 Back in March, Twitter suspended the account of the massively popular Christian satire site, the Babylon Bee, after it awarded Man of the Year honors to Rachel Levine, a trans woman serving in the Biden administration's Department of Health and Human Services who had been named one of USA Today's Women of the Year. The Babylon Bee's editor-in-chief, Kyle Mann, says that the article was intended to satirize media treatment of identity politics, not demean trans people. We love trans people and we love, you know, we don't, we don't consider people like that beneath us. You know, the Christian world do is that everybody, everybody has the opportunity to be saved, you know, and we can love everybody and I'm no more deserving of God's grace than a transgender person is. But when the culture bows down and starts handing out trophies to people for stuff like this, it's when we say, hey, wait a minute, we need to protect women in our society as well. The Bee's Twitter account remains locked because the publication steadfastly refuses to delete the tweet and acknowledge it contravene Twitter's policy against hate speech. In response to the Twitter ban and persistent demonetization and minimizing of the reach of its content at Facebook, the Bee has created its own social network and subscription model, both of which are flourishing. The episode shines a light on how contemporary culture wars are waged online and illustrates the specific travails that evangelical Christians face in a country that is increasingly secular and socially liberal. Reason caught up with Man at Freedom Fest, the annual gathering in Las Vegas, to talk about why he loves making fun of Donald Trump and Joe Biden, but saves his deepest burns for mega church pastors such as Joe Lasting, why he believes that the left and Gen Z can't deal with humor that makes fun of them, and why he loves personal liberty and personal freedom, even if he creates a culture that is deeply hostile to his faith. Kyle Mann, thanks for talking to reason. Yeah, thanks for having me. You've been editor-in-chief of the Babylon Bee since 2016. I've been with the Babylon Bee since 2016, but I first was just part-time. I was in construction sales and writing headlines before I went into my soul-sucking job. And the soul-sucking job is at the Babylon Bee? No, no, no. I have my construction sales job. And the Babylon Bee sucks your soul in a different way because you have to read the news, you know, which is a whole other thing. That is dead end, right? Yeah, yeah, for sure. So when did you become editor-in-chief? In 2018. 2018, I think. Two years later, yeah. You recently tweeted something to the effect of you love your job and you did a screencap of the Babylon Bee from like a day or two ago. And I just wanted to go through some of the headlines and get your commentary on that because I think it's a good way to kind of sum up where the Babylon Bee is right now. And like the main headline is in the well of the page, Up Yours, Woke Moralist Cries Jordan Peterson While Attempting to Ride the Ostriches at the Zoo. That's one story. Also near the top is Americans Offer to Trade Lebron to Russia for Brittany Griner. Time Travel and then subscriber headlines. Time Traveling, Joel Osteen Gives Job, Job, as in the biblical book of Job, a copy of Your Best Life Now. Trump's Children Change Their Last Name to Biden so that media will ignore them. Why do we start with those types of things? Like, how, you know, you said, I love my job. Like, what what's great about the Jordan Peterson? Well, that morning I had spent an hour photoshopping Jordan Peterson onto an ostrich. Right. And and there's these surreal moments when you're running the Babylon Bee where you're sitting there like, am I really getting paid for this? How does this work? You know, how how did I get to this point? You know, you know, even here at Freedom Fest, talking to these comedy legends like John Cleese. And, you know, you just like, you know, people that are, you know, you're a distinguished interviewer and you get to interview John Cleese and you're like, you can have a sense of, well, I'm really good at interviewing. So I got to this point. I'm like, I write, I photoshopped Jordan Peterson on an ostrich and I get to talk to John Cleese. So what it was a moment of the surreal realization that I that my job is is so awesome, like we get to create this alternate world and then write the newspaper about it. Right. You know, so it's such a fun, creative, imaginary thing. Remind me, what does the Babylon Bee respond? What is that reference as? Because you guys are Christian. You're Bible based evangelical Christians. Yes. Yeah. And and you believe the Bible is the inerrant word of God. OK, so this is all as a backdrop of saying you you're being funny and you have tied five hands behind your back because this just adds to the level of complexity. But what what does the title of the Babylon Bee refer to? Yes, so Babylon is a biblical reference to a time when Israel was in Babylonian captivity, Babylonian exile. And, you know, there was this sense where Israel had to maintain their identity as the people of God, despite no longer having the promised land. Right. And so that's where we are as Christians in America. You know, we don't America is not the promised land. It never was the promised land. And yet we're grateful for obviously all the freedoms we have in America. And yet we have to go. But we're exiles or strangers in a strange way, right? But there's a sense of humor that comes with that. You know, there's a you have to have a sense of joy about that, I think. What is the what is the bee in that? Because the bee or the beehive is has biblical dimension. So but it's also a very Mormon. The Mormon. Yeah, there was no. There was no Mormon reference there that we were at them. I don't think so. Yeah. It was a it's got a stinger, which is great for satire. OK. And, you know, we were kind of picking through different newspaper names, you know, the courier, the time. Yeah. And Babylon Bee has that great. Yeah, alliteration and there's the Sacramento Bee. So I mean, it's not an unknown name for it. So I realize this is the worst thing that I can be asking. And you talked to John Cleish yesterday. I did. But so I'm going to do the worst thing possible and say, what is funny about a headline that says up