say and what to do? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But that one was kind of funny. | ||
| So how do you respond? | ||
| When someone fact-checks a joke, AOC on Price is Right, Trump's better for Christianity than Jesus. | ||
| How do you respond to that? | ||
| Well, when they fact check it, I think it's hysterical when they fact check it. | ||
| What I don't like is when the fact check says they've managed to pull off this ruse before, they're tricking people. | ||
| The reason your grandma shared that joke on Facebook is because the Babylon Bee tricked her into believing it was true. | ||
| That kind of stuff is ridiculous. | ||
| We actually threatened to sue Snopes because they were literally... | ||
| They're maligning us and suggesting that we were misinforming people on purpose. | ||
| And then Facebook was saying that they were going to demonetize and deplatform us because we were being fact-checked by Snopes. | ||
| So they're saying you can't spread fake news on our platform. | ||
| Like, it's satire. | ||
| So I assume Snopes is run by the CIA. I mean, I don't have evidence of that, but like Wikipedia, it seems obvious. | ||
| But what do you know about Snopes? | ||
| There was a couple that started it, and they were running it for a long time. | ||
| I think the guy's name, I might mess it up. | ||
| It was David Mickelson or something like that, or Michelson. | ||
| I may be getting that wrong. | ||
| But anyway, it changed hands recently. | ||
| Somebody else took it over. | ||
| Oh, someone else, yeah. | ||
| They actually reached out to us and said, I know we've had a rough past, but we want to put that behind us and move forward. | ||
| 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? | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, well, first of all, they're spending their time fact-checking satire. | ||
| The joke about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, her death being overturned by the Ninth Circuit Court. | ||
| Can you overturn someone's death, by the way? | ||
| It happened once. | ||
| I don't think it happened with Ruth Bader Ginsburg. | ||
| But USA Today fact-checked that one, and they cited 15 sources in their fact-check. | ||
| Like, they were taking it so seriously. | ||
| They checked the Ninth Circuit Court website. | ||
| They placed phone calls. | ||
| It's like, just look at the website that published it. | ||
| It's the Babylon Bee. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I always think that behind every ludicrous event like that is a person who spent his day doing that thing. | ||
| So imagine if he went home at night and your wife says, you know, like, Seth, what'd you do today? | ||
| Yeah, what'd you accomplish today? | ||
| And you're like, well, I fact-checked a joke with 15 sources. | ||
| The respect level for your wife has to plummet, right? | ||
| The fact that it got fact-checked is funnier than the joke itself. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| I had spoken with you about this one before. | ||
| CNN purchasing an industrial-sized washing machine to spin the news in before publishing it. | ||
| That's a ridiculous joke. | ||
| It's silly. | ||
| It's a CNN bias joke. | ||
| And that got fact-checked and rated false. | ||
| So they're spending their time on stories that aren't even... | ||
| Wait, the CNN didn't actually purchase an industrialized washing machine? | ||
| Never happened. | ||
| They never did. | ||
| They never slapped their logo on a washing machine and spun the news in it before it never happened. | ||
| It was a joke. | ||
| But the joke is that they fact-check it. | ||
| They took it seriously. | ||
| But no, fact-checking... | ||
| So the way that I look at it is, you know, fact-checking is a... | ||
| It's an arm... | ||
| It's one of the methods that's employed by the lovers of censorship to guard the narrative, not the truth. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's all narrative-driven. | ||
| It's all about protecting the popular narrative. | ||
| And by narrative, you mean lie. | ||
| The lie, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So normally we wouldn't care what the fact-checkers say because they're obviously discredited. | ||
| I mean, they're disgusting by their nature. | ||
| But we have to care because they are the triggers that set into motion the censorship apparatus at the social media companies, correct? | ||
| Well, they rely on this. | ||
| So the fact-checkers are the way of them... | ||
| We're not the ones determining. | ||
| We're not the arbiters of truth. | ||
| Facebook could go could punt to Snopes or whoever else USA Today, whoever is doing the fact checking and say, we're not censoring you. | ||
| We're not removing your content based on arbitrary rules. | ||
| We have third party fact checkers. | ||
| They're objective and they're the ones deciding what's true and what's false and what can stay and what goes. | ||
| So they just they fit in as a piece that allows them to basically have like plausible deniability that they're involved in censorship. | ||
| But the USA Today fact check on Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death that was funded by grants from Facebook. | ||
| So Facebook paid USA Today to write that. | ||
| Well, didn't Facebook steal the last election, too? | ||
| They put almost half a billion dollars, Mark Zuckerberg, into changing the way we vote. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| Are they going to fact check that? | ||
| Does that actually happen? | ||
