BREAKING: Babylon Bee pledges $250,000 towards ads on X to combat cancel culture

Elon Musk came up with the idea to buy Twitter in spring 2022 after The Babylon Bee was suspended from the platform for posting a joke about Biden's diversity hire Dr Rachel Levine. Now, amid an ad boycott due to a Media Matters hit piece on Musk, the Bee has pledged a $250,000 ad buy to help sustain the free speech platform.

"The Babylon Bee has pledged $250,000 towards ads on X," said Ashley St. Clair.

She quoted Edmund Burke's famous phrase: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

Seth Dillon, co-founder of Christian satire site The Babylon Bee, made the announcement on Twitter, now X.

"They attack Musk because they hate freedom, and they hate freedom because it threatens their power to control the narrative. It really is that simple," Dillon said.

"As others are pulling their ad spend to punish Musk for the crime of letting free people speak, the Bee is committing to spending more. Today I'm pledging $250,000 toward a new ad campaign on X. It's not a lot compared to the budgets of the anti-speech bullies, but it's something. And hopefully it will be multiplied by others who join us."

The Media Matters hit piece on Musk arrived amid accusations of anti-semitism both against Musk and X. Those leftist pundits, media outlets, and government officials who relished the censorship on the platform under previous leadership have balked at Musk's dedication to the First Amendment and free speech. They claim that there should be more content moderation. After a Media Matters researcher started looking for anti-semitic posts, that researcher found both those posts from small accounts and ads that, according to an X exec who spoke to the Financial Times, were following the researcher and not the anti-semitic posts.

"Ads follow the people on X, in this case the Media Matters researcher that was going to actively look for this content—that's how user targeting works. As it relates to the platform itself, control settings are in place there for every user and every brand," that X exec said.

The companies that stated their intentions to pull ads on X included Apple, Bravo (NBCUniversal), IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity (Comcast). The Biden White House also weighed in condemning Musk and X. The Biden admin and previously, his campaign, had been among the most egregious offenders of pushing Twitter to censor and suppress Americans' free speech on the platform. Officials with the FBI and White House encouraged the censorship of everything from stories about Hunter Biden's laptop, to Covid concerns, suspicions about the validity of the 2020 election, and more, claiming that it was "misinformation" or "disinformation."