The Ben Shapiro Show - Seth Dillon | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 131

00:00:00.000 We're criticized often for having jokes that are too believable.

00:00:04.000 It's like, well, this is the problem.

00:00:06.000 It amounts to misinformation because people are believing that your jokes are true.

00:00:09.000 It's like, well, whose fault is that?

00:00:11.000 Is it the satirist who's trying to stay a step ahead of the truth, or is it reality for bumping up against satire?

00:00:18.000 The Babylon Bee's intersection of news and Christian church humor may have seemed more niche at one point.

00:00:22.000 Today, it's the most popular satire on the internet, dominating where the onion once stood.

00:00:27.000 In our episode, we'll talk about why.

00:00:29.000 Our guest, Seth Dillon, bought the bee in 2018.

00:00:31.000 Coming from a career in e-commerce and specialized in monetizing web traffic, Seth has led their publication to greater heights.

00:00:38.000 At the time Seth purchased the site, they pulled 3 million page views per month.

00:00:41.000 Now, they average 20 million page views per month.

00:00:44.000 Seth and the Bee are busier than ever.

00:00:46.000 They're doing sketches, books, including a brand new one, The Babylon Bee Guide to Democracy.

00:00:50.000 Plus, newfound collaboration with the popular account Libs of TikTok, known for its reposts of radical lefty TikToks.

00:00:57.000 Mainstream media and big tech often censor quote-unquote misinformation in order to censor those with opposing views.

00:01:03.000 Whether out of idiocy or fear, the Babylon Bee is regularly fact-checked for its jokes, leading to the penalization of their social media accounts.

00:01:11.000 In early 2022, a joke led to their official Twitter account being fully suspended. 0.71

00:01:15.000 Seth has refused to remove that tweet.

00:01:17.000 The account is still locked as of this episode's release.

00:01:20.000 We dive into the adventure of making satire in the current political climate in this episode.

00:01:24.000 Plus, Seth reacts to his abortion debate with Joe Rogan going viral.

00:01:27.000 We discuss the backlash on conservatives for criticizing the Boston Children's Hospital gender surgery scandal.

00:01:32.000 and we ask, is there anything that's too hard to make a joke about?

00:01:46.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special.

00:01:47.000 This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.

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00:01:51.000 Protect your data.

00:01:51.000 ExpressVPN.com slash Ben.

00:01:53.000 Just a reminder, we'll be doing some bonus questions at the end with Seth Dillon.

00:01:57.000 The only way to get access to that part of the conversation is to become a member.

00:02:00.000 Head on over to dailywire.com slash Sunday.

00:02:02.000 You can click that link in the episode description.

00:02:04.000 Use code Ben for 25% off You'll have access to all of the full conversations with every one of our awesome guests.

00:02:10.000 Seth, it's great to see you.

00:02:11.000 Thanks for stopping by.

00:02:12.000 Great to see you.

00:02:13.000 Pleasure to be here.

00:02:14.000 So why don't we begin from the beginning?

00:02:16.000 As they say, it's a good place to start.

00:02:17.000 So how do you become a professional satirist?

00:02:20.000 How is that a thing that occurs to you or leaps upon you?

00:02:24.000 Well, most of our writers were doing something else.

00:02:29.000 They were like construction workers, engineers, you know, like they have some kind of day trade, something that they do.

00:02:35.000 And then, you know, the Babylon Bee comes along and they see this satire kind of coming at the issues from their perspective and they start pitching ideas to us.

00:02:42.000 We get a lot of unsolicited pitches from people.

00:02:46.000 And some of them are just, you know, they just have a talent for it.

00:02:48.000 You have a knack for it.

00:02:48.000 It's something that's very difficult to teach.

00:02:50.000 It's hard to teach exactly how to, like, have a satirical take on, like, a real news headline.

00:02:55.000 But some people just kind of have a knack for it, and if they find us, that's usually how we find them.

00:03:01.000 They come to us, and that's how we've hired a lot of people.

00:03:03.000 Our editor-in-chief right now, Kyle Mann, he was submitting headlines to us right after the site launched, and they were really good.

00:03:10.000 So it's like, keep them coming, keep them coming.

00:03:12.000 So eventually he became part-time, and now he's running the whole team, so.

00:03:16.000 It's not like, you can't go to school for it, you can't really be trained in it, so it's just kind of something you have a knack for or not.

00:03:22.000 What was the origin point of Avalon Beard?

00:03:23.000 You're sitting around and you're like, we need to make a right-wing version of The Onion, or what was it exactly?

00:03:28.000 Basically, I mean, yeah, it was, it's like a, it is kind of a right-wing, conservative answer to The Onion because, you know, there's so much, there's so much that the left does in media and entertainment and comedy.

00:03:39.000 You know, all the late night shows, SNL, all of these things are dominated by leftist ideology, political ideology, secular progressivism, you could say.

00:03:49.000 And so there was nobody who's really doing that well from a Christian perspective.

00:03:52.000 There's a real lack of Christian comedy in general, but no Christian satire in particular.

00:03:58.000 So Adam Ford, who started the site in 2016, saw that and just thought, hey, maybe there's like a void there that if I fill it, it's going to attract some attention.

00:04:10.000 And the site was getting like millions of hits within the first couple months.

00:04:12.000 So obviously he was right.

00:04:14.000 How do you even come up with the concept of sort of a Christian satire?

00:04:17.000 Meaning that the sort of traditional view of Christians, particularly in the media, are extraordinarily sincere, hallmark movies, bad Christian rock.

00:04:26.000 How do you actually, you know, merge the idea that there's going to be a subversive humor to a Christian-oriented, because it's not just a conservative political site, it really is Christian-oriented.

00:04:37.000 Well, yeah, I think the biggest challenge to trying to conceive of what that looks like is overcoming the problem of, well, how do you, how do you make fun of things from a Christian perspective and do it in like a way that's not like mean spirited, you know, because so much of comedy involves mockery. 0.74

00:04:52.000 And the question is like, how do you mock people and love them at the same time?

00:04:56.000 Um, without being, you know, without being cruel, without just, without, without attacking the person, you know, you're really trying to attack the ideas is ultimately what we're going for rather than like ad hominem, nasty, mean attacks that are just meant to make people feel bad about themselves.

00:05:09.000 So I think that's, you know, uh, that's the main thing is just like accomplishing that mission of, of like engaging in mockery from a moral perspective.

00:05:19.000 And I think that, um, I think the B has accomplished that.

00:05:21.000 I think that, I think that there's this mistake that we've made where we've, we've, we've, we've decided that we're more moral as a society because we make fun of fewer things.

00:05:32.000 I don't know if you noticed that, but it's like everybody, you don't want to make fun of anybody because you'll hurt people's feelings.

00:05:37.000 And that's not right.

00:05:38.000 You don't want to hurt people's feelings.

00:05:40.000 And I don't think we're more moral as a result of making fun of fewer things because I think what ends up happening is we end up, we end up affirming and accepting what we should be ridiculing and rejecting.

00:05:49.000 And I think there's a moral case that can be made for why we should be rejecting and ridiculing certain things.

00:05:54.000 You know, there's, as you know, there's bad ideas that have harmful effects in society.

00:05:58.000 But what do we do with them?

00:05:58.000 Do we just affirm and accept them because somebody thinks that they're a good thing?

00:06:03.000 So, I don't know, I think Christians have a role to play in engaging in that conversation, and you can argue with people, sure, you can refute their ideas or whatever, but you can also mock them when they deserve it, and you can do it very effectively, I think. 0.98

00:06:17.000 I think in both the Jewish community and the Christian community, just the religious community in the United States generally, which is this problem of niceness as the chief virtue, which is not one of the virtues.

00:06:26.000 I mean, there's this sort of idea that has set in that to be Christian means that predominantly it's just being kind of a nice person in the same way that secularists think of the high virtue as just being tolerant or nice.

00:06:36.000 And the reality is that the Bible is not known for its niceness.

00:06:41.000 I mean, there's a lot in the Bible that isn't particularly nice, not just in terms of commandments that people have a tough time with, but also in terms of the way that you're supposed to treat bad ideas.

00:06:49.000 I mean, you are overtly enjoined in the Old Testament to chastise people when they violate.

00:06:54.000 You're not supposed to, when it says not to set a stumbling block in front of a blind man, it means you're supposed to chastise them. 0.99

00:06:59.000 You have to go to the next versus you have to correct your brother, you have to stop him from doing that sort of thing.

00:07:04.000 So bringing that back to the fore, I think, is actually something that is really important for religious people of Judeo-Christian persuasion to understand.

00:07:11.000 Well, I mean, when you just think of a concept like truth, you know, I don't think it's mean to confront somebody with the truth if they're denying the truth or if they're asking you to affirm something I mean, it may be, you know, there's so many cliches that you can throw out there.

00:07:30.000 Like the truth hurts, right?

00:07:31.000 It can be, it can be like you say something that, that somebody doesn't want to hear and it bothers them, it grates against them.

00:07:37.000 But it doesn't mean that you're a mean person for doing that.

00:07:40.000 Ultimately, I think you're doing more harm to that person.

00:07:43.000 You care less about that person if you're just willing to say whatever they want you to say to make them feel better about themselves, even if it means affirming a lie, for example.

00:07:53.000 So yeah, I mean, I just, I reject the idea totally.

00:07:57.000 I agree with you that, you know, this niceness is not necessarily, but now it doesn't mean that you need to be mean.

00:08:02.000 Um, or cruel just for the sake of being cruel.

00:08:05.000 You know, like putting somebody down for, like, their appearance, for example.

00:08:07.000 You know, stuff like that is just, you're just taking shots at somebody to make them feel bad about themselves.

00:08:11.000 There's no, like, redemptive side to that type of humor.

00:08:15.000 But, I don't, if you look at the Babylon Bee, you know, you don't really see us doing that.

00:08:18.000 The main thing that we're doing is we're confronting, I think, bad ideas.

