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The power of satire, with The Babylon Bee's Joel Berry
1.8k Plays1 year ago
Satire is one of the most important ingredients of a healthy public discourse. But it is under threat across the west. Comedy, once the most subversive of artforms, has caved to the woke mob. Misinformation laws threaten to curtail free speech even further. And perhaps some of us have lost the ability to laugh at the irreverent and the politically incorrect.
Joel Berry is not one of those people. Joel is the Managing Editor of the Babylon Bee, one of (if not the) most popular satirical websites on the planet. Millions of people read the Bee’s content every month.
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Transcript
The Threat to Comedy and Satire
00:00:14
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia. I'm Will Kingston. There is a very good reason why satire is so aggressively repressed by authoritarian regimes. It can be lethal. It's one thing to argue with someone but to take the piss out of them and to do it well. There is no greater tool to undermine the legitimacy of bad politicians or to shine a light on bad ideas.
00:00:39
Speaker
that makes satire one of the most important ingredients of a healthy public discourse. But make no mistake, it is under threat across the West. Comedy, once the most subversive of art forms, has caved to the woke mob. Misinformation laws threaten to curtail free speech even further. And perhaps, just perhaps, some of us have lost the ability to laugh at the irreverent, the incorrect, and the un-PC.
Introducing Joel Berry and The Babylon Bee
00:01:06
Speaker
My guest today, Joel Berry, is not one of those people. Joel is the managing editor of the Battle on Bee, one of, if not the most popular satirical websites on the planet. Millions of people read the bee's content every month. Joel, welcome to Australiana.
00:01:22
Speaker
Thanks for having me. That, that was a perfect intro. I don't know if I need to say anything more after that. I was inspired by the writings of the B and in fact, I've scoured the pages of the website for my favorite recent headlines. Let's use them as some starters for discussion. Let's do it. And I think this is, this is a good one to frame the conversation.
Challenges of Satirical Writing
00:01:41
Speaker
So in October, the B wrote strong response to rising hate crimes against the Jews. Democrats denounce Islamophobia.
00:01:53
Speaker
This is one of a now sub-genre of satirical headlines from the B that are retrospectively just turned into straight reporting by what happens in the world around us. My question is, is it harder to do satire in an age when it feels like more and more of the news is verging on parody? Yeah, it is.
00:02:16
Speaker
I quote this, I quote G.K. Chesterton all the time, so forgive me if you've heard this quote before, but he said over 100 years ago that satire has diminished in our current age because the world has become too absurd to be satirized.
00:02:30
Speaker
And I would argue that 100 years ago, the world was probably a little bit more sane than it is today. So our job has become even harder. I think it's harder in one sense that it can be difficult to top what you read in the news every day because it is so absurd.
00:02:48
Speaker
But there's a flip side to that coin where it is easy because you're always being given new material. I think we started this in 2016 and we were just a bunch of church guys. We were writing church jokes about bass players and the worship team and potlucks and things like that.
00:03:06
Speaker
And a few months in, our editor-in-chief, Kyle Mann, he tells this story about how a few months in he was like, I think I'm out of ideas. I can't think of any more headlines to write. The Babylon B might be done. And then Trump was elected, and suddenly we had all of this new material just being handed to us on a silver platter every single morning.
00:03:30
Speaker
So it is fun. It can be difficult to top the absurdity of the world, but at the same time, you're always being given new things to make fun of. And so I think for that reason, the bee will be around for a very long time. I hope so. Give us an insight into the creative process. How does an idea get to the front pages of the bee? Give us an insight to how the process works.
00:03:54
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm on Eastern Time here in the Midwest, so I kind of wake up with the news cycle. First thing in the morning, I'm looking at what people are talking about on social media. I'm looking at the way the news is covering it, from left-wing news sources to right-wing news sources, everything in between. And then I'm usually kind of, I'm sending out to our writers kind of a list of, here are some topics that I think we should hit today. Here are some angles that I think will work.
00:04:22
Speaker
and we have writers all over the country so me and Kyle we write a good share of the headlines we have a few assistant editors and then we have part-time writers who are just normal people they have day jobs and families we have people who are surgeons engineers blue-collar workers fast-food workers i mean like it runs the gamut
00:04:46
Speaker
and they'll just start pitching so once i kind of send out my instructions for i think this is what we need to hit on here are a few angles the pitch storm commences and i'm just waiting through hundreds and hundreds of pitches so that's that's the thing with you know when you're writing satire and comedy
00:05:02
Speaker
You have to be willing to be rejected a lot. You have to be willing to write a lot of bad jokes to finally get to the good joke. And for every one headline that we publish, there's probably 50 to 100 that are rejected. So it's a number scheme. You got to get the juices flowing and keep pitching until you come up with something that works. And what draws you specifically to satire and comedy as opposed to straight journalism?
