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Satire morphs into reality as nearly 100 Babylon Bee ‘stories’ have prophetically come true

March 27, 2023 | | Print Article

The Babylon Bee’s satire is loved by many, many readers and nearly 100 of their headlines have at least partially come true, proving that life is stranger than fiction under the Biden presidency and, at times, hilarious as well.

The CEO of America’s largest right-leaning satire website, Seth Dillon, told Fox News in an interview, “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.”

The Babylon Bee is keeping track of their humorous prophecies morphing into reality after publication. They include an ever-expanding range of topics with jabs and jokes at the expense of Democrats and Republicans alike.

“So we have a spreadsheet of nearly 100 jokes now that we’ve tracked,” he claimed. “They were fulfilled like prophecies instead of punch lines.”

https://twitter.com/MenchilloW/status/1640102740528431104

In June 2021, The Babylon Bee published, “To Improve Public Perception, Kamala Harris Taking Likability Lessons From Hillary Clinton.” A month later, a former Clinton advisor hosted a dinner with prominent Democratic women, including Clinton’s former spokeswoman on how to defend Vice President Kamala Harris from unfavorable press, according to Axios.

“Who would take likability lessons from Hillary Clinton?” Dillon incredulously 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,” he noted.

Former President Trump reportedly said during an interview in 2021 that “nobody has done more for Christianity or for evangelicals or for religion itself than I have.”

That happened after the Bee wrote in 2019 a piece titled, “Trump: ‘I Have Done More For Christianity Than Jesus.” It was fact-checked as false.

“And then two years later, he actually said it,” Dillon commented. “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.”

Another example given by Dillon occurred in September 2022 concerning the economy. The Bee’s headline read, “9 Reasons Not To Worry About The Tanking Economy.” Two days later, the Washington Post ran with the headline, “7 ways a recession could be good for you financially.”

The satire site CEO remarked that it’s hard sometimes for his writers to come up with headlines because current events more closely resemble jokes these days.

“There are all the time stories that come across the screen that are just incredibly outrageous,” he pointed out. “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,” Dillon continued. “So, yes, there are plenty of times where we pull up a headline, and we’re just baffled by it.”

In another instance on Feb. 3, 2022, the satire king ran the headline, “Biden Says He’ll Shoot Down Chinese Spy Balloon As Soon As He’s Done Letting It Spy.” Everyone knows how that incident turned out. One day later, Biden told the American people that the balloon was shot down over the Atlantic Ocean after it finished crossing the United States. The president insisted he waited so debris wouldn’t fall on civilians.

“We did show a joke during the pandemic about how pants sales were plummeting because everyone was working from home,” Dillon noted, 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 added.

And there are so many others. Their newest one is an instant classic. Visions of war with the Chinese.

Dillon had big plans for the Bee when he bought it in 2018 while it was still a small blog. He first tripped over the site two years before 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,” he told Fox News. “They were inside jokes that were funny and witty, and it wasn’t cheesy comedy.”

The Bee is now getting 25 million page views a month according to Dillon. It has tens of thousands of paid subscribers as well as over a million YouTube subscribers.

The CEO recounted how fans of the site often shared non-satirical headlines on Twitter using the hashtag “#NotTheBee.” That gave birth to the idea to launch a new website by that name in 2020 that actually covers the news. It’s hard to tell which site is satire and which isn’t these days given the current state of things.

“You know, there needed to be a site dedicated to just covering these specific insane stories that should be satire but somehow aren’t,” Dillon concluded.

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