Who’s Afraid of the Babylon Bee?

To understand how the New York Times and other leading media and tech institutions view the Babylon Bee, imagine that when Stephen Colbert was still doing The Colbert Report, conservatives thought that they were actually listening to a right-wing populist Bill O’Reilly type, instead of a satirist who was mocking everything O’Reilly stood for.

Everything the Bee publishes is a joke. You don’t have to find it funny, and you probably won’t if you don’t agree with the underlying premises of its joke. And that’s fine. Those premises are right-of-center. Apart from Greg Gutfeld, the Bee might be the most visible and successful purveyor of right-leaning comedy in the country.

And yet, here we go again: Yesterday, Mailchimp, which was previously assumed to be a content-neutral service for sending out mass emails, suspended the Bee for typically nebulous reasons. Oopsie. These things have a way of happening to right-of-center outfits.

This isn’t hard. You’d have to be either really dumb or really dishonest not to recognize this as a joke:

And yet Snopes.com ran a harrumphing fact-check built on the premise that some people might actually think the Bee was earnestly claiming there were such things as washing machines for news and that CNN had purchased one. Facebook flagged the post as “disputed,” citing the Snopes report. The Times until recently was tagging the Bee as “a far-right misinformation site,” and removed that assertion only after the Bee’s lawyers started making threatening noises.

A year after Snopes was ridiculed for being confused about the CNN joke, it doubled down by publishing a lengthy claim arguing, essentially, that so many Americans are stupid, so satire and sarcasm are dangerous in the wrong hands:

The truth is, understanding online political satire isn’t easy. Many satirical websites mimic the tone and appearance of news sites. You have to be familiar with the political issue being satirized. You have to understand what normal political rhetoric looks like, and you have to recognize exaggeration. Otherwise, it’s pretty easy to mistake a satirical message for a literal one.

I haven’t bothered to look at the research, because I don’t care. We’ll stipulate that if you do a survey asking how many Americans believe this or that stupid idea — that ghosts are real, that they have a decent shot at winning the lottery, that Vladimir Putin caused Donald Trump to be elected president, or that Hugo Chavez caused Joe Biden to be elected president — a lot of stupid people will agree. But the New York Times, the people who run Facebook and Snopes and Mailchimp and other institutions aren’t supposed to be dumb. They should be bright enough to distinguish between “joke whose premise I disagree with” and “earnest claim of fact.”

As it happens, I think they probably are bright enough; I think what is happening is that they can’t deal with the existence of right-wing humor that lots of people find funny, and are desperately trying to get the Bee marginalized and shoved off various platforms so that it will stop making fun of people and ideas they like. Or to put it in Bee terms, “Support growing for common-sense tweet control.”