00:05:29
Speaker
Oh, man. Well, there's a number of reasons for it. I think, for one, it's more fun. I love how satire can cut to the truth so quickly and effectively. And I don't have to write a 12-page think piece that has 100 sources to do that. To a certain extent, people know the truth. We have these moral consciences that God gave us.
00:05:55
Speaker
satire i think has a way of awakening that in people even in people where it may have been dormant for a long time so i i i think that it's it's it's a fun way of looking at the world it's a fun way of of telling the truth and i think especially in in today's age,
00:06:11
Speaker
There are so many things competing for our attention. There are so many distractions. Not many people are going to read a long book or a long article anymore. And sometimes a quick, pithy one-two punch of a Babylon B headline can get to the truth more effectively than all the rest of those things, kind of the way our culture is today.
00:06:32
Speaker
So I love it for those reasons.
Satire's Role in Coping with the World
00:06:34
Speaker
I think as someone who used to consume the news and feel very distraught over it and worried about the state of the world and where my country's going, it is really refreshing and healing to wake up every morning and look at the news and think, okay, what's the funny angle with all this stuff? What can I make fun of? It's
00:06:56
Speaker
We need to laugh in these. I think the West right now is in kind of a dark time. Our arts have kind of failed us. Our elites and our politicians have failed us. By all accounts, it doesn't seem like it's going anywhere good, at least in the short term. And so we need to laugh. And I think we need to keep the truth in front of us. And we need to keep, I think, the long-term hope that we have. You know, the Babylon B, we're Christians. We believe in Jesus, and we have this kind of long-term hope that our king will eventually
00:07:24
Speaker
Make all things new make all things right again and so that's part of the function of the bees is reminding ourselves of those very core human truths and encouraging people in that this is an interesting distinction between America and Perhaps other Western countries in that religion in America is declining like other Western countries But it's declining at a much slower rate than say Australia or the UK What are your reflections on how?
Religion's Influence in America
00:07:52
Speaker
The role of religion in the lives of many American people is perhaps less prevalent than it once was. And the impact that that may be having on the culture more broadly. Yeah, I think America is definitely going the way, the way of the rest of the Western world in the sense that American religion is declining. I think it is a little more ingrained and America's newer. So, so I think we're kind of, we're earlier on in that process.
00:08:19
Speaker
But I think it's a cycle. I think that there are periods throughout history of decline and decay and then rebuilding. I hope that revival is coming. I think we're starting to see it a little bit from the intellectual class, ironically.
00:08:36
Speaker
you know, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who you might be familiar with, her announcing that she had become a Christian, you know, for very kind of rational reasons. She's an intellectual, she's a, you know, former new atheist, and coming to Christianity for very rational reasons is interesting.
00:08:55
Speaker
And I'll be interested to see how that grows and develops over time as I think hopefully rational people see the utility and usefulness of religion and Christianity in particular as a stabilizing force, as a way of
00:09:11
Speaker
keeping a population moral and giving them the ability to self-govern. And I would hope that that would grow into true faith, a true personal relationship with God as people kind of take that first step in seeing the utility and then the faith grows from there. But in the short term, it doesn't look good though. In the short term, I think it'll probably get worse before it gets better.
00:09:33
Speaker
That's interesting. I've never heard someone say that before, that the morals and the cultural benefits of religion can almost be an entry point to then a deeper level of belief as someone I imagine learns about religion and understands it more deeply. I haven't heard it phrased that way before. I personally am an atheist, but I can understand both the value of religion in terms of fostering community
00:09:56
Speaker
in terms of giving people a moral framework. And I can see in our culture more generally that I think a lot of the cultural problems that the West is facing is at least indirectly, if not directly related to the decline of religion.
Wokeness as a Pseudo-Religion
00:10:12
Speaker
And some people would argue that the rise of work is a makeshift religion in and of itself to replace the monotheistic religions of days gone by for many people. Yeah, I think, you know, with the enlightenment and modernism
00:10:26
Speaker
We went temporarily insane in the 20th century where Darwinism became this system of ethics. We saw some of the logical ramifications of that with Nazi Germany and communism. I think wokeness almost was designed to
00:10:44
Speaker
Okay, how can we kind of avoid some of those pitfalls of modernism while still being able to reject God? And as we see, it doesn't really work and it has pitfalls of its own. I'll continue the religious theme with a headline from the B on November 17. Satan announces early retirement thanks to TikTok.
00:11:10
Speaker
This was hot on the heels of the viral TikTok trend of the moment in which many young people were responding to Osama bin Laden's now 20 year old letter to America by effectively saying, well, he had a point. Can we draw any inferences from this trend or is it just a couple of nutty kids on social media?