yours, what, more or less, cries Jordan Peterson while attempting to ride the ostriches? Well, yeah, because Jordan Peterson is riding an ostrich. So that's that's what your sense of Peterson is. Do you I mean, I assume that you like him because liberals and progressives hate him. They find him intolerable and just every extra book he sells, it makes their head explode a little bit more. But do you also do you think he is because he's certainly not a Christian? And, you know, do you like the content of his ideas? Or is it mostly just that he is a flash point for the people that you dislike? He's great for jokes, first of all, being able to ride in the voice like Jordan Peterson, whenever we write a Peterson article, you get people that are commenting saying, I read the entire thing in his voice, you know, because he has that whiny kind of voice. Trump was similar. Trump was great to write jokes about because you write quotes in Trump's voice and people are like, it's exactly how he would say it. So he's great for comedy. I never really followed Peterson that much until, I don't know, a year or two ago, I picked up 12 rules and I thought it was good wisdom. You know, it was interesting as from a Christian perspective that he he hasn't embraced the Christian faith, but he draws a lot of wisdom and applications from and probably knows the Bible better than a lot of Christians do. So it's been interesting to see a mind like his kind of go on this journey. He's come close to Christianity and then move and back the other way. And, you know, I think about if I was a contemporary of someone like C.S. Lewis, who was converted later in life, you know, he was this brilliant philosopher in his own right and brilliant professor in his own right, brilliant author and then comes to faith. You know, and I see a similar kind of. Jordan Peterson is going to join your team at some point, right? Well, if we ever get to interview him, we'll try to convert him. OK, C.S. Lewis, I want to get into your theology a little bit later, but isn't he a little too Catholic for you? Well, he's Anglican. Yeah, I mean, he's a J.P. Catholic. And he's he's a pussy like he knows he's Catholic, but he can't be a Catholic because he's in England. And then that's a whole problem. You know, yeah, maybe some of the traditions are a little more Catholic. But that's, you know, J.R. Tolkien is my favorite author and he's very Catholic. Oh, my God, that's why I was raised half again. I can't read the Hobbit. You know, it's like I lived it. Yeah. What about the LeBron James, you know, American offers to trade LeBron to Russia for Brittany Griner? And she's the women NBA star who's being held in a Russian prison for having weed vapes. You know, again, why is it so funny to trade LeBron to Russia? Because, you know, we're offering to trade him for Brittany. It's a great joke. And you always say that like you'd never explain the joke, but it's obvious that they're not equivalent in terms of basketball skill and what like whatnot, but or or presents. Well, LeBron is kind of represented, you know, for jokes. He's such a great punching bag because he does have the smug like I am better than everybody. And I hate America and yet America has given me everything that I have. So those kinds of personalities are great punching bags. Do you do you think and, you know, for me, the I, I, you know, LeBron James is like a fantastic athlete. And to the extent that that matters, you've got to kind of admire that and give that. And then, you know, he was a rank hypocrite in terms of when Black Lives Matter took place. He said, you know, the NBA should allow or foreground protest by players about George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. And then when it came to people saying, like, hey, we want to protest, you know, the mistreatment of Uyghurs and other people in China. He was like, you better shut up and you don't have any. Yeah, is that I mean, even as he was refusing to do that, when other people were saying, is that the nut of why LeBron bugs you? I don't even know that he bugs me that much. I don't get to I try not to get too passionate about the stuff that we're joking about. Like it's a great joke. And, you know, any time you have somebody who is stuck up, there's an hypocrisy. And that's another area where that's great for humor and anybody who's a hypocrite. And that's why Christians have been a great punching bag for years, because people hone in on hypocrisy within Christians really easily, which brings me to the headline time. Time traveling, Joel Austin gives Joe a copy of Your Best Life Now. Explain, I mean, if you follow the Christian world at all, everybody knows who Joel Austin is, but some secular people might not. Who is Joel Austin and why is this funny? Yeah, so he's a soft prosperity, gospel preacher, you know, that kind of has this idea, it's a very associated with the word faith movement and, you know, the whole of the secret and everything that comes with that, that you can speak wealth into existence. You can speak health into existence. Your words have creative power, which is also kind of if you're right with God, you're going to do extremely well in this world. It takes the proverbs to the extreme, you know, it takes the proverbs which say like, work hard and you'll be blessed. But the proverbs are a general principle that say in general, if you work hard, then you're going to reap the rewards of that. But it takes that as this kind of like divine promise that if I put in the work, God is going to reward me with health and wealth. And it's really, it's really devious because it's, it tells people who have cancer, it's your fault. You don't have enough faith. You haven't given enough money. You haven't done enough. And so we've from day one really punched at the prosperity. At the bright shining teeth of Joel Osteen. He's got great teeth. You had to admit that. I don't know where they came from. I don't think they're natural. That might they might have come directly from God or Satan. Satan has great teeth, right? I'm assuming he's got a really good smile. But Osteen, yeah, you you've mocked him. Like whenever there's a natural disaster, Joel Osteen in a Babylon B headline shows up, giving out his own books, right? And then Job, how, you know, Job is obviously, you know, the one of the more interesting characters