728 Days to Flatten the Curve! A Dinner with the Babylon Bee!

All right, I would like to welcome you all to our event tonight.

And I've been in contact with Kyle Mann of the Babylon Bee. He'll be logging in shortly.

But this event is a charity event. We're raising money for the

Women's Pregnancy Center here in town, as well as Lutherans for Life. And so we have

Pastor Salomink online with us today to give us a presentation, but he'll do that shortly.

But what we'd like to do to start off with and you'll know, one of the things that we're going to do is we're going to put up on the screen at different intervals, a

QR code that you can scan with your phone, and that you could then make a tax deductible donation.

That what we're going to do is the all of the proceeds, Roseboro doesn't get a cut. Cotton's Vinegar doesn't get a cut.

All of the proceeds are going to go for supporting our charitable events, our recipients tonight, the

Women's Pregnancy Center, as well as Lutherans for Life. And so that being the case, what

I'm going to do here real quick is I am going to share a video that we created for the

Women's Pregnancy Center. And we're premiering it tonight. This is the first time it's been seen in public.

And so do I have the right audio settings,

Josh? We're at seven. Kyle begins at seven.

What setting do I need the audio on for the video? All right, well, we'll try it this way.

Let's see if this works. Here we go. Well, the

Women's Pregnancy Center has been serving women in our community since 1987. So we have helped a lot of women.

And considering that 50 % of all pregnancies in the United States are unplanned or unexpected, that means that there's a lot of women looking for help.

So when a young woman comes through our door, we can tell that the emotions are running high.

There's a lot of pressure that they carry in with them. In fact, it's like the weight of the world is on their shoulders because they're either carrying a secret that they haven't told anyone, or maybe they've told their boyfriend, a roommate, and that person has given them advice on what they think she should do.

And it's a weighty thing to deal with when you're not sure. So our main objective whenever somebody comes in is to greet her with non -judgment, to love her where she's at.

You know, we're a faith -based non -profit and we follow the best model.

We follow Jesus and how he cared and loved people. And so we want her to know that she's safe here and that our nurses will listen with unconditional care and support.

So the first thing we would do would provide a pregnancy test. And if that test comes back positive, then there would be options counseling and just a soul searching activity.

How is she responding to it? Is she happy? Is she sad? Is she frustrated? Is she probably falling apart?

There's a lot of tears here all the time. But the nurse from that point, and we only employ registered nurses because we want to make sure that the information we're giving is medically factual.

But also our nurses need to be walking tight with the Lord because they need to be exceptionally loving and they need to be good listeners.

Because a lot of the soul searching is about her, what her dreams are, what her values are, what she sees are adequate support systems or not.

It all makes a difference in her decision. So what makes our center different from a regular medical clinic, we have unrushed appointments for one thing and everything is completely free.

Our nurses treat the whole client. So it's not only physical, but it's mental and spiritual as well.

Usually they've been referred by a friend who has been served by our clinic in the past.

They know they can trust us and they know that it's easy to talk to our nurses. The clients who enter the

Women's Pregnancy Center range in age from anywhere from 14 to 40 years of age.

Most of the individuals that we see are single, some are married, but most of them have at least considered terminating their pregnancy and that's the one thing that they share in common.

We support them through free pregnancy testing, free first trimester ultrasounds,

STD testing and treatment, as well as parenting classes that include shopping privileges in our baby boutique.

And we do all of this completely free of charge. We feel that the ultrasound is the most powerful tool that we have at the

Women's Pregnancy Center. It allows us to show her the life that is within her. Most often we don't even need to use words.

She's able to just look at the TV and see for herself that there is an undeniable separate living human being within her.

She's able to see arms and legs kicking. She's able to see the beating heart. She's able to see her baby turn over and move within her, even though she's not able to feel any of this from inside.

There's nothing quite like that powerful aha moment when you see a mom see her baby for the very first time, meet that baby for the first time through the ultrasound.

It's like a light bulb goes off and everything clicks and they can see that this is what they were made for.

So what I need you to really know is that we can't do any of this without you.

We rely so heavily on donations. This is your invitation to be part of something that is so much bigger than anyone even can imagine.

You know those of us who work here and our volunteers who are mentors, we're invested.

We need you to be invested with us. We just invite you. I invite you to be part of Women's Pregnancy Center where lives are changed every day.

All right give me a second here. I have to make sure my sound is on the right setting.

Select a microphone. There we go. Jill is here in the building with us.

Nope. All right now next up is

Pastor Salmanik from the Lutherans for Light and I need to ask him to unmute himself and I need to probably make it so that he can actually turn his video on.

Hang on a second here because we have our security settings so that people can't start their video. But Pastor Salmanik if you can unmute yourself and turn your video on we'd like you to share for a couple minutes about Lutherans for Light and the importance of what you are doing there and how their support tonight will help your organization.

Let's see here. Ask to unmute and I'm having a zoom issue here.

Hang on a second here. There he is. There he is.

All right let's get you unmuted sir and I'm going to pin him.

All right am I live? Yes you are. Great to see you Pastor. Likewise.

Good evening Pastor and to the assembly. So there we go.

So tell us about Lutherans for Life and how we can support you guys and what we're doing here.

Well first of all good evening everybody and thank you so much for the invitation and the opportunity to be a part of this wonderful event.

Thank you for the benefit to Lutherans for Life. My family and I are gathered here in our living room.

Even have my folks here looking forward to the evening's events. My name is

Pastor Michael Salmanik. I'm the Executive Director of Lutherans for Life. Lutherans for Life exists to equip

Lutherans to be gospel motivated voices for life and we believe that Lutherans have a distinctive voice to bring to our culture's conversations about the sanctity of life.

Those conversations so frequently take place in a spirit of anger and fear and we believe as Lutherans that we can bring a message of joy and hope into those conversations.

Of course as Lutherans we remember that we are motivated not by a political controversy or public opinion or personal choice.

When it comes to the sanctity of life we are motivated because life issues our people and the sanctity of life is the heart of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Every human life is precious because God has created us in his own image with his own hands.

He has redeemed us through his son our Savior Jesus Christ who came into our flesh and into our world first as an embryo and then grew up and gave his body on the cross to sanctify every one of our bodies and we believe that God has called each and every human life to be part of his family and his kingdom forever.

So Lutherans for Life is active across the United States in a ministry of educating and connecting the sanctity of life to the gospel of Jesus Christ to the word of God and to Lutheran doctrine.

We do this through a wide variety of programs that includes a vast library of print resources.

We put together congregational worship resources for Celebrating Life Sunday every year.

Those are available free on our website as is most of what we have to offer. We also publish a quarterly journal called

Life Date which is a collection of gospel motivated articles, commentary, bible studies, and reflections from the distinctively

Lutheran perspective. We have a large archive of video resources.

We have bi -weekly webinars for both adults and youth as part of our

Why for Life program. We also have national conferences, one coming up this year in October.