00:11:33
Speaker
No, I think the groundwork for this trend has been laid in our education system for decades now. I think the ideas of critical theory, this Marxist dynamic of oppressor and oppressed intersectionality, I think the thing that made this Osama bin Laden TikTok trend go so viral was that
00:11:55
Speaker
a lot of the things that he was saying hit on a lot of those ideas that you read about in Critical Theory. And people don't realize Critical Theory
00:12:06
Speaker
in our education system, in our culture, it's like the water we swim in now. It remains unsaid. People think in this way without even realizing it. It's become so ingrained. And so, yeah, I think that it went viral for that reason. I think that, I read it a couple days ago, I was just curious, I was like, okay, I've never read it before, so I'm gonna read the whole thing. I was surprised to read how much of the grievance that he has against the West
00:12:33
Speaker
is centered around Israel and the fact that the US supports Israel. And it seems to be a common theme with a lot of radical Islam is that they don't want the Jews to be alive anymore. It's really as simple as that. And they believe that the Holy Land belongs to them. And it's as simple as that. And so it's that age old conflict that will really never be solved, probably. Yeah, I was surprised by that.
00:13:01
Speaker
as well. The other thing which surprised me is 80% of that letter could have been written by a Marxist academic at Columbia today. It's actually quite prescient in terms of picking up on a lot of the tropes that a lot of academics now are playing on. At the same time, there is this selectivity on the part of some young people on the part of academics where they will take part of that narrative
00:13:30
Speaker
and support it, but then ignore very obviously things which should be abhorrent. So he still called the Sharia law in that letter, which I imagine a lefty undergrad at Columbia would be opposed to, you know. It's the handmaid's tale. I mean, he's calling for the handmaid's tale to happen. It's like the thing that they fear most. This is also the queers for Palestine thing. This is any number of recent examples where there are
00:14:00
Speaker
seemingly maybe intelligent people otherwise who are calling for ideologies, which are so obviously intended to harm parts of their personality. I struggled to get my head around the selectivity. How can someone be so blinded by one part of an ideology at the expense of another?
00:14:18
Speaker
That's a very good question. I think at its core, human beings are pretty irrational creatures. And when we get hooked on an idea or an ideology, I think some of this is just like lizard brain stuff taking over. I don't know. Wokeness, Marxist ideology, I think does give people a sense of morality and goodness and feeling good about themselves. Like you said, it is a replacement religion.
00:14:45
Speaker
And when you adopt a religion, there is a certain amount of rationality that you have to suspend. It's a matter of faith. Even in Christianity, there are paradoxes that you can't reconcile with your rational brain. And so it is. In that sense, it does operate like a religion where they believe in it so strongly.
00:15:05
Speaker
in this dynamic of oppressor versus oppressed, and the idea that resistance and liberation, anything done in service of that is justified. That just kind of overrides all reason. And that goes back to this idea that human beings are fundamentally religious creatures. We're going to worship something. It's just a matter of what you're going to worship.
00:15:27
Speaker
Obviously, you're an exception, but you know what I mean. I think human beings crave some kind of faith and belief in that way.
00:15:37
Speaker
I've thought about this a lot and I've come to the same conclusion. I think you've hit the nail on the head that the key here is the oppressor via pressed matrix is now the most important consideration in the eyes of certain people at the expense of anything else. So queers for Palestine, the common thread that runs through both groups is they are perceived to be oppressed groups.
00:15:59
Speaker
So they can bind together. And if there are some other minor differences, like for example, that queers in Palestine would likely be thrown off the top of buildings, we can overcome that because the oppressor of the oppressed matrix is so important. That is the glue that binds at the expense of everything else. For me, it is the singular theme that is most important running through all of these different work ideologies. And the only thing that I can really think of that explains the incoherence of it.
00:16:27
Speaker
You're exactly right. And the funny thing about that to me is like, what a hopeless in the dark worldview, because that oppressor versus oppression matrix that this idea that equalizing power between different groups is like the ultimate North star of morality. It like it never ends. It's just all we have forever and ever and ever is, is
00:16:50
Speaker
different classes and groups fighting for power over and over and over and over again. It's really no different than the blood for you to see in the Middle East and the Taliban and Hamas and everywhere else that go back thousands of years. It's just fighting for power. And it's so empty and hopeless. I think it's funny that it's like this new kind of advanced Western brand of what is essentially like the most ancient and caveman-like tendency in human beings going back however long we've been around.
00:17:19
Speaker
That word brand is really interesting because the brand of work, and I think this is changing a bit, but nonetheless, the brand of work is very good.
Wokeness and Comedy Post-Trump
00:17:30
Speaker
It's all about love and tolerance and kindness and empathy and compassion, you know, even down to the color schemes, you know, the rainbow color schemes, they all exude positivity. And so for someone who maybe doesn't look at this stuff day in, day out,
00:17:42
Speaker
pretty easy to get sucked in and say, well, I am a good person. I do believe in empathy and kindness. So therefore I believe in, in these ideologies. I think the interesting thing is when you look beneath the surface, both the ways in which they go about trying to achieve their aims as well as the end outcomes of some of these woke ideologies are incredibly harmful and incredibly damaging. But the word brand is right because I think the branding of it has been very, very successful.
