Conservative satire website The Babylon Bee has published nearly 100 joke headlines that have turned out to be prophetic, according to its CEO Seth Dillon.
Dillon told Fox News that the problem “isn’t that our satire is too close to reality.”
“It’s that reality is too close to satire, so our jokes keep coming true,” he said.
The Babylon Bee has been keeping tabs on its satirical headlines, which have turned into reality, including pictures and jokes about Democrats.
“So we have a spreadsheet of nearly 100 jokes now that we’ve tracked,” he said. “They were fulfilled like prophecies instead of punch lines.”
In 2021, The Bee published one article titled, “To Improve Public Perception, Kamala Harris Taking Likability Lessons From Hillary Clinton.'”
However, a month later, it was reported by Axios that a former Clinton advisor hosted a dinner to discuss how to defend Vice President Kamala Harris from bad media perception.
“Who would take likability lessons from Hillary Clinton?” Dillon asked. “But then a month later, there’s a real story that [Harris’] staff reached out to Hillary’s staff to make her more likable.”
“We even did one about how Trump had claimed to have done more for Christianity than Jesus himself, and that one went crazy viral,” Dillon said.
President Trump remarked during an interview in 2021 that “nobody has done more for Christianity or for evangelicals or for religion itself than I have.”
According to Dillon, a Bee article from 2017 titled “Trump: ‘I Have Done More For Christianity Than Jesus,'” was fact-checked and rated false.
“And then two years later, he actually said it,” Dillon told Fox News. “He said he’s done more for Christianity than anyone else in history. In fact, he’s done more for religion than anyone else in history.”
The Bee also joked about the economy in a headline titled, “9 Reasons Not To Worry About The Tanking Economy.”
Two days later, a headline published “7 ways a recession could be good for you financially.”
Dillon admitted that it is becoming harder for his writers to develop satire because real headlines are eerily similar.
“There are all the time stories that come across the screen that are just incredibly outrageous,” he said. “You know you wouldn’t believe that they’re true, and we have to do a double take and see, is this parody, is this a real story?”
“We’re living in really crazy, insane times,” he added. “So, yes, there are plenty of times where we pull up a headline, and we’re just baffled by it.”
Earlier this year, the Bee posted the headline “Biden Says He’ll Shoot Down Chinese Spy Balloon As Soon As He’s Done Letting It Spy.”
A day later, Biden announced that the spy balloon was shot down over the Atlantic Ocean after it had already crossed the United States.
“We did show a joke during the pandemic about how pants sales were plummeting because everyone was working from home,” Dillon said, citing a March 2020 example. “And it was this picture of a guy sitting there in his pink boxers, but he’s got a nice dress shirt on, like at his desk.”
“The very next day, there was a story about how Walmart was seeing increased sales of tops, but not bottoms,” he continued.
Dillon bought the Bee when it was just a small blog in 2018.
The CEO first came across the blog when a friend shared the headline “Holy Spirit Unable To Move Through Congregation As Fog Machine Breaks.”
“It was a funny inside joke that you get if you know the church world, which I did because my dad is a pastor,” Dillon said. “They were inside jokes that were funny and witty, and it wasn’t cheesy comedy.”
The Bee now boasts a whopping 25 million page views a month, tens of thousands of paid subscribers, and over a million YouTube subscribers.
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