00:08:22.000 Uh, the bad people that are advancing those ideas, um, but not in a mean-spirited, cruel way where we're just, like, trying to hurt people.

00:08:29.000 Um, so, you know, I think you can do that.

00:08:31.000 I think you can, you can successfully accomplish engaging in mockery of ideas that deserve to be mocked.

00:08:36.000 You know, some things, some, some things need to be held in contempt.

00:08:40.000 Um, and so, you know, I think you can do that successfully without being mean.

00:08:44.000 One of the things that's been kind of amazing to watch is the left has ceded the entire comedic battleground.

00:08:48.000 I mean, I remember when The Onion was actually funny.

00:08:50.000 And it's been a very long time since The Onion was funny.

00:08:52.000 I remember, you know, when it launched and I remember reading it in 2007, 2008.

00:08:57.000 And I'd say like half the headlines were funny.

00:08:58.000 Now it's a rarity to find a good headline on The Onion.

00:09:01.000 And I wonder if that's just because of the cultural dominance of the left is so strong.

00:09:05.000 What is there to make fun of?

00:09:07.000 And if they don't have Trump to kick around, there's really nothing for them to make fun of.

00:09:10.000 Whereas because of their cultural dominance, the left, that's provided you a target rich environment.

00:09:15.000 I think, I mean, there's two reasons I would say why The Onion, well I still think The Onion is funny sometimes.

00:09:20.000 I think they're really funny when they're going into like their absurd humor.

00:09:23.000 You know, they're just making a silly joke.

00:09:25.000 I think they're a lot less funny when they're getting involved in the cultural and political commentary with their humor.

00:09:31.000 And the reason for that is because the funny stuff, you know, and Joe Rogan said this recently when he was talking about the Babylon Bee, he says, you know, woke stuff is the funniest stuff.

00:09:38.000 Wokeness is insane. 0.97

00:09:40.000 It deserves to be ridiculed. 0.98

00:09:41.000 There's so much there that's mockable, right?

00:09:44.000 And the left doesn't want to touch it.

00:09:46.000 They want to promote those things.

00:09:47.000 They certainly aren't going to undermine them by making fun of them.

00:09:50.000 So they are actually, they've carved out this huge swath of ideas and activities and behaviors that they won't touch from a comedic perspective.

00:09:59.000 The ones that do, you look at somebody like a Dave Chappelle who's willing to, or Ricky Gervais, somebody like that.

00:10:04.000 Somebody willing to make the jokes they're not supposed to make, they blow up.

00:10:07.000 They get so much attention.

00:10:08.000 You know, obviously there's cancel attempts to shut them up, but the cancel attempts backfire.

00:10:13.000 They become more prominent.

00:10:14.000 They get more views on their specials that they're putting out.

00:10:16.000 People want real comedy.

00:10:18.000 They want you making fun of the things that deserve to be made fun of.

00:10:21.000 And by the way you know it's like when you talk about the things that deserve to be made fun of and wokeness and whatever this is like this is what they are always saying that we're guilty of doing is like punching down like we're not punching up or punching down at the marginalized the oppressed.

00:10:33.000 Wokeness and all of these ideas are coming from the top down like if you're supposed to be punching up as a comedian you're supposed to be making fun of those things you're supposed to be poking holes in the popular narrative not promoting it.

00:10:44.000 And so I love when guys like Bill Maher, for example, notice this and they comment on this and they say, look, you know, these are things that these are things that need to be made fun of.

00:10:51.000 They deserve to be made fun of and comedians won't touch it.

00:10:53.000 Why?

00:10:54.000 I think they're doing everybody a disservice by doing that.

00:10:57.000 But they also you know, you also have this problem that you run into the onion runs into it.

00:11:01.000 Your jokes have to be tethered to the truth.

00:11:03.000 There's got to be like an underlying like There's got to be something in reality that you're joking about.

00:11:09.000 And if it's just your narrative that you're using as your platform for the joke, it's not tied to reality and people are going to read that, especially people who don't agree with your narrative, they're going to read that and they're going to be like, that's not funny because it's not true.

00:11:20.000 So there has to be truth to the joke.

00:11:22.000 So in a second, I want to ask you about, you know, the unsayable truths.

00:11:25.000 Some of them have gotten your account banned from Twitter, for example.

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00:12:53.000 Okay, so let's talk about the fact that when you say some of these unsayable truths, when you go after the woke, you run a pretty significant business risk.

00:12:58.000 So obviously the Babylon Bee account has been banned by Twitter for the great sin of noticing that men are not women and women are not men.

00:13:03.000 This is a risk most of us run now on a daily basis.

00:13:06.000 The way that I've been dealing with it over at Twitter is I will say that men are not women and women are not men, but I will also specifically use the rules as sort of a way to mock. 0.80

00:13:17.000 So instead of saying, Elliot Page is a woman, and Elliot Page is in fact a woman.

00:13:22.000 I will instead say Elliot Page is the most manly man ever to man.

00:13:25.000 There's never been a more masculine man than Elliot Page.

00:13:27.000 Like Hulk Hogan, Elliot Page.

00:13:29.000 The two most manly men who ever lived.

00:13:31.000 But how do you deal with that?

00:13:32.000 Because one of the things that you've had to do at Babylon Bee is they obviously knocked your account off Twitter, and you've refused to take down the apparently offending headline.

00:13:39.000 Why don't you tell the story of how it got banned in the first place, and then what your response has been.

00:13:42.000 I wish we were that prudent.

00:13:43.000 I wish we were as prudent as you are.

00:13:45.000 Yeah, so USA Today did a story on how Rachel Levine, you know, this transgender health admiral in the Biden administration. 0.97

00:13:52.000 Like John Paul Jones of health.

00:13:55.000 Yes, exactly.

00:13:56.000 Named Woman of the Year by USA Today.

00:13:59.000 Um, I guess they named several women, women of the year.

00:14:02.000 Um, but in this particular instance, they picked a man to name woman of the year.

00:14:06.000 And there's this picture, you know, you look at the headlines, there's this picture of this person who's obviously male, but dressed as a woman.

00:14:12.000 And there's the headline that says, Rachel Levine is our pick for woman of the year.

00:14:15.000 And this is a, a mockable idea.

00:14:18.000 You know, like this is first of all, it's a front to women everywhere. 1.00

00:14:21.000 It's a front to women everywhere that like this person who just like announced that they're a woman is now woman of the year.

00:14:26.000 There weren't other people that we could listen.

00:14:28.000 Men are amazing.

00:14:28.000 We're so amazing in things that we can be women for like five seconds, be the best, or even better, even better women than women are.

00:14:34.000 Patriarchy is so good at this. 1.00

00:14:35.000 It's unreal.

00:14:36.000 So we do a joke and we say, you know what?

00:14:38.000 Uh, we named Rachel Levine man of the year over at Babylon B. And that's like, That didn't get run by me first before that went out.

00:14:48.000 If it had, you know, I might have said, guys, we could probably make this joke without the blatant misgendering, as they call it.

00:14:58.000 Because I don't agree that that's misgendering.

00:14:59.000 I think it's misgendering when a male person refers to themselves as being a woman.

00:15:03.000 Um, but we made that joke and we got flagged for hateful conduct.

00:15:07.000 So, you know, they, uh, they want us to basically what happened was they didn't suspend our account.

00:15:12.000 They just said, you've got to delete this joke and take it down.

00:15:15.000 You know, they, they do this sometimes where they'll say this particular tweet needs to be deleted.

00:15:18.000 If you do that, your account will go back to, you know, normal activity reinstatement.

00:15:23.000 Um, But they require you to acknowledge that you engaged in hateful conduct, that you violated the terms against hateful conduct by making that tweet in the first place.

00:15:32.000 We don't acknowledge that at all.

00:15:35.000 For one thing, this is a joke.

00:15:36.000 That's the first point, right?

00:15:37.000 It's just a joke.

00:15:38.000 And why can't we joke about this stuff?

00:15:40.000 And for another, it's true.

00:15:43.000 Rachel Levine is in fact a man.

00:15:45.000 If you look up right now today in the dictionary, which could change tomorrow, you look it up today and a man is an adult human male, right?

00:15:52.000 That's the definition of a man.

00:15:53.000 So we can't say that.

00:15:54.000 We can't even say that fact.

00:15:56.000 And the craziest thing to me is when you actually look at the hateful conduct policy on Twitter's website, you go to that page and it starts out with like this tribute to free expression.

00:16:04.000 They talk about how they want to be a platform for free expression without barriers.

00:16:07.000 Those are their words, without barriers.

00:16:10.000 But then you scroll further down, you get to hateful conduct, and they have all this stuff about deadnaming, you mentioned Elliot Page, deadnaming, misgendering, all of these things that you can't do.

00:16:17.000 And so, they put you in a tricky situation, especially like as a comedian or humorist, satirist, whatever you're doing on Twitter, where you're supposed to be, like I said, poking holes in the popular narrative.

00:16:27.000 That's your job.

00:16:29.000 But then Twitter has rules where you must affirm the popular narrative.

00:16:33.000 The ideology's baked into the terms of service, so you have to follow the popular Narrative and promote it or just don't say anything at all.

00:16:41.000 Those are two choices.

00:16:43.000 We either promote it or you stay quiet.

00:16:44.000 You can't poke holes in it.

00:16:46.000 You can't make jokes about it even which is what we tried to do.

00:16:49.000 We weren't making some big statement.

00:16:50.000 You know we weren't attacking Rachel Levine as a person.

00:16:52.000 We're just simply joking about something that I think deserves to be joked about and if we have free expression without barriers we should be able to do that.

00:17:00.000 But the ideology is baked in there.

00:17:02.000 They smuggle it in there.

00:17:02.000 So the comedian is really handcuffed.

00:17:06.000 They're not able to really do what they're supposed to do.

00:17:08.000 You have to promote the popular narrative or shut up.

00:17:11.000 And obviously, this is applied to the Babylon Bee.

