Appearing on Tucker Carlson’s show Monday, Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon explained why the satire site is refusing to delete a tweet it sent out about Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine being the “man of the year,” as a joke.
The site received a Twitter suspension for promoting a parody article about the transgender Biden official, which Twitter claimed violated its rules “against hateful conduct.”
Now Twitter will not restore the Babylon Bee account until it deletes the tweet, but Dillon says they will not comply because “Truth is not hate speech.”
“We don’t believe that facts are hate speech, that speaking truth is hate speech,” the CEO said, adding “At some point, people need to stick by this, Tucker. 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.”
“It’s like asking us to say 2+2=5,” Dillon told Carlson, adding “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,” Dillon continued, adding “This is satire, it’s just a joke. It’s pretty harmless. It’s certainly not hurting anybody and this is a public official.”
“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,” he further urged.
“There’s an appeal process we can go through, but we’re not going to delete the tweet,” Dillon emphasised, further noting that comedy is under attack from woke outrage and that comedians are supposed to make a living by “poking holes in the popular narrative.”
“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 asserted.
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