The Moral Case for Mockery

Bad ideas are everywhere… 

Spreading like viruses…

Infecting every area of our lives…

And driving millions of otherwise rational people to embrace the irrational.

Here’s one obvious example. It illustrates a broader point I want to make about — of all things — the moral importance of mockery.

Ready for this?

We’re told by so-called experts with straight faces that men can become women and women can become men.

We’re told that sex is assigned at birth, rather than observed, as if doctors just make their best guess whenever they see a newborn baby.

We’re told men can become pregnant and “chestfeed.”

These aren’t fringe ideas promoted by radicals on Reddit. They’re mainstream, endorsed by once-respected medical organizations, highly-educated doctors, and popular internet wellness sites.

Go to healthline.com and type in, “Can men get pregnant?” and you’ll find this answer:

“Yes, it’s possible for men to become pregnant and give birth to children of their own… In order to explain, we’ll need to break down some common misconceptions about how we understand the term ‘man.’”

So the people who just told us men can get pregnant are going to clear up misconceptions for us? Hmm, I don’t think so.

It would be bad enough if these ideas were merely popular, but they’ve quickly gone from mainstream to mandatory.

You can’t criticize them.

You can’t even joke about them.

Comedians risk being canceled, and in some cases physically attacked, for doing so.

In a twisted way, this all kind of makes sense.

In order to prop up an insane worldview that can’t be defended, or even coherently articulated, you have to insulate it from criticism—especially the comedic kind that employs mockery to expose foolishness.

It’s embarrassing to be exposed as a fool.

So, it can’t be tolerated.

My team at the Babylon Bee learned this the hard way when we made a joke about Rachel Levine, a transgender health admiral in the Biden administration.

USA Today had named Rachel Levine as one of their “Women of the Year.” They were serious. But Rachel Levine is no more a woman than I am.

So, we fired back with this satirical headline: “The Babylon Bee's Man Of The Year Is Rachel Levine.” 

The mockery, of course, was of USA Today — not the admiral.

Twitter — pre-Elon — was not amused. They locked our account for “hateful conduct.” “Delete the joke,” they said, “and you can have your account back.” We refused.

The intolerable truth you’re not allowed to speak is that Rachel Levine actually misgenders himself whenever he calls himself a woman. And pointing that out, no matter how it’s done, is not hateful conduct because the truth is not hate speech.

But this is how the system is rigged to safeguard bad ideas.

The leftists who dominate our media and culture are armed with both a sword and a shield. They can call anyone who differs with them a bigot, a transphobe, a Nazi. It doesn’t matter. They know, they’ll never get banned.

That’s the sword.

But if you joke about the Left’s lunacy, you’ll be suspended or even banned for hateful conduct.

That’s the shield.

So how did we get to the point where it’s considered hateful to tell the truth, even in jest?

The answer is simple: We took bad ideas too seriously.

Instead of laughing at absurd notions like men can get pregnant or the planet will burn up in ten years if we don’t ban fossil fuels or that morbid obesity is healthy — to name just a few — we tolerated them.

The absurd has become sacred because it hasn’t been sufficiently mocked.

But isn’t mockery mean and cruel? Well, that depends.

We’re not talking about mockery for the purpose of putting people down and making them feel bad.

We’re talking about using it as a tool to expose foolishness for what it is, so that it isn’t taken seriously.

Mockery of this kind is not only cleansing, it’s a moral imperative. Why? Because bad ideas can have catastrophic consequences. Ask any mutilated teen who now regrets having gender transition surgery. Or any married couple who didn’t have children because of “climate change,” or any obese person who now has diabetes because being overweight is supposed to be okay.

Imagine if the ideas that produced these results had been laughed at instead of lauded.

So many things are off limits in comedy and culture now.  And too many people think this represents progress. They think we’ve improved morally because we make fun of fewer things.

The truth is we’re more confused than ever because we’ve affirmed and accepted what should have been ridiculed and rejected.

If our goal is moral improvement, we need more mockery, not less.

I'm Seth Dillon, CEO of the Babylon Bee, for Prager University.