00:17:12.000 Also, you work with Libs of TikTok. 0.81

00:17:14.000 and lives of TikTok, they keep trying to ban lives of TikTok over and over and over.

00:17:17.000 Eventually, I assume they will succeed in the banning of lives of TikTok for the rights of, actually just putting up videos of people who are of the woke persuasion on TikTok.

00:17:27.000 That's literally the crime.

00:17:29.000 Which demonstrates once again, for a lot of these social media outlets, it really is just about propagandizing.

00:17:35.000 If you even, if somebody puts up a video to draw attention to themselves, and then you repost the video with a quote from them, they'll be like, no, that's not the type of attention We want the type of attention where you celebrate us, not the kind where you actually quote us.

00:17:47.000 That's the, that's the real problem.

00:17:48.000 Well, cause it draws criticism, right?

00:17:49.000 You, you take that thing like a family friendly drag show, uh, can put out a flyer and promote it and they'll promote it on social media.

00:17:58.000 And it's fine to do that, but they're promoting it to their own audience.

00:18:02.000 They're promoting it to people that are not going to complain about it for the most part, but then somebody picks it up and shares it with lives of Tik TOK and lives of Tik TOK posts it.

00:18:10.000 Don't even have to be with any commentary attached to it.

00:18:12.000 It can just be this is happening.

00:18:13.000 This is an event that's happening and here's the flyer for that event.

00:18:16.000 Well, that's additional promotion for the event by the way to a much larger audience than they would have gotten anyway.

00:18:22.000 But it's just like that's unacceptable to them because it's being promoted to an audience that actually takes issue with the event itself and objects to the event itself.

00:18:30.000 That's a big conversation to have about whether or not, you know, are there certain things that we're not allowed to object to?

00:18:35.000 That we're not allowed to find objectionable?

00:18:37.000 Can we not find it objectionable that minors are undergoing hysterectomies for what they refer to as gender-affirming care?

00:18:44.000 Like, we should be allowed to object to that without somebody saying that our objection amounts to a call to violence or harassment or something of whoever it is that's engaging in this activity.

00:18:57.000 You can criticize behavior.

00:18:59.000 You can dislike the behavior without wishing death upon the person who's engaged in it.

00:19:03.000 You just want them to stop.

00:19:05.000 It would be nice if hospitals, which are in fact performing hysterectomies on underage people, healthy minors, Who don't need hysterectomies.

00:19:14.000 They are doing that.

00:19:15.000 It would be nice if they would stop.

00:19:17.000 You know, just simply saying, I think they should stop doing this does not amount to a cult.

00:19:21.000 But that's their tactic.

00:19:22.000 You know, the tactic is you've got to try to say, we don't like this speech, so we have to try to find a way to put this speech in violation of the speech code.

00:19:30.000 And the way we put it in violation of the speech code is by pretending that and by acting like it is somehow threatening.

00:19:36.000 But you know, there are deep ideological roots to all that, obviously.

00:19:39.000 The kind of cult of personal authenticity that the true you is how you feel on the inside and any sort of imposition on that, including from reality itself, is bad for you.

00:19:48.000 And therefore, the goal of civilization is basically to reflect back at you what you are what you are feeling about yourself.

00:19:54.000 And if you're not accepted, then this amounts to an act of violence.

00:19:57.000 It amounts to an act of subversion of the real you.

00:20:01.000 And so it's all of our jobs to just sit and cheer like seals as you change your pronouns every five seconds while promoting the transing of the children. 0.59

00:20:09.000 That sort of deep ideology is baked into the cake of a lot of what they're doing.

00:20:14.000 Well, it's problematic, though, because if you have this standard that you apply to Libs of TikTok and you say, look, if you just if you simply report on the fact that a hospital said on a recording that they will do these procedures for children under 16, which Libs of TikTok recorded and put out the recording as proof, you know, that the hospitals are saying this.

00:20:33.000 Simply reporting on that, you know, you treat that as though it's incitement to violence or something like that.

00:20:37.000 Well, then isn't all reporting incitement to violence?

00:20:41.000 Like anytime you report on something, imagine, let's say, let's imagine a scenario where, um, staffers at the hospital were sexually abusing minors, right?

00:20:48.000 And that gets out somehow.

00:20:49.000 Somebody leaks that to the media and the media reports on that.

00:20:53.000 Does that mean that the hospital is like inciting by, I mean that the media is inciting violence against the hospital?

00:20:57.000 Of course not.

00:20:58.000 They're doing their duty by reporting on something objectionable that's happening at the hospital.

00:21:02.000 They're telling the truth.

00:21:04.000 So, yeah, I just think it's, if you take that standard and you apply it everywhere, then you have to shut down the whole enterprise of journalism.

00:21:12.000 Like, you can't report on anything.

00:21:13.000 So they pick and choose though, as you know, you know, they don't apply these standards evenly.

00:21:17.000 And so that's the point is you got to continually point out to people, look, they're engaged in these kinds of crazy double standards.

00:21:23.000 And these rules that they're applying to us, if you applied it to them, they would have to be banned too.

00:21:27.000 So in a second, I want to ask you about how, you know, the Babylon Bee standing up in favor of the possibility of telling jokes about, about just absolute madness, how this has drawn kind of a unique audience, including some very famous people.

00:21:39.000 We'll get to that in just one moment.

00:21:40.000 First, let's talk about a sad fact.

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00:23:10.000 When you started Babylon Bee, I doubt that you thought that people like Elon Musk were going to be giant fans of Babylon Bee, and yet Elon Musk was, for a brief moment in time, it appeared that he was going to be the savior of Twitter.

00:23:22.000 He was going to come in, he was going to flip a switch, suddenly all of the shadow banning of accounts was going to stop.

00:23:28.000 accounts like yours were going to come back online.

00:23:29.000 He pretty much openly said that one of the reasons that he was getting involved is to stop the kind of censorship like the censorship of the Babylon Bee on Twitter.

00:23:37.000 So what do you know about how Elon Musk became a fan of your site?

00:23:40.000 Because it's pretty wild.

00:23:42.000 I mean, he started engaging with our content out of nowhere.

00:23:45.000 You know, every now and then we'd have an article, like someone would like screen grab it and send it to us.

00:23:49.000 They'd be like, Elon Musk just commented on one of your articles.

00:23:51.000 You know, he started commenting on them.

00:23:53.000 He shared them a couple of times and they started following us.

00:23:56.000 So and then I think the onion started picking at him and making jokes about him.

00:24:02.000 And so to troll the onion.

00:24:04.000 He was like giving a nod to the Babylon Bee and commenting under their articles and saying, have you checked out the Babylon Bee?

00:24:09.000 They're great.

00:24:09.000 They're even better, you know?

00:24:11.000 So he was kind of using us to troll the onion for a little while.

00:24:15.000 But he's been a fan of the Bee for a little while now, and he actually sat down with us for an interview on our podcast.

00:24:21.000 Which is unique.

00:24:21.000 He never sits down with anybody on the right side of the aisle.

00:24:23.000 It's hard to get him to do that, yeah.

00:24:26.000 But yeah, he was like, yeah, if you come to Austin, you know, I'll do a sit down with you.

00:24:29.000 So we talked with him for a couple hours and that was a wide ranging discussion, by the way, but it was fascinating because we talked some about speech.

00:24:35.000 We talked about wokeness.

00:24:36.000 You know, he described wokeness, um, as being divisive and exclusionary and hateful, uh, and how it's like an excuse for people to be mean and cruel, well armored and false virtue, which I thought was a great way of putting it. 1.00

00:24:48.000 He turned to us and he asked us, he's like, well, what do you guys think about it?

00:24:50.000 And I'm like, Can't beat that.

00:24:52.000 That was a pretty good way of putting it.

00:24:56.000 He cares a lot about the mind virus of wokeness, like he was just describing, and the ability of others to push back on it and debate this stuff.

00:25:07.000 Like, you should be able to have these debates.

00:25:09.000 We shouldn't have one side that just wins by default because everybody on the other side has been silenced, suppressed, throttled, suspended.

00:25:16.000 So yeah, he refers to himself as a free speech absolutist, and he thought it was pretty outrageous when the bee was locked out of our account.

00:25:24.000 So, you know, we were hoping for a little while there that something was gonna happen.

00:25:26.000 Maybe it still will.

00:25:27.000 I don't know if he's gonna be forced to go through with the deal.

00:25:29.000 It'll be interesting to see how that all plays out.

00:25:31.000 I'm not sure.

00:25:32.000 Yeah, I think it's gonna be difficult to see him having to be spending $45 billion on a company that's market cap is not even remotely close to that.

00:25:41.000 I mean, man, the multiples, I could go all day on this.

00:25:43.000 The multiples for that company right now are 160 times, their P.E. ratio is 160, which is just, I'm sorry.

00:25:49.000 Yeah.

00:25:50.000 That bleep bloony, but in any case, the other person who- He said it wasn't about money, though.

00:25:55.000 That's the thing.

00:25:55.000 Right.

00:25:56.000 For him, it was not a financial deal, where he's like, I think Twitter's a great investment.

00:25:59.000 I don't think he was thinking of it in those terms.

00:26:01.000 He's thinking of it in terms of there's a problem here.

00:26:03.000 No one's dealing with it.

00:26:04.000 Congress isn't dealing with it.

00:26:05.000 Courts aren't dealing with it. 0.99

00:26:06.000 The public square, if it exists today, is digital, right?

00:26:11.000 He calls it the town square, the digital town square.

00:26:14.000 That's what he thinks of Twitter as being, Facebook as being, like these big tech platforms are in fact the town square of the modern age.

00:26:19.000 So if free speech doesn't exist there, then it doesn't exist anymore.

00:26:23.000 So what do we do about that?

00:26:24.000 And he's just thinking in terms of, well, I have the resources to do something about it, so maybe I should step in and do something about it.

00:26:29.000 I applaud him for that.

