BARI WEISS ON AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: How The Babylon Bee Predicted the Vibe Shift.
The Bee is a conservative, Christian satirical news site, which may sound like an oxymoron. It did to us. Until we read it and discovered it’s funny. Often really funny. While everyone else was busy criticizing and mocking the right, the Bee found success by filling a void. The Bee’s infamous tagline is “Fake News You Can Trust.”
Here are a few recent headlines: “Biden Cancels Aid to Syria After Finding Out Some Needy Americans Live There” and “Canadian Dentist Now Offering Euthanasia as Alternative to Cavity Filling.”
The crazy thing about the Bee is that the headlines are often not just satire, but prophetic. Here’s an example: In 2020 the Bee posted “Democrats Call for Flags to Be Flown at Half-Mast to Grieve Death of Soleimani.” And now Ivy League students are flying Hezbollah flags and mourning the death of the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. In 2021, the Bee published the headline “Triple-Masker Looks Down on People Who Only Double Mask.” Later that same day, CNBC featured a graphic highlighting the higher efficacy of triple-masking.
While the Bee’s anti-woke takedowns have garnered fame, or infamy, depending on who you ask, they do try to be equal opportunity critics, poking fun at the right too. Here are two 2016 headlines about Donald Trump: “Psychopathic Megalomaniac Somehow Garnering Evangelical Vote” and “Shocker: European Supermodel Who Married Billionaire Reality Star Might Not Actually Be Conservative.”
Still, in the past few years, The Babylon Bee has been the target of online censorship, deplatforming, and media scrutiny. Twitter suspended the Bee’s account in 2022 after it made a joke misgendering Admiral Rachel Levine, President Biden’s head of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. The Bee was later reinstated when Twitter was taken over by Elon Musk, who said, “There will be no censorship of humor.”
These days, The Babylon Bee still gets fact-checked by Snopes and USA Today, which perfectly encapsulates our internet age: a parody page getting its jokes fact-checked because people really can’t distinguish between truth and humor.
Flashback to 2019: A ‘Fact Checker’ Declares War On Satire: When we make fun of liberals, Snopes pretends to take us seriously and labels our jokes ‘false.’
Glenn wrote in response that “When You Understand That Snopes is Just a Democratic Party Message-Control Tool, It All Makes Sense…The Left understands and employs the power of mockery. And it wants to keep that power to itself.”
When your job is to attempt to get politicians like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris over the hurdle, you’ve really got to keep all of your powder dry. And as one person tweeted in 2019, “They’re intentionally pretending that these memes are meant to mislead the public so they can claim censorship is necessary to deal with misinformation on social media.”
Those “cheap fakes” were everywhere in 2024 — until Biden was ousted from the presidential campaign.