| Okay, let me get to the third example of the Babylon Bee's prophetic accuracy. | ||
| And I don't actually know how else you describe this. | ||
| This is from April of 2022. Government Disinformation Board determines all criticism of Government Disinformation Board to be disinformation. | ||
| It is a self-licking ice cream cone. | ||
| Okay, so that was your headline. | ||
| Here's the fact. | ||
| Mayorkas cites misinformation about Homeland Security's disinformation board. | ||
| It's, you know, the world is too absurd to be satirized. | ||
| So when you see that, I mean, do you feel vindicated? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, of course. | ||
| I mean, did Jeremiah feel vindicated? | ||
| It means we're onto something. | ||
| What it means is that there was... | ||
| Okay, so this is another criticism of the Babylon Bee. | ||
| We're narrative-driven. | ||
| We're propagandists. | ||
| We're trying to push our own viewpoint. | ||
| Is that what the propagandists say about you? | ||
| Yeah, like Slate, all these people, Rolling Stone. | ||
| When they write... | ||
| They do, yeah. | ||
| And when they write pieces about us, they talk about how we're trying... | ||
| The reason our jokes aren't funny is because they're not riding on the back of the truth. | ||
| They're not carrying a message of truth. | ||
| They're pushing a narrative. | ||
| They're based on a narrative. | ||
| So the joke isn't funny because it's rooted in a lie. | ||
| So Slate doesn't think it's funny. | ||
| But I think the fact that we get fact-checked so much and these jokes are coming true vindicates that there is truth to them, obviously. | ||
| So, I wonder if we take this seriously enough. | ||
| I mean, if someone is trying to stop you from talking... | ||
| That person doesn't consider you human, of course, because you can't. | ||
| If you consider someone human, that person has every bit the right to speak that you do. | ||
| If you consider the person subhuman, a slave, then you can make them shut up. | ||
| So the way they see you is not how you see them at all. | ||
| You see them as human beings, correct? | ||
| The censors, the fact checkers, Slate. | ||
| You don't want to shut them up or put them in prison, do you? | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Therefore, we're taking your page down. | ||
| You can't talk anymore. | ||
| The answer to speech that you don't like should be more speech, a refutation or an argument, not... | ||
| Removal of your voice. | ||
| Well, of course not. | ||
| So, but your voice was removed from Twitter back when it was Twitter. | ||
| You were in Twitter prison. | ||
| I can't remember. | ||
| Why were you there? | ||
| The prison changes. | ||
| Like, how was your time in Twitter prison? | ||
| We were in Twitter jail, as you could put it, for eight months. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| Did you join a gang? | ||
| We were there with a few other interesting people. | ||
| Jordan Peterson, Captain Cripton. | ||
| You can't let the time do you. | ||
| You know, a lot of interesting people in Twitter jail. | ||
| I can't even imagine! | ||
| I can just picture you smoking your home-rolled cigarettes, playing pinochle, cooking pasta. | ||
| So we had made a joke. | ||
| So there was a real headline. | ||
| USA Today Names Rachel Levine Woman of the Year. | ||
| So Rachel Levine is the transgender health admiral in the Biden administration. | ||
| Oh, the dude with the medals. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Woman of the Year. | ||
| That headline itself, I think, is comical. | ||
| It's funny. | ||
| It seems like a parody. | ||
| But it's not. | ||
| It's real. | ||
| So we were thinking to ourselves... | ||
| Ugliest woman in America. | ||
| What do we do? | ||
| Very bold and beautiful woman. | ||
| I don't know what you're talking about. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sorry. | |
| Brave. | ||
| Stunning. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So that was the headline that we put out there. | ||
| Babylon Bee names Rachel Levine man of the year. | ||
| You know, Twitter didn't like that. | ||
| It's misgendering. | ||
| That's so hateful. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| So misgendering falls under the hateful conduct. | ||
| You're calling him a man. | ||
| You're referring to a male person as a man. | ||
| Yeah, that's hate. | ||
| It's hateful conduct. | ||
| It's misgendering by their policy. | ||
| It's not, you know, it's not acceptable. | ||
| So basically what they said was this. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So sign a confession. | ||
| Sign a confession. | ||
| Bend the knee. | ||
| You know, censor yourself. | ||
| Delete your own joke. | ||
| Like we were, I was basically telling Twitter, I'm like, you guys delete. | ||
| If you don't like it, you take it down. | ||
| Why make me take it down and admit that I did something wrong? | ||
| It's not censorship. | ||
| It's subjugation, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So we said no. | ||
| So we're like, no, we're not going to delete it. | ||
| And we got into this standoff with Twitter. | ||
| Can I ask you just a question? | ||
| So, which is a little bit off topic, but maybe central. | ||
| You are a Christian, son of a pastor. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When you're told by the authorities, not simply that you're being punished, but that you have to agree that your punishment is just. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Is there like a theological component for you when you say no? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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So, how did that play out? | |