00:26:30.000 No, for sure.

00:26:30.000 I mean, it's been fascinating to watch as he turned from a person who was the great hope for humanity into a cartoon villain almost overnight.

00:26:39.000 And it had to do with the fact that he decided to fight back against wokeness and that he basically suggested that merit ought to be rewarded and that we shouldn't decide based on equity concerns, left-wing equity concerns, how to construct companies or how to do science.

00:26:51.000 It's been amazing to watch the morphing of him in the public view according to the media.

00:26:55.000 Again, like three years ago, Elon Musk was the guy who was going to take us to Mars and he was going to make all of our cars electric.

00:27:01.000 He was gonna be- He's fighting climate change.

00:27:02.000 Exactly, he's gonna create a tunnel in the San Fernando Valley to the city, like the whole thing.

00:27:06.000 And now, of course, all he's known for is being an evil Twitter troll who goes on yachts and talks with Seth Dillon.

00:27:13.000 It's pretty amazing to watch that flip.

00:27:15.000 Yeah, he's now considered a far-right extremist just because he's not far left.

00:27:19.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:27:19.000 Which is just, you know, Joe Rogan's in the same boat.

00:27:21.000 Yeah, I was about to ask about Joe.

00:27:22.000 So, obviously, I'm pretty friendly with Joe.

00:27:24.000 I've been friends with Joe for a while.

00:27:25.000 So, you were just on his show pretty recently, and it really blew up.

00:27:30.000 There are a few issues that you guys got into that were really fascinating.

00:27:33.000 So, first of all, it is fascinating to see the dynamic that the left has about Joe, because Joe is clearly not a right-winger.

00:27:38.000 I mean, I keep saying this over and over and over.

00:27:40.000 Joe and I agree on maybe 35% of things politically.

00:27:45.000 We both are very much in favor of free speech.

00:27:47.000 Both of us dislike wokeness. 0.65

00:27:49.000 He likes guns.

00:27:50.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:27:51.000 He likes guns.

00:27:51.000 He works it out.

00:27:53.000 And there the similarities kind of end because when you get to, you know, kind of social values or when you get to fiscal values, I mean, he endorsed Bernie Sanders.

00:28:00.000 When he gets to that sort of stuff, there's just wide divergence.

00:28:02.000 But because Joe is not hard left, he's now been characterized as kind of one of us.

00:28:07.000 That's the way that the political narrative works these days.

00:28:09.000 Yeah.

00:28:10.000 Yeah.

00:28:10.000 He doesn't like that, by the way.

00:28:12.000 I toasted him when I sat down, I said to my favorite far-right extremist.

00:28:15.000 He's like, I've never even voted Republican.

00:28:17.000 Like, not once.

00:28:18.000 So, yeah, it's unfair, those characterizations.

00:28:22.000 And, you know, I think he cares about that maybe a little more than he should.

00:28:26.000 Because he wants to try to find ways, when you're having discussions with me, he has to try to find ways to disagree with you.

00:28:32.000 I did feel like maybe that was happening in R&D, maybe not, but that he was looking for an opportunity to disagree with me, because if he agrees with Seth Dillon on too many things, then, you know, Then obviously, he's too right-wing, right?

00:28:43.000 So he's got to have an issue to disagree with me on.

00:28:45.000 And in our interview, the main thing that came up that we butted heads on, I think for the most part we agreed on a lot, because we were really focused on free speech and censorship.

00:28:52.000 We were talking about what you and I were just talking about, the Twitter deal and deleting the tweet and Elon Musk.

00:28:58.000 And, you know, he's going to come down on the side of, you should be able to make these jokes, you should be able to have free speech.

00:29:05.000 But we got on the subject of abortion somehow, and I don't remember, I'd have to go back and watch, I don't remember exactly how it started, who brought it up, me or him, but that was where we kind of butted heads.

00:29:13.000 Yeah, and that was the sort of situation that went viral, and I thought it was a great example of how media coverage diverges, because everybody who's on our side of the aisle, everybody who's pro-life, was like, this is a great exchange for Seth.

00:29:23.000 Like Seth did a really good job of explaining pro-life position.

00:29:25.000 He didn't back down.

00:29:26.000 He didn't get shy when he was asked about the edge issues.

00:29:29.000 Because you know, the pro-choice side, they like to argue the edge issues as opposed to arguing the 99% of actual abortions, which are elective in nature.

00:29:37.000 Instead, they like to argue rape or incest or life of the woman.

00:29:41.000 They like to argue all those edge cases.

00:29:43.000 And you really didn't back down on, for example, rape and incest.

00:29:46.000 And so people on the right were like, this is great.

00:29:48.000 And then the way that was portrayed in the left-wing media is look at this extremist Seth Dillon and how Joe Rogan really would shed it in.

00:29:53.000 And that really wasn't what the conversation was.

00:29:57.000 You're right, though.

00:29:58.000 It's the emotional argument.

00:30:00.000 He tried to bring in the most emotional case he could think of.

00:30:04.000 And he has a daughter who's a teenager, and brought his daughter up as an example of, if my daughter were to get raped and get pregnant, do you think you have the right to tell her that she's got to keep that baby?

00:30:15.000 And, you know, I think it's very disingenuous if people on the left are going to use those examples as their argument for why abortion should just be available on demand.

00:30:25.000 Because what percentage of pregnancies happen in those circumstances?

00:30:29.000 We have a 14-year-old who's been raped.

00:30:31.000 It's a very, very small percentage of pregnancies.

00:30:34.000 So even if you have somebody, let's say for example, I had conceded the point and said, okay, Joe, you know, she should be allowed in that case to get an abortion.

00:30:42.000 Then we have to have, now let's have a conversation about all the other abortions.

00:30:45.000 Now what about those?

00:30:46.000 It's not rape. 0.82

00:30:47.000 It was consensual sex.

00:30:49.000 You know, they didn't use any kind of contraceptive.

00:30:51.000 And so you have a baby and you're not ready to have a baby.

00:30:54.000 Is that okay?

00:30:56.000 If it's not okay then, what is your argument gonna be in those cases?

00:31:00.000 And of course, they usually end up going off into something about some kind of self-defense argument.

00:31:06.000 That it's gonna be a financial burden.

00:31:10.000 Or it's gonna, I have bodily autonomy and I don't choose to give up my bodily autonomy.

00:31:15.000 It's a threat to my bodily autonomy.

00:31:17.000 So it's always like this, I have to defend myself against this thing that's coming into my area and it's gonna mess up my whole life.

00:31:24.000 And so, then you're on much shakier ground when you're trying to make that case, because do you really have the right to use lethal force against a threat of that nature?

00:31:32.000 You know, it's not a threat of imminent death or great bodily harm.

00:31:35.000 It's just a baby, you know?

00:31:37.000 A baby, not a bomb.

00:31:38.000 Who happens to be yours, by the way.

00:31:40.000 Who happens to be yours, genetically yours, you know?

00:31:42.000 So, they're on much shakier ground there.

00:31:44.000 That's why they prefer those edge issues.

00:31:46.000 They have such emotional weight to them.

00:31:49.000 So I think it's important that when we engage in those conversations that we not give an inch and we say, you know, it is an emotional argument, but you can make a very dispassionate non-emotional response.

00:31:58.000 Like I did.

00:31:58.000 I just laid out a syllogism for him and just told him, you know, if it's wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human life, then it's wrong all the time.

00:32:05.000 Right, and I think that that's what took a lot of folks aback, both on the right and the left.

00:32:09.000 Number one, you're very clear about it, so for the right, that's unusual.

00:32:12.000 And on the left, that's never an argument that they actually confront.

00:32:16.000 It is fascinating when you argue with people about abortion on the left, how they just refuse to see that, like the actual personal interest of the child as even a factor in the consideration.

00:32:28.000 Because once you take that into consideration, it completely shifts the math.

00:32:30.000 So instead it's just like this thing does not exist and we're gonna pretend it doesn't exist and then we're gonna talk about bodily autonomy in the same way that you would about taking a vaccine.

00:32:37.000 Or we're gonna talk about the burden on you as though we're talking about whether to take a job or not.

00:32:43.000 As soon as you eliminate one of the interests in the conversation, the conversation becomes incredibly simple from the pro-choice side.

00:32:49.000 And so for you to sort of say that, I think a lot of folks on the right were obviously very excited about that.

00:32:53.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:32:54.000 And you know, there's other contexts too where you can really draw out how insane the reasoning is.

00:32:59.000 And this didn't come up in my discussion with Joe Rogan, but it's come up since then.

00:33:03.000 I've got people in my DMs sending me messages saying, you know, well if you're against the death penalty, I mean if you're for the death penalty, You know, they try to bring the death penalty for criminals into the conversation about abortion and try to say that, you know, you can't be against one and for the other, you know, like you've got to be like it. 0.68

00:33:26.000 That's just totally erroneous.

00:33:28.000 The death penalty is for people who are like convicted of murder, you know, like some egregious crime.

00:33:32.000 They're like, they're guilty, you know, and a baby is innocent.

00:33:35.000 They haven't committed any crime.

00:33:37.000 And so to suggest that for some reason they're against the death penalty before abortion, they have compassion inverted, right?

00:33:43.000 Like we should reserve compassion for people who are innocent, not people who are guilty.

00:33:47.000 And yet that's what exactly what they do.

00:33:49.000 You know, they flip it on its head and they're like, Oh, well, we should let violent criminals off the hook, but babies should be met with lethal force. 0.98

00:33:56.000 Um, you know, those are just, those are just wild arguments.

00:33:58.000 So anytime you confront those types of arguments with like a reasonable response, rather than an emotional response.

00:34:05.000 You know, I think it carries a lot of weight.

00:34:07.000 So in a second, I'm gonna ask you about the typical left-wing response to this sort of stuff, which is, well, you must be saying this because you're religious, right?

00:34:13.000 That's really the next move.

00:34:14.000 We'll get to that in just a second.