Information about that is available on our website and we have an extensive YouTube channel.

Of course you guys are familiar with YouTube. Lots of video education there about how the gospel connects to sanctity of life issues like surprise pregnancy and terminal diagnosis.

We also have a nationwide network of over 150 volunteer communities.

We call them state federations, life teams, life chapters, life ministry coordinators in all 50 states who are taking action on the local level to show the love of Christ and speak

God's truth to people who are facing life issue situations. So your support for our organization is going to help us accomplish all of those things this evening.

And if you would like more information, I encourage you to visit our website www .lutheransforlife .org.

We also have a smartphone app. You can navigate to your app store and download that for your phone.

It's absolutely free. That'll keep you up to date on all that we've got going on and connect you with our nationwide community.

Again, we're so grateful for your gospel motivated voices for life and we pray that God is going to bless our time together this evening.

There we go. And what I'm going to do real quick is

I'm going to share the information and this is a QR code for this event.

So I promised everybody we were going to ask you for money, but it's not for Kongsvink. It's not for Pastor Roseborough.

It's to support Lutherans for Life and the Women's Pregnancy Center here in Grand Forks, North Dakota. If you scan that QR code, it will take you to our website there on our

PayPal where you can make a tax deductible donation. And again, all the proceeds from tonight will be split evenly between Lutherans for Life and the

Women's Pregnancy Center here in town. So if you haven't already scanned the code, scan it, head over to the website and make your tax deductible contribution.

Now I'm going to stop sharing here for a second here, not because I don't like to share, but we have a special guest that we've invited for tonight to regale us with the stories of, well,

I'm not sure how to describe it. Kyle Mann, let's get you unmuted and get your camera on, sir.

And I'm going to hit ask to start video. And there we go, Kyle Mann.

I'm going to spotlight you for everybody. And there we go.

So are you joining us from your secret bunker there in Southern California? Yeah, I'm joining you from the bat cave here.

All right. Very good. Now we named this event something like 728 Days to Flatten the

Curve. And I think we're officially up on like, you know, two years since lockdown, something like that.

Yeah, I think we're on two years now. So two years of two weeks to flatten the curve.

And all I got was this lousy t -shirt. Well, what I'm going to do, sir, is

I'm going to pass things off to you. I'm going to turn off my video and I'm going to sit and enjoy your time with us tonight.

So. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for joining us, everybody.

And I wanted to thank Pastor Chris and the Kongsfinger Lutheran Church, as well as Lutherans for Life and the local pregnancy center for hosting this event and for having me.

This is going to be a lot of fun. We're just going to kind of talk about humor and satire and why that's so important.

Obviously, a live Zoom event isn't as fun as being in person, but hopefully we can still have a good time.

When Pastor Chris asked me to come on, I was excited, too. I haven't been able to give as many speeches lately because of COVID.

And it's always such a blessing to be able to share what we do at the Babylon Bee and with everybody.

And the fact that it's for such a great cause is awesome. So I'm sure we'll get the

QR code and all that back up on the screen soon after my little session here so that anybody that's following, any

Babylon Bee fans that have tuned in, that you can donate to Lutherans for Life and that will also be split with the local pregnancy center.

So yeah, just to get started, I had stumbled upon this

G .K. Chesterton quote, and being in the satire business, it really struck me.

Chesterton wrote in 1908 that satire has weakened in our epic for several reasons, but chiefly,

I think, because the world has become too absurd to be satirized. If that was the case 115 years ago, how much more is that true today in 2022?

It feels like every year Chesterton's prophecy of how satire would become so difficult and almost impossible becomes more and more true.

Chesterton faced a world that was increasingly encroached upon by modernism, which of course was eventually replaced by post -modernism, and this threatened to upend social orders and establish traditions that were painstakingly discovered through thousands of years of trial and error and God's guiding hand.

It seems like Chesterton and men like him stood like a lighthouse warning the world of the rocks of relativism and a hollowed out false moralism upon which it would soon crash and how much we have seen that come true.

It feels like if Chesterton felt like the world was too absurd to be satirized, we have no hope in 2022, and that's something that I feel intensely day -to -day as the editor -in -chief of the

Babylon Bee. Now, if you don't know what the Babylon Bee is, you're probably at the wrong conference, but just in case you don't, we are a

Christian satire site. We cover politics, general everyday family life.

We cover religion, church life, lots of worship leader jokes, all kinds of fun stuff.

We started out mostly parodying the modern church, the prosperity gospel,

American evangelicalism, and all the craziness that we see there, and obviously that's a ripe target, but we quickly expanded to commenting on the insanity of the world that we live in, and I guess the kind of the question that I want to ask today or the topic that I want to explore is it's a pretty dark time.

I was talking to some of the event organizers earlier this week, and when we scheduled this event, we didn't know that we would be talking about World War III.

That wasn't really a topic of discussion, so we thought it'd be fun to have a light -hearted discussion about humor and satire, and now it feels like everything has gotten even more intense since then, and that's kind of what

I want to ask is why satire? Why humor? You know, why do we do these things?

Like, is it important to joke? Is it important to have a good sense of humor about yourself? And of course,

I think so. That's why I do what I do, but I'd like to kind of convince you of that, that it is important to laugh, you know, whether that's reading the

Babylon Bee or just having a really good sense of humor about yourself and about, you know, your own beliefs even, like being able to recognize hypocrisy in yourself and be able to recognize when you don't quite measure up.

Our satirists here at the Babylon Bee have a tough job, you know.

People ask me, like, isn't it really easy to write satire for the

Babylon Bee in 2022? Because, you know, the crazy people on the far left and the far right, crazy

Democrats, crazy Republicans, crazy Pentecostals, if I can go there.

This is a Lutheran crowd. I suppose that's a friendly joke. Crazy Lutherans even, right?

People that are extremists or are just so over the top, you know.

How do we wake up in this world every day and write satire that's more absurd than reality, you know?

People think it's easy. People think we have our work all done for us, but it's actually quite difficult to write satire that is more absurd than what's already out there.

You know, we wake up every morning and we start to write our jokes and then we look at the real news and there's headlines like that men can get pregnant now that, you know, all the last couple years, you know, it's illegal to go outside and take your dog for a walk.

We see all kinds of these crazy stories and we have to face down these stories and somehow, you know, stare them dead in the eye and somehow come up with something that is even crazier.

That's how a good satirist works, you're taking real stuff and you're just taking it to its logical conclusion or you're just pushing it that one step further over the cliff, you're turning it up to 11.

How do you out satirize a world that verges on self -parody and always seems to one -up itself when it comes to ridiculousness?

Let me see if I can share my screen here and do this presentation.

Are you able to enable that, Pastor Chris? Yes, I'm able to enable that.

Give me a second here. I've banned you from that, but give me a second here. You can now try it, sir.