| And by the way, this is, you're one of the main owners of the business. | ||
| Your whole business is getting your content in front of viewers, selling ads against it. | ||
| I mean, this is like a... | ||
| As you said, a very costly... | ||
| It was a very stupid business decision. | ||
| I think it was a morally right decision. | ||
| But, you know, the right thing and the easy thing are rarely ever the same. | ||
| It was a costly decision because that's where we generate a lot of our traffic is through Twitter. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| And that's where... | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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So... | |
| 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. | ||
| It was quite a mouthful. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And then Twitter sues him to try to keep him in the deal. | ||
| And so we had no idea if anything was going to happen, if he was actually going to take over, if this was just a big publicity play or whatever. | ||
| So I woke up to a message one morning. | ||
| It was October, November last year. | ||
| I don't know exactly when it was that he took over. | ||
| But he finally closed the deal. | ||
| It was October. | ||
| Yeah, it was in October. | ||
| He finally closes the deal. | ||
| And I wake up at like, I don't know, 8 or 9 in the morning. | ||
| I was sleeping in that day. | ||
| It was a weekend, I think it was. | ||
| And I had a message from Elon that he sent overnight. | ||
| He said, would you like me to restore the B's account? | ||
| There will be no censorship of humor. | ||
| So he took over and was immediately wanting to... | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| Rectify the problem. | ||
| And how long after he took over was that? | ||
| That was day one. | ||
| Day one. | ||
| So what if his first text was to you saying, you're restored? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, would you like me to restore your account? | ||
| There will be no censorship from here. | ||
| 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. | ||
| If you insult someone in power, we censor you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So they were like, you can't just restore the Babylon Bean. | ||
| He's like, well, why not? | ||
| Why can't? | ||
| Isn't it like a presidential pardon? | ||
| Why can't I pardon somebody, you know, and set them free? | ||
| And they're like, that's not how this works. | ||
| I mean, I guess you can if you want to. | ||
| So they actually argued with him a lot back and forth. | ||
| Can I ask you just another sideline question? | ||
| But like, you can't insult Richard Levine. | ||
| Product of private school, doctor, guy posing as an admiral or whatever. | ||
| He's in power. | ||
| He works for the current administration. | ||
| But if you were to find some 45-year-old white guy drywall hanger in Iowa, is there anything that you would not be allowed to say about him? | ||
| No, nothing. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Including let's kill him and everyone like him. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| So this is such an important point you're bringing up. | ||
| This concept of who you can and can't make fun of. | ||
| Richard Levine, Rachel Levine, whatever you want to call him, man of the year, high-ranking white male government official. | ||
| High-ranking white male government official. | ||
| And this is a person that you can't joke about because they're marginalized and oppressed, supposedly. | ||
| Do words even have meaning? | ||
| What does the word marginalized mean? | ||
| Dylan Mulvaney. | ||
| Is Dylan Mulvaney on the red carpet at these events and sponsored by every major brand marginalized and oppressed? | ||
| What does that word even mean, to be marginalized, right? | ||
| We're looking at this and we're like, so wait a minute. | ||
| They're telling us they have a rule. | ||
| Facebook now has a rule. | ||
| The other platforms are adopting this rule. | ||
| And they're trying to make comedians live by the rule. | ||
| You're not allowed to punch down. | ||
| That's what they say. | ||
| You can't punch down. | ||
| And punching down means... | ||
| Dylan Mulvaney towers above the rest of us in his power, right? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| But the rule against punching down... | ||
| Who has more power? | ||
| You were Dylan Mulvaney. | ||
| I can't get anybody censored for making fun of me. | ||
| So I think if you have the will and the power to silence people who so much as make a joke at your expense, then you have more power than anybody. | ||
| You're punching up. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Ibram X. Kendi has way more power than anyone in the county I live in. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I think it's a matter of reclaiming the language. | ||
| Like, Dylan Mulvaney, Rachel Levine, I mean, these are our rulers, actually. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, they're the most powerful and privileged people in our culture. | ||
| And you're not allowed to joke about them. | ||
| Except for Michelle Obama. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I mean, everybody understands this, too. | ||