in the Old Testament. Just briefly recap, you know, why Job. Yeah, Satan basically gets permission from God to beat up Job for a while. And he loses all his livestock and his family and his farms. And he's left with just his nagging wife and boils on him, so it's almost a tragic comedy, you know, one of those dark comedies. It really reflects well. Well, that's the Old Testament God, right? I mean, yeah, so. Right. But so Job just needs to book up. Trump's children changed their last name to Biden so that the media will ignore them. Yeah. And that's another example where hypocrisy, especially in the media, is a great target for us because everybody's sitting there. See, we all see it. We all see what's happening in the media, how they treat one side completely differently from the other side. And when you can just shine a light on that as our satirical newspaper does. Do you, you know, I remember we talked, I think, three years ago, you talked to reason a couple of times. And you guys, you were hitting Trump pretty hard and things like that. A lot of people said as Trump kind of went on, you got a little bit softer on him and you started going after liberals more. Do you think that's a fair criticism? Or did your or did your focus change for other reasons or your focus did not change? I think we went after Trump harder than we've ever gone after anyone on the left. And we still do a lot of good jokes about Trump. You know, I think there's I think there's a lot of humor to be found in Trump. The problem with Trump humor is that the left was doing it so much and so poorly that it just kind of didn't interest me anymore. It doesn't interest me to say Trump has orange skin and he's stupid, you know, like, OK, let's let's come up with something more clever. So when Trump humor can really play with his character and realize that he already he's already funny in his own right, you don't need to you don't need to add anything. Yeah, and you can just get out of the way that you got a role. You got a role with his character. Once we realized that, I think that Trump humor really became more fun like that. But we've called we had a joke, you know, that said that people who vote for Trump are like voting for the Antichrist or something, you know, so so it's like we never done that kind of savage stuff on the left. So there was something where we were punching our own a little harder. Do you consider Trump a Christian? I don't think so. Yeah. I mean, he says he is there was a and he held the Bible. Like I'm pretty sure you had like a Teflon glove because he's Satan. And if he touches the Bible, his hand would burn or something. I think we did a big joke on that, that he he was rushed to the hospital with with severe burns. Yeah. And when he was asked, like, what's your favorite book of the Bible? And he was like, all of them. It's like he obviously could not name a saint. He could not say they Genesis or a single guy. Well, then he said two Corinthians, which is how we say it. But I heard him speak. I heard him speak at the Faith and Freedom in Nashville. And he he was making fun of himself for not knowing the Bible. He says, I know, I don't know the Bible as well as people know the Bible. And I think he realizes like, oh, wow, I'm in the space where I'm a complete noob. And why did why did evangelical? I mean, they supported him incredibly strongly. And I realized maybe outside of your expertise, but you're an evangelical. You must know people who were like, yeah, I voted for Trump. I mean, he is a like on a personal level. You know, he seems to be a despicable character as a businessman. You know, everybody says he cheats on them and he's just awful. His personal life is a mess. He is a kind of horrible character. Why and he is patently not a Christian, but got the Christian vote. And he was one of the few politicians who actually did a lot of the things he said he was going to do. Yeah. So you think they knew that? Well, yeah, I think maybe they got that sense from him. But but also like some people just hated Hillary. I mean, there was a real revulsion to Hillary across the board. And, you know, was that left versus right thing in the binary choice that, you know, I don't know if if we didn't have that binary choice that Trump would. No, it was a trider. There was a man named Gary Johnson who died a criminal's death. Yeah, you know, he was the Trump stuff led to one of the most bizarre moments. I think in my lifetime in a lot of ways, where I like to think every once in a while, you know, that we're living in a Philip K. Dick universe of science fiction writer who, you know, just, you know, where the world is insane in ways we can't fully appreciate. But you guys in I think it was 2018 or there about you published a headline saying that Trump takes credit for doing more for Christianity than Jesus. And then literally a couple of years later, I mean, I guess it was this year or last year, Trump actually said I've done more. And he said it a couple of times in different contexts. I have done more for religion or for Christianity than anybody in history. I mean, how do you know how do you deal with that? I just think he's a he's a big, lovable guy that, you know, can. And I think that he doesn't. I don't think Trump takes himself as seriously as his haters think he does. I think he says these big boisterous things because he knows it gets a reaction. He knows it gets applause and laughter. And, you know, he's a character, you know, so he's a cartoon character. And I think he leans into that. Do you want him to come back into American politics or do or are you a partisan? Do you I don't I don't really care one way or the other. I mean, it'd be great for comedy. So I'll take that. OK. Although it's kind of bad for comedy, right? And you've pointed this out in other people work with comedy when you don't understand him, but it was great for us. Yeah. That allowed us to have this meteoric rise where we were doing great Trump jokes because the late night liberals didn't know how to do it. Yeah. They were going very, I mean, the easy obvious. It's not even low hanging fruit. It's like Trump. His name is not Trump. It's Trump. Yeah. Like that's that's comedy gold in the late night comedy world. What do you why do you think late night comedy, even places like the onion, which is still doing well, but seems to