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 parity. If 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 B, and he joins us now. Seth, thanks so much for coming on.

Thanks for having me.

We're really talking to you today not as the proprietary of America's premier humor site, but as a prophet, as our own, Isaiah, because it turns out, and we went through quite a few examples, that the Babylon Bees' parity stories have come true in dozen scores, nearly 100 cases. I'm going to put three on the screen and get your reaction to them to set the stage to announce you as America's most accurate prophet. Let's go in order here. This is from January2023. Here's that line. 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 sharively 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.

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 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, and it's actually the opposite. 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 know, it's right. Imagine if your job is to write jokes that are funnier than a Kam La Harris speech. No, it's totally. I mean, it's challenging. It's actually very challenging.

You really want to live in an Irish country where everything is orderly and neat and sensible. That's something fun to pivot against.

Yeah, exactly. I don't know. We see this stuff happen. We're amused by it on the one hand, and on the other hand, we're like, It's crazy that satire can't stay satire for more than a few hours.

I don't know what the shelf life of your piece 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. 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 did you see that coming? It's comical. Well, in some sense, we're just reporting the news when we're doing this. 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.

I guess the joke is you see the implications of the news.

Yeah. The joke is that you can see around the corner. I think it's easy to... You can guess at what people are going to go to next. What's the next logical step here? What is Kamala Harris's line about where we've been and where we're going or something? The line just keeps repeating all the time.

And wherever you are, you are.

And wherever you are, you are. I don't know. You can 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. 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 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. 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 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. 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. Yes. So reality is at fault for that. It's not that our jokes are too believable. How often are you getting back- It's that reality is too close to satire. How often did you get fact-checked? We get fact-checked all the time. We've been fact-checked dozens of times. Snopes has fact-checked us at least 20-plus times.

Do they know that you're a parity site?

They do. They used to attribute nefarious motives to us. They used to say that we were like 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. Yes. But they would fact-check them regular ridiculous jokes like AOC goes on the Price is Right, guesses everything is free or... That's a good joke. Ninth Circuit Court overturns death of Ruth Baderginsberg. 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 and say. They're clever enough. We have a very sharp writing team. They're very good at this. Super good at this. 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 said that at some.

Point, didn't he? He did. Well, yeah. We made that joke in 2019. It got fact-checked shortly thereafter because it went crazy viral. 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. 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 funny.

How do you respond? When someone fact-checks a joke, AOCN 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 stuff is ridiculous. We actually threatened to sue Snopes because they were literally maligning us and that we were misinformationing people on purpose. Then Facebook was saying that they were going to demonetize and deplatform because we were being fact-checked by Snopes. They're saying you can't spread fake news on our platform. We're like, It's satire.

I assume Snopes is run by the CIA. I don't have evidence of that, but like Wikipedia. It seems obvious. But what do you know about Snobes?

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. 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.

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. Well, first of all, they're spending their time fact-checking satire. The joke about Ruth Peter Kingsberg, that her death being overturned by the ninth Circuit Court- Can.

You overturn someone's.

Death, by the way? It happened once. It happened once. I don't think it happened with Ruth Baderkinsberg, but USA Today fact-checked that one, and they cited 15 sources in their fact-check. 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 of the Aden Saint.

I always think that behind every ludicrous event like that is a person who spent his day doing that thing. Imagine if he went home at night and your wife says, Seth, what did you.

Do today? What did you.

Accomplish today? You're like, Well, I fact-checked a joke with 15 sources. The respect level from your wife has to.

Plummet, right? The fact that it got fact-checked is funnier than the joke itself. 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. That got fact-checked and rated false. They're spending their time on stories.

That aren't even- Wait, so CNN didn't actually purchase.

An industrial-sized washing machine? Never happened. They never did. They never slapped their logo on a washing machine and spun the news in it before it ever happened. It was a joke. But the joke is that they fact-check it. They took it seriously. But no, fact-checking, the way that I look at it is fact-checking is one of the methods that's employed by the lovers of censorship to guard the narrative, not the truth. Yes. 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. 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.