00:34:15.000 First, let's talk about your sleep quality.

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00:35:32.000 Okay, so we're talking pro-life issues here, and one of the things that I find happens a lot when I debate these issues is you'll make a bunch of dispassionate, non-religious arguments, and then somebody will come back and say, well, this is just because you believe in the Bible.

00:35:43.000 Yeah.

00:35:44.000 Did I even cite the Bible?

00:35:45.000 Have I mentioned God anywhere in this conversation?

00:35:47.000 But it is incredible how there's this sort of emotivism that goes on where when people start to lose the argument, they immediately ascribe a motivation to you. 0.96

00:35:53.000 You hate women. 0.78

00:35:54.000 You must be doing this because you're a Bible thumper. 1.00

00:35:56.000 It can never be just Maybe the argument is convincing on its own.

00:35:59.000 Maybe there's an actual natural law argument in favor of preserving the lives of the unborn, for example.

00:36:04.000 Yeah.

00:36:04.000 And I did mention that, you know, uh, there are a lot of atheists who are pro-life.

00:36:08.000 Um, the argument that I gave, I laid out a syllogism for him.

00:36:12.000 It didn't cite a Bible verse, you know, it just, it is wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human.

00:36:17.000 So, uh, that's not, that's not, I think we all agree on that.

00:36:21.000 You don't have to believe in the Bible to believe that that premise and that argument is true.

00:36:28.000 It is, you know, to suggest that this is a religious argument when we're talking about, you know, when does life begin?

00:36:33.000 That's a scientific question.

00:36:34.000 You can answer that question by looking at a biology textbook, not your Bible, right?

00:36:39.000 And that's what I was really challenging him on was when he was saying, look, you know, so are you saying that when, when fertilization happens, you know, in, in this, you have this like developing life form that at that precise moment, some kind of magic happens, some kind of miracle happens where, where, you know, the life suddenly becomes valuable.

00:36:53.000 Yes, absolutely.

00:36:54.000 That's, that's the place where, where you have a distinct new life coming into existence.

00:36:58.000 Otherwise you have some arbitrary place along the line in this, in this new humans development where you're suggesting that they suddenly become valuable.

00:37:06.000 That's more of a religious conviction than anything else.

00:37:09.000 That's much more of a faith belief that I can just pinpoint a time on this chart, you know, where it becomes valuable based on what.

00:37:17.000 And if you go back to where life begins, you're using a scientific argument as well.

00:37:23.000 You know, obviously there's a moral reasoning there.

00:37:25.000 It's a human life and you're ascribing value to it.

00:37:28.000 But that's the place where it makes sense.

00:37:29.000 It actually makes rational good sense to say that this is a new life and that this is where the value comes into play.

00:37:35.000 It's not some arbitrary thing that you're just picking out of nowhere.

00:37:37.000 So one of the things that's been kind of fascinating is in the aftermath of the overruling of Roe v. Wade, so long as we're on this topic, there's been a lot of argument inside sort of conservative circles over how Republican politicians ought to deal with the issue of abortion because I would say, you know, roughly speaking, 20% of Americans are in the hardcore pro-life camp.

00:37:54.000 Maybe 10 to 15% of Americans are in the hardcore pro-choice, up till birth, three months after birth, kill it, do whatever you want, you know, camp.

00:38:01.000 And then everybody else is sort of in between to varying degrees.

00:38:04.000 It seems like if there were a consensus, it would be somewhere in the 10 to 12 week range is where the American consensus seems to be.

00:38:11.000 A lot of Republican politicians You know, who overtly say that they are pro-life, then may back off of that in the public square.

00:38:18.000 And this has driven a lot of ire from the pro-life side.

00:38:20.000 I get it on a sort of passion level, but I think it also mistakes what the job of a politician is to do, which is get as much as you can.

00:38:27.000 Meaning, you know, if you never win an election, you're not implementing anything in the first place.

00:38:31.000 And so the idea of saying, I'm pro-life, the bill that I propose to put forward is, for example, at 12 weeks.

00:38:38.000 And then we're going to get people used to that.

00:38:39.000 Then we move to 10 weeks.

00:38:40.000 Then we move to eight weeks.

00:38:42.000 To me, as a tactical matter, that may be a better tactic than simply coming out and saying we're going to ban it right away, we're going to ban all of them if that's bound to lose.

00:38:51.000 What do you make of that?

00:38:52.000 Well, I would agree with you.

00:38:53.000 I mean, well, if, if whatever you're proposing is going to result in fewer elective abortions than the previous laws, then that's an advance.

00:39:05.000 It's, you know, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're moving to protect at least some of the life that you want to protect, which I think is better than failing to protect any of it.

00:39:14.000 Um, so certainly, certainly better than nothing.

00:39:17.000 And then, like you said, you know, you can kind of, Move from there, you know, and get more restrictive and preserving life down the road when it's more appropriate, when it's more popular.

00:39:28.000 You have to pick your battles, right?

00:39:30.000 I think it's better to accomplish something than not accomplish anything at all.

00:39:33.000 So if you go too hard and you just go straight for the band, you've got to have a band, no exceptions, no anything.

00:39:38.000 I totally understand.

00:39:39.000 I would argue for that.

00:39:40.000 I think that you should argue for that, but I agree with you that something is better than nothing, for sure.

00:39:44.000 So to go back to the comedy for a second, as I was saying before, it's very fascinating how the fact that you guys are funny has opened all of these doors to people who disagree on these sorts of issues, and it's actually allowed for conversation on these sorts of issues, because there's been a vast gap that's emerged in American life where people literally refuse to appear on the same camera with people who are of another political ilk.

00:40:05.000 I'd say that it used to be a lot easier on this show to book people who were of the opposing political viewpoint than it is right now.

00:40:12.000 Now it's very difficult.

00:40:13.000 People are so scared of even being in the same room that if, as it turns out, you are in the same room as somebody who disagrees with you, they may actually try to generate a boycott against your company because of your essence, because your very presence, as it turns out, in the podcast movement.

00:40:27.000 You're dangerous.

00:40:28.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:40:29.000 Massively dangerous, super scary, like a weird sort of shadowy Presence lurking in the HVAC system.

00:40:38.000 But you've been able to open a lot of these doors through comedy, and it feels like that's where the left is losing.

00:40:44.000 You mentioned Dave Chappelle, who's clearly not a right winger.

00:40:46.000 You mentioned people like Louis C.K., who's clearly not a right winger.

00:40:50.000 There are a lot of people out there who are suddenly having conversations because the left has gotten so censorious and so terrible that suddenly this lane has been opened up.

00:40:58.000 Yeah, I think comedians...

00:41:01.000 Comedians have a unique way of approaching the issues where it can be, if not necessarily unifying, I think unifying is the wrong word, but humor and comedy can be very disarming.

00:41:13.000 And I think that there are people on the other side of the aisle who you can slip a joke through.

00:41:17.000 You know, I love the way GK Chesterton put it.

00:41:20.000 He said humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle.

00:41:24.000 I like that.

00:41:24.000 I think it's true.

00:41:25.000 I think that sometimes it can kind of slip past your defenses and you can end up dealing with an issue that might be really upsetting and cause a lot of strife and division if you talk about it seriously.

00:41:38.000 But with humor, you can approach it from a different angle and it's maybe not quite as upsetting.

00:41:42.000 I think it's part of the reason why, you know, you can get across the aisle with humor easier than you can with other things.

00:41:48.000 And we have had, you know, we've had examples of people.

00:41:51.000 We did a joke about how a motorcyclist identified as a bicyclist and set a world record.

00:41:55.000 And it's just a silly identifies as joke, you know?

00:41:57.000 We do a lot of those.

00:41:59.000 In fact, we're often criticized for only having one joke because we've made jokes like that so many times.

00:42:04.000 But it's a joke that bears repeating, right?

00:42:07.000 But somebody actually reached out, a couple people did.

00:42:09.000 We got emails from people who said, you know, like, this actually helped me see this.

00:42:13.000 Issue like as it is like it's unfair. This isn't right that we have biological males and women's sports and And your article kind of as silly as it was help me see that we get feedback like that sometimes I think that's you know I think it's one of the I think it's one of the strengths of comedy is that is that it?

00:42:29.000 You know somebody might be willing to share that article, but they're not gonna just say Males shouldn't be in women's sports But they might share that article, and that article might actually make a point that gets through.

00:42:41.000 So, one of the taboos that you've touched on a bunch, obviously, is the trans issue, but there are a bunch of other taboos from the left that you guys have been pretty fearless in securing.

00:42:49.000 What do you see as the sort of big taboos that are out there that you've spent a lot of time and effort sort of going after?

00:42:55.000 Oh, uh, I don't know.

00:42:58.000 I mean, the gender thing is such a big one.

00:43:01.000 Some of these things are hard to joke about.

00:43:03.000 We were talking about abortion a minute ago.

00:43:05.000 Like abortion's hard to joke about.

00:43:06.000 It's very hard.

00:43:07.000 Like yeah, yeah, good luck sitting down and writing a funny abortion joke. 1.00

00:43:10.000 I mean, it's just not a funny topic.

00:43:12.000 We have managed to, I mean, there's been a couple of times, we did one about how, you know, Planned Parenthood came to Bill Cosby's defense saying that sexual assault was only 3% of what he did.

00:43:26.000 And like, you can do that where you're like, Planned Parenthood is the target, you know?

00:43:29.000 And they're trying to suggest that they only, you know, it's only 3% of their business, this abortion stuff, so it's not a big deal.

00:43:34.000 Well, what if Bill Cosby made that claim, you know?

00:43:37.000 So jokes like that can work, but it's, those are tough topics.

00:43:40.000 Um, I think right now it's anything related to wokeness.

00:43:43.000 Anything related to wokeness.

00:43:44.000 That is the, To use Musk's phrase again, the mind virus that's like taking over like crazy.