All right, let me give that a shot. I'm juggling two computers and let's see.

I think I made it happen. Let's see if you guys can see that. All right, so oops, let me hit this button here.

All right, so here's some headlines and I'll click back over to my video in a second, but here's some headlines that were satire when we wrote them.

And later quickly became true, or at least very close to it. Democrats propose replacing all police with traveling bands of hippies singing

Imagine. Just a few months later, we had police in the

UK revealed their rainbow car that would drive around and stop crime, inspire people to stop doing crime,

I guess. Here's another one. We joked in 2020 that BLM rioters would be awarded the

Nobel Peace Prize. And then several months later, they were actually nominated.

They were nominated for one. This is a fun one.

We wrote this in early 2021. Triple masker looks down on people who only double mask.

And I promise this seemed like satire at the time, and it seemed very absurd at the time we wrote it.

And then the very next day, this news broadcast came out on NBC. Cripple masking was much more efficient than double masking.

And as much as I'd like to claim that we are modern day prophets, you know, for all these headlines with the gifts of the spirit for today or whatever, satire constantly coming true isn't really a commentary on the quality of the satire.

It's a commentary on the absurdity of this world that we live in. That's really a scary thought.

You know, any one of these ideas would have been so absurd as to not even really be a good joke just a few years ago.

You know, sometimes if satire is too over the top, it's too crazy, it's too wacky, it's too, you know, loony tunes or whatever, then it kind of loses its potency.

And now we are having trouble staying ahead of tomorrow's headlines. We've kind of pitched that as one of our

Babylon B possible taglines, you know, tomorrow's news today. It's not just real news, though, of course, that makes our job difficult.

People who are constantly progressing, trying to push our society towards some, you know, humanistic utopia, they seem increasingly determined to remain as humorless as possible.

Um, it wasn't so long ago that we religious people were seen as kind of the fuddy duddies, you know, who didn't have a sense of humor, we couldn't laugh at ourselves.

I don't necessarily think that that stereotype was true. Anybody who's been a member of any good church for any amount of time has knows the good sense of humor that a lot of the folks have, and knows that there's a lot of good humor pointed at us.

But that was kind of the stereotype that we were the guys who were sitting hotly in the corner of a party looking down our noses at people who laugh and have fun.

Or maybe that's maybe that was just us Baptists. But more and more, it seems that that stereotype rings true more for, you know, leftist zealots than it does for Christians.

It rings true more for extremists on the on the secular end of the spectrum. Because really, secularism has become a religion.

It has its priests in the form of agenda driven scientists and politicians, it has its dogma and things like Marxism and critical race theory.

It has its end times predictions and in climate alarm, alarmism and hysteria and pandemics.

And it even has its own saviors in progressive politicians and policies. There is some truth, though, that the blindly religious cannot take a joke.

We've encountered this time after time as we put our satire out there on social media, and we for the world to see.

We've been fact checked many times as a satire site, which is bizarre. We've been fact checked by Snopes, USA Today, the

Associated Press, PolitiFact. You name the fact checking website and we have been.

We've been fact checked by them. You know, the left claims that there's so much sinister fake news and Russian disinformation or whatever out there, but they sure seem to have a lot of time to fact check jokes.

Deliberately obtuse fact checkers, big tech, social media sites and news networks pretend not to understand our humor and regularly accuse us of sharing dangerous far right disinformation.

Powerful people on the left wielding massive platforms and plenty of funding use their platforms to try to suppress us and silence us merely because they disagree with our positions.

And I'm kind of rattling off this laundry list of people who have attacked us, not to sound like we're persecuted.

Obviously, there's Christians and people all around the world who face much worse persecution than us as a humor site.

But I think there is certainly some commentary about our society that just telling jokes draws so much ire, just telling jokes makes people so upset of us and really try to use all their power to shut us down.

I think it does say something about the state of our society and where we're headed. And that's why tonight I'd like to argue for the power of humor and the importance of laughter.

And I know we're dealing with heavy topics today like, you know, the World War Three possibility,

Russia invading Ukraine, all kinds of things are going on. We're obviously dealing with pro -life organizations,

Lutherans for Life and the Pregnancy Center. Abortion is not a topic to be taken lightly.

And yet I think satire and humor can play a role in exposing the evil of those things.

And we'll deal with that in just a little bit. But first, let me see if I can do this again.

Sorry, bear with me here. So here's some of the people that have attacked us as the

Babylon Bee over the years. This is Brian Stelter of fake, he called us a fake news site. So this is

Donny O'Sullivan of CNN. And he was mad. I won't read that whole wordy tweet.

But he was mad at us because a Babylon Bee article got more shares than the

CNN story on the same topic. And he posted this to shame us and claim that that was evidence that we were actually sharing disinformation.

And what's more interesting is that post, that tweet that he's sharing there is from an ex -CIA agent who called us disinformation.

In that tweet thread that he quotes, she goes on to say that we use the word satire as a shield to protect us from anti -disinformation activity.

And we're not actually a humor site. We're just a far -right misinformation site. This is a quote from the

New York Times associating us and calling us far -right misinformation, a far -right misinformation site that uses the word satire to protect our presence on Facebook.

And they say, for example, the Babylon Bee, a right -leaning site, sometimes trafficked in misinformation under the guise of satire.

And here's a couple of fact checks that we've gotten in the past, which are all bizarre. We wrote a joke saying that after water had been discovered on the moon,

Trump proposed a space navy. And this was classified as dangerous misinformation and fact -checked by USA Today.

Another one that USA Today fact -checked is we claimed that the Ninth Circuit overturned

Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death. And these fact -checks, if you get a chance, you really should go look up these fact -checks because they're hilarious.

They're almost funnier than the original article. The USA Today fact -checker here goes and she actually calls the, she says she actually called the

Ninth Circuit court to ask them if they had overturned Ruth Ginsburg's death as part of her fact -check.

So that was awesome. So we wrote this article, Senator Hirono demands

Amy Coney Barrett be weighed against a duck to see if she is a witch. And you won't get that unless you know

Monty Python. And it got removed from Facebook, who said that it was inciting violence.

So let me see if I can pause this again. So and I, and I kind of, you know, just have a laundry list of all those times we've been attacked just to kind of prove the point that there is this bizarre pushback against us.

Snopes has accused us of muddying the waters of current events in order to confuse and mislead people for clicks.

And they draw no distinction between our humorous and obviously clearly labeled satire and people who actually publish fake news.

Whenever they fact -check the onion, it's always very, you know, it's always very positive towards the onion and it kind of accused,

Snopes will kind of accuse the readers of being the ones who are fooled. When they fact -check us, they accuse us of intentionally misleading people.

So there's an obvious kind of bias there when it comes to the way that we are fact -checked.

The probably the most absurd one we got is that Facebook threatened our site with the de -platforming and demonetization for sharing fake news.