| It's a well-known saying that you can tell who rules over you by who you're not allowed to criticize or who you're allowed to joke about. | ||
| And that's exactly the situation. | ||
| I don't think you're even allowed to say that, though. | ||
| Are you? | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| I don't think you are. | ||
| That's hate speech right there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But we're not punching down. | ||
| There's nothing truer! | ||
| We're not punching down. | ||
| I think we're punching back. | ||
| But this is the thing. | ||
| So comedy... | ||
| When they make this rule, you know, well, there's a number of elements to this, too. | ||
| Imagine thinking to yourself when you're making a joke, too, like, you know what? | ||
| I shouldn't joke about those people. | ||
| They're beneath me. | ||
| Imagine if that's the mentality that you're in, right? | ||
| Like, that's a condescending mentality. | ||
| Well, any man who's ever lived in a dorm knows that mocking somebody is a sign of fraternal friendship. | ||
| That's your peer. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I had a friend whose birthday was this morning. | ||
| I mean, I said a whole barrage of insulting jokes about his age and his sexual potency. | ||
| That's the first thing I do when one of my closest friends gets older. | ||
| The way of treating each other equally is joking about each other indiscriminately. | ||
| So yeah, I think comedians who, and this is why so much of comedy is not funny today. | ||
| It's my chief criticism of late night comedy, which I find unwatchable. | ||
| I think it's totally unwatchable. | ||
| But also contemptible. | ||
| I mean, they're collaborators. | ||
| They are... | ||
| Just like the fact checkers, they're guardians of the narrative. | ||
| How can Jimmy Kimmel live with him? | ||
| 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? | ||
| How can he live with himself? | ||
| How can his wife sleep with him? | ||
| Well, it'd be... | ||
| No, I mean that. | ||
| It'd be one thing if... | ||
| If his job wasn't to be a comedian and to do that, but his job is to be a comedian. | ||
| He's supposed to be funny. | ||
| And comedians are supposed to hold people in positions of power. | ||
| But he's a pure suck-up to the people in charge. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| He's their Praetorian guard. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's like the self-hatred he must feel because he wasn't always... | ||
| That's my point. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, Colbert has always been a hard partisan, talented guy, but obviously a part... | ||
| You know, he's not a comedian. | ||
| But Kimmel was a comedian. | ||
| Like, how does he... | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| How he can sleep. | ||
| He might buy into the narrative to the extent that he thinks it's morally wrong to joke about these certain topics. | ||
| But it's not just that. | ||
| He's like pouring hot oil on the peasants from the parapet. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like he's hurting anyone who challenges the king. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's crazy. | ||
| It is crazy. | ||
| It's upside down. | ||
| The comedian should be poking holes in the popular narrative, not propping it up. | ||
| What a filthy man Jimmy Kimmel is, but truly. | ||
|
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No, I mean it. | |
| You said it, not me. | ||
| No amount of money is worth what he's doing, in my opinion. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Okay, so speaking of handmaidens to power who want to kill you and anyone else who speaks the truth. | ||
| So you get back on Twitter, and this deeply upsets a figure called Brandy Zedrozny, assuming I'm pronouncing its name correctly. | ||
| And I'm also not guessing gender on this one. | ||
| But I will say, as you watch this clip, this is Brandy Zedrozny complaining about you speaking out loud. | ||
| Keep in mind, it's not just about Brandy Zedrozny, whatever that is. | ||
| This is the person who runs our society. | ||
| This person and people like it are actually in charge. | ||
| And I just can't wait till the rule ends because there's never been a worse ruling class than Brandy Zedrozny and friends. | ||
|
unidentified
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Who did he bring back yesterday? | |
| He brought back Jordan Peterson, the Babylon being Catholic. | ||
| Kathy Griffin. | ||
| So the Babylon Bee and Jordan Peterson, they weren't taken off the platform. | ||
| They were suspended for misgendering trans people. | ||
| So apparently that policy against hate speech and harassment of trans people, that's done with. | ||
| That's important. | ||
| This comes at a time when trans people are being harassed and, you know, violence is aimed at them at sort of unseen levels before. | ||
| So this sort of matters. | ||
| Everything about that! | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, every... | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's just... | |
| That's the perfect... | ||
| I hope that someone puts that in a time capsule. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For when the revolution finally ends and, like, we're rid of people like that. | ||
| They ran the world! | ||
| How do we let them? | ||
| I know. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| But it's, you know, it's how they control speech and thought. | ||
| It's how... | ||