00:43:49.000 It's got us thinking that it's like that we can have three-year-olds who are transgender, you know?

00:43:54.000 And that they need to go down this path of taking these hormones, puberty blockers, chemical castration, and going through these surgeries, gender-affirming surgeries.

00:44:05.000 These ideas are so toxic.

00:44:07.000 They're so crazy.

00:44:08.000 The critical race theory stuff that's getting into the schools, all that stuff.

00:44:11.000 Everything, basically everything that you see on libs of TikTok, those are the things that Babylon Bee is really, you know, primarily focused on skewering the most because those are the most outrageous things that are having the worst impact on society, I think.

00:44:22.000 So in a second, I want to ask you about, you know, whether we've actually moved beyond the point of satire and parody because the left is so far around the bend that you basically Only have to do what Libs of TikTok does, but from a comedic standpoint, you just repeat the things back that they are saying, and they act as parody.

00:44:36.000 I'll ask you about that in just one second.

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00:45:38.000 Okay, so let's talk about the fact that as politics gets more radical and insane, it may become harder to write jokes, because how do you actually write jokes that are sort of better than what's happening right now?

00:45:48.000 You can't write something funnier than what Democrats are already doing.

00:45:51.000 Like, I mean, look at a Kamala Harris speech.

00:45:53.000 You know, just read her speech verbatim and it looks like something that came from like a Simpsons episode or something, right?

00:45:59.000 You know, her just going on and on.

00:46:00.000 It's the predictive tech mix.

00:46:01.000 Yeah.

00:46:02.000 I mean, like if you're entering into Google and then whatever is the next word is the thing that she says.

00:46:06.000 It actually works pretty well.

00:46:07.000 Exactly.

00:46:08.000 Biden the same way, you know, like all the gaffes and then the shaking hands with the air and it's just having the notes, note cards with very large font saying sit in your chair and, you know, like remember your name.

00:46:20.000 Like this kind of stuff is so out there, you could never imagine that it would be real.

00:46:25.000 And so I do think, you know, I complain all the time, like not that we have a hard job, we have a great job.

00:46:30.000 Making jokes on the internet is fun, and it's, you know, there's tougher jobs out there.

00:46:35.000 But in an environment where the world is so insane, the project of satire is to exaggerate the truth.

00:46:42.000 You've gotta go a step beyond the truth.

00:46:44.000 You've gotta be more outrageous than whatever's happening in the real world.

00:46:47.000 And so that is challenging, because we'll do it successfully.

00:46:50.000 We'll make a joke, we'll make a joke like, like Trump claims to have done more for Christianity than Jesus himself, right?

00:46:55.000 We'll make that joke.

00:46:57.000 And it's funny, and it seems like something Trump would say.

00:47:01.000 And then three days later, he actually said, well, in this case, it was like two years, I think, before he actually said it.

00:47:05.000 But that one, I love that one because the left shared it like crazy, Snopes fact-checked it, and then two years later, he went on a radio show and said that he's done more for Christianity and religion in general than any other person in history.

00:47:17.000 And so he actually took a step further than the original joke.

00:47:20.000 So yeah, it's just a matter of time.

00:47:22.000 You know, even silly jokes like we did one about how amid coronavirus, pants sales plummet as everyone working from home, you know, and it's a guy sitting in his computer in his boxers, you know, like working.

00:47:33.000 He's got a nice shirt on, but he's in his boxers. 0.67

00:47:36.000 And it's just, you know, it was silly. 0.66

00:47:38.000 It was a dumb joke, like, you know, nobody sees you from the waist down when you're working at your computer unless you're Jeffrey Toobin over at CNN. 0.66

00:47:45.000 And so the next day, literally the next day, Yahoo Finance does a story saying that pants sales are down at Walmart, but tops are up. 0.59

00:47:54.000 So more people are buying shirts, less people are buying pants.

00:47:56.000 It's a real headline one day later.

00:47:58.000 Like, it's just, and that's a silly example, you know, because that was probably just coincidence that we happened to nail that one.

00:48:05.000 We have a spreadsheet.

00:48:05.000 We're tracking them.

00:48:06.000 We got 76 of these jokes that we've made that have come true.

00:48:09.000 And so trying to stay a step ahead of reality, it actually is challenging.

00:48:12.000 And it's really sad.

00:48:13.000 Like we are, we're, we're criticized often for having jokes that are too believable.

00:48:18.000 You're, you know, it's like, well, this is the problem.

00:48:20.000 It amounts to misinformation because people are believing that your jokes are true.

00:48:23.000 It's like, well, whose fault is that?

00:48:25.000 Is it the satirist who's trying to like stay a step ahead of the truth?

00:48:28.000 Or is it reality for bumping up against satire?

00:48:30.000 I think it's reality's fault.

00:48:32.000 I mean, that brings us to the fact-checking of it.

00:48:33.000 So you have famously been fact-checked for telling jokes, which is an amazing thing.

00:48:38.000 First of all, the actual joke is the fact-checkers, because they are terrible at their jobs.

00:48:41.000 They are.

00:48:42.000 It is astonishing how bad they are at their jobs, especially because now the basic formula is, if you say something true about a Democrat, it's missing context.

00:48:50.000 And if you say something false about a Republican, it is true.

00:48:53.000 That's the basic way that it works.

00:48:54.000 But you guys are overtly a comedy site.

00:48:56.000 And how many times have you been fact-checked?

00:48:58.000 You've been fact-checked by Snopes.

00:48:59.000 Dozens.

00:48:59.000 I don't know.

00:49:00.000 I mean, it's totally crazy.

00:49:01.000 And then they'll ding you.

00:49:03.000 I mean, it's not just that they fact check you.

00:49:04.000 It's then the social media companies use these in the same way they would use it to ding Daily Wire.

00:49:10.000 They use it to ding your ability to reach people on things like Facebook.

00:49:14.000 Well, you've been fact checked false four times.

00:49:16.000 Yes, you're a satire site.

00:49:17.000 How's that even applicable?

00:49:18.000 No, we're an unreliable news source now because we've been fact-checked so many times.

00:49:22.000 I would say, you know what, we're more reliable than a lot of actual news sources.

00:49:25.000 Look how many of our jokes came true.

00:49:27.000 They should be tracking those and using those as like the examples to counterbalance the fact-checks that were rated false. 0.98

00:49:32.000 It's just like some of the jokes that have been rated false are so dumb. 0.66

00:49:36.000 It's like Ninth Circuit Court overturns the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. 0.97

00:49:39.000 Like jokes like that.

00:49:41.000 USA Today cited 15 sources to refute that joke.

00:49:44.000 And Facebook paid for it.

00:49:46.000 You go down to the bottom and it says this was paid for by grants from Facebook. 0.95

00:49:49.000 So it's like Facebook pays people to sit there and read dumb jokes like that.

00:49:53.000 You can't overturn somebody's death. 0.95

00:49:55.000 That's not a thing.

00:49:56.000 And they rate it false.

00:49:57.000 They don't read it satire.

00:49:59.000 They read it false and then they ding us and say, yeah, you're spreading false information on this platform.

00:50:03.000 It's really, you know, you see it more honestly in some of the reporting that's been done.

00:50:07.000 You read like the New York Times and they did like a write up on us.

00:50:12.000 One of their technology reporters calls a far-right misinformation site that sometimes traffics in misinformation under the guise of satire.

00:50:18.000 So they're ascribing these motives to us, you know, like we're pretending to be satirists so that we can write these really believable, not true stories that are dangerous and harmful and get them to go viral and spread everywhere so that our false narratives prevail and get out into the open.

00:50:33.000 We actually got a retraction from them for that because we threatened to sue them if they didn't stop Slandering us like that. You know, it's these smears are just stupid. But yeah, the fact checks they're not honest And the reason they're fact-checking us, you know, I don't think it's that I don't think that the Babylon B is like in anybody's crosshairs where it's like they're singling us out for you know The B needs to be taken down or something like that It's, it's that there's, they're really threatened by the truth. 0.99

00:51:01.000 Honestly, it's just, it's the joke about Rachel Levine.

00:51:03.000 There was truth to that joke and they don't want anybody saying the truth.

00:51:07.000 So it just happened to be us.

00:51:08.000 We were the convenient target for, you know, it wasn't like they singled out the Babylon Bee.

00:51:12.000 Anybody can say that stuff on there and they'll get taken down.

00:51:14.000 Um, so, you know, with the fact checking, it's a similar thing.

00:51:17.000 It's like our jokes are inconvenient for the left because there's so much truth to them.

00:51:22.000 The point that they're making is effective.

00:51:24.000 Um, and so, you know, they can't handle, they can't handle seeing that prevail. 0.91

00:51:28.000 But like the examples though, like CNN purchasing an industrial sized washing machine to spin the news in, you know, before publishing it, like these jokes are so dumb and they're getting rated false. 0.69

00:51:37.000 It's like, Come on.

00:51:39.000 And as I said before, it's almost impossible to surpass the fakeness of many of the mainstream media outlets, and meanwhile, they're not getting, I mean, this weekend, there was two separate CNN stories about a story that didn't happen.

00:51:51.000 There was this Duke volleyball player, black Duke volleyball player, and she claimed that she was called the N-word multiple times at a game with BYU, at a match with BYU.

00:51:59.000 Never happened.

00:52:00.000 And it's never happened, right?

00:52:01.000 There's no evidence of it.

00:52:01.000 They've gone through every piece of tape.

00:52:02.000 They took out the announcer's audio at the game so that they could just listen to the crowd noise to see if they could identify anything.

00:52:09.000 This woman had suggested that every time she served, that she was being hit with the N-word, and they couldn't find a single instance of any of that happening.

00:52:16.000 There were two separate segments on CNN talking about how terrible it was that this thing, I guess, didn't happen.

00:52:22.000 And it's amazing.

00:52:23.000 How could people be so tolerant of a thing that didn't happen?

00:52:26.000 They're in search of things that didn't happen to get angry about.