have lost something of an edge? Is it is it just simply that as liberals retake power, you know, because Trump came in and, you know, the Republicans were running, you know, Congress and the White House. They have the Supreme Court and things like that. That's gone. And does comedy suffer when your team, for lack of a better term, is is kind of running the show? It can. I think you have to be more careful. I don't really buy into the punch up, punch down paradigm where comedy can only punch up. And so if you're if you're out of power, then you're funny. And if you're in power, then it's not funny because it's much down. I don't really buy into that. I do think like I was talking earlier about how Christians were such a great target because Christians are self serious. Christians are dour Christians have this obvious hypocrisy in a lot of areas. Well, I think that describes the woke liberal far left right now. Like that is who they are, you know, they're hypocritical in the way that they treat other people. And they say they were against racism and yet a lot of their policies are racist. They take themselves very seriously because politics is their religion, you know, they believe in salvation, but they believe in salvation through wokeism and they believe in salvation for our country, but only by voting for the right policies. And so if you make fun of them, you're making fun of their religion. Yeah. You, the Babylon be published, a guide to wokeism or wokeness. What do you think define wokeness briefly? And then what is driving it? Because this is something, you know, when people will quibble over stuff, but certainly over the past 20 years, but over the past five years or so, wokeness has become a real thing that is everywhere around us. Yeah, well, I don't pretend to be a cultural expert or anything. But in my limited experience of what I've observed, it has been this like flashpoint in the last year or two that is just, you know, you heard the word woke kind of being thrown around five years ago, but it wasn't it wasn't this big cultural thing where I can talk to my neighbor and say, welcome to like, I hate woke people or I love, you know, there's now everybody on the street knows what it's right. But yeah, wokeness is a very it's a tough thing because it is a moving target. It is I think at its core, it is kind of the Marxist ish. And I won't say it's exactly defined with classical Marxism or anything, but it is the Marxist ish idea that there's oppressors and oppressed, you know, and they just kind of take that and apply it to different areas, whether that's gender or race or nationality. And and that's where you find all your misery from. Why do you think that viewpoint has captured if if it hasn't become if it's not something the masses believe in it, something that the elite particularly on the left side of the political spectrum really is going going deep on. Yeah, I'm not sure. I mean, I think there's probably a lot of white guilt going around and it's a way to deal with it. You see that because they pay, you know, Robin D'Angelo, $50,000 speaking fees or whatever to show up and tell them how evil they are. But I mean, ultimately, I think I think people need a I think people need a way to salvation and redemption and they need that narrative in their lives. And if they can say, well, here's my sin, I was I mean, my ancestors were evil and then they can find a way to atone for it by doing better. I think that helps them, you know, in their mind, at least. Do you think it is? Do you think American culture is becoming more secular and less religious over, you know, over the past 20 years, 30 years? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, there's but but I think there's. Well, and I was going to ask if that's the case. So maybe people, you know, maybe we assume that there is a fixed amount of people always want to find salvation, the phrase you use. And it used to be you found salvation through religion. And if religion is gone, then you look, you seek for it and you seek it in other secular passions. Well, I mean, I believe people are created to worship. I believe people are created to find meaning. And if you don't find meaning in the church, you're going to find meaning somewhere else. So people aren't leaving the church. They're going and finding their own church. And it happens to be the religion of woke ism on the left. Right. So one of the things, you know, that is interesting is that you've been, you know, for years now, you guys have been in this interesting kind of war. And I think you you all must own snopes.com because when, you know, the minute that they started fact-checking you as a bad source, as misinformation, because people, they said that people were uniquely taking the Babylon be as truth, you know, and that needs to be fact-checked. Like, I mean, that gives you, you know, you get more coverage, you get more readers, people are interested and it's funny. Can you talk a little bit about that? Why do you think there is a concerted effort? And it's not just snopes. It's also CNN and whatnot. There is this interest in kind of delegitimating the Babylon be as, you know, I mean, it's a satirical site that can't be missed. But there seems to be this attempt to say you guys aren't legitimate because people are mistaking you seriously, which is not really true to begin with. But then and that means you shouldn't be doing satire. Yeah, it's an interesting question. And I don't fully know the answer, but it does it does seem like the left is very confused by comedy that makes fun of the left. They don't understand it. They don't get it because they're used to controlling these cultural institutions. They're used to controlling the late night shows and the satire sites and all of that. And so when all of a sudden we come along and we have a hopefully a good sense of humor and we're writing comedy that people are finding funny, they think there's some like nefarious motive there. And that's what they always say in these fact checks. They're intentionally muddying the waters of a current event, news story to confuse people. Like that's the accusation that's made, which is so insane. Like we're writing very similar jokes to the jokes that the other guys are writing on the other side and we're just writing them from our perspective. But I really think that they