And the headline, if I can get that one up again, sorry,

I'm learning Zoom here. So we did this headline, CNN purchases industrial -sized washing machine to spin the news before publication.

Oh, sorry, it's not up there. Maybe now you can see it. A giant washing machine.

So this was the article that got us threatened with de -platforming and demonetization from Facebook.

I mean, it's just so absurd on its face. You know, no one on planet earth ever believed that headline. Nobody actually thought that CNN purchased the giant washing machine to spin the news.

It doesn't even make sense. And yet we were facing the complete destruction of our platform and the ability to reach our audience merely because we were making fun of the left.

It's absolutely insane. And just for fun, here's a few other Babylon P headlines that Snopes has fact -checked in the past.

Trump, I have done more for Christianity than Jesus. California Christians must now register

Bibles as assault weapons. That might be true.

That's one of those that's just not true yet. Thanks to new laws,

VeggieTales finally introduces new cannabis character. Oh, wow.

Sorry, there's kids in the room. I'll get this moving along here. Joel Osteen launches line of pastoral wear, sheep's clothing.

Sorry, you guys are all... Oh, I like that. You sound offended.

Is there a bunch of Joel Osteen fans there? I don't know. Ocasio -Cortez appears on The Price is

Right, guesses everything is free. And here's another one that was fact -checked.

Pope Francis says COVID vaccine will now be required to enter heaven. I read a lot of very concerned tweets from Italian grandmothers in Italian that he was going to actually do this.

So this one started making the rounds in Italy. Let me see if I can get back to my beautiful face here.

Satire was, of course, fine in the liberal wonder years of the Colbert Report and the glory days of Saturday Night Live, and not to mention

The Onion. And none of these sites were ever fact -checking these guys or calling them disinformation.

Saturday Night Live had a bit where Sarah Palin said that she could see Russia from her house.

There's still people today who think she actually said that because of the Saturday Night Live bit. And you don't see these sites raising this massive concern about fake news and misinformation.

When nearly 100 % of comedy was coming from the left, liberals pretended to be cool with satire. And when attacks started coming in their direction, they quickly changed their tune.

And the question I kind of want to ask is, you know, is satire worth defending in the face of this kind of an onslaught?

Should conservatives and religious people throw in the towel and cede this ground of culture and art to the left, as we've seen happen in the realm of art and music and movies over the past several decades?

Well, of course, as the editor in chief of the Babylon Bee, I believe it is time for us to take a stand. It's time for us to create something good, to create something true, to create something funny and beautiful, and fight back, especially when it comes to satire.

Satire is a powerful and a multi -faceted tool with a long and storied history within Christianity.

So I'll kind of spend the rest of the time here just talking about a few of the benefits that satire has and some of the roles that it can play in the church and in the culture, just kind of as a supporting argument for the fact that we need to defend satire.

I classify kind of the first advantage of using humor and satire as that satire has a prophetic role to play.

And of course, I'm not arguing for modern day, you know, craziness or anything. I'm talking about a prophetic role to play in the sense that it is speaking truth, as sometimes the word prophecy is used to refer to in the

Bible. Throughout the Bible and church history, God used humor to mock the foolish and to call people to see through the fleetingness of current events and to behold that which is transcendent.

There's, of course, the famous example is when Elijah challenged the prophets of Baal and he did not attempt to reason with them.

He didn't write a 3 ,000 -word blog post arguing of why

Baal is a false god and not that there's not a place for apologetics and argument and blog posts and theology, but there comes a time for mockery.

And Baal, of course, Elijah mocked their god asking if their god was absent because he was too busy relieving himself.

Of course, you guys have read the passage, and they took the bowl that was given them and they prepared it and called upon the name of Baal for morning till noon saying, oh

Baal, answer us. But there was no voice and no one answered and they limped around the altar that they had made.

And at noon, Elijah mocked them saying, cry aloud for he is a god. Either he is musing or he's relieving himself or maybe he's on a journey or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened.

That's pretty brutal. I mean, think of it from our perspective if someone was saying, hey, your god is not answering your prayers.

And obviously, atheists will do this kind of argument. God is not answering your prayers.

Maybe he's asleep. He's just this magic sky fairy or whatever. And Elijah uses this kind of mockery very effectively.

Satire speaks to false cultural beliefs by absolutely skewering them. We use satire and humor to speak to the culture.

And just as an aside, there's people that will say, as the Babylon Bee or you guys as Christians, you shouldn't write jokes about things that are going on in the culture.

You should stick to satire about the church. You should only use satire to point inward.

Otherwise, it's punching down or bullying or all kinds of arguments that they'll make there.

And that's not what Elijah is doing here. He's not using satire just as this tool to expose hypocrisy or sin within the community.

He's using it to point to cultural beliefs outside that are threatening Israel and then threatening the people of God.

So I think there's even an example here in the Bible of satire mocking cultural beliefs that are ridiculous.

And I think that is a powerful place for satire. Even God himself, speaking through Isaiah, mocked idol worship, turning the powerful lens of satire on his own people.

In Isaiah 44, we read the word of the Lord. The woodcarver uses part of the wood to make a fire.

With it, he warms himself and bakes his bread. Then, yes, it's true, he takes the rest of it and makes himself a god to worship.

He makes an idol and bows down in front of it. He burns part of the tree to roast his meat and to keep himself warm.

He says, ah, that fire feels good. Then he takes what's left and makes his god a carved idol.

He falls down in front of it, worshiping and praying to it. Rescue me, he says. You are my god.

This passage literally just cracks me up sometimes because God is, Isaiah is just mocking, absolutely mocking the idol worship within Israel and saying, you know, you go cut down a tree.

How do you know that you didn't cut the wrong half of the tree for firewood and the wrong half for the idol and you're accidentally worshiping firewood, you know?

And oops, you burned your god because you picked the wrong side. It's a really powerful tool.

So, we can also see how humor can be prophetic and that it's a way that it could expose sin and folly within the congregation, within our own community.

And just as another side note that I just thought of, this is one criticism of satire that you'll get for Christians using satire is that good satire is supposed to punch up.

You can only make fun of the powerful, you know, the rich and powerful or whatever. And you're not supposed to make fun of the poor or whoever the people making this argument would say is the oppressed or the lowly.

You're not supposed to make fun of them. You're only supposed to make fun of the correct groups or else it's not actually satire.

But that's not what's happening here. You know, Isaiah's words are going out to the poorest farmer, the poorest shepherd, and he's exposing sin in their lives.

So, satire can target all kinds of things, not just the powerful. Satire can target sin in our own lives no matter what class we happen to be a part of.

Jesus mocked his foes, of course. You know, we know some of the vicious words of Jesus and just even the very clever turns of phrases that when he's asked if the disciples asked if they should pay taxes and they hand him the coin, you know, the coin says

Caesar is the son of God. And he's like, give Caesar his coins, then give him his blasphemous coins if he's the son of God, you know, and it's a way for him to get out of this trap.