| If your worldview is incoherent and impossible to defend rationally... | ||
| Yes. | ||
| ...then you have to insulate it from criticism. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And that's not the case. | ||
| No, it's not! | ||
| You're going through the stages of realization. | ||
| The stages of realization. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But that's exactly right. | ||
| If they would censor you, they would kill you. | ||
| Period. | ||
| Because you don't censor a peer, another citizen, another human being. | ||
| You censor your slaves. | ||
| You censor someone you consider less than human. | ||
| So if censorship doesn't work, they'd indict you. | ||
| If that doesn't work, they would kill you. | ||
| 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? | ||
| I mean, there is a kind of... | ||
| The passive aggression is very hard to take. | ||
| I'd rather neither of them. | ||
| But, well, I don't know. | ||
| If I have to take my pick, I'll take Twitter jail over real jail any day. | ||
| Well, that's where that's going. | ||
| You don't censor people if you consider them human, period. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| They're both bad. | ||
| They're both bad. | ||
| They're just two sides of the same coin. | ||
| How long do you think your moment of freedom will last? | ||
| Well, a lot longer now that Musk is running one of the predominant platforms. | ||
| If that hadn't happened, I mean, it was just a matter of like Facebook throttles us so badly now. | ||
| We don't get any reach on Facebook. | ||
| We don't drive any traffic on Facebook. | ||
| It's not really that valuable to us anymore. | ||
| Do you talk to them about it? | ||
| We've tried. | ||
| You can't get straight answers. | ||
| Do they wear complicated glasses too and up-talk? | ||
| They just give you really canned responses or they point you to their policies. | ||
| They have bureaucratic language. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's kind of my point though. | ||
| Or they have people in place. | ||
| They'll have some kind of policy person who's there to mollify you and just hear what you have to say and tell you we're looking into this for you. | ||
| You know, I'm going to run this up the chain. | ||
| The people who are there to listen to you to make it seem like they're actually paying attention, but they don't do anything about it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| At least that's honest. | ||
| At least it's honest. | ||
| Yeah, and it's less self-righteous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I think I'm hopeful for a couple reasons. | ||
| I think I think Musk really is committed to free speech. | ||
| I think he means that. | ||
| I don't think, you know, Twitter was not a money play for him. | ||
| I don't think that he's, you know. | ||
| No, it was not a money play for Twitter. | ||
| Twitter was is an absolute money pit. | ||
| And and he realized very early on it became real. | ||
| So one of the conversations that they were having internally about whether to restore us was. | ||
| Well, what are going to be the advertisers' reactions to us putting people back on the platform? | ||
| And this is where the censorship gets all the more complicated, is the brands themselves don't want that speech. | ||
| They will pull out their funding. | ||
| They will pull out their ad buys and cripple Twitter financially if Twitter doesn't do their bidding. | ||
| And so it's coming from the government. | ||
| It's coming from the advertisers. | ||
| It's coming from everywhere. | ||
| All the positions of power are controlling our speech and saying that we can't joke about these people and things, but we're punching down. | ||
| So, yeah, I mean, he had to he's he's he's walking that tightrope of I want free speech, but I need revenue in order to keep this business going. | ||
| So, you know, he was doing this drastic cost-cutting measures, you know, all of that stuff. | ||
| But trying to, I don't know how you actually run a free speech platform and have it be... | ||
| Have it generate enough revenue for you to survive. | ||
| I don't know how he's going to figure out. | ||
| Maybe he will. | ||
| If anyone can do it, Musk can do it. | ||
| He reuses rockets and lands them on platforms in the middle of the ocean after they've already launched and crazy stuff like that. | ||
| So I think he can figure this out. | ||
| But I don't know how he's going to do it. | ||
| So you expect to be up and available to the public through the election? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I do. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Last question, as someone who operates in this world every day. | ||
| Which platform do you think is more censored? | ||
| The Facebook, American-owned by Mark Zuckerberg, or TikTok, owned by the Chinese Communist Party? | ||
| I'm not sure they're that distinguishable at this point. | ||
| I mean, what do you think? | ||
| Facebook is not a free speech platform at all. | ||
| They may give more lip service to free speech. | ||
| In fact, Twitter did, too, back when we were censored, that they're a platform for free expression without barriers. | ||
| They're liars. | ||
| They're liars. | ||
| They lie straight to your face. | ||
| And that's fraud. | ||
| They shouldn't be allowed to do that either. | ||
| Seth Dillon, thank you for everything you've done. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And congratulations on your prophecy. |
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