Babylon Bee refuses to stand down over trans ‘woman of the year’ article

The CEO says “truth is not hate speech” and refuses to delete “hateful” article and tweet about a transgender Biden official

Seth Dillon, the CEO of satirical website Babylon Bee, said he refuses to delete a parody article and tweet about transgender Biden official Rachel Levine being ‘man of the year’.

The Babylon Bee article came in response to Levine (who is a 4-star admiral in the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps and currently serves as Biden’s assistant secretary for health) being named as one of 12 ‘women of the year’ by USA Today despite being born male.

Twitter suspended Babylon Bee’s account and says it will not restore it until the “hateful” tweet is deleted, but Dillon claims it is like being asked to “bend the knee” and beg to be kept on the platform.

The Babylon Bee's Man Of The Year Is Rachel Levine https://t.co/mZdcXbUnmf

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) March 15, 2022

Appearing on Tucker Carlson’s show on Monday, Dillon said he doesn’t believe that “facts are hate speech” or that “speaking the truth is hate speech.”

“People have to be willing to say ‘listen, if they want us to deny the truth in order to stay on this platform, we speak the truth.’ Make them kick you off. Make them boot you,” he said.

“It’s like asking us to say 2+2=5,” Dillon continued. “We’re sitting here looking at this email that tells us in order to reinstate our account and get access to be able to tweet again, we’ve got to delete this tweet. And the tweet’s a joke, that’s the first thing to get straight here.”

“This is satire, it’s just a joke. It’s pretty harmless. It’s certainly not hurting anybody and this is a public official,” he said. “They’re asking us to basically bend the knee and say ‘we admit that this is hateful conduct, please keep us on your platform.’ And we’re not going to do that, so we don’t know where this ends.”

The CEO continued by saying that while there is an appeal process the company can go through, they will not be deleting the tweet. 

He added that a comedian’s job should to be to poke fun at popular narratives, but rules imposed by companies such as Twitter restrict the ability to do that, and that comedy as a whole is currently under attack from woke outrage.

“Comedy is being rendered ineffective where they’re basically making rules about what you can and can’t joke about to the point where we’re saying ‘well, we’re going to continue to make these jokes’ and if we have to, we’ll do it off Twitter.”

Dillon concluded by saying that he feels most people see the situation for what it is, and the majority of Americans are on the Babylon Bee’s side on this issue, as they are “not some sort of fringe group that has some outrageous idea that nobody accepts,” adding that Levine’s claim to be ‘female’ – a reference to biological sex – is “simply not true,” and that pointing it out must not be equated to hate speech.