Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon on what headlines from satire site have come true
Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon speaks to Fox News Digital at CPAC in Dallas.
DALLAS -- Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon believes that suppression of conservative thought has picked up in recent months, and he isn’t quite sure of the cause, but feels liberals are "redefining what’s true" and Big Tech is enforcing their ideology through terms of service agreements.
"I don’t know if it’s due to the midterms, I think they’re just getting more aggressive with making their own ideology into these terms of service," Dillon told Fox News Digital at CPAC Texas.
"We’re looking at Big Tech’s stance on hateful conduct, for example. They’re putting their ideology into the terms. They’re saying you can’t misgender, you can’t deadname. Now, you can’t say things like the word groomer to describe behavior," Dillon continued. "Even if you think it is, in fact, grooming behavior. It’s considered a slur… they’re protecting their own."
Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon believes that suppression of conservative thought has picked up in recent months. (getty images)
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The Babylon Bee CEO said the left has their "sacred cows" that they protect at all costs, and the practice has been ramping up for some time. While he’s not sure if the midterms are a factor, Dillon notes that it’s happened around elections in the past, too.
"Remember the Hunter Biden laptop story? A lot of willingness to do what they can to suppress information that they think will be damaging to their side. Maybe that is playing a role," he said. "But I think it’s just the natural progression of where they’re taking things. They’ve decided they know what’s good and what’s right and what’s true. They’re redefining what’s true."
Dillon believes that once liberals determine what’s acceptable, their Big Tech allies enforce the rules through their terms of service agreements. As a result, comedy is often deemed improper or offensive.
"The fact that comedy is suffering, right now, where the left is like, unwilling to make fun of jokes, they’re basically kind of tiptoeing around these issues that you shouldn’t joke about. The wokeness thing. Joe Rogan recently said that woke s—t is the funniest s—t right now," Dillon said. "The reason why the Babylon Bee is funny is because we’re willing to make fun of that."
Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon spoke to Fox News Digital from CPAC Texas 2022 in Dallas. (Fox News Digital/Joseph Wulfsohn)
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He argued conservatives who are "actually willing to do comedy" and push back on liberal narratives by making fun of things that "deserve to be mocked" are the most successful.
"It used to be that men couldn’t have an opinion on abortion, and now we’re told that men can get pregnant. I mean, like this kind of stuff is accelerating so quickly and going crazy, people who are kind of willing to mock some of this insanity and make fun of it, I think, are going to generate an audience," Dillon said. "I think it’s part of the reason why [Fox News late-night show] ‘Gutfeld!’ has done really well, it’s the reason the Bee is doing so well."
The Babylon Bee, with the slogan "fake news you can trust," has received widespread criticism from politicians and legacy media, and was recently banned from TikTok just three months after having its Twitter account suspended.
Dillon said Big Tech censorship has slowed down the reach of the Babylon Bee, as his satirical site has been banned or silenced by a variety of platforms. However, the media attention that the censorship has created helps even things out.
"Some of the cancelation efforts have drawn more attention to us, and I think lifted our notoriety and some of our traffic, at least in spikes. Whether or not we can maintain that when we’ve lost our platforms is another question," Dillon said. "We’re doing really well right now, we have more traffic and engagement than The Onion. We are the most shared, most popular satire site in the world right now despite censorship which our competitors aren’t facing."
The Babylon Bee may be satire, but Dillon and other content creators have a Nostradamus-like ability to predict the future. They keep a running spreadsheet of headlines that were intended to be jokes but eventually came true, such as the time they pretended that President Trump claimed to do more for Christianity than Jesus himself.
"That was a joke. It got fact-checked and rated false, and then two years later he actually said that he’s done more for religion and Christianity than any other person in history," Dillon said.
Fox News’ Nikolas Lanum and Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report.