But a powerful statement about the allegiance of the Christian, what kingdom our allegiance is to.

We can look back at Martin Luther and the way that he, you know, he, you want to talk about punching down, you know, he,

Martin Luther was absolutely a savage satirist, you know, we would have hired him at the

Babylon Bee if we had been created in the right age.

And that would make anybody cringe today, you read some of his insults and some of his barbed words.

C .S. Lewis shone a light on Christian living in the screw tape letters. G .K. Chesterton, I mentioned before, of course, used satire to skewer politicians and the religious alike.

And I kind of say all this just to say like being funny and using mockery is part of a

Christian tradition. You know, I believe it should be used rightly and it should be used in the right context and with the right frequency.

But I do think that is one of the tools in the toolbox that God has given us to communicate the gospel, to call our own to repentance, to engage in arguments with those outside the church.

Sorry, I'm having to switch between computers here with my notes and the screen. But here's a few.

Here's a few bee headlines that. That kind of I feel kind of play this sort of prophetic role, and I have apologies if anyone's offended.

Liberty University criticized after unveiling stained glass window depicting Donald Trump. This one was was also fact checked and went around as real news.

Inspiring celebrities spell out we're all in this together with their yachts.

And I didn't mean to make all these get fact, but this one was also one that was fact checked. The thought was real.

But, yeah, that's there's an example of one that's prophetic. And, you know, in speaking to the culture and speaking to ridiculousness going on outside the church,

NBA players wear special lace collars to honor Peter Ginsburg. That was also fact check.

Man, Elevation Church debuts water slide baptism. And I if I remember right, this was our first.

This was our first one that ever got fact checked. This is back six years ago when we launched the

Babylon Bee. We did this one and it got fact checked pretty quick, all the way to the point that Elevation Church was posting on its

Facebook page like, no, do not show up this Sunday to get to go down the water slide. There is no water slide at our church.

Sorry about that, Pastor Furtick. Here's one. This one did not get fact checked, but Holy Spirit unable to move through congregation as fog machine breaks.

Let me see if I can do this here. That was actually the first Babylon Bee article

I ever wrote. That was the day the Babylon Bee launched. I sent that in. Our first big viral article.

So satire has this prophetic role to play. I believe satire also has. I'm trying to see how I'm doing on time here. I probably get a little bit more.

Satire also has, believe it or not, humor can have an encouraging role to play.

And it can have a role of comfort.

How timely that feels, that message feels now that we're kind of teetering on the brink of this conflict that's brewing and we're plunging deeper and deeper into this possible conflict and war.

And why laugh? I mean, it really is a struggle for us at the Babylon Bee. You get up and you see the headlines and you're like, how are we going to write a funny joke when everybody is so angsty about something?

Everybody's so worried about something. But I think that it really is the most important time that we need to come in clutch and make something like that happen.

We got an email from a fan recently, and she said, this past year

I've been going through a crisis. There are a lot of things that I can't control, but every day I take my border collie for a long walk and I listen to your podcast.

It gives me a lot of peace and I love knowing that I'm not alone in Christian culture. You guys get me to lighten up and laugh at myself while taking more important things more seriously.

I know God's mercy is our new daily and he will supply what I need for the future. But I want you guys to know that you have been one of God's methods of providing peace in my life lately.

It's really humbling for us that I'm just a dude who goes and writes jokes on the internet and I somehow get paid for that.

And you get people that email and say, you saved my life. And I'm not bragging on that really, but just saying,

I can't believe the way that God uses humor, whether it's my jokes or humor from some other source.

The way that he uses that as common grace to get us through the day, to help us to have a real sense of perspective about things.

One nice thing is that you can be scrolling through your social media feed and everybody is trying to get you to get riled up about something.

And there's pundits on the right, pundits on the left. They're like, I can't believe this. And they're yelling about this or that.

And then when you come across a Babylon Bee headline, it's presented in that dried news type of voice.

So you almost get tricked like into, oh, here's another depressing news story.

And then you're like, oh, it's a joke. And there is this sense of like, we're kind of jars you out of that doom scrolling that you're doing on social media.

So I really think that that is one of the ways that God gets us through hard times.

Satire is a cutting tool, and it really can cut away a lot of the misconceptions about the news, a lot of the things that we're struggling with and help us to focus on what's eternal and what's important.

We can put less, but we can lighten our load about the way that we think about events rather than making these making these things weightier than they actually should be.

We need to think rightly about the news. One of the reasons that the Babylon Bee got so popular is that we launched right during the 2016 election, and people had real anxiety over that election.

If you remember, many Christians felt there was no good outcome, no candidate they could vote for in good conscience.

We published, sorry, let me switch over here. We published this headline on the night of the on the night of the election, we published this headline, election results are in Christ still on his throne.

And it was kind of like when the results were coming in and not, it wasn't really clear who was going to win one or the other.

And we like to publish this from time to time, but a lot on election days, we'll put this up because it's a way that humor can kind of remind you of something that's very true.

And people were freaking out over if you guys, if any of you follow politics, you sit there on election night and you're just a ball of stress for 48 hours or whatever.

And that reminder was powerful for our audience. Satire can also encourage change in the

Christian life with headlines like this man sitting literally three feet away from the Bible asked God to speak to him.

And there's a power in that, right? And that you could read, you could read, you could hear sermon after sermon about how you need to read your stinking

Bible. You can read blog posts and blog posts about it and it can't sink in.

And then you read something like this and it cuts, you gotta say ouch as they say. We can also just kind of encourage endearment to the church with light hearted church jokes.

Satire finds strong or study finds strong connection between holiness and the number of chairs you can stack after church service. You see, you guys got a lot of chairs there.

We'll see who's the holiest after this event. One of the reasons, another reason the

BB got so popular when it launched is that we were making fun of Christians, but we clearly loved Christians. You know, it was clearly humor that was targeted inward that we were clearly in the church, but making fun of the church in a loving way.

If you've ever watched a Hollywood movie that mentions the church or set in the church or it has a Christian in it, you know, it's obvious that whoever wrote these

Hollywood movies has never met a Christian in their lives and their lives or has never even set foot in a church.

And, you know, all the details are wrong and the person is a total hypocrite. And that's like just the stereotype that it's kind of painted as.

Christian satire doesn't have to be that way. It doesn't have to be bitter, mean satire with no hope and no answers, just deconstructing everything and so, and so seeing nothing.

I, you know, just kind of, as I, as I wrap up here, I I loved,

I just, I just recently reread C .S. Lewis's Abolition of Man. And he has that great quote towards the end where he's talking about deconstruction and how the whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.

You cannot go on seeing through things forever. To see through everything is the same as not to see.

And I'm paraphrasing, it's something like that. And I think the way that the world does humor is to just break down and mock everything to the point where it's like, you're just drained and cynical about everything.

