For some time, Babylon Bee top staff have been waging a war against what they call “the woke right”. Here’s the brief synopsis of how they think:
I didn’t say they were white identitarians. Wokeness is an operating system that’s been adopted by white identitarians, but it’s not exclusive to them. Anyone can plug in their own parameters.— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) May 11, 2025
Alright. But it’s not just about White identitarianism. It’s anything that “goes against the American founding,” by which of course they mean the postwar managerial capitalist consensus. C. Jay Engel points out that postwar managerial capitalism is not the only political viewpoint that Americans have ever had:
The drama of the now is that Joel Berry, Managing Editor of the satirical Babylon Bee, is grilling New Founding CEO Nate Fischer about what views he is allowed to have:
Fischer responds that he’s not into performative denunciations:
I don’t make a practice of performative denunciation.
I’m open to listening to a wide range of ideas. I want to move in a direction as closely anchored to the American tradition as possible, and I’m open-minded about what this entails.
Certainly some republican elements are…— Nate Fischer (@NateAFischer) June 30, 2025
The deeper context is the ongoing war between Babylon Bee staff and what they call the “woke right,” meaning the Reactionary Right, a political viewpoint or family of viewpoints with a great deal of influence among the more intellectually developed echelons of the MAGA milieu. Anything that has a whiff too strong of any vertex of the reactionary trichotomy is to be denounced, according to this Babylon Bee viewpoint:
New Founding in particular probably orbits most closely to Techno-Commercialists. In techno-commercialist reactionary parlance, the wisdom of democracy is questioned and the possible merits of monarchy are discussed. Joel has a pithy response to this:
No King but Christ, you redcoat. https://t.co/uY5FUJDpUS— Joel Berry (@JoelWBerry) June 30, 2025
Of course, Christians throughout the history of Europe had no problem with monarchical government. In fact it was argued by Haller and others that monarchy is the only theologically legitimate form of government.
Babylon Bee editor Joel Berry and CEO Seth Dillon have become so wrapped up in their war with the “Alt Right” or “Woke Right” that it has become almost the exclusive topic of concern on their respective Twitter accounts. For those who are not extremely online, this discussion can be confusing since the contours of the Reactionary Right are not immediately apparent to anyone who doesn’t read a lot of political debates on Twitter. To Joel and Seth however, it is the primary threat to our democracy.
It should be interesting to see how this “front line” against the Reactionary Right develops.
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