How the Babylon Bee toppled digital dominoes

On March 15, 2022, Babylon Bee editors ran a blunt joke about a powerful American leader -- proclaiming an assistant secretary in the Department of Health and Human Services as the website's "Man of the Year."

The joke caused controversy because Admiral Rachel L. Levine had, more than a decade earlier, transitioned to a transgender woman and, two days before the Bee jab, was named one of the "Women of the Year" by USA Today.

At that point, Twitter's management suspended the Babylon Bee's account, cutting a vital link between the Christian satire website and the online readers that were its lifeblood.

"Many people said trans people are already subject to so much ridicule, and posts like this just fan the flames against a minority group," noted Bari Weiss, editor of The Free Press, in a recent podcast with Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon. "How do you respond to that criticism?"

That's a "fair question," noted Dillon, but one built on the "concept that comedy should be something that only punches up at the power structure. That the oppressors can do no right, the oppressed can do no wrong. They're marginalized, and they need to be protected and insulated, and the powerful can be the subject of scorn and ridicule."

In this scenario, an evangelical humor website far from the entertainment-industry mainstream was the powerful "oppressor." Meanwhile, noted Dillon: "Admiral Rachel Levine is a transgender admiral in the Biden administration, a high-ranking government official. The narrative that's being imposed on the culture is ... coming from the top down, imposed on people that really do in large numbers find it absurd and objectionable. So we were, in fact, punching up."

With the Bee locked in "Twitter jail," digital dominoes began falling -- a chain reaction that would help shape trends in news and journalism, which would affect debates during a tense, complicated White House race.

On March 24, 2022, the Bee team heard from a reader -- Elon Musk -- who was paying close attention to "cancel culture" trends. As an omnipresent Twitter user, the world's richest tech entrepreneur was already getting messages from people urging him to buy the social media platform.

Musk wanted to know why Bee tweets had vanished. At the end of his first conversation with Bee editors, Musk asked if the quickest way to address their problems was for him to buy Twitter.

On April 14, Musk made an unsolicited offer to buy Twitter and, after months of legal warfare, took control of the platform, which he soon renamed X. On his first day in Twitter headquarters, Musk texted the Bee and asked: "Do you wanna be unsuspended?" The Washington Post reported that Musk then told Twitter's Trust and Safety Team: "Bring back the Babylon Bee."

Thus, a 2023 Bee podcast opened with Dillon and editor-in-chief Kyle Mann handing Musk a note written on a crumpled paper napkin: "I.O.U. $44 BILLION -- B.B."

Musk responded by quipping, "You made me buy the company."

The key to this strategic public-square battle was the Babylon Bee's combination of satirical humor and religious convictions. The Bee team wants laughs, but also believes it is defending truth with a capital T.

"I hardly need to tell you guys but, you know, the essence of a lot of comedy is a revealed truth -- like the hidden truth that people understand intuitively or explicitly," said Musk in that podcast. "There's that sort of moment of revealed, you know, kernel of truth, of often unacknowledged truth, and in that unacknowledged truth is the humor."

While many critics accuse the Bee of spreading political misinformation -- the website's motto is "Fake News You Can Trust" -- controversies about its work usually center on clashes between religious doctrines and powerful trends in modern life, such as the sexual revolution.

"People keep saying we are a political outfit that's trying to help get certain people elected by using satire to attack their opponents," Dillon said. "What we want to do is defend what we believe, as Christians, is the truth. ... We also want to poke holes in things that we believe are funny and bizarre.

"That makes some people mad, and they yell, 'Politics!' That's safer, I guess, than saying that people's religious beliefs are wrong."

Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tenn., and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.

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