But I think Christian humor can have a way of knocking down the temporary, knocking down the fleeting things of the world to help us to see the eternal, to help us to see the transcendent, help us to see what's really important and not just the constant 24 -7 stream of depression and despair that we see in the news.

Satire from a Christian worldview can deconstruct hypocrisy. It can attack false teaching and it can topple the idols of our culture so that we can point to something greater.

As we distort and skewer the shortcomings of our own world, we reveal within ourselves a desire for something more, a desire for something heavenly and true and real.

So what the satirist can do is remind people of the true value of things in the world. Satire just kind of acknowledges the truth that people are funny, politicians are funny, preachers can be funny,

Christians can be really funny, goofy, ridiculous people. There is humor in all of these things and if we cannot find the humor, it's often true that we have some issue in our lives.

There's some hypocrisy that we're afraid is going to be exposed through humor. I sometimes liken satire and humor to a funhouse mirror.

A funhouse mirror will distort, it'll make your nose look gigantic and if you're secure about how you look and you know that's just a funhouse mirror, then you don't you don't care.

If you are very insecure about your looks, you're going to start screaming at the mirror and try to break it and say it needs to get fact -checked and pulled off Facebook or whatever.

So just kind of as I close, I mean we are in this culture that hates comedy, we're in this culture that hates humor, that wants to dismantle it and destroy it and de -platform it and fact -check it.

And in the midst of that though, there's hope, there's people that really can find this humor, there's people that are gravitating towards sites like the

Babylon Bee, towards other humor outlets and are realizing that this is the way that we really can challenge the systems of this world.

This is a powerful tool that God has given us to be prophetic, to skewer our own sin and to call for change and to help us to see the true value of things in the world.

So let me just close with well, why don't I do this Chesterton quote and then

I'll switch over to a couple more bee headlines. Chesterton said, laughter has something in it, something common with the ancient words of faith and inspiration.

Laughter unfreezes pride and unwinds secrecy. It makes people forget themselves in the presence of something greater than themselves.

And that's kind of a good place to stop. Let me share a couple more bee jokes

I have here. These are ones that help us to laugh at ourselves.

So Ken Ham's new life -size tower of Babel reproduction plagued with construction delays.

Poor guy. This was a bit of a prophecy too.

I don't know if they have delays, but we wrote this article and then a year later they announced that they were actually building the tower of Babel down there.

So I don't know how the construction is going. So communication problems maybe.

Man dies of old age in church parking lot waiting 60 years for wife to finish socializing.

Very true. Fact check true. Chick -fil -a installs confessionals so that you can repent from eating at Papa.

Weighing in on the chicken sandwich wars there. And then finally this one seems increasingly true.

American Christian bum that following Christ may actually cost him something. Thank you guys for hanging in there and for dealing with all the little

Zoom delays. And thank you, Pastor Chris, for having me. And I know we were going to do some more interaction and stuff.

So I'll hang tight for that here. Switch sources here.

Kyle, great presentation. I appreciated the thoughtfulness that you put into that. I have a question for you because cancel culture seems to be a thing, right?

And you've noted the fact that you seem to be always on the edge of being canceled by Facebook and Snopes and all this fact checking that's going on.

As Christians, just as kind of a thought, I noticed that there were people kind of calling for the cancellation of the

Babylon Bee because they felt that your interview with Elon Musk could have gone a different way.

And so what are your thoughts on the controversy regarding that? Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, we're always open for any criticism. And just because we're jokesters doesn't mean we're above that or that there's things that we can do better.

So with the Elon Musk thing, yeah, at the end of the interview, we had a bit of a joke altar call where we asked him to come to the front in a very

Arminian megachurch type way, like while the music plays, come forward.

And it was a joke. And it's a joke that we've done for a few years now on our podcast, is that we have this conversation and it's not,

I mean, sometimes we'll, you know, if the conversation goes towards the gospel, we'll go towards the gospel. If it goes towards theology, we'll talk about theology.

If it's just politics, it's just politics. It kind of depends on the guest. And on the podcast, we're kind of just listening to a guest's point of view and getting their perspective and having a civil disagreement about things.

So it's not really an evangelical or an evangelism focused podcast or interview show.

But we had this whole conversation with Elon. And so we had that question as last question, as we've done many times.

And most people, you know, get the joke that we're kind of baptizing the podcast by doing this fake altar call at the end.

And Musk got what we were doing and kind of chuckled about it and then used the opportunity to kind of launch into a very interesting history of his own experience with faith, you know, that he had grown up in Sunday school, but he hadn't understood the miracles thing.

And, you know, we kind of went back and forth a little bit on that, but we weren't debating him. That wasn't the purpose of the meeting. And then kind of at the end, he's like, all right, fine, you know, yeah,

I'll come forward, you know, and kind of jokingly, and we laughed about it. But there was a lot of people that didn't, I think, didn't get that we were joking.

And so I think in hindsight, we're kind of like, well, you know, millions more people watch that interview than usually watch our interview show.

And the people who usually watch it are like very much in the Christian culture, or they love the Babylonian, they know what we're doing there.

And we had millions of people that watched it that what the heck you like, did you just randomly give a really bad gospel presentation?

That's horrible. You know, he didn't actually accept Christ. And we're like, yeah, that's the point, right? You know, so because we're kind of mocking those

Christian media that just tacks on an altar call onto something, even though the gospel hasn't been presented.

But at the same time, I mean, I sympathize with some of the criticism that if you're talking to a guy who actually needs the gospel, maybe a great joke isn't to be like, hey, do you want to accept

Jesus? Because it's like, well, yeah, he does need to accept you on some level, right? So I, so I sympathize with the criticism there.

And we obviously saw a lot of things in hindsight that we could have done a little bit differently. Excellent.

Thank you for that answer. Hold on a second here. We have a my mic's on.

Hang on a second here. We have a technical glitch being fixed here.

All right. So we had, we had asked some people that if they wanted to, they could submit their own attempt at satirical headlines.

And, and since, you know, you're a professional at this, you know, and, you know, back in the day, you started out and you were yeoman at it, and you've now become the master.

There's some, there's some people who submitted some, well, headlines that we'd like to get your candid, well, interaction with, that's the way

I could put it. Okay. So we had a Babylon Bee news title contests.

All right. And, and I, we didn't get that many. So we're just going to go with this.

Huh? The information was on the website. Are you, trying to submit now?

Kongsvingerchurch .org slash Babylon Bee, right? You know, I think there's a submission place that you can do it.

Submit now or forever hold your peace. Okay. So I hope you're ready for this

Kyle. Again, this is all, some of this is very North Dakota. I, I apologize.

So here, here's the number one, Pelosi's new dance. The I haven't fallen yet shuffle is a hit with the new drug message from the white house.

Am I supposed to be rating these? No, I'm just giving you the, we're trying to get your candid reaction.

