Addressing the crowd at Turning Point USA’s AmFest event, Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon described social media censorship of satire as “absurdity” and an attack on truth. The Babylon Bee’s Twitter account was restored by Elon Musk after spending eight months in Twitter jail for awarding Assistant Health Secretary Rachel Levine “Man of the year.”
“So what can you hope to learn today from an expert online troll? Probably not very much. But I do have a wealth of experience in at least one area that I think is relevant to everyone here at the moment. I’m talking about my experience with absurdity,” Dillon said.
“As the CEO of a comedy site that’s been repeatedly fact-checked, smeared, and censored, and that’s seen nearly 100 of its jokes come true as if they were prophecies rather than punch lines, I think I have a somewhat unique perspective on the insanity that’s resulted from our culture’s all-out war on reality, reason, and truth,” he continued.
Related: Former Twitter censor stands by decision to ban satire site Babylon Bee – “not funny” “dangerous”
Dillon told the crowd that there’s a need to resist the “tendency” to accept the “craziness around us.”
“I just think we’ve become so accustomed to the madness that we’re losing sight of it.”
“We need to resist that tendency. I think we need to continually remind ourselves that the craziness around us is not normal or good or deserving of acceptance. It must be consciously and consistently resisted.”
Dillon said satire websites do not have “a lot of material to work with” because it is difficult to make funnier jokes than “what Democrats are doing in real life.”
“Imagine if your job is to write jokes that are funnier than a Kamala Harris speech.”
He added that the attack on the Babylon Bee is not an attack on comedy. “The attack is really aimed at truth and our right to speak it.”
