Death of comedy 'a danger' to country, Vivek Ramaswamy warns Babylon Bee CEO
Former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy stressed the importance of comedy to a free society and floated the idea that "wokeism" could legally be treated as a religion under civil rights statutes, thereby preventing employers from forcing it on their employees.
After Ramaswamy dropped out of the GOP primary and endorsed former President Donald Trump earlier this month, The Babylon Bee took flak on social media for a satirical headline suggesting that Ramaswamy had been offered a job in the administration running the White House's 7-Eleven.
Ramaswamy took the joke in stride, sarcastically telling Dillon that he found it "devastating" and that he might have to undergo therapy because of it. The two went on during their wide-ranging discussion to talk about the dangers of being too easily offended, and the threat that such a mindset poses to free speech.
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Vivek Ramaswamy sits down with Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon to discuss rallying behind Donald Trump, social media censorship, Nikki Haley ruining America, and how he really felt about that one 7-Eleven joke.
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) January 26, 2024
Timestamps:
0:08 That 7-Eleven Joke
4:20 Comedy
9:01 DeSantis and Nikki… pic.twitter.com/sUjY80UxdA
Noting that there is "a hunger for sanctimony right now," Ramaswamy said there is "a hierarchy of holiness" in the culture that finds its ultimate expression in the impulse to clamp down on speech.
"We live in a society of hierarchies," Ramaswamy said. "There's the intersectional hierarchy of who's the higher victim on a totem pole, and then there's the opposite totem pole based on who's actually more virtuous, based on sanctimony shown to those who may have been in a more oppressed class."
"And it's just a weird thing going on in our culture more broadly, where people are so eager to be offended that they even lose their anchoring to what they're actually offended about in the first place," he added.
Ramaswamy suggested the impulse to censor jokes and other speech is ultimately one that emerges from "self-indulgence," and warned that it poses a threat to liberty.
"Humor being treated as harmful is not dangerous; that's annoying," he said. "I think the part that's dangerous is the people who most will abuse the death of comedy or the assault on comedy, will be those who actually are in power, [who] are using it to silence dissent."
Humor has the ability to hold leaders accountable more than anything else, Ramaswamy said, who noted how even the ancient Romans were able to get what they wanted from their emperors by mocking them.
"If we think about the greatest tyrants or autocrats throughout human history, what they eventually do is they suppress comedic relief," he said. "But one of the things that they're most responsive to is actually people who are hitting them at the expense of a joke. That actually is a way that you hold people accountable, especially the kinds of people who need to be held accountable."
Ramaswamy added that he believes comedy "is one of the levers we have to hold people in positions of power accountable for their failures," and that losing it is both "a loss" and "a danger" for the country.
The two later pivoted to talking about Big Tech censorship and how private companies are getting involved with stifling dissent. Dillon noted that The Babylon Bee's Twitter account was suspended after the outlet labeled U.S. Assistant Secretary of Health Rachel (Richard) Levine their "Man of the Year."
Their account was reinstated in November 2022 after Elon Musk took over the company.
Ramaswamy also suggested that liberal "wokeism" has all the trappings of a religion, and that it could potentially be labeled as such under civil rights statutes, which he said would prevent employers from forcing their employees to accept it.
"The religion prong of the civil rights statutes say that you can't discriminate against an employee based on his religion if you're a large employer, but it also means that you can't force your employee to bow down to your religion," he said.
"So if what's happening today — effectively threatening to fire somebody because they wore a MAGA hat or they had the wrong political posts online — if that's effectively like forcing your employee to bow down to your religion, then I think you have a good argument in the tech companies cases that forcing the employees to do that [is a civil rights violation]," he insisted.
Ramaswamy brought up how a federal court ruled in 2016 that a belief system known as "Onionhead" was considered a protected religion for the purposes of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits religious imposition by an employer.
In EEOC v. United Health Programs of America, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York ruled in favor of plaintiffs who alleged reverse religious discrimination when they were fired for declining Onionhead-related meetings and workshops.
"If Onionhead counts as a religion, modern woke leftism definitely meets the Supreme Court's test to a tee: a comprehensive belief system, certain words you can't say, clothes you can't wear, apologies you must recite," Ramaswamy said. "So I wouldn't go so far as to say there's no precedent for it."
Ramaswamy conceded that such is "a little bit more creative as a legal argument."
Jon Brown is a reporter for The Christian Post. Send news tips to [email protected]