It did make me chuckle. It did make me chuckle. All right. Let's see.

And I'll just, I'll tell you, I get, I get friends and family members that come up all the time and pitch.

So to get a chuckle out of me is a, that's a good thing. That's solid. Okay. So we figured out what the grading scale is.

Good. Okay. Let's see. Whoever this is really has a thing. Nancy Pelosi.

Let's see here. Pelosi releases her liberal pheromones to keep sleepy Joe on track and focused.

Wow. I'm laughing, but I think it's just cause I like how obsessed this person is with, with, with yeah.

And I'm going to not read the next one. Okay. Yeah. Executive decision here.

Let's see. Let's see. I can't even man. All right. I I'm going to mess this up pronunciation wise.

Mattel's initial release of Rock 'em Sock 'em Posky has Fox's very own

Peter Doocy as the blue opponent robot. I have no idea. Yeah.

It's a Socky, Socky and Peter Doocy are always yelling at each other at the white house press conference. Got it.

Okay. I might, if I were, I might simplify it a little, you know, just say nude. Yeah. Rock. There's a, there's a good

Rock 'em Sock 'em joke somewhere in there for sure. Okay. All right. So the Occam's razor maybe. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Let's see here. Next headline upon hearing

Americans can't afford gas, Biden promises to give them cake instead on odd and even days.

So that, so there, there's a, there's a concept in comedy called putting a hat on a hat where you, you, you told two jokes instead of you should have stopped with one, you know, like, cause the cake is funny, but then you say that every other day, that's what,

I'm not old enough. That's a 1970s thing, right? Like, was there gas? I lived that. Okay. You know, whoever wrote it is just a little not connected with this current generation, you know.

Got it. Okay. Okay. I'm not sure what to do with this one.

The, the headline reads what curve I saw. All I saw was the Liberty bell. Okay.

Is that like a flatten the curve joke? Yeah. I think that this person knows math.

Okay. Like a bell curve. I do believe math is evil. So let's see here.

All right. Let's see. All right.

Hang on a second here. This was kind of inside Lutheran baseball.

Let's see. Wow. This is weird.

Okay. So here it is. ELCA orders all pews and chairs removed from their churches, schools, and organizations.

You can't be woke if you are sitting down, stand up. I thought the joke was just going to be that they don't need the pews because there's nobody there.

Ouch. That's coming from a Baptist. Dude. All right.

Hang on a second here. Is there, did you get your submission? Okay. So we have a live one here.

Hang on a second. Oh, I see it. It came in. I see it. Here it is. Okay. So here it is.

We got two entries. Let's see here. It's a novella.

I tried to teach her that Brevity is the soul. Hang on. Okay. So entry number one,

Babylon be under fire for illegal satire trafficking into Facebook newsfeeds. Zuckerberg proposes to build a firewall.

Okay. Yeah. I would, I would again, just simplify, just do like, yeah.

Zuckerberg to build, build border firewall to keep fake news out or something. Yeah.

All right. All right. Let's see here. No, no, no.

I can't do that. I can't read that. No, no, no. She's, she's a pastor's kid.

I can't read that. Yeah. I, I, I, I think we'll just, we'll,

I appreciate the, the interaction at this point and that, that, that ends that part of the audience participation.

I think this would be a question for Kyle Mann regarding anything he's talked about actually in his presentation tonight about the importance of satire, something that you want to clarification on or something like that.

I think this would be the good time to do it. And we can actually pass the microphone for that to happen, but you'll have to kind of speak up because it has to come through my laptop.

Does anyone have any questions? Yes, sir. All right.

All right. So we want to know your Genesis story. How did you get involved in the Babylon B and you, uh, there was a co -founder who is no longer with you guys from the early days that tells a little bit about that.

Yeah. So the, the, the website was founded by Adam Ford in March of 2016. He had been doing some reformed web comics up till that point.

And, uh, I emailed him a headline submission, the one about the, uh,

Holy spirit, unable to move through a congregation as fog machine breaks. I said, I emailed that to him on March 1st, when the, the day the site launched and then the, the next day that got published.

And then he said, you want to send another one? And so I did. So then I, after a while I was writing three or four a day and I was still working a construction sales job, um, as my full -time job.

And I was just doing this on the side. And then after two years of doing that, I quit my job to take over the site full -time as the editor in chief,

Adam Ford still owns part of the Babylon B, but he's sold off the majority of it. And, and he's not involved on the day -to -day anymore.

He's actually running, not the B now, which is our sister site that, um, that does real news, you know, so, so insane, you would think it was on the

Babylon B, but it's not the B that's the kind of stuff he does now. Excellent. All right.

Any other questions deeper looking at each other?

They're not making eye contact. Bruce doesn't have a question.

Yeah. I should warn you. Bruce has a question. You're going to be here for a while. Okay. Uh, yes.

Um, I believe you said you live in California. All right.

So the question is, so you live in California. How often does your house get attacked?

Uh, yeah, I've never been attacked or we've never been attacked by Antifa or hippies or homeless people or anything like that.

Um, the, we, we, we kind of, we actually did move, uh, out.

We were kind of in the greater Los Angeles area and we moved a ways away from there during the pandemic because things were getting crazy.

Um, not really in the sense of crime or homelessness, but in the sense of, uh, uh, of COVID restrictions.

So moving, we moved to a kind of a red area, um, further away from Los Angeles and it's night and day, you know, and that's, that's one thing

I've noticed through the pandemic as being, being in the city versus being in a more rural areas, just night and day, no matter what state you're in.

Um, so yeah, we, and it's kind of fun, you know, we're, we're, we write humor. We were, we're a little contrarian, we're a little rebellious.

So being in a blue state, uh, for most of us creatives is fine. Like we, we enjoy the kind of the conflict and, and, uh, and I think it's a good place for creativity to thrive a little bit.

Yeah. Oh yeah. Yep. Is like doxing ever a concern?

Do you get people sort of coming after you or your family because of the work that you do?

All right. So the question has to do with fears regarding doxing and I've even seen other sites that do conservative commentary.

They've been swatted, you know, you know, in the middle of, uh, you know, recording something, somebody sends the

SWAT team and says that they, they're up to nefariousness. Do you have concerns about that?

I mean, a little bit, I, we, we haven't, we don't really get that much rage against us, except for like, you know, the, the very small percentage of people on Twitter who are just mad at everything.

I know I shared a lot of the like fact checkers and stuff that are coming at you. So for us, it's more of a concern of kind of like the systemic attack on humor as a whole that will eventually just shut our website down, you know, um, versus like personal stuff.

Um, so I don't think any of us have really had too much of a problem with doxing or like, you know, once in a while you'll get a crazy fan or angry person who wants to come at you for this or that.

Typically they're not like coming to your house and banging on the door or anything like that. We haven't really had that happen yet, but we also are fairly careful just in that, like the address of our office isn't, uh, of our creative office in California isn't published anywhere.

