Seth Dillon warns Liberty students about ‘radical conspiracists’ exploiting young Christians

By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter Saturday, October 24, 2026

Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon warned Liberty University students Wednesday that “radical conspiracists” are exploiting young Christians’ grievances to steer them toward hatred, singling out commentator Nick Fuentes.

Speaking at Liberty's Convocation, Dillon, who bought the satire site from founder Adam Ford in 2018, encouraged students to “get into the creative world.” He recalled that when the publication launched 10 years ago, there “was nobody who was doing comedy and satire from a Christian worldview perspective.”

“Most of the comedy that you were seeing was dominated by a secular progressive worldview,” he said. “The same worldview was being advanced no matter where you looked. Nobody was pushing back on that or doing comedy from another perspective.” 

Dillon described the content of The Babylon Bee as “Christian comedy that wasn’t cheesy” in addition to “telling jokes that were dealing with the issues in the culture because the philosophy that we have at The Babylon Bee is that the ideas that are permeating the culture that are being promoted, the popular narratives that are out there are often very harmful and damaging and they have to be dealt with one way or another.” He highlighted the value of “choosing to ridicule that which deserves to be ridiculed so that it isn’t taken seriously.”

“I think the primary reason we’ve gotten to this place that we’re in today culturally, where we have all these insane ideas that are so popular, so wildly popular, it’s because we took them seriously. We weren’t laughing at them. We weren’t mocking them,” he contended.

After highlighting the mission of The Babylon Bee, Dillon returned to his call for Christians to create. According to Dillon, “Christians need to engage the culture. And this is the philosophy behind The Babylon Bee is that one of the ways to do that is to create good content.”

Dillon expressed support for the late author C.S. Lewis' philosophy, paraphrasing him as saying, “We don’t need more Christian books,” but rather, “We need more good books written by Christians.” Maintaining that “the distinction is subtle but it’s significant,” Dillon acknowledged that explicitly Christian content “can still be good” while stressing that “if you want to have broad cultural reach and impact then you have to do something that’s going to engage the culture, meet them where they are.”

In addition to highlighting the need for Christians to gain a foothold in the culture, Dillon warned the audience that “You are the target of grifters and bad actors and radical conspiracists.” He noted that the “radical conspiracism that’s out there” stems from “resentment and grievance” following the time “when woke was really at its height in 2020 through 2022” in the form of “DEI hiring practices” and “discrimination against white people,” which was fueled by the scapegoating of “white people” and “men.” 

“People were scapegoated unfairly and vilified unfairly for years. And a lot of young people said: ‘I’m tired of that. I don’t like being treated as the villain. I don’t think I’m the villain,’” he acknowledged. He lamented that “radical conspiracists” seek to tap into the “freshly cultivated resentment and grievance that’s built up in young people” by telling them that they are “the victim” and that “there is a real oppressor out there and it’s not you.”

Describing this philosophy as a “very dark path,” Dillon explained that “it actually mirrors and looks just like the woke left’s worldview.” He identified Fuentes as a perpetrator of the worldview focused on the “systemic oppression that comes from the Jews,” which rests on the premise that “it’s actually white men, generally Christians, who are the victims of this oppression.”

“As Christians, we have to exercise discernment and see these things for what they are and see how they’re trying to appeal to what may be a very real resentment or grievance that we feel that has validity,” he said. 

Dillon advised against viewing the world “through that lens where you begin to see yourself as the oppressed and someone else is the oppressor and you begin to feel hatred in your heart towards other people that God Himself loves and gave His life for but you start to see them as the enemy and start feeling like you need to cast them off or denigrate them or curse them in Christ’s name.” 

“How do we as Christians engage in this environment where we now have more freedom than ever and people are out there abusing it, often with you being their target?” he asked. “They want to exploit you. They want to try to turn and twist your heart into these dark places where you start thinking about and believing these things. Where you wake up every day and you think about how Israel and the Jews are ruining everything, you’ve been sucked into this cult woke right mentality.” 

Dillon concluded his speech by telling students to “love everyone and share the Gospel with everyone,” adding, “Don’t feed the grifters who are just out for clicks and engagement at the expense of your soul.”