don't understand that we we just want we just want to put humor out into the world. You know, we want to put laughter out into the world. Yeah, a lot of it's going to come from our world viewer or our perspective, but who's isn't? So I think there's a there's a real confusion over it. You know, that we'll write articles that will make fun of ourselves. You know, where we write, you know, we remember George Peterson writing an ostrich or whatever. Or like we wrote an article that was supposed to make fun of really bad Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez humor, where we said that she tied up, you know, she was trying to tie her shoelaces and she accidentally strangled strangled herself and the headline says, because she is an idiot, because she's so stupid. And we were really mocking the kind of over the top Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is an idiot means that it just kind of became as stale as the Trump is an idiot means. And people on the left freaked out and said, this is such a bad joke. You know, we're kind of sitting there and snickering like, yeah, that's the point. You know, but they really just thought that we didn't have a sense of humor about ourselves because they couldn't they can't comprehend how conservative that sense of humor. Right. One of the in an interview with the Atlantic that you gave last fall, you talked about how, you know, if you have to, you will you you identify more your humor with the baby boom generation or you'll you'll take the you'll side with boomer humor over kind of zoomer humor, Gen Z humor. You are you're 35. So you're you're a millennial and you're you're I get maybe even closer to Gen Z than, you know, Gen X at that point and that what talk a little bit about generational humor. And you I think in that interview, you said that, you know, a lot of your readers are boomers and they kind of get it in a way that younger people don't. Yeah, there's a well, you know, I think there's a split. Most of the time I'm at a conference, people will say my college son loves your stuff or my grandpa loves your stuff that's always always. They never like my stuff. No, of course not. Yeah, they're holding a gun on you when they're like that. But, you know, so that so I think there's an interesting thing in that it does appeal to multiple people. But the to me, boomer humor was this kind of classic Seinfeld cheers, you know, and I know that's during the Gen X era. Yeah, it's a 90 or 80s and that's when that's when boomers with your 40 and we're watching that stuff and tuning into it. There's a classic, you know, just just good old fashioned men do this. Women do this. Isn't that silly observational humor about life? And now it seems like, you know, with Gen Z's humor, they subvert that and they say, no, there's no punch line. You watch a TikTok video, there's no punch line. It's something crazy happens. And then the video cuts off. There's there's like a nihilism to the humor. And I think absurdity can be great in humor, of course. But, you know, then they go and they attack everybody that builds all these great cultural institutions for comedy, you know, whether that's Saturday Night Live or all the classic sitcoms or Calvin and Hobbes. I mean, these are things that like these are heights to which, you know, I don't think Gen Z humor can ever aspire to be, you know, and we'll see what comes of it. But yeah, is part of it that older forms of humor and boomer humor. And I'm thinking like early Saturday Night Live, which is, you know, made by the early boomers were parroting, you know, TV shows from the 50s and the 60s and kind of broadly held, you know, cultural templates, people had a common culture. So you knew what the form of a presidential address was, you knew what the form of a sitcom was, etc. And like you can satirize that kind of thing as we get into an age where people have less and less in common or consume fewer forms in common, it becomes hard to do satire. I agree with that. And I also think social media is, you know, it creates all these little subcultures, it shortens people's attention spans, you know, even even you look at the format of comedy on TikTok, where if you don't make the joke in three seconds, people flip to the next video, you know, people used to have a longer attention span where they could they could track with a sketch that was six or seven minutes long, you know, you look at Monty Python sketches that just go on and on and are absurd and don't have a point. But but go on and you're willing to let the joke develop and you're willing to let the little narrative arc build. And that's great. I also think that reporter was asking me about boomer humor. I just got a little annoyed. Yeah, because she she was like, she was saying a lot of boomers like your stuff. Are you ashamed to be associated with boomer humor? Yeah, do you want to come out? Okay. I mean, I'm a I'm a boomer and I'm kind of ashamed to be associated with that. But you know, you talk about social media and fragmentation from a kind of religious point of view or from a Christian point of view, isn't it kind of good, though, that you live or we live in a world where the barriers to entry are pretty low and that a lot of different groups. I mean, this is part of the certainly the Protestant Reformation. And as it came out of England in the 17th century, it was kind of great that anybody who wanted to could start a church and had the freedom to do that. Isn't that somewhat analogous to, you know, the landscape we're in where it's like, if you believe this thing, you know, whether it's religion or media or whatever, you can kind of create that world and try to draw adherence to your community. Well, I think it's a double-edged source. I'm not completely down in social media. Obviously, the Babylon Bee wouldn't exist without it because we were able to say, Hey, you know, do you like the onion? But hate when they are really bad at humor because they're too, you know, absorbed in the leftist worldview or whatever. Here's something that here's comedy that doesn't hate you. You know, that was kind of the pitch. Yeah, we'll make fun of you too. But we don't hate you. You know, that was kind of the way that it got popular. So obviously, we were able to find a subculture using that that we wouldn't have been able to launch the Babylon Bee on, you know, network TV or something, getting some deal there. Yeah, or just through traditional print. Our traditional print would be hard to find that audience too. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about social media because you've been in a kind of fight or a standoff now with Twitter. You still are on Facebook and you have a massive presence there, right? Well, it's very suppressed by Facebook. Okay. What does that mean? We've been demonetized and de-platformed several times by Facebook and they... When you say demonetized, that means... Well, like, we'll get either videos demonetized. We've had, when we get those fact checks that come up, we get dings on our account where we can't monetize until we take certain steps. And we also have been told that our site is rated low for sharing false information. So now, whenever you see a Babylon Bee dot com, even if you share it from your personal page, Facebook flags, that is like, this is that information we can't spread. Although you have a large presence on Facebook. We have a large following, but it's just our followers don't see our content. Yeah. Okay. But you are on Facebook. You're active on Facebook. On Twitter, you have been... You were banned when you named Rachel Levine, who's an assistant secretary of health, who's transgender. She transitioned from a man to a woman, I think, in 2010 or 11. And you named her Man of the Year. And that triggered a Twitter response. Can you walk us through what happened? Yeah. So we gave Rachel Levine our prestigious Man of the Year award, and we were sent a message a few days later that you're locked out of your account, you know, you have to recant. You have committed hateful conduct, and you are calling for violence against somebody and acknowledge our hateful conduct policies and click this button to delete the tweet and acknowledge that you've committed hateful conduct. And is that the actual language? Yeah, I'm paraphrasing. I could find the original if you need. And did they say that this was committing violence or leading to violence or something? If you click on it, please review our hateful conduct policy, you can click on it, and it says calling for violence against people calling for... So it's part of the list, but they're not necessarily saying that tweet that you were calling for. It wasn't typed custom for us, but it was part of that language, yeah. OK, so they said, you know, you got to get rid of this tweet, and then we'll unlock the account. Right. OK, and you guys have chosen not to. Right. OK, can you walk us through the logic of that? There wasn't a ton of discussion. It was very much we got together and said, we're not deleting this, right? And it felt, it just felt there's a humiliation like bow before Twitter and apologize and acknowledge. You know, you're calling someone who is a biological male no matter what Rachel Levine identifies as. And really, we weren't even making fun of Rachel Levine so much. We were making fun of the fact that you had said today named Rachel Levine one of their women of the year. And so this had kind of blown up on social media, you know, that transgender people have started to take awards away from biological women and starting to erase that category in our society. And we said, well, you know, we're not going to delete this tweet. And we just kind of announced that on all the channels that we were still able to access, you know, on our personal Twitter profiles. And you have your personal Twitter account is still up and running. Mine got deleted shortly after that. I got locked out as well. And then I was able to get back on though. How did you get back on? I appealed it and I was I had made a joke about something how like if the Babylon B had only committed genocide against Uyghurs, then we would be allowed on Twitter. Right. And they flagged that for violence. Yeah. Did you retweet the headline about Rachel Levine? I don't think I did. Personal account, because would that have bounced you or whatever? I think pretty quickly we were like, OK, let's not share it on our personal pages, because if we do that, all of a sudden we're going to have no ability to access anything. But we'll leave the main account locked. So you're talking about the Rachel Levine joke. It's I mean, you're kind of this is there was a South Park episode shortly after Caitlyn Jenner transitioned. And the punchline of that was that everybody, no matter what, at every moment in the show, would stop and talk about how Caitlyn Jenner was an incredibly brave, you know, an courageous person. You're saying that that's the joke, really, that you're making with Rachel Levine, that it's kind of it's the larger cultural response that you're parodying or that you're making comment. Yeah, it's the it's the absolute, you know, obviously we we love trans people and we love, you know, we don't we don't consider people like that beneath us. You know, the Christian world do is that everybody everybody has the opportunity to be saved, you know, and we can love everybody. And I'm no more deserving of God's grace than a transgender person. But when the culture bows down and starts handing out trophies to people for stuff like this, is when we say, hey, wait a minute, we need to protect women in our society as well. And do you think do you think trans people have are they mentally ill that they want to transition? I mean, probably nowadays, there's a lot of social a lot of social pressure as well as we've seen among a lot of trans transgender teens, especially women. So, you know, one of the things that's interesting is the your response, the Babylon Bees response to Twitter, like you're saying, OK, we're not we're not going back on Twitter. And you seem to be holding pretty firm to that. That's one thing. And do you do you agree that Twitter, you know, has a right to kind of throw people off if they want? Like you might disagree with that, but I'm I'm of two minds about it because I see both sides of the argument. You know, on the one hand, yes, they are a private company. You know, and I don't know that I want to see a world where the government is sending regulators into bureaucrats into Twitter. And what are you guys doing and give us reports on censorship? And anytime you give government that kind of power, you know, it only grows and never comes down. On the other hand, if they are