When Reality Meets the Babylon Bee

Ever since the Babylon Bee was founded in 2016, something uncanny has happened: the world has become even more absurd than the imaginings of its writers. 

As with The Simpsons, if something appears in the imagination of Bee writers, it soon shows up in our newsfeeds as a real thing. 

For example:

JUST IN: Woman has meltdown because Trump shut down her job where she studied “how to safely collect s*xual orientation and gender identity” practices.

Lmao. You literally can’t tell what’s a parody anymore.

“I was told to stop work immediately and that no more research… pic.twitter.com/fdOBSHMEP2

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) February 19, 2025

“Safely collect sexual orientation and gender identity” of cancer patients? Really?

How about try this: ask the patient if you need to know. There really is no need for millions of dollars in research funding from the federal government to tell you that if a question is medically relevant then a medical practitioner should ask it and note the answer. 

But of course, we know the truth: the money was being pushed out the door not for scientific reasons but to check a genderqueer alphabet research funding box. Bureaucrats up the chain wanted to fund things in this space so somebody invented a “study” to fit the criteria, and the money flowed. 

This wasn’t cancer research. “Cancer” was the funding hook.

27% of all National Science Foundation grants awarded last year went to DEI, according to an analysis by @tedcruz. The database is searchable at the below link.

These are science grants to activists who say the scientific method, the written word, and peer review are racist. pic.twitter.com/DFPFbZY9Lq

— Luke Rosiak (@lukerosiak) February 10, 2025

Federal science spending is filled with similar grifts, with somewhere around 25% of US science funding going to DEI-related “studies.” It got so bad that scientists were looking for ways to shoehorn in gender or sexuality into everything, including astronomy. 

.@sciam is on drugs again. https://t.co/wrrtLcdOkJ

— Will Kinney (@WKCosmo) January 5, 2024

Alphabet ideology and “critical studies” are where the money went, and where the money goes, so do the researchers. 97% of all researchers agree with the people who pay them to say things, and over the past few years, the market has been not in cancer cures but in alphabet ideology and NetZero research. 

Yes. Look at how much DEI has been injected into fields like geosciences or mathematics. https://t.co/Sj9dJkRQPP pic.twitter.com/FQIc0nu43G

— Jonatan Pallesen (@jonatanpallesen) February 10, 2025

The irony is that when these people go out to protest, they unintentionally sound funny or pathetic. Imagine the average person hearing this entitled twit complaining that she is no longer getting paid to make nonbinary people feel safe talking about their gender. 

Most of us would think that the cancer-ridden trans person is more worried about their cancer than anything else, but what do I know?

I am a big believer that investments in scientific research are important, but we can’t keep throwing money out the door to conduct ideological BS research to produce propaganda that makes life worse for everyone. 

When I hear somebody is doing “cancer research,” I want the research to be about CANCER, not gender identity BS. Until it is I will support cut after cut after cut.