Seth Dillon, CEO of The Babylon Bee, tweeted from his personal account that the satirical Christian website had been locked out of its Twitter account for a March 16, 2022, post that read, “The Babylon Bee’s Man of the Year is Rachel Levine.”
Twitter, which has almost 400 million users, told The Bee that it was locked out for “violating our rules against hateful conduct” which state, “You may not promote violence against, threaten or harass other people on the basis of … gender identity …”
I just received this notice that we’ve been locked out of our account for “hateful conduct.” pic.twitter.com/udMriKcDr6
— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) March 20, 2022
The Babylon Bee posted the tweet mocking USA Today’s selection of Dr. Rachel Levine as one of its “Women of the Year 2022.”
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) March 16, 2022
Dr. Levine was born male, lived as Richard Levine for more than 50 years, married, and fathered two children. The doctor began “transitioning” around 2008 and announced his “transgenderism” around 2011.
Levine became U.S. assistant secretary for health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in March 2021 and was appointed as a four-star Admiral to head up the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps in in October 2021.
Levine told USA Today of his concern for “the challenges women and girls face related to body image, saying “We need to be welcoming and celebratory for women of all aspects of all sizes and shapes.”
USA Today asked Levine, “What is your definition of courage?”
Dr. Levine responded, “I think my definition of courage would be to be true to yourself, be true to who you are and then to pay that forward, to work towards the common good. That’s what I have always tried to do.”
Rather than adhering to the anodyne cliché, “Be true to yourself,” with its individualized, changeable, internal definition of truth, Dillon and The Bee are holding to real objective truth: Men and women are different, men can’t change into women, and women can’t change into men.
The company was told by Twitter that its account could be re-opened if it deleted the post
The CEO responded, “We’re not deleting anything. Truth is not hate speech. If the cost of telling the truth is the loss of our Twitter account, then so be it.”
We're not deleting anything. Truth is not hate speech. If the cost of telling the truth is the loss of our Twitter account, then so be it.
— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) March 20, 2022
He added, “They could, of course, delete the tweet themselves. But they won’t. It’s not enough for them to just wipe it out. They want us to bend the knee and admit that we engaged in hateful conduct.”
They could, of course, delete the tweet themselves. But they won't. It's not enough for them to just wipe it out. They want us to bend the knee and admit that we engaged in hateful conduct.
— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) March 21, 2022
Dillon also tweeted suggestions for how people can help The Bee, giving three suggestions:
- Never censor yourself. Insist that 2 and 2 make 4 even if Twitter tries to compel you to say otherwise. Make them ban tens of millions of us.
- Get on our email list so we have direct contact with you. It’s not a perfect solution – email service providers have censored us, too – but at least we own our email list and can take it with us.
- Become a premium subscriber. If enough of you do that, we won’t need traffic from big tech platforms to generate revenue.
Related articles and resources:
Biden to Nominate Controversial Transgender Doctor for Assistant Health and Human Services Secretary
Focus on the Family Broadcast, Part 1 and Part 2, with Rod Dreher, author of Live Not by Lies
Focus on the Family: Transgender Resources
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution, by Carl R. Trueman
Twitter Locks Out ‘The Daily Citizen’ Over Factual Reporting on Biden’s Transgender Nominee
Photo from Facebook.