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. Fat checkers haven't touched it. It has not been rated false. Now, Governor Abbot in Texas was talking about how this administration currently has basically an open border policy, and that got fact-checked and rated false. The challenges to the narrative are fact-checked and rated false. The narrative itself, which isn't true, is allowed to go unchecked.

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. They use the fact-checkers as the way of them getting out of the way and saying, Well, we're not the ones determining, we're not the arbitrators of truth. Facebook could go or could pun 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. They fit in as a piece that allows them to basically have plausible deniability that they're involved in censorship. But the USA Today fact-check on Ruth Peter Kingsberg's death, that was funded by grants from Facebook. Facebook paid... I'm going to say today to write that... 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. Are they going to fact-check that?

Because.

That actually happened. Let me get to the third example of the Babylon B'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-looking ice cream cone. Okay, so that was your headline. Here's the fact. Majorca cites misinformation about Homeland Security's disinformation board.

The world is too absurd to be satirized.

So when you see that, I mean, do you feel vindicated?

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 to the Babylon Bee. We're narrative-driven. We're propagandists. We're trying to push our own viewpoint that has no basis. Is that what the propagandists are saying about it? Yeah, like Slate, all these people, Rolling Stone. Slate? They do, yeah. When they write pieces about us, they talk about how we're trying... Or 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. 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, it vindicates that there is truth to them, obviously. They're rooted in the truth because they're coming true. You have to fact-check them and rate them false.

I wonder if we take this seriously enough. 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 sub-human, a slave, then you can make them shut up. 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. I actually like the way that Twitter now X is handling false claims or misleading claims because what they're doing is instead of trying to shut anybody up, the community notes thing where they'll 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 they make a ridiculous claim. Biden has been noted a bunch of times. Even Elon's been noted a couple of times. You share something that's either from a dubious source or you make a claim that's obviously false and a community note gets attached to it that offers context, readers added context. That's at least more speech and the answer to speech that's disliked. It's a rebuttal that's prominently set up next to whatever the claim was. I like that a lot more than, Okay, 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. 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. Because prison changes. How was your time in Twitter prison?

We were in Twitter jail, as you could put it, for eight months.

Wow. Did you join a gang?

We were there with a few other interesting people. Jordan Peterson, Captain Criflin. You got to give.

Your time, Seth. You can't let the time do you.

A lot of interesting people in Twitter jail. I can't even imagine.

I could just picture you smoking your home rolled cigarettes, playing pinnacle, cooking pasta.

There was a real headline. Usa Today names Rachel Levin, Woman of the Year. Rachel Levin is the transgender health Admiral in the Biden administration. Oh, they're duned in the with the Metals. 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. We were thinking to ourselves-.

The ugliest.

Woman in America. What do we do? Very bold and beautiful woman. I don't know what you're.

Talking about. Sorry.

Brave, stunning. We were looking at this headline and thinking to ourselves, What do we do with this? What is the angle here to make a joke out of what's already a joke? This is already a joke. 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 B's pick for Man of the Year is Rachel LaVine. That was the headline that we put out there. Babylon B names Rachel Levin Man of the Year. Twitter didn't like that. It's misgendering. That's so hateful. Yeah, exactly. So misgendering falls under the hateful conduct.

Stop trying to put an Adam there. Pull it a jockstrap. You're calling.

Him a man. You're referring to a male person as a man. Yeah, that's hate. It's hate. It's basically hate. It's hateful conduct. It's misgendering by their policy. It's not acceptable. 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, when you delete this tweet, you acknowledge that you violated the rules, including the rules against hate crime.

Sign a confession.

Sign a confession, bend the knee, censor yourself, delete your own joke. 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? Well, that's the whole point. It's not censorship. It's subjugation. Exactly. We said no. We're like, No, we're not going to delete it, and we got into this standoff with Twitter.

Can I ask you a question? Which is a little bit off topic, but maybe central. You are a Christian, son of a pastor. 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.

Is there like a theological component for you when you say no?