00:18:09
Speaker
Yeah, it really has. And I think that's been part of what's fueled the Babylon Beast satire. It's been so fun to make fun of it. It is really fun to make fun of people who take themselves very seriously and think that they're very good and moral. I always say that the essence of comedy for me, I grew up with three stooges and slapstick. I love that stuff.
00:18:32
Speaker
The essence of comedy for me is like a proud, well-dressed man in a suit who thinks he's something special, like slipping on a banana peel and into a pie, you know? And that's kind of what we're doing at The Bee is I think we're, like you said earlier, kind of taking the piss out of some of these people that think that there's something special. They think they're good. They think they're moral. They think they're the most kind, decent, compassionate people. And it is really fun to kind of just point out how like, no,
00:18:58
Speaker
You're just like the rest of us. Interesting you say that. I think of Monty Python, for example, that was the essence of say Monty Python's comedy. It was basically saying in the 1960s and 1970s in the UK, a very class-based, order-based society, they were saying, we're going to say that you dress up in the suits and then you are part of the establishment. We're going to take the piss out of you. You are subject to ridicule. My question to you would be,
00:19:25
Speaker
That has almost inverted in modern comedy where so many comedians, so many standup comedians, so many people in the entertainment industry now side with those kind of mainstream liberal left woke worldviews. And if you are actually outside of that mainstream, you're not celebrated anymore. You are canceled. How has that changed happened in comedy?
00:19:49
Speaker
Yeah, well, I noticed the biggest change, I think, when Trump was elected, and that was, I think, the biggest boost to what we did at the Babylon Bee. When Trump was elected, a lot of comedians, a lot of mainstream comedians, a lot of late night hosts very quickly lost their sense of humor because they were so mortified by Trump, so enraged by him.
00:20:13
Speaker
They decided, okay, we need to put this comedy thing aside for a little bit and we need to use our platform to fight this guy. Instead of seeing comedy for what it was and what its virtues are, they looked at what they did as a platform. And again, taking themselves way too seriously. And so they stopped being funny.
00:20:34
Speaker
They stopped being funny and they started to get really afraid of the kind of the cancel mob. And so what we found at the bee was there was all of this low hanging fruit that the comedians just weren't touching. I mean, you tune into Saturday Night Live and.
00:20:49
Speaker
Three or four hilarious things would have happened that week, but they were sacred cows to the left. They couldn't be made fun of. And so here we go. Like the bee became kind of the only voice in town making fun of some of these things that everyone looks at and says, that's hilarious. And so that was a huge boost to us. I think in the last few years, I think I've been encouraged.
00:21:08
Speaker
Because some of that has started to turn around. I think we've seen some comedians pushing back against this narrative. We've seen encouraging things from Dave Chappelle, from Bill Maher, a little bit from Bill Burr, Louis C.K. You know, and a lot of them have been canceled for various reasons for this stuff, too. But that's what, you know, that's what comedy is. It's kind of the canary in the coal mine. You know, they're the ones kind of the immature kid in the corner saying the emperor has no clothes. And so
00:21:34
Speaker
But it'll never go away. I mean, they say that when the Soviet Union was rising, people still found ways to make fun of the regime in their own way. And so, yeah, it'll always be here.
00:21:49
Speaker
I think as well about say the compilations of jokes that Reagan would make about the Soviet Union, you know, and which I, I still occasionally watch today and you think there's nothing more powerful than that sort of humor in, in calling out that sort of absurdity and that sort of evil. And unfortunately it's not a skill that certainly many politicians have today. I might actually use that as a, as a segue into the current crop of Republican politicians.
Trump's Influence on Politics
00:22:16
Speaker
So on November 8th, the B said.
00:22:19
Speaker
The Republican Party checks itself into rehab for addiction to losing. How would you assess the current state of the Republican Party?
00:22:28
Speaker
Oh man. Um, I think that Trump changed a lot of things. I think a lot of things for the better, you know, the left has kind of become a bit of an elitist party and conservatives have become more of a populist party. Someone who represents the, you know, the blue collar worker and the everyday average person. I think those things are good. I think that, you know, the thing that holds back Republicans,
00:22:55
Speaker
is the fact that a lot of us are Christians and we have this innate sense of, you know, like we have to be nice and polite and courteous and we have to follow the rules, whereas like the left isn't bound by any of those things. The ideology that binds the left is like this by any means necessary. Their cause is so just they will subvert and lie and do whatever it takes to get their
00:23:16
Speaker
Get what they want done, but we're fighting. We're not just fighting for our ideas and for what we want We're also fighting to preserve the system this American experiment in freedom and the system can be it can trip us up sometimes and and it can
00:23:33
Speaker
A lot of Republicans are feckless when it comes to navigating the system with shrewdness. And that's why I think you have a lot of people in the right that are, you know, you kind of have this emergent new right that wants, you know, theocracy and monarchy. You see them on Twitter and, you know, they're kind of fighting against the old right that still wants this, you know, classical liberal idea to persist. And so, yeah, I think
00:23:57
Speaker
The other thing that has been difficult in the last year is that the reversal of Roe versus Wade has suddenly brought abortion back at the forefront of the political conversation.
