It's been just over a year since Elon Musk bought Twitter, changed his bio to "Chief Twit," and sent me a DM that said, "Do you want the Babylon Bee restored? There will be no censorship of humor." We've been trying to think of a joke worth $44 billion ever since. But as resourceful and committed to free speech as he is, Musk is still just one man. And Twitter (now X) is just one platform. Censorship remains the rule on Big Tech; X is a welcome-but-rare exception.
Just a couple months ago I was notified that the David Horowitz Freedom Center — a conservative non-profit — was permanently suspended by Vimeo for posting a talk I'd given about censorship. Just think about the irony of that for a second. As if they wanted to make my point for me more emphatically than I ever could, they censored my talk about censorship.
Why? "Hate speech," they said. I was giving a talk about how the Bee had been censored unjustly for hate speech, and they censored it for hate speech. We've reached a point where you can't even talk about how they're censoring you with them censoring you. I think Dave Chappelle was right when he said, "It shouldn't be this dangerous to talk."
So what is it exactly that the lovers of censorship want from us? I think the answer is clear. They want acquiescence. They want submission. They want unquestioning conformity. They want us to give up and stop fighting. Stop telling jokes. Stop telling the truth. They want to raise the cost of speaking freely so high that we'd rather just keep our mouths shut to avoid all the hassle and penalties.
That would be the easy thing, wouldn't it? Adjust our behavior. Fall in line. Do our best to play by the rules of wokeness that try to reshape reality itself. It'd certainly be easier than fighting back and risking everything. We'd have no more headaches. No more suspensions. No more disruptions to our revenue streams. And all it would cost us is our integrity. All we have to trade for a little peace of mind and a platform is the truth itself and our right to speak it. All we have to do is trade freedom — a thing so profoundly valuable that men have laid down their lives to secure it — for captivity and capitulation. Are you willing to make that trade, just to make things easier?
We were faced with this choice when Twitter suspended us last year for a joke we made about Rachel Levine, a transgender health admiral in the Biden administration. For those who don't remember the details, USA Today had named Rachel Levine their pick for "Woman of the Year." Apparently they ran out of real women to choose from. When we looked at that headline, it felt like a parody already. How were we supposed to satirize that? A man in a dress picked for woman of the year sounds like something straight out of a South Park episode.
But this is the burden of being in comedy today. You have to somehow manage to come up with jokes that are funnier than whatever Democrats are doing in real life. It's a tough job. So we started pitching ideas back and forth. One idea we had was to mock USA Today's insane choice for woman of the year by just accurately referring to Rachel Levine as a man. The headline we landed on was this: "The Babylon Bee's ‘Man of the Year' is Rachel Levine." Our chief editor, Kyle, joked that this one was going to get us kicked off Twitter. One of our writers replied, "Yeah probably, lol."
They count on this, by the way. They know that if they can make you afraid of being deplatformed, you'll do their job for them and censor yourself. For every case of hard censorship, where they actually take down user content, there are a thousand cases of soft censorship, where users bite their own tongue, knowing they'll be penalized if they speak freely.
Make them censor you. Never do the tyrant's work for him.
We took a chance that day and posted the Rachel Levine joke, knowing it might get us in some trouble. It wasn't long before some trans activists got a hold of it and started mass reporting the tweet. Twitter reviewed it, determined we'd violated the hateful conduct policy which prohibits misgendering, and sent us a notice to say that our account had been locked. As these platforms often do, they gave us a choice. Delete the tweet and you can have your account back. Refuse, and your account will remain locked indefinitely.
Now they could have deleted the tweet themselves. That would have been censorship, sure, but I'd much prefer that to what actually happened. Instead of deleting it themselves, they told us we had to delete it. And not only that, we had to check a box acknowledging that we'd engaged in hateful conduct. That's not just censorship. It's subjugation.
We refused. Within minutes, I responded publicly. "We're not deleting anything," I tweeted. "If the cost of speaking the truth is the loss of our Twitter account, then so be it."
We knew this meant losing access to our millions of followers. We knew it meant being sidelined from the conversation. But we also knew we'd be giving up something even more important if we caved.
Almost immediately people started mocking us and taunting us, saying it was only a matter of time before we deleted the tweet. They couldn't wait to see us betray our own principles just to get back the clicks and engagement we'd given up. I actually found their wishing we'd show weakness motivational. It made me want to double down. I mean, what could be more fun than disappointing a bunch of leftists?
A couple of days later we got a call from Elon Musk. He wanted to know if we'd actually been suspended. We explained that we were locked out and had to delete a tweet to get our account back. He asked us why that was a problem for us, so we gave our reasons. And he respected them. Then he paused for a moment and said, "Maybe I just need to buy Twitter."
We thought he was kidding. He apparently wasn't. But Musk understands the dangers of censorship. He knows that the freedom to argue and tell jokes is necessary not just for the entertainment value, but because bad ideas need to be challenged. They need to be refuted and they need to be ridiculed or they'll spread like the mind viruses they are and ruin everything.
Chief among the mind viruses is wokeness. Musk has called it one of the greatest threats to civilization, and cited its spread as one of the primary reasons he felt compelled to buy Twitter. I asked him why he thinks wokeness is such a threat, and this was his reply: "Wokeness, at its heart, is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful. It gives mean people an excuse to be cruel while armored in false virtue."
That's beautifully put. But more importantly, it's true. And we're seeing this play out with the left's attacks on comedy. Mean people - I like to call them crybullies - want to take away our freedom to tell jokes, and they're doing it in the name of protecting others from harm. But they aren't actually protecting anyone. All they're doing is shielding their bad ideas from criticism and mockery. Just like Musk said, wokeness is oppressive cruelty designed to crush dissent, all under the guise of false virtue. They'll tell you that we're using the cover of satire to push hatred, but that's just projection. In reality, they're using the cover of concern for the so-called marginalized to be bullies and tyrants who trample all over our freedom.
We saw this play out with the recent advertiser boycott of X. Big brands like Disney, Apple, and IBM withdrew their ad spend in an effort to twist Musk's arm and get him to do their bidding. And I'm sure most of you have seen the video where Musk responded. Using language I won't repeat, he told them not to advertise. He told them he didn't want their money if it came with strings attached - strings that infringed on the freedom of both himself and the millions of users he'd just liberated.
I don't think people realize how profound it is to see somebody stand up and say, "I don't care. You can try to bully me into silence and force me to do what you want by holding money over my head. I'm going to stand for freedom no matter what." No one has ever stood up to Disney like that and said "no thanks" to their mountain of money. It was insane. It was inspirational. And there's an important lesson in it. Musk has shown us the key to winning this fight — we have to stop caring what freedom might cost us.