acting as de facto sensors for the federal government, you know, how are they doing that? Well, because they're talking with the government, you know, we know that they're communicating with the White House about who they want censored and and and, you know, and all that. So when we had it, we had a person who was an ex CIA agent come after the Babylon Bee for sharing misinformation, you know, talking about how she had been monitoring the Babylon Bee for sharing misinformation. And so then she's talking about how we just use satire as a shield to prevent ourselves from getting blocked up. But she's an ex CIA agent. So what does that mean? Like what's her connection to the government? The thinking is that that had been a pattern of thought within that agency, you know, is that people like the Babylon Bee are sharing misinformation. At what point? I mean, because people used to this is kind of faded, but it'll come back. You know, there's a distinction between a publisher and a platform or whatever. But I mean, because you would say nobody wants the government to come to the Babylon Bee or to reason and say, you have to carry this speech. Right. But at what point then what what makes Twitter different that you might be OK with saying, OK, you know what, this should be treated like a public utility. It's like the old phone system where anybody can make a call about anything they want and you can't block. Yeah. Well, and I don't I don't know that I entirely agree with that argument either that that, you know, the publisher versus platform distinction. I think that whole thing is a little misunderstood from a legal perspective. Yeah, well, it's invented. It's made or it's not anywhere in the like it's like it's like it's like it isn't the protection for social media that people think it is. Right. I think so. I don't know that I entirely agree with it either. So I don't know what the answer. But my but my my feeling is culturally, no matter what you think legally, culturally, we're in a really bad place when the place where 90% of speech occurs is online and it's all controlled by the left and big tech. Yeah. What's the answer? I don't know. I think we do need to build alternative platforms. I think we do need to build our own stuff. But as soon as we do that, they kick us off Amazon server, you know. So well, let's talk about that, because I think one of the most interesting things from a from a libertarian or from a market perspective is your response to the Twitter stuff is not simply to say, OK, well, Twitter's closed off to us and we'll just drop it. You have really robustly built out your online infrastructure. You have like more subscription plans and you're pumping out more material in a place in an environment that you control, including creating a social kind of social media network. Right. And that's part of not to be social. Can you talk a little bit about that because this is, you know, it's kind of like you got kicked out of one city in a valley and you're building a kind of shining city on a hill for yourselves. Right. It's true. Yeah. Yeah. We built a little social network on the back of our not to be website, which is also kind of connected. And it's a back end for both sites. You know, so that's what we're building out is that you log into Babylon B and now you can share Babylon B articles with other Babylon B subscribers. And so, you know, it's almost almost a classic Internet forum model. Right. I used to be that we didn't all go to Facebook to talk about things. You know, if you were a hotty car enthusiast, you went to the car forum. You know, it was like use that in that very certain to see that fragmentation as people are doing all this stuff. So I do think it's exciting to see that because of the pressure that we're facing on social media, we just said, OK, well, we're going to move over here. Right. But at some point that breaks down because, like, you know, we could get cut off by payment processors or banks or has that has that happened? We haven't got cut off cut off. I mean, this is I agree with you broadly, you know, it's disturbing. And you mentioned Amazon Web Services when, you know, when back end things that nobody, you know, you don't even think about it. Yeah, there's no reputational kind of value of, you know, what when places like back at pressure to say, like, we don't want you carrying this website, even though nobody knows which, you know, who you're back and where your where your pages are hosted. That's totalitarian or it's totalist. It's very disturbing for sure. Yeah, we've had stuff like MailChimp suspending for a while. You know, we've had stuff like our email front end that kicked us off. You know, it's hard to even make an appeal. Like, I got to go get subscribed. Are you like what about, I mean, but then we see a proliferation of places like Substack that are at least for the time being explicitly committed to not being MailChimp in terms of, like, when we don't, as long as you are not breaking the law or, you know, we don't really care what you're writing about. Yeah. I mean, that's good, right? I think that's a great thing. And I think that's a great adaptation that the market has made. I don't know if it's going to completely solve the problem. Yeah. But I also don't have government involved. So I don't know. I just write jokes on the internet. Yeah. Can I ask a kind of final broader question? I mean, you're you're a born again Bible believing evangelical Christian. You're a stranger in a strange land, right? Because, you know, what what maybe 20 percent of America is evangelical or no, smaller than that. Right. Yeah. But is there a real tension? Because, like, you know, you believe you come from a belief system that believes in revealed truth that is absolute, that is unchanging. And that calls upon you to act in a particular way. And it's like, you're going to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. But there comes a point where it's like, no, you're not going to participate. How does that feel? Like, I mean, do you are you waiting for that moment where you are going to have to, you know, kind of cut yourself off from secular society around you? Well, the Christian is is prepared for this because, you know, Jesus already told us like the world hates him. So imagine how they're going to treat you. You know, but he also says, let's