00:24:10
Speaker
Public opinion is still very much on the side of allowing at least some abortion rights, maybe with limits, but most Americans are to some extent pro-choice, maybe 25 to 30% of Americans are actually fully against abortion.
00:24:28
Speaker
And so I think a lot of Republicans are scared to have those conversations. They're worried that it's a losing battle. And so there's a lot that's up in the air right now as to where we're going to go next with it. But I'm of the opinion that if we stand for life, we have to stand for life and be unapologetic about it. And I think that that's more attractive than sneaking around and being too faced about it.
00:24:53
Speaker
Let's wade into this murky water. Most of the listeners to this podcast would be either Australian or British. In both of those countries, abortion is pretty much a settled issue. There isn't political debate about abortion.
The Abortion Debate in the U.S.
00:25:09
Speaker
There is bipartisan consensus on abortion.
00:25:11
Speaker
For a lot of continental Europe, that is also the case, I believe. America feels like it is an outlier and that it is and continues to be a very live political issue. Why is that the case?
00:25:25
Speaker
I think part of it is kind of what you alluded to earlier that Christianity still is very much a part of American culture, more so than other Western nations. I think that when you get down to it, you have to admit that the pro-life side does require a certain amount of religious belief.
00:25:44
Speaker
If we're just animals, atoms, and stardust, then I don't see why abortion should be illegal. When it all comes down to it, you kind of come to this point where you have people who believe we are made in God's image and have inherent dignity from conception and people who don't believe that. And so it really is at its core, it's a religious struggle. I think there's scientific points to be made on either side, but it's at its core a religious struggle. And I think the way it goes will follow the way religion and Christianity goes in the country.
00:26:14
Speaker
I think that's really well articulated. I think as well, it probably does speak to the cultural differences across America. Before we went on air, we were talking about the differences across the different states of America in worldviews, which I don't think you see the same variations across, say, Australia or the UK as two other Western countries. It does make me think whether Roe v. Wade actually counterintuitively
00:26:42
Speaker
kept the ferocity in this debate because instead of recognizing that a New Yorker's view on this issue is going to be very different from someone in Kentucky, it basically said that everyone needs to think the same way about this. I wonder whether Roe v. Wade actually maintained the rage in this debate in a way where making it a state issue all along would have maybe dulled the flames a bit.
00:27:03
Speaker
I fully agree with you. Even before Roe v. Wade, I mean, there were certain different states had different laws and allowances for abortion. And so I think the fight and the passion will probably calm down a little bit over this issue. I think you'll still have people on either side who are very passionate about it, but it might fade into the background a little more than it has.
00:27:26
Speaker
our ability to argue about this was taken away from us. And I think that that enraged a lot of people for good reason. And so I think what we'll see going forward with the pro-life fight, it'll be a lot quieter. It'll be in local communities among friends and family and neighbors having conversations about the stuff rather than marches in Washington. And I think that's a positive development. I also want to pick up on a little
00:27:51
Speaker
nugget from your previous answer talking about the nature of the Republican Party and its supporters, and a lot of the time its supporters are religiously affiliated, they are moral, good people. A lot of evangelicals are, well, the Republican Party is most closely aligned with the evangelical movement. Some external observers would struggle to understand how so many evangelicals and
00:28:16
Speaker
religious people have put their support around Donald Trump. I don't think he is the monster that a lot of the mainstream media make him out to be. At the same time, I think you can make a pretty good argument.
Evangelicals' Support for Trump
00:28:26
Speaker
He's not a particularly moral person. Explain how that alliance has merged on the right in America.
00:28:34
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I think every evangelical in America has at some level done some sort of soul searching over this, especially those who ended up voting for Trump. I ended up voting for Trump in the second time, but the first time I was planning on sitting out the election and not voting at all. I found Donald Trump personally kind of objectionable to me for some of those reasons that you mentioned.
00:28:59
Speaker
I eventually kind of came to the conclusion. This was after one of our Supreme Court justices died. And I realized that the next president was going to be naming several Supreme Court justices that could be a threat to our constitutional rights of free speech, the first amendment, the second amendment.
00:29:16
Speaker
And again, this isn't the conclusion that everybody came to, but I looked at it as a tragic choice. Okay, my ideal candidate isn't an option for me. I have to pick the best choice. And it's like I'm hiring a mercenary here. I'm not hiring a moral guy who espouses all my values that I personally believe.
00:29:36
Speaker
I'm hiring a general patent to go crush the enemy. And so it is tough though, because I think in the Clinton years, evangelicals spent a lot of time talking about how important it was to have moral leaders, with Bill Clinton being as immoral as he was.
00:29:54
Speaker
We kind of changed our minds when Donald Trump came along and we were faced with this choice. So, you know, I don't judge anyone who voted differently or thinks differently than me, but I felt that the situation had become dire enough to where, you know, to love my neighbor as a Christian, to preserve freedom for my children, that I had to vote for someone that, you know, maybe I didn't like and prefer maybe would have preferred someone different.
