The Babylon Bee has come a long way since its days as a small comedy website making in-jokes about dispensational theology.
In a mere eight years, it’s become a major media company with the clout to land interviews with Elon Musk and John Cleese, while arguably overtaking the Onion as America’s best satire website.
Mann’s shrewd portrayal of an overconfident yet ignorant man-child who sees the world through the simplistic lens of superheroes and supervillains deftly mocks what passes for journalism these days.
Like that formerly great institution, the Bee can be a little hacky or partisan at times, but it’s consistently funny and regularly risks the occasional big swing.
The Bee’s books “The Postmodern Pilgrim’s Progress” and “How to Be a Perfect Christian,” for example, are both funny and surprisingly honest about modern challenges in the evangelical world. Having met a few of the Bee’s writers and seeing them grow, I’m generally impressed by the wit and cultural relevance the site exhibits.
So I was particularly eager for the release of the company’s first feature film, “January 6: The Most Deadliest Day.”
The film follows “investigative journalist” Garth Strudelfudd (Babylon Bee editor Kyle Mann, also credited as writer) as he bumbles his way through interviews with conservative pundits and January 6 participants in an attempt to uncover the truth about the darkest day in American history.
Much of the joke here is Mann’s earnest investigative journalist persona: He is a deluded crusader convinced that his efforts are crucial to both saving democracy and honoring the “billions” of people who died that day.
There’s no mistaking the movie’s target audience; it’s unlikely that anyone who sees January 6 as a brush with a fascist coup will have his mind changed by what Michael Knowles or Dennis Prager has to say. The pundits in the film are content to make the usual observations about media malfeasance and declining public trust, while pointing out once again that Trump never actually called for violence.
“The Most Deadliest Day” flirts with actual journalism when it focuses on infamous January 6 participants like Jacob Chansley and Adam Johnson. But instead of taking this opportunity to humanize the people labeled as “insurrectionists” by the mainstream media, the movie mostly uses them as props to expose the vacuousness of its fake journalists.
And ultimately it is the media that “The Most Deadliest Day” means to target. This isn’t meant to be a hard-hitting expose in the manner of Tucker Carlson or the Epoch Times. Nor is it meant to reach out to those for whom January 6 is one of the high holidays of the liberal liturgical calendar. Unlike Matt Walsh’s recent “Am I Racist?” “The Most Deadliest Day” stays behind a subscriber paywall, explicitly marking it for those already in on the joke.
As I’ve written previously, the great risk of every conservative documentary is that it sacrifices persuasion on the altar of reassuring propaganda. But sometimes reassuring propaganda is what’s called for.
The Bee knows its audience, and the audience is fed up with media-fueled January 6 hysteria, especially as it ramps up ahead of next month’s contentious election. Mann’s shrewd portrayal of an overconfident yet ignorant man-child who sees the world through the simplistic lens of superheroes and supervillains deftly mocks what passes for journalism these days, and it’s both satisfying and often hilarious.