Yeah. 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. A man means an adult human male, so there's truth to it as well. The idea that we're not allowed to speak the truth and that we have to censor ourselves and admit that we engaged 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. Amen. 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. We didn't know that if he did, that he would end up restoring us. So it wasn't like we had any 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 five minutes and we're like, No, we're not doing it.

We sat in Twitter jail until Elon took the reins and was like, Bring back to Babylon B.

How did that play out? By the way, 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. This is like, as you said, a very costly...

It was a very stupid business decision. I think it was a morally right decision, but 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.

When.

People say, Well, how costly was it to be off of Twitter? Well, we weren't getting engagement from people like Trump or yourself or Roogen or Musk on Facebook or Instagram. It was happening on Twitter. That's where we got engagement from people with big following. 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. 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. B account and we couldn't respond to him because we were locked out of it. We're like, We can receive the message, but we can't reply to it. We're like, Elon Musk is trying to message us and we can't get back to him.

It's unbelievable. Yeah. We couldn't even respond. Eventually, he found our editor-in-chief's account and was able to message him and get in touch with him. We're like, Yeah, we got to go to find you guys. He really made it happen to find you guys. 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 positioning himself looking at Twitter as a potential acquisition. 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. We had a conversation with him about 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? We're like, I don't think we should. I don't think we should have to. He's like, Well, no, I don't think you should have to either.

Fast forward a little bit. We were on a roller coaster there for a while because he made an offer and then he tried to get out. He tried to back out and say, Oh, you guys misrepresented your numbers. There's all these bots. I don't want to buy bots. I want to buy real users. He was trying to get out of the deal. Maybe he bit off more than he could chew and was having cold feet.

About it. It was quite a mouthful.

Yeah. Then Twitter sued him to try to keep him in the deal. We had no idea if anything was going to happen or if he was actually going to take over, if this was just a big publicity play or whatever. 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 closed the deal. I wake up at like, I don't know, 8:00 or 9:00 in the morning, just sleeping in that day. It was a weekend, I think it was. I had a message from Elon that he sent overnight. He said, Would you like me to restore the Bee's account? There will be no censorship of humor. He took over and was immediately wanting to rectify the problem.

How long after he took over was that?

That was day one.

Day one. One of his first texts 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 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. That's your rule. Yeah. They were like, You can't just restore the Babylon being. He's like, Well, why not? Isn't it like a presidential pardon? Why can't I pardon somebody and set them free? They're like, That's not how this works. I guess you can if you want to. They actually argued with him a lot back.

And forth. Can I ask you just another sideline question? But you can't insult Richard Levin, 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 hangar in Iowa, is there anything that you would not be allowed to say about him?

No, nothing. Nothing? Yeah. Now, so this- Let's.

Kill him and.

Everyone like him. Right. This is such an important point you're bringing up, this concept of who you can and can't make fun of. Richard LaVine, Rachel LaVine, whatever you want to call him, man of the year, high-ranking white male government official. High-ranking white male government official. 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? We're looking at this and we're like, 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.

Is- Dylan Mulvaney towers above the rest of us in his.

Power, right? Right. But the rule against punching.

Down- Who is more power? You were Dylan Mulvaney.

I can't get anybody censored for making fun of me. 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. Kennedy has way more power than anyone in the county I live in.

Right. 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 sadderist, a comedian is sitting down to write a joke, they should be thinking to themselves, Is this joke funny? Not, 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 Levin. 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. That tells a- Except for Shell, Obama, who was oppressed. Yeah. 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. We're not punching down. I think we're punching back. But this is the thing. So comedy, when they make this rule... 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? 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 said a whole barrage of insulting jokes about his age and his sexual potency. That's the first thing I do. One of my closest friends gets older.

The way of treating each other equally is joking about each other indiscriminately. I think comedians who... 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 contemptable. I mean, they're collaborators.

They are... Just like the fact-checkers, they're guardians of the narrative. How can Jimmy Kimmel live.

With them? Jimmy Kimmel is a talented guy, and I don't think he's like an evil person or something, but he's made this deal where he just serves power and attacks anybody who challenges power. Honestly, how can he look in the mirror and say, I'm doing something honorable? How could he live with himself? How could his wife.