00:30:21
Speaker
That said, Donald Trump was hilarious. And we at The Bee, we loved to make fun of him in this good natured way. Because everyone else that was making fun of him was doing so from a place of like hate, anger, and rage, and they were seething. And Trump was such a comical character by himself. It was just so fun to poke fun at him in a good natured way. And people really latched onto that, that we could support Trump while at the same time acknowledging kind of what a crazy
00:30:49
Speaker
person he is and having fun with that a little bit. Again, we can't take ourselves too seriously in any of this stuff. And this is the problem with just these black and white conceptions of either Trump is the savior or Trump is a monster miss the shades of gray here. And that a lot of people who just want to write Trump off ignore the fact that he is darkly, very, very funny. And he's an incredibly insane figure and he knows it. And that captivates a lot of people. And I think, you know, to, to your analysis.
00:31:19
Speaker
It's a two-party system, right? We've got RFK emerging, but really it's a two-party system. You've got to make a choice. And that doesn't necessarily mean you have to be fully on someone's team to say that I've got two options. I need to pick what I think is the best option. And that is a cost-benefit analysis. It's not like supporting a football team and saying, I've got to love everything they do. It surprises me actually how often that cost-benefit
00:31:47
Speaker
nature of a vote is overlooked today.
00:31:52
Speaker
Yeah, it's true. I think you have to kind of lay aside the tribal kind of lizard brain tendencies of human beings when you're in that voting booth. You have to think rationally because 90% of the time you're voting between two extremely narcissistic, imperfect people who are going to probably do some good things and probably do a lot of bad things. You have to make that tragic choice between who's going to do the fewer amount of bad things.
00:32:22
Speaker
Well, one leader who the B has said is already responsible for mass death is Javier Millay. So only yesterday the B wrote, one billion Argentinians already dead after libertarian elected. This I think speaks to the response of the mainstream media to his election in Argentina. He's been labeled as far right, which today is used interchangeably with fascist or Nazi by a lot of people. I saw a CNN article.
00:32:52
Speaker
He's apparently going to put the peso at risk despite the fact the peso has been taken for about 10 years. It was a very funny graph where they had that quote from CNN and then they had the 10 year trend line of the peso with the peso just literally going into the bottom of the graph.
Media Narratives and Optimism for the Future
00:33:09
Speaker
Why has the media taken this position against this guy in Argentina?
00:33:14
Speaker
I mean, the media is the media and that's part of what's fun at the B is they're also very predictable and we could have predicted they were gonna respond like this. I mean, I don't know a whole lot about Argentinian politics or this particular new guy. He does seem very Trumpian. I do love how gleeful he is about like, we're just gonna, we're gonna.
00:33:34
Speaker
just completely clean out government, get rid of all these departments. It's just beautiful to see. We were trying to come up with some jokes yesterday like, okay, how are the socialists responding in Argentina right now? Have they placed an order for a bunch of Dominion voting machines or maybe a new COVID strain for the next election? I don't know.
00:33:52
Speaker
But I don't know. I mean, I don't want to be pessimistic. But I mean, we've seen, I think, in the wake of Trump, we saw some other kind of copycats arise in various places around the world. Not copycats, but similar figures to him. I think we were very optimistic about this new prime minister of Italy, who the media freaked out about and said was a far-right Nazi and now seems to be maybe more moderate. A lot of these,
00:34:19
Speaker
And again, this is going to sound very glass half empty and pessimistic, so I apologize. This is just my honest opinion. Trump, this guy in Argentina, this prime minister in Italy, to me, they don't strike me as like the beginnings of like a turnaround or a revolution. They strike me as like the last gasp of like a dying civilization. Like, you know, the West is falling off a cliff and we're like reaching for like a weed or a root that maybe we can hold on to before we fall the rest of the way. I hope that's not true.
00:34:47
Speaker
But, you know, because the election of these people, it is a testament to the fact that there are still freedom loving people out there who are rational and are thinking rightly about this stuff. So that that's reason for hope. I guess I'll wait and see whether this this turns out well for everybody or not. Well, a two part question in response to that pessimism, is the American Republic in terminal decline? And if so, what comes after that decline?
00:35:16
Speaker
I think it's definitely in decline. I don't necessarily think it's terminal decline. I think that we have to really be serious about thinking about what
00:35:29
Speaker
what the resurgence or the rejuvenation or the revival of the American Republic might look like because it's not going to look the way it used to. I think we have to kind of let go of this idea that we're going to bring back the 50s or go back to this idyllic version of America that we have in our heads. I think we have to figure out how to reinvent it.
00:35:51
Speaker
and contextualize the ideas of the West for a new generation with new problems that they didn't have 50 and 100 years ago.