00:52:29.000 And then meanwhile, over at the New York Times, there'll be an entire article about how a white jogger gets murdered by a black guy.

00:52:35.000 But we do not talk about race under any circumstances.

00:52:38.000 It's completely irrelevant here.

00:52:40.000 Okay, fine.

00:52:41.000 I mean, you want to say it's irrelevant there?

00:52:42.000 That's totally fine.

00:52:43.000 But this is where it's relevant in a case where it didn't happen?

00:52:46.000 Well, the demand for hate always exceeds the supply with them, right?

00:52:51.000 So they're always looking for it.

00:52:54.000 Any story that they can latch on to and try to get some mileage out of in promoting a narrative that causes more hatred and division, they'll do that.

00:53:02.000 And if it ever gets corrected, the truth ever comes to light, then it's like, shh, don't talk about that.

00:53:06.000 We want that narrative to stay out there.

00:53:09.000 Um, what just happened recently with Libs of TikTok was so egregious where, you know, this, the report on hospitals that we're doing where we're looking at these, you know, these gender affirming practices that they're, that they're doing on healthy minors and exposing this stuff. 0.94

00:53:22.000 It's like, where's the concern for what's actually happening at these hospitals?

00:53:26.000 The hospital can put out a press release and say, no, we're not doing this, but we have their staffers on recording saying they do.

00:53:31.000 Like, that's something to dig into.

00:53:32.000 Let's figure out if it's actually happening.

00:53:34.000 But there's no questions that are being asked.

00:53:36.000 They're just, the media's upset that we talked about it in the first place because that was dangerous, you know?

00:53:41.000 This is the broader thing that drives me up an absolute wall because, you know, I comment on politics for a living.

00:53:45.000 And so, when the left will promote a person or an idea, and then they'll say, it's really important, it's super important that you notice this idea, and then you notice the idea.

00:53:56.000 And they say, what are you even noticing it for?

00:53:58.000 Why are you even paying attention to this thing?

00:53:59.000 It's the biggest mind grew in the world.

00:54:03.000 It's terrible.

00:54:04.000 I mean, a couple weeks ago, they put AOC on the cover of GQ.

00:54:07.000 They're making her a famous person.

00:54:09.000 It's indistinguishable from a cover of Jennifer Lawrence at Vogue or Meghan Markle at the Cottage.

00:54:16.000 Indistinguishable.

00:54:17.000 But you're obsessed with her if you notice it.

00:54:18.000 Do not notice it.

00:54:19.000 Absolutely you are 100% not allowed to notice it.

00:54:22.000 Why do you even care?

00:54:23.000 Why are you even paying attention?

00:54:24.000 It's like, well, because you're flashing a billboard outside my window at three o'clock in the morning with neon lights, that's why I'm paying attention.

00:54:29.000 It's not my fault that you guys are doing that.

00:54:31.000 But that's the game that they really love to play.

00:54:33.000 And they play that game with you guys a lot, where you make a joke about a thing like, well, why are you even noticing it?

00:54:38.000 You shouldn't be noticing it.

00:54:39.000 That's bad that you're noticing it.

00:54:40.000 And it's good that it's happening.

00:54:41.000 Right.

00:54:42.000 It's always, it's not happening, but it's good that it's happening, and it's bad that you're noticing that it's happening.

00:54:46.000 Yeah, it's happening all over the place.

00:54:48.000 And what made this story, going back to the hospitals thing, so crazy was that We did have evidence, you know, directly from the hospitals, their own website, these recordings.

00:54:58.000 And then I put up, you know, this bomb threat comes into one of these hospitals.

00:55:01.000 It comes into Boston Children's Hospital, and they're trying to blame lives of TikTok for this bomb threat.

00:55:07.000 I'm like, well, for one thing, our followers are concerned about children.

00:55:11.000 That's why we're worked up about this.

00:55:13.000 Like Libs of TikTok is objecting to mistreatment of children.

00:55:16.000 We're not going to be inciting violence on a children's hospital or calling for that.

00:55:20.000 And our followers aren't going to do that either.

00:55:22.000 This is probably a leftist who's like, you know, these hoax loving leftists who, who, who want these things to be happening so that they can try to blame the right for whatever they want to stick them with, you know?

00:55:31.000 So, I put out a reward.

00:55:33.000 A reward.

00:55:33.000 $20,000 cash reward for information leading to the arrest of the person who called in that threat.

00:55:39.000 And guess how much the media covered it?

00:55:41.000 Not at all.

00:55:42.000 Fox?

00:55:43.000 Like Fox, PJ Media, Daily Wire?

00:55:43.000 Maybe?

00:55:46.000 Nobody else is covering that story.

00:55:47.000 Nobody else wants to.

00:55:49.000 You know, Taylor Lorenz wrote a piece at the Washington Post, a hit piece on Lives of TikTok, after that reward was out there and didn't even mention it.

00:55:56.000 You know?

00:55:57.000 So, the dishonesty that's there in just trying to cover up anything that is inconvenient while promoting whatever is convenient, regardless of the truth, but we're the ones spreading misinformation?

00:56:08.000 It's just insane to me.

00:56:09.000 The fact that they're using misinformation to smear us as being sources of information is just egregious, and it is a mind screw, as you put it, and it needs to be pushed back on.

00:56:18.000 I mean, to be fair to Taylor Lorenz, it's possible that due to her advanced age, she couldn't properly see or actually hear what was happening in the news, and so maybe she just missed it.

00:56:26.000 That's a possibility.

00:56:27.000 She's going to talk about this too.

00:56:29.000 Why are they so obsessed with me?

00:56:30.000 Why are they obsessed with me? 1.00

00:56:33.000 It's all the same dumb game over and over. 0.78

00:56:34.000 So we've talked about some of the things you're not allowed to talk about on the left. 0.70

00:56:37.000 But one of the things that's great about the Babylon Bee is that you'll also make fun of stuff on the right.

00:56:41.000 So you guys have hit me.

00:56:42.000 There have been a bunch of headlines making fun of me.

00:56:43.000 They're all really funny.

00:56:44.000 I don't care.

00:56:45.000 In fact, I wrote those. I appreciate that.

00:56:48.000 You're just putting that out there.

00:56:50.000 Like, that's, they're funny.

00:56:52.000 Like, that's funny stuff.

00:56:54.000 But there are things on the right that you're also not allowed to say.

00:56:56.000 The Babylon Bee is pretty fearless in saying, kind of crossing taboo lines on the right.

00:57:01.000 What do you think right now are sort of the big taboo lines on the right that you're not supposed to talk about?

00:57:05.000 Well, things that we're not supposed to criticize.

00:57:09.000 I mean, it all depends on who your audience is.

00:57:12.000 There's certain segments of our audience that consider Trump off-limits.

00:57:16.000 You can't make fun of Trump.

00:57:17.000 He's the one true president and king and must reign forever.

00:57:26.000 Some of these issues, like when you get into things like COVID policy, election denial, you know, things like that.

00:57:34.000 I just think anybody who's kind of on the, maybe the, not necessarily the fringes, but like the people who are promoting the wildest ideas on either the right or the left.

00:57:45.000 They all deserve to be mocked.

00:57:47.000 So we don't hold back. 0.99

00:57:48.000 If there's somebody on the right who has a bad or a silly idea, or is hypocritical, we're happy to go after them. 0.92

00:57:55.000 And sometimes it's just in good fun, and sometimes it's because it really does need to be dealt with. 0.94

00:57:58.000 And so we're happy to do that.

00:58:01.000 I mean, everybody's deserving of it. 0.97

00:58:02.000 Cause we're all at some point, as you know, like passengers on the ship of fools at some point, we all deserve the mockery. 0.82

00:58:08.000 So, um, we try not to hold back and, uh, and avoid certain issues that are going to upset people on our side of the aisle. 0.90

00:58:15.000 Um, because.

00:58:16.000 The self-examination I think is healthy, you know, like taking, taking your things, whatever your stances are, whatever your beliefs are, whatever your side is really pushing for and examining it and holding it up to see, like, does it really like hold water?

00:58:28.000 Does it really make sense?

00:58:29.000 Is it really good?

00:58:30.000 I think it's a healthy exercise and just being able to laugh ourselves is a healthy exercise.

00:58:34.000 You know this idea that the idea that like we We take ourselves so seriously that a joke at our expense is so hurtful and damaging that, you know, we should shut up that person forever.

00:58:46.000 They should never be allowed to talk because they made a joke at my expense.

00:58:49.000 We take ourselves so seriously.

00:58:51.000 I think if we had, if mockery, like I said before, I don't think we're, we've improved morally because we do less mocking.

00:58:57.000 Um, you know, we've, we've now gotten a situation where people, if you use the wrong pronouns to like address them, they break down crying on Tik TOK and like, And, like, have a nervous breakdown and need to see a therapist because they were, you know, the wrong pronoun was used in a conversation.

00:59:10.000 Like, the sensitivity that's there, the narcissism that's there, like, these are things that, and I'm not calling for bullying.

00:59:16.000 I'm not saying that people need to be bullied.

00:59:17.000 I'm just saying, like, like the fact that that we're so hypersensitive and unwilling to even laugh at ourselves and take a second look at some of these ideas is not a healthy place to be in.

00:59:27.000 I mean, it's something Jonathan Haidt has talked about, is when you create an oversensitive society where there's a premium placed on being offended, where you get rewarded for being offended, what you're actually doing is creating mental illness among people.

00:59:36.000 Right.

00:59:36.000 Because one of the key methods that you use to, for example, defeat depression, if you're trying to have therapy, is cognitive behavioral therapy, which is where you have a chain of thoughts and it leads to a depressive outcome.

00:59:46.000 And so the therapist is supposed to sit there and say, well, is that really reasonable?

00:59:49.000 Should you really go all the way there?

00:59:51.000 Right, exactly.

00:59:52.000 Is that feeling justified?

00:59:53.000 And that's a question you're never allowed to ask in today's politics.

