Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon was the keynote speaker at the annual Pro-Life Wisconsin Love for Life Gala on Saturday, Sept. 14, at the Brookfield Conference Center. (Photos by Andy Gilicinski)
As a younger man, Seth Dillon had to fight just to stay in school at his Christian college.
“I have always loved satire and almost got kicked out of my Christian university for writing satire. I was anonymously publishing articles that I was emailing to the entire listserv, and I don’t recommend doing that,” the CEO of the satirical Babylon Bee said as the keynote speaker at Pro-Life Wisconsin’s 32nd annual Love for Life Gala on Saturday, Sept. 14, at the Brookfield Conference Center.
“They traced the articles back to my IP address and confiscated my computer in the middle of the night, then dragged me before the board to justify why I should stay at the school. It was kind of intimidating, but they showed a bit of grace and allowed me to stay.”
Nowadays, Dillon fights with abandon to save the preborn. He said unborn babies are very clearly developing humans and dismissed efforts from some pro-choice activists to diminish life based on its developmental stage, whether it can think, feel pain or have other such experiences.
“It doesn’t matter how many friends you have or what kind of platform you have, if you are the one at your table who is willing to say what’s true, it will embolden others to speak the truth and speak it boldly. Courage is contagious and evil prevails when good men do nothing,” Dillon said. “It is wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human life. Abortion intentionally kills an innocent human life. You have to be willing to say what’s true or we will lose the fight for life and truth and beauty and goodness.”
As he led the opening prayer for the event, Archbishop Jerome E. Listecki said, “The battle for life was predicted by St. John Paul II in ‘Evangelium Vitae’ when he spoke of ‘the value of human life and its inviolability,’ and ‘a pressing appeal addressed to each and every person in the name of God: Respect, protect, love and serve life, every human life. Only in this direction will you find justice, development, true freedom, peace and happiness.’”
St. John Paul II painted a disturbing picture of the culture of death, the archbishop continued. “We are living in a culture of contradiction, where abortion is protected as a business and those who are pro-life are called extremists. The end of Roe v. Wade should have been a great outcome, and we should be protecting these little ones.”
After quoting the Declaration of Independence, especially the part that says life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable rights, he said, “All rights begin with the right to life. From there all other freedoms flow.”
Citing his publication’s tagline of “Fake news you can trust,” Dillon combined humor with his zeal for the unborn in his keynote address.
Throughout his talk, Dillon poked fun at politics on both sides of the aisle and demonstrated many examples of the Bee’s satirical articles that have come true since he became the CEO in 2018.
While his college days are long past, Dillon admits he is still punished for writing satire.
“A common misconception is that our job is easier than ever because the world is so crazy. There is a lot of low-hanging fruit and a target-rich environment with so much to make fun of — you have probably thought that to yourself,” he said. “They have said to me, ‘But the job of the satirist is to exaggerate what’s going on in the world, so you have to caricature it, you have to go a step beyond reality and exaggerate.’ How in the world are we supposed to exaggerate what’s happening right now?”
Dillon chronicled 110 headlines that have come true after they published satirical articles. One such headline announced California Governor Gavin Newsom as the U-Haul Salesperson of the Year, mocking the mass migration out of California in 2020 and 2021.
“Then we saw this real headline, ‘Californians fleeing for Texas so fast U-Haul ran out of trucks,’” he said.
While it is amusing when the jokes come true, Dillon said it is disconcerting that we live in a world where it’s difficult to stay ahead of the curve by telling jokes when they keep coming true.
Dillon spoke of the many times Facebook and Twitter censored him, even to the point of putting him in “Twitter jail” with President Trump, until Elon Musk purchased the platform.
“Elon called me and told me that there will no longer be censorship for humor,” Dillon said. “We need people in this country who understand and recognize that being silent and censoring ourselves is not the way we will change things. We need to stand up and work together to stand for truth, beauty and goodness because there is an all-out war on these things.”
Dan Miller, State Director of Pro-Life Wisconsin, outlined many of the organization’s activities, from sidewalk counseling to legislative efforts to educating pregnant women about the beauty of life.
“Thanks to the efforts of pro-life sidewalk counselors, 87 babies have been saved from abortion in Wisconsin this year,” Miller said. “We always need more sidewalk counselors, and we are grateful for the 54 pregnancy centers in Wisconsin.”
Thanks to generous donors, Pro-Life Wisconsin has been able to enact polygonning, which provides the ability to provide pro-life options, such as giving information about pregnancy help centers to women contemplating an abortion.
The digital advertising is expensive, but Pro-Life Wisconsin Development Director Kraig Sorvick said the cost of the geolocational data is well worth it.
“Babies deserve to be born, not forced to die,” Sorvick said.