00:36:01
Speaker
And I think it can be done. I'm encouraged by kind of this resurgence of intellectual Christianity and people seeing the utility of it. I think that that's reason for hope. And it's very possible we could see a groundswell revival from the grassroots too, where people from family to family, individual to individual, wake up to the ideals of liberty. It can happen. I think zooming out, if you look at history over a 5,000
00:36:26
Speaker
from 5,000 feet, it's always been cyclical, and there's always been decay, and there's always been renewal. So the decay has to happen before the renewal, and hopefully the decay won't last too long. And maybe this is just a temporary blip. But I remain optimistic that I think we worry too much, I think, about the globe and the nation and the culture.
00:36:49
Speaker
If you have a family, with your wife and your kids, you kind of have your own little kingdom to worry about. And if you're doing right by them and you're raising your kids to the best of your ability and teaching them the right things so that they can hopefully carry the ideals of liberty to the next generations, then you're doing your job. That's all that we can do when it all comes down to it.
00:37:13
Speaker
till our own little slice of land that God has given us to the best of our ability. And if enough people do that, things can turn around, things can change. I think one of the reasons that people have a problem with a lot of gender ideologies, they see it at least indirectly as an attack on the traditional notions of the family.
Satirical Commentary on Modern Ideologies
00:37:34
Speaker
There was an article recently in the B, Eight Perks to Becoming Trans, which my two favourites were you can
00:37:41
Speaker
choose to identify as an orca at SeaWorld and you can move to the front of the Starbucks line without question. This is promoting the Bee's book, The Babylon Bee's Guide to Gender, which is out now. For the casual observer who sees some of this, sees the rainbow flags in the office or hears about this whole trans thing but doesn't really know what's going on, what should people know about gender in 2023?
00:38:10
Speaker
Oh man, gosh, to the casual observer. I think the casual observer is blindsided by this and a lot of people think, where on earth did this come from? This happened overnight. I mean, all of these assumptions, these things that we thought were obvious, obvious truths of human existence are suddenly being questioned and deconstructed.
00:38:30
Speaker
And I guess to the average person, my answer would be you don't have to know gender ideology in and out and understand it at an academic level. It doesn't deserve your respect to that level. Feel free to laugh at it and ridicule it because it is... I think of the midwit meme, the bell curve where you have kind of the
00:38:57
Speaker
the simple guy on the left and the Jedi guy on the right. Eventually, they come to the agreement at the end after, even though the Jedi is really smart and done all this research, you eventually come to the conclusion that this stuff is really silly and stupid. The core of civilization from the very beginning has been one man, one woman in marriage and
00:39:21
Speaker
them having children. That's the foundational building block of a healthy civilization. Have confidence in that no matter who's questioning it or bringing in new arguments. Most of them are silly. And that was the point of the book. The book that we wrote was really just kind of taking gender ideology to its logical conclusions and showing people how silly it is. So just have fun with it. Make fun of it until it dies and collapses in on itself because it eventually will. It can't stand on its own two feet.
00:39:51
Speaker
And it's no coincidence to me that this is born out of academia, this thinking. I can't remember the person who made the quote, might've been Michael Shermer, might've been Peter Bogosian. I can't quite remember, but they basically said that intelligent people are unusually good.
00:40:07
Speaker
at developing dangerous or very, very dumb ideas because they can take a lot ludicrous premise and then use analysis and, and, and argumentation to build, build it up. So it's, it's, and I think that is very much the case in that the average person with the bullshit detector that they have from working a nine to five proper job and, and kind of being in say middle America or the outer suburbs of, of New South Wales and Australia.
Academia's Ideological Shift
00:40:35
Speaker
You can see into seconds that this stuff is nonsense, but if you are in a university day in, day out and you don't see the real world and you spend your time pontificating about this stuff, you can actually get to a point where you can say a man is a woman and come up with all these logical fallacies and then put them in place and say, all this is, this is true. Could only have come out of academia.
00:40:57
Speaker
Yeah, it's I mean, it's it's just, I mean, we call it common sense. And I love telling the story. I remember as a freshman at university, taking sociology 101. And our sociology professor used to make us repeat this mantra again and again in class.
00:41:15
Speaker
all through the semester. This is like the theme of the class. And the mantra was this, common sense is usually wrong. Common sense is usually wrong. Common sense is usually, she used to make us repeat that again, like we were chanting it. And she really wanted us to kind of
00:41:31
Speaker
To be deep programmed from trusting our eyes and ears and consciences and just our common sense as she Put a bunch of crazy ideas up on the board, you know She wanted to she didn't want us like you said that she didn't want the bullshit detectors to to call her out And so kind of making people question their common sense is where where it begins well October 27 the bay rights a must leader appointed senior fellow at Harvard University and
00:41:59
Speaker
Again, this is one of those ones where it's satire, but jeez, it's...
00:42:04
Speaker
It's not too, too far away from potential reality. I think a lot of people that maybe went to university 20 or more years ago, potentially can't comprehend this ideological shift and the new ideological realities on campus, not just as part of the culture, but in terms of how students are being taught, particularly with respect to say American universities. How bad is it? Oh man. I mean, I went to college in like 2006, 2007. And so.