You know, it's, we kind of keep it on, on the down low. Um, there's not, we don't have a giant Babylon B sign in the middle of Los Angeles of where our offices or whatever.

So we definitely are, have a, uh, we're a little cautious about that at least.

Right. Another question. So the question was, because there's so many people fleeing

California to other States, um, have you heard any reports of anybody turning into salt after looking back?

No, but we could use that. There's a, there's a food shortage. We need some salt, uh, out here.

So, uh, maybe, maybe that could happen. And then, and then there'll be salt on the store shelves again.

Um, I, I feel like we did that as a Babylon B headline, but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe that's just one of those ideas.

That's so good that I think, why didn't you submit that as an idea in the, during the headline submission portion?

Yeah. Now I remember in the early days of Babylon B, it was readily noticeable that, uh, they were looking for submissions from people in, you know, in their audience.

Does the Babylon B still take amateur submissions from people? Uh, do you have a, a means to, uh, to receive and filter and vet out any, you know, any aspiring satirists?

So we don't have anything advertised. Um, whereas we're just ran random people can just send headlines in all day.

Um, because it was, it was just such a firehose of stuff. You know, you'd get, I don't know, a hundred pitches in a day from different people.

Um, and so it was just, it was a lot of noise, which was hard for me as an editor or the other writers to try to like, think up ideas while you have this whole flood that you have to respond to or to look at.

Um, what we did, what we did do actually is, um, we have a, we have a, uh, paying subscriber service, uh, where people will just, you know, they'll pay five or 10 bucks a month just to support us in the event that we get deplatformed or demonetized.

And there's some benefits like, uh, you know, extended podcasts or, um, or a comment section, uh, people that subscribe to both our site and not the

B get access to a social network. So there's fun stuff there. And then as part of that, we add it, we have a little, um, forum button on our

Babylon B site. And if you click on that, you can submit headlines. So there's a lot of people that just all day, just, you know, there's a, there's a few of our really hardcore fans that just constantly submit a headline idea.

So that's, that's one way we kind of vetted out a little bit is that we have paying subscribers that we kind of pay a lot closer attention to their, to theirs than, than an email from a random, random person.

That does make sense. I mean, you know, the, the fact that they're, they got a little skin in the game. Yeah. Right. Yeah. All right.

All right. That's a good question. Yes. I'm just wondering like how long do they like sleep on a, okay.

So this has to do with your creative process. So you come up with like a sizzling headline. Do you sit on it or do you just go right to press with it?

I mean, since you don't have to really fact -check any of this stuff, you're just making it up, you know, what, what, how long is from genesis of idea to actually hitting the publish button on your website?

Yeah, it really depends on the idea. You know, some of the ones that are a little more evergreen maybe they're in the cooker for a while, weeks or months, you know some of the ones that take a while to put together will be in the pipeline for a long time.

You know, we have one that's a, we have a sermon generator where you can click a button and it'll generate a modern evangelical sermon for you.

And like that, that's an idea that I had very early on, but it took a year or two before we, you know, just had the time to sit down and actually program it.

We have, we also have a worship song generator now where you can generate a modern worship song. But the stuff that's like, the stuff that's really timely, like we're commenting on a news story that happened this morning.

Like that's like, we're just pitching in our little Slack channel and somebody will pitch it and we're like, that's the one.

And as soon as we can get a Photoshop done and the copy written it's up, you know, so it could be 10 minutes or 15 minutes from pitch to the website.

So who does your Photoshop for? I do some of it. My managing editor Joel is out in Ohio and he does some of it.

And we have a couple of people on staff now that are also doing Photoshops. So it's, and we're all learning.

We're all very, you know, when Adam Ford launched the website in 2016, he downloaded Photoshop the day that he launched the

Babylon Bee. He's like, I better learn it, you know. Wow.

Okay. So there was a question on the YouTube stream about your thoughts on the

New York Times having to correct themselves. Was that, is that in reference to when they, because they did issue a retraction on the story they wrote about us saying that we were a far right disinformation site.

So maybe that's what that's referencing. We did send a legal letter to the

New York Times and we threatened a lawsuit when they called us far right disinformation. And, you know,

I don't know if that sounds over the top, you know, to send it, to threaten a lawsuit, but it really is scary the way that they can do this.

Because if they could, if the New York Times can call you misinformation or disinformation, whatever they called us. And then that ends up on our, like that ended up on our

Wikipedia page. Like the Babylon Bee has been known to publish misinformation. So now Facebook can classify you as misinformation, citing the

Wikipedia page, citing the New York Times article, and then use that to demonetize you, fact check you, or just pull you off the platform entirely.

So we were like, no, we cannot have that in the New York Times. So they actually did edit that article, the article

I showed, the little excerpt I showed earlier, they did edit it later. It's still not great. Like it's still kind of connects us to that, but they took out the worst, the most offending parts of it anyway.

Okay. Wow. Always fun when you have to pay an attorney by the hour.

So yeah. Okay. Any other questions?

Now, Kyle, I want to thank you for your time. This was, this was fantastic. And I'm going to really quickly do this because it's important that people remember that tonight's event is a fundraiser.

We are raising money for Lutherans for Life and our local women's pregnancy center.

And if you scan that QR code, it'll take you to our website where you can make tax deductible donations and all, literally all of the proceeds from tonight will be divided evenly between the two, the two recipients.

And we're going to keep the video up on YouTube for a little bit of time so that people can, you know, contribute over the next 30 days or so.

The hope, the hope here is to really make this, to be a thing that will raise a decent amount of funds because these are worthy, worthy causes and worthy, worthy institutions.

And I was there when we interviewed the women's pregnancy center, when we interviewed

Jill and was really blown away by just how much I didn't understand that they offered and did and realized that this, this is a really important facility in our community.

And, and the services that they're providing literally are saving lives. And, and, you know,

I think about the fact that here in, in small rural North Dakota, you know, you bet you don't, you know, that, that, that she can give you the number of infants who are alive last year because their mothers chose life.

And, and she can't imagine the world without any of them. And so that, that it's just an amazing story.

And so, again, if you are able to support this cause, scan the

QR code and everything's going to be going equally between the two, between the two groups.

So with that being said, Kyle, again, thank you for your time.

Thank you guys so much for having me. And yeah, if anybody is following the Babylon Bee has stumbled upon this and we shared it on our socials and stuff, please check out that QR code that Chris had up on the screen and that will, and he'll, he'll still have it on the live stream and support

Lutherans for Life and the Women's Pregnancy Center. It's such great work that they're doing. And thank you so much for, to Pastor Chris for having me and to, and to the church.

Thank you guys. Thank you. And with that, we're going to end our stream and, and we'll, since we're in Minnesota, it'll be a couple hours before you guys actually leave from here.

We understand that. So this is the first goodbye, which means two hours from now, you'll be able to go out, leave the parking lot.