“Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon,” wrote socialist Saul “the Red” Alinsky in his book Rules for Radicals. It “infuriates the opposition.” His fellow leftists are certainly proving this true, too. Having a “Babylon Bee in their bonnets,” they’re attacking the satirical site because, apparently, they only like fake news when it’s masquerading as the real thing.
Implying that there’s one bee die-off they’d like to see, the New York Times warned in 2019, “The line between misinformation and satire can be thin, and real consequences can result when it is crossed. On social media, parody can be misconstrued or misrepresented as it moves further and further from its source. And humor has been weaponized to help spread falsehoods online.”
This is the same Times whose Walter Duranty reported in the 1930s that all was hunky-dory in the Stalinist USSR when, in reality, millions of peasants were being systematically starved to death. It’s okay, though, because Duranty wasn’t joking. He was lying — and got a Pulitzer for it, too.
CNN also attacked the Babylon Bee, which is a Christian satire site founded in 2016 that now boasts 15 million monthly page views, complaining about deception, writing that many people “don’t know it is satire.”
This is the same Counterfeit News Network whose employees were caught in 2017 on hidden camera admitting the Trump/Russia/collusion story was nonsense — but they were pushing it, anyway. As National Review recently quipped, “Did you know that CNN has a reporter on the ‘disinformation’ beat?”
“I’ll skip the cheap joke about his never having to leave the office…”
Much like Elizabeth Warren’s newfound embrace of her whiteness, leftists’ warnings about satire threatening the Republic are situational. They never complained about the satirical website the Onion, founded in 1988; or “New Yorker humorist and inexplicable viral goldmine Andy Borowitz”; or “the satirical ‘news’ programs that dominate streaming services and late-night television,” points out the Washington Examiner.
Nor did they ever claim the satirical articles and cartoons peppering colonial-era American newspapers damaged our founding or that Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” or Gulliver’s Travels did violence to 18th-century Britain’s grasp of reality.
Oh, it’s not that jokes can’t have damaging staying power. Ex-Alaska governor Sarah Palin is still mockingly remembered for the line, “I can see Russia from my house,” for example.
Except that she never said it.
Comedienne Tina Fey did, spoofing Palin on a 2008 Saturday Night Live telecast.
Oh, yeah, the mainstream media never complained about that misconception, either.
So don’t “be fooled into thinking the news media’s newfound concerns for satire have anything to do with protecting the public from falsehoods,” writes the Examiner. “The alarms that sound now for the Babylon Bee stem from transparent partisan politics.”
You see, not only does the site mock the Left (and Trump, too, sometimes), but many consider the Bee, well, the bee’s knees. It has exploded in popularity.
And that the attacks have also exploded from the “corporate press” — which for years gushed over ex-Comedy Central host and faux newsman Jon Stewart — has been “illuminating,” Bee editor-in-chief Kyle Mann told the Examiner.
“‘The hypocrisy is blatant,’ said Mann. ‘When liberal late shows and satire sites fool people, they say it’s because the satire is hitting close to home,” the Examiner relates. “‘When our satire is mistaken for real news, they say we’re a dangerous threat to democracy that must be silenced.’”
In truth, leftists hate the Bee not because it makes people believe damned lies about them, but because it well illustrates damning truths about them. Here’s a sampling of the site’s headlines:
• “CNN Attacks Babylon Bee: ‘The Internet Is Only Big Enough For One Fake News Site’”
• “Threat? Bolton Wakes Up Next To His Dead Mustache”
• “Democrats Warn That American People May Tamper With Next Election”
• “Don Lemon Furious About His Privacy Being Invaded By People Actually Watching His Show”
Then there’s this, directed at the “other side”: “Barron Trump Gets Hold Of Dad’s Phone, Sends Numerous Tweets, No One Notices Difference.”
Despite the Bee’s obvious satirical nature, however, the mainstream media cartel would love for Big Tech to censor the site. Yet the Left may render this unnecessary by putting the Bee out of business its own way — by getting in on the act.
Just consider the headlines, “David Hogg: ‘Black,’ ‘LGBTQ’ and ‘Non-binary’ Women Founded Gun Control ‘Centuries Ago’” and “Elizabeth Warren Enlists a Transgender 9-Year-Old to Choose the Education Secretary.” That’s hard to beat for satire.
The problem is that those headlines are reality. The Left’s actual proposals have become so insane and surreal, as it transforms the country into a 3,000-mile-long mental asylum, that real news begins to seem satirical. This is a result of leftist media, academia, and entertainment creating a faux reality with the building blocks of fake ideas (e.g., “‘Truth’ is relative”).
As for fake news, if left-wing media figures really are concerned about combating it, there’s a simple way to do so: resign.
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