00:42:35
Speaker
I mean, it was bad then. I mean, that was almost 20 years ago. So I think it was just beginning. It's only gotten worse since. The universities, as far as I'm concerned, they're gone. I mean, they are completely bankrupt.
00:42:51
Speaker
I don't think they're gonna be recaptured or fixed. I think that at some point there's gonna have to be some kind of a parallel system that is built up to counteract it, but it's bad. I mean, it's really bad. I mean, I hear enough from young kids who are in school today, and it's not just the secular universities. I mean, biblical Christian seminaries have swallowed critical theory and Marxist ideology, and they've baked it into their teaching of theology in the Bible. I mean, it really is, it's the water we swim in now.
00:43:21
Speaker
Yeah, and I think there is a movement underway in the US to try and build that separate track. So Peter Begosia is one of several people who is behind University of Austin, I think is, which is expressly being built on the principles of free thought and pushing against, say, DEI, Dogma and all that sort of thing. There is a acknowledgement that potentially
00:43:46
Speaker
the current universities are too far gone. There is no way of reforming them and we need to build a new, that's certainly the Peter Begosian view of the world. I also just, like when I think, so I went to Sydney University a bit after you, so I would have been in university early 2010s. And I think the one big difference is there were still nutters on campus then, still loonies with the purple hair talking about the equivalent of whatever queers for Palestine was at the time.
00:44:13
Speaker
But I think there was a greater acceptance of the importance of debate and having arguments and discussions with those types of people. And I even think those types of people enjoyed the debate with say, between the right and the left on campus. Whereas now the instinct on the part of groups like that is not to debate the evil capitalists, it is to shut them down. It is to call them fascists and have them, them cancel. That to me, I think is perhaps the biggest change in a relatively short historical period.
00:44:42
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, honestly, that's kind of an encouraging sign to me because that tells me that they're losing. They've lost the argument and they're resorting to Gestapo tactics to protect their ideology. So I think that's an encouraging sign to me and I hope the trend continues because like I said, it's going to collapse in on itself one way or another and we're going to have to be there ready
00:45:05
Speaker
to you know with either the alternative or start building the new whatever the next thing is gonna be and that's what I that's another thing that gives me hope I mean that's that's what our side does we build we invent we innovate because we love humanity we love the truth and so those people will always be here with us and you know as things decay as things pass away there's always gonna be something new to take its place.
00:45:28
Speaker
We've talked about ideological capture of the media. We've talked about ideological capture in the eight educational institutions. We haven't talked about corporates. So the B says target releases trans Muslim, Chinese quadruple amputee Santa is the age of what capitalism over. Oh boy. That's tough. I mean, so much of this is artificial, you know, like it's not like the rank and file of the people who work at these corporations.
00:45:58
Speaker
believe this stuff. It has all been enforced from the top down by powerful interests with a lot of money. You have BlackRock and their ESG scores and the way they've kind of artificially forced this ideology on corporations. You have other
00:46:14
Speaker
kind of, you know, shakedown organizations like the Human Rights Campaign that they give every corporation a score of, you know, how many trans people have you put on your Bud Light cans, you know, things like that. And so, so much of it is artificial. It is encouraging to see some pushback. You know, we saw Governor DeSantis in Florida, he pulled out of all the state pensions out of BlackRock.
00:46:36
Speaker
I think as more and more people wise up to this, you're going to see more of that. I'm encouraged that BlackRock dropped the ESG thing. I'm sure they're just going to repackage it and rebrand it and try to sneak it back in a different form. But ESG became so toxic as a brand that they had to get rid of it.
00:46:52
Speaker
That's encouraging. I think that the truth is like a beach ball that floats on the water and you can try to suppress and repress that beach ball and push it under the water as hard as you can, but eventually it's going to come popping back up. That's a lovely quote to end on. I actually had one more question, but I would like
00:47:09
Speaker
listeners to finish on that quote because I think it's a beautiful sentiment. Joel, this has been such a lovely conversation. I would of course recommend to everyone listening that they check out the Babylon Bay. I'm sure that everyone already does. I would also recommend if anyone hasn't yet read your book, Postmodern Pilgrim's Progress. I strongly urge them to go out and buy it. I loved it when I read it.
00:47:29
Speaker
an allegorical tale for our times with all the satire that you'd expect from the bee, as well as some uncommon wisdom to boot. Joel, love the stuff you do. And as I said at the outset of this conversation, it isn't just entertainment. It is incredibly important in how we hold both bad ideas and bad leaders to account. So please keep it up and thank you for coming on Australiana. Thank you, Will. Thanks for having me. I really, really enjoyed the conversation.
00:47:56
Speaker
Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Australiana. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show, head to spectator.com.au forward slash join. Sign up for a digital subscription today and you'll get your first month absolutely free.