‘Babylon Bee’ Followers Feel Attacked By Generic Joke About White Supremacists

Babylon Bee readers haven’t felt this betrayed, wounded and castrated since their sisters bit down.

Now that’s just an old redneck joke repackaged for the topic at hand and certainly not a punchline worth launching anti-Semitic conspiracy theories over, but, then again, my opinion might not be shared by the majority of the internet’s alt-to-far-right satire enthusiasts. As we’ve seen time and time again, the right-most end of the online political spectrum may claim that they would put their lives down to protect comedy’s right to offend, but when the jokes are targeted toward themselves, those fragile white snowflakes melt down faster than a scoop of vanilla ice cream at a Fourth of July cross-burning. 

So, when the popular conservative satire site Babylon Bee posted their own wording of a joke about neo-Nazis that’s as old as the Stormfront forums, it spectacularly triggered the white Christian nationalist contingency of their readership. Earlier this week Babylon Bee tweeted the headline, “‘The White Race Must Maintain Our Genetic Purity,’ Says Inbred Man,” sparking an intense backlash from fans who felt that the Bee had betrayed their base by making a post that can only be enjoyed by the literate.

Almost immediately, the replies under the Babylon Bee tweet targeted the publication's owner and CEO Seth Dillon, a Jewish-American entrepreneur, with vitriolic outrage. “Tay-Sachs sponsored this post,” one read, with another Babylon Bee follower writing, “I see the Jewish marching orders have been distributed to ‘Right wing’ influencers and media sites." Another user was more direct, posting a reply that earned multiple thousands of likes, “The Babylon Bee is run by (Star of David emoji)s who often lash out against Christians and Whites fyi.”

Many other Babylon Bee followers offered their not-explicitly-Nazi-but-probably-Nazi-adjacent tirades over the headline’s targeting of white supremacists, with one whining, “Haha any other races this applies to, or just the usual easy target?” One user even declared, “What is this? Has the Bee gone woke, I’m outta here.” All such responses had like counts in the hundreds to thousands.

Dillon himself addressed the backlash to the headline in a series of tweets, telling his followers of the post, “It wasn’t even about white people. It was a joke about white supremacists. And it was originally published back in 2017 without any backlash. Something changed, but it wasn’t us.” He later added, “When you’re personally offended by a joke about white supremacy you might want to rethink some things, including whether Christ really is your King.” 

However, the top reply to Dillon’s latter tweet reads, “Cool, non-Christians telling Christians what they should believe in and how they should worship lol the chutzpah."

It seems that, after years of the website posting overtly racist headlines about non-white groups, the veil on Babylon Bee’s base is finally being lifted, and Dillon doesn’t like what he sees. As it turns out, running a platform where racists can express their bigotry with the cover of “comedy” when you’re anything besides a white Christian nationalist is a lot like hosting a family reunion in Mississippi — you can't expect them to fuck everybody else without fucking you, too.