Sleep with him?

Well, I mean that.

It'd be one thing. It'dbe one thing if his job wasn't to be a comedian and to do that. But his job is to be a... He's supposed to be funny, and comedians are supposed to hold people in positions of power. But he's a poor.

Suckup.

To the people in charge.

Exactly. He's their preterian guard.

It's like the self-hatred he must feel because he wasn't always... That's my point. I mean, Colbert has always been a hard partisan talent guy, but obviously he's not a comedian. But Kimal was a comedian. I don't understand...

I don't know. -how he can sleep. I don't know. 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 pouring hot oil on the peasants from the parapet. Right. Like, he's hurting anyone who challenges the king.

It's crazy. It is crazy. It's upside down. That the comedians should be poking holes in the popular narrative, not propping it up. What a filthy man, Jimmy Kinwood. But truly. No, I mean it. You said it, not me.

No amount of money is worth what he's doing, in.

My opinion. 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 Zadrazny, who... I'm not 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 Zadrazny complaining about you speaking out loud. Keep in mind it's not just about Brandy Zadrazny, whatever that is. This is the person who runs our society. This person and people like it are actually in charge. I just can't wait till the rule ends because there's never been a worse ruling class than Brandy Zadrazny and friends. Who did he bring back yesterday? He brought back Jordan Peterson, the Babylon Bee, and Kathy Griffin. The Babylon and the and Jordan Peterson, they were taken off the platform. They were suspended for misgendering trans people. 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 violence is aimed at them at unseen levels before. This matters. Everything about that.

The obviously the low IQ, the uptalk at the end of every sentence, the Earth's Sats Glass is a completely theatrical fake glasses, the made-up stats.

The.

Fake concern for some group that she knows nothing about at all. 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 as the people who run the world. That's the perfect... I hope that someone puts that in a time capsule for when the revolution finally ends and we're rid of people like that. They ran the world. How do we.

Let them? I know. It's insane. But it's how they control speech and thought. If your worldview is incoherent and impossible to defend rationally, then you have to insulate it from criticism. What's the most effective criticism there is? I think it's mockery, which exposes foolishness for what it is. So it makes perfect sense to me. 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 skulls 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 here. 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 to do with them being. They don't have blibs. It has nothing to do with being offended. This whole thing, 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. 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.

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. If censorship doesn't work, they'd indict you. If that doesn't work, they would kill you. It's a very obvious continuum. But I 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. The passive aggression is.

Very hard to take. I'd rather neither of them. Well, I don't know. If I have to take my pic, I'll take Twitter jail over real jail any day.

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, 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 from them. Do they wear complicated glasses too, and uptalk?

They just give you really canned responses or they point you to their policies or whatever. Bureaucratic language. -or whatever to hand you off. Exactly. That's my point though. Or they have people in place. They'll have some 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 and then 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 translates. At least that's honest. At least it's honest.

Yeah, it's less self-righteous.

Yeah, but I don't know. I'm hopeful for a couple of reasons. I think Musk really is committed to free speech. I think he means that. I don't think Twitter was not a money play for him. I don't think that he's...

No, it was not a.

Money play for Twitter. Twitter is an absolute money pit. He realized very early on it became real. One of the conversations that they were having internally about whether to restore us was, well, what are going to be the advertiser's reactions to us putting people back on the platform? 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. 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. He's walking that tightrope of, I want free speech, but I need revenue in order to keep this business going. He was doing this drastic cost-cutting measures, all of that stuff. I don't know how you actually run a free speech platform and 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, I do. Will we do we have as much reach as we used to have? No, but 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. 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. 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. The Supreme Court is now going to hear these cases because one of them was rejected by the 11th Circuit, one of them was upheld. The Texas one was upheld by the Fifth Circuit. The Supreme Court is going to make a decision on whether or not these companies can engage in politically motivated viewpoint discrimination. 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 Government?

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 lies. They're liars. They're liars. They lie straight to your face. That's fraud. They shouldn't be allowed to do that either.

Seth Dylan, thank you for everything you've done. Thank you. Congratulations on your prophecy. Thanks.