“We still do lots of church jokes — they just don’t go as viral as the other stuff,” he said, while the opportunities for satire in the daily news cycle are endless. He pointed to the site’s repeated satire of Donald Trump — a Trump joke tops the Bee’s “greatest hits” list of pages that have drawn the most traffic — whom Dillon called an “outrageous figure” who deserved to be mocked.
Today, though, the site is known most for its critique of liberal politicians and what Dillon called the “woke mind virus.” He describes the Bee as a satire site with a Christian worldview that is devoted to mocking bad ideas in popular culture.
“We don’t want our audience to feel bad about themselves like we’re bullying them,” he said. “We want our audience to take bad ideas less seriously.”
Ford remains a part owner of the Bee and also runs “Not the Bee,” which aggregates weird headlines, often about progressives.
While the Bee’s website still offers a mix of jokes — twin headlines “Churchgoer Turned Into Pillar Of Salt After Turning To Glare At Sound Guy” and “Satan Leads Prayer At Trump Rally” topped the site on Monday (Nov. 7) — the political jokes and jabs at progressive culture attract the most attention, dominating both the site’s “buzzing” list, which tracks trending stories on the site, as well as the Bee’s greatest hits.
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“They do a great job at bringing awareness to the absurdity that drives much of our culture,” said Alex MacArthur, a software engineer and Bee fan from Nashville, Tennessee.
The site’s writers seem particularly obsessed with U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, running two dozen stories about the New York Democrat in 2022 alone. For subscribers, who pay between $4.17 and $15 a month for ad-free content and other premiums, the site offers a top 10 list of Ocasio-Cortez jokes (“AOC Engaged, Registers For $10,000 ‘Tax The Rich’ Toaster,” “AOC Cries Outside Disney World In Dress Reading ‘Groom The Kids’”).
The site has run a number of anti-trans jokes — mocking both particular transgender people like Levine as well as fictional trans people. One of the site’s greatest hits is about a motorcycle rider who wins races by “identifying as a bicyclist.”
The Bee’s satirical forays into culture war issues have earned a loyal following — the site draws about 20 million page views a month, said Dillon — and the ire of many.
Along with having its Twitter account suspended, The Babylon Bee has been dinged by fact-checkers and social media sites for sharing disinformation. That has cost the site traffic and money, said Dillon. Even so, the Bee tries to capitalize on what Dillon called big-tech censorship of conservative viewpoints by running ads highlighting its clashes with social media gatekeepers to attract subscribers.
“It helps expose them for being not just humorless scolds but big-tech tyrants,” he said.
Matt Sienkiewicz, chair of the communication department at Boston College and co-author of “That’s Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them,” said The Babylon Bee is part of a larger, highly successful conservative comedy ecosystem.
But the Bee’s success in promoting “anti-liberal comedy” has come at the cost of drowning out the Christian satire, in Sienkiewicz’s opinion. Fans who came to the site for church humor likely no longer see those jokes because they don’t feed the outrage algorithm or because they are turned off by the politics.
“The stuff that no one else can do has been lost,” he said.