00:59:55.000 Is that feeling justified?

00:59:56.000 You have to say, no, no, no.

00:59:57.000 Every feeling is justified.

00:59:59.000 Every feeling is legitimate and just—well, maybe not.

01:00:02.000 Maybe that feeling is coming from a super dumb place, and you should really reconsider whether you ought to be having that feeling in the first place.

01:00:07.000 And that's really what comedy is supposed to do at its best, is to say, you know, you're being very offended about a thing that you really shouldn't be very offended by.

01:00:14.000 But again, I think that's why there's so many people who Refuse to even engage with the business of comedy because to give up the possibility of being offended, even if it makes you a better person, is to give up your power in this society.

01:00:27.000 It's not good to do what you do when someone tells a joke about you or what I do when someone tells a joke about me, which is laugh.

01:00:32.000 You're not supposed to do that.

01:00:33.000 You're supposed to immediately come back with, how could you say that?

01:00:37.000 How dare you?

01:00:38.000 You're attacking me.

01:00:40.000 I can't sleep at night.

01:00:41.000 It's just terrible.

01:00:42.000 And I'll say how terrible it is and how you're trying to stifle me on the cover of GQ.

01:00:46.000 And that's the most deserving thing of mockery now, is that kind of behavior.

01:00:49.000 Comedy's supposed to be offensive.

01:00:51.000 That's really the whole point.

01:00:52.000 Like, every joke that's made from a stand-up comedian stage has someone that's the butt of the joke.

01:00:59.000 Something is the butt of the joke.

01:01:00.000 Like, that's what makes it funny.

01:01:02.000 Like, it's the job of the comedian to be... You're supposed to squirm a little bit, right?

01:01:06.000 And be a little uneasy.

01:01:07.000 But with a healthy understanding that We're not perfect.

01:01:12.000 We all have our things.

01:01:14.000 And some of these stereotypes that exist are in fact rooted in reality and they're funny.

01:01:19.000 It's okay to laugh at them.

01:01:20.000 Like we all have those things, whatever community we belong to, we have those things.

01:01:25.000 Um, and, and the idea that there are certain communities or certain people groups that should never be joked about and others who you can not just joke about them, but you can call for violence against them or hate them and, and smear them with terrible attacks and names.

01:01:40.000 That only reinforces in practice inequality.

01:01:47.000 You should be able to joke about people indiscriminately.

01:01:49.000 That's the way of treating them equally.

01:01:52.000 It's not just that we should be able to joke about people indiscriminately.

01:01:56.000 The idea that the Babylon Bee, for example, punches down when it makes these jokes, and you know, for people who aren't familiar with that terminology, you know, the punching down thing in comedy is like, you're making fun of people who have less power and privilege than you, right?

01:02:07.000 You're making fun of people who are supposedly marginalized and oppressed, and that's a no-no.

01:02:10.000 You're not supposed to do that.

01:02:12.000 But you've got to, in order to, in order to think as a comedian to avoid making fun of people like that, you have to think of them as being less powerful and privileged and more marginalized than you.

01:02:21.000 You have to get in, you have to get into this mindset that says, you know what?

01:02:24.000 I shouldn't joke about those people.

01:02:26.000 They're beneath me.

01:02:28.000 And it's just so condescending and terrible to have thought, like, you should only be thinking, like, is this joke funny?

01:02:33.000 You know, is it funny?

01:02:34.000 There's something that occurs to me in the moment.

01:02:35.000 That is that, and now I'm going to say something that is likely to get us both canceled.

01:02:40.000 And that is that the, I wonder if as society moves away from sort of traditional masculinity in certain ways, that comedy just inevitably declines.

01:02:48.000 And the reason that I say that is not because women can't be funny.

01:02:50.000 There are some very funny women. 1.00

01:02:51.000 But because the way that men tend to interact, like when you're with your friends at a ballgame or something, half of your conversation is just making fun of each other.

01:02:58.000 After conversation is just ribbing the hell out of each other and ripping on people and and telling jokes about each other and When women go out to brunch with each other, that's not really what they're at least not in my personal experience That's how my wife interacts with her friends. They don't sit around like ripping on each other. That's what dudes do, right? 0.99

01:03:13.000 When you're at a poker game, you just rip on each other and make fun of how dumb you all are. 0.99

01:03:16.000 And it's a sign of masculinity to be able to brush that off. 0.99

01:03:21.000 If you're a really offended guy with a bunch of other guys, everybody looks at you like, what the hell? 0.73

01:03:24.000 What's wrong with you?

01:03:25.000 You don't go cry in the bathroom.

01:03:26.000 Right, exactly.

01:03:27.000 And so I wonder if, as a society, we've decided that masculinity itself is something that's bad. 0.95

01:03:33.000 Masculinity is toxic and dangerous.

01:03:35.000 We have to tell fewer jokes.

01:03:36.000 Jokes are too aggressive.

01:03:38.000 Jokes are nasty.

01:03:39.000 Jokes are mean.

01:03:41.000 And so we really need to kind of wipe that, we need to wipe that away a little bit.

01:03:46.000 I couldn't disagree more.

01:03:47.000 I think, you know, I think the way, the way that I put it, and I think it's an important point that people need to keep in the front of their minds is that the absurd has only become sacred because it hasn't been sufficiently mocked.

01:03:59.000 There's so much that's, that's mockable, including the idea, by the way, that masculinity is a bad thing.

01:04:04.000 That's a mockable idea.

01:04:06.000 There's a lot of good that comes from toxic masculinity.

01:04:10.000 Men need to become more like women. 1.00

01:04:13.000 What even is a woman, Ben?

01:04:15.000 What is a woman? 1.00

01:04:17.000 These ideas are so mockable.

01:04:19.000 We have to attack them.

01:04:21.000 Ridicule them really honestly, it's it's it's a moral good to do that Because otherwise they're gonna they're gonna flourish they're gonna become pervasive They're gonna actually get picked up and believed by you know kids are so susceptible to these things you know young people are so susceptible to these ideas because they're they don't have like a They haven't figured out their worldview.

01:04:39.000 Like they don't have a solid foundation under them, like theologically and philosophically to be able to ward off bad ideas.

01:04:45.000 And so they can soak up these things that don't make any sense and think that they're reasonable.

01:04:50.000 But if we were making fun of them more, I don't think that they would be so susceptible to them. 0.99

01:04:53.000 I think they would see them for what they are, which is insane and stupid and even funny sometimes. 0.99

01:04:59.000 And then they won't take them so seriously. 1.00

01:05:01.000 And we'd all be better off for that, I think, ultimately.

01:05:03.000 There's a point you talked about a little bit earlier that I want to get back to for a second, and that is that if you want to do good humor, you actually have to target something that's true about the other side or whoever you're making a joke about.

01:05:13.000 You can't target something that's just narratively false.

01:05:16.000 And that occurs to me in the context of late night comedians who have just fallen completely Completely off the map in terms of comedy.

01:05:23.000 I mean, you cannot watch Stephen Colbert's show and get from there to the idea that this is comedy.

01:05:28.000 It's just not.

01:05:29.000 I mean, Jimmy Fallon used to be somewhat funny.

01:05:30.000 He is no longer funny at all.

01:05:32.000 I remember when Stephen Colbert was funny, when he was a correspondent on Jon Stewart.

01:05:35.000 And it feels as though the comedy is just not present anymore.

01:05:39.000 I mean, Jimmy Kimmel is more of an MSNBC host than he is a comedian.

01:05:43.000 And that's because he spends all day making jokes about things that are just not true.

01:05:47.000 I mean, it's kind of amazing.

01:05:51.000 It's the propaganda.

01:05:52.000 It's going for the applause of affirmation rather than the laughter of amusement.

01:05:57.000 And you see it all the time in the stand-up.

01:05:59.000 They'll be doing their opening monologue or whatever, and the audience is clapping.

01:06:04.000 They're not laughing, they're clapping.

01:06:08.000 This propaganda that's being preached from the stage, and the audience is agreeing with it, and it's not actual comedy that's happening.

01:06:16.000 It's a very strange and bizarre thing.

01:06:19.000 And I think that the only way that they're gonna start getting laughs is if they tell jokes that are true, for one thing, that aren't rooted in a narrative, promoting a narrative, and attack the things that are actually worth attacking, mocking.

01:06:34.000 They're training their audiences to go along with this idea, too, that these things are untouchable and they shouldn't be joked about.

01:06:40.000 And I guarantee you that some of them have now reached the point where if they do make some of these jokes that are unacceptable, their audiences are going to walk out on them.

01:06:47.000 Or they're going to throw something at them. 0.77

01:06:48.000 Or they're going to walk up on stage and slap them in the face. 0.69

01:06:51.000 There's actually physical threats of violence now against comedians for making jokes.

01:06:56.000 That's how sensitive people are now.

01:06:57.000 You see how Chappelle got attacked on stage?

01:06:59.000 We saw what happened with Chris Rock getting slapped by Will Smith.

01:07:04.000 And some of these smaller comedians, I read a story in the New York Post recently about their smaller clubs.

01:07:08.000 These comedians are having to pay security to come with them to make sure they don't get attacked on stage.

01:07:14.000 They can't afford that.

01:07:15.000 You know, like they're not getting paid a lot at these smaller clubs, but they're having to pay for security to keep them safe while they tell jokes.

01:07:21.000 It's just a wild place to be in.

01:07:22.000 So you're either safe because you're not actually telling jokes or you're in danger because you are.

01:07:27.000 So, in a second, I want to ask you a few final questions, starting with your favorite joke.

01:07:30.000 I want to ask you what your favorite joke is.

01:07:32.000 If you'd like to hear Seth Dillon's favorite joke, you have to be a DailyWire member.

01:07:35.000 Go to dailywire.com slash sunday.

01:07:37.000 You can click that link in the episode description.

The Ben Shapiro Show - September 25, 2022

Seth Dillon | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 131

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