face it, you're not Jesus. And it's true. But he says, take heart, because I have already overcome the world, you know. And I think I think there's a there's a there's a little bit of being based to being a Christian nowadays, and I'm OK with that. Like, I'm OK to not be like everybody else. Right. And so I don't think I don't think there's a fear or worry. I think there's almost an excitement. The Christian church is always flourished under persecution. Right. You know, the Christian church is going much faster in China than it's growing here, despite it being banned in China. And, you know, I was thinking of that because we're mere steps away from Caesar's Palace, the Casino in Vegas and they have the Colosseum. And I was I was talking with my son about I was talking about the early Christians. You know, it's but do you feel like American culture in your lifetime? You know, there was a period in in the 70s and in the 80s, especially, where Christianity, the religious right, evangelical Christianity, seemed to be a growing and almost dominant cultural force. It would rarely admit to that. But it really was, you know, it moved politics in a big way. It it created a lot of cultural phenomena on that where became broadly popular. Are those days over? Or do you do you think, you know, is Christianity evangelical Christianity shrinking as a source of cultural power in America? Well, I hope so, because we made a lot of bad Christian art in those days. Yeah, that's true. And I think the you know, I think there's a bit of a culling, you know, you're having a lot of people, especially during the pandemic that stopped going to church. But, you know, we kind of wonder how committed were they anyway? You know, and I don't, you know, if we're attracting big crowds, but these people's lives aren't being changed and they're just there for cultural power, then we don't really we don't really mind, you know, that now we're kind of seeing who the true believer. Now you're sounding like the certain aspects of the libertarian movement. You know, it's like we don't need big numbers. We just need hard people, right? That are we need true believers. Is there a way, you know, one one story that we tell about America? And I say this to someone who's raised Catholic, you know, this was a story I was told is that America ultimately was a place of religious toleration and that that spread out into different, you know, into a secular form of toleration, where the genius of the country really is that we have enormous numbers of people who come from very different backgrounds and believe very different things, some religious, some secular, whatever, and that kind of the genius of the country is that we can create a, you know, a governance system, not government, but just like a kind of operating system where as many of us can live peaceably together without killing each other. And, you know, you get to you get to live your truth and try and persuade me into your group. I do the same. Is that, you know, is that a version of America that is attractive to you? And then if it is, are we failing to do that? Yeah, I mean, I think that's great. I love I love personal liberty and personal freedom. And I think a lot of those values were thought up in the West, you know, because of Christianity. Absolutely. I mean, freedom of conscience, the right to believe, you know, what you believe and act on that is like central to, you know, 17th century British to the Reformation, ultimately to America. I still worry, though, that the freedom, you know, that freedom still needs a common culture, you know, and that doesn't have to be, you know, a Christofascist regime or something. But but I do think there needs to be a kind of a common appreciation of some traditional values. And I wonder how we how we manage that when the country is so far divided and polarized right now, you know, when we can't agree on what a man is. Can we have that kind of tolerance and freedom? What is a man? I don't know. No, seriously, you know, it's it's X, Y chromosomes. You know, that's OK. That doesn't get us very far, though, right? But what would what, you know, looking forward to the next couple of years, you know, certainly in the political arena, nothing, nothing's going to get better, right? Like we are the only thing we know is we're falling. And we're, you know, we're we're not near the bottom, probably where we're going to hit. What are the types of things that might might allow for, you know, a kind of settling of saying, OK, here are the three, four or five basic things that we all agree on as Americans. And then now, you know, as long as that's settled, then we can go about trying to persuade each other to, you know, you you join my tribe, I join your tribe or we come up with new tribes. Yeah, I mean, and the new tribes may be the way to go. You know, I don't know. I increasingly don't see a way for America to reconcile beyond, you know, secession. Yeah, which is not necessarily, it doesn't have a great track record. It doesn't have a great track record. You know, the onion wrote a joke about peace in the Middle East, where they said that that a new peace treaty was going to be three hundred and eighty million little, you know, as each person. Right, right. Yeah. And how you just discovered, you know, individualism and freedom, you know, and inadvertently making a joke that was pointing towards that. And I don't know. I mean, I don't know practically how we see that in our lifetime. But I do feel like G.K. Chesterton had a quote that another Catholic. I know. You're going soft, man. The Catholics have the best quotes. Protestants don't do as well. But he had a quote about how all politics should be as local as possible. And he said that that the politician who keep your politicians close enough where you can kick them. Yeah. And he says a shame. How many politicians, how few politicians are hanged? Yeah, that could get you banned from Twitter. I think that's up. Yeah. Yeah, I tweet that occasionally and I hasn't gotten me banned on Twitter yet. But but it is, you know, I do believe that what we've seen through the pandemic is local elections, local politics, keeping things as local as we can is one of the solutions. OK, well, we're going to leave it there. Thank you, Kyle. Man of the Babylon Bay. It was great talking. Awesome. Thank you so much.