Inside the Beehive

The Babylon Bee is a right-wing satire site that borrows a format from the satirical news outlet The Onion while amplifying far-right rhetoric and disinformation. Its sister site, Not the Bee, is a junk-news site with salacious headlines about culture-war issues designed to stir up right-wing outrage. Dillon, who purchased the Bee in 2018, has been tight-lipped about his past businesses, with prior biographical articles making only vague references to his history in “e-commerce” or a “legal filing service.”

Publicly available data reveals that from 2004 to 2011, Dillon operated two term-paper writing services, Custom-Writing.com and TheWriteElements.com, which charged up to $18.95 per page to write term papers for college students.

The Write Elements website listed Dillon’s phone number, and that same phone number appeared in data sets stolen from Elance, a now-defunct freelancer search service, and later leaked to the public internet, where the Data Lab viewed it. Along with the phone number, the Elance data breach also listed email addresses for “sdillon” and “Seth Dillon” at both of the term-paper websites.

The Custom-Writing.com site claimed to have been in business since 2001, and both term-paper businesses were located in Palm Beach County, Florida, according to information posted on the now-defunct essay mill websites.

Seth Dillon attended Palm Beach Atlantic University, a Christian college, in Palm Beach County from 2000 to 2004. He has had several residences there, including his current home in upscale Jupiter.

In a 2006 review of Custom-Writing.com, one customer complained:

Their prices were so low that made me go with this company. Also the fact that I have paid them by paypal made me think that this company is for real and trustful. Unfortunately, none of the 3 essays were never done by them. Every last day they were supposed to finish and send the essay to me, they claimed that they have lost contact with the writer or couldn’t deal with my topic, even though I was contacting with them every now and them and asking about hte [sic] progress, telling me that everything is according to schedule.

Another customer said they received a paper from the service that they believed to be “plagiarized.”

In 2009, Dillon appears to have begun transitioning TheWriteElements into a business called Optisearch Marketing LLC. In 2009, the Optisearch contact information and tagline appeared on multiple pages of TheWriteElements.com website.

In 2011, Florida passed a law making term-paper mills illegal.

‘Money for nothing’

In 2014, Dillon registered a Delaware company called Volentric LLC in Florida. Volentric appears to serve as a parent company for a slew of business ventures – including NameChangeResources.org, ConcealedCarryServices.org and ExpressFilings.com – that purport to help consumers fill out government paperwork, for a fee.

One user of one of Dillon’s name-change websites explained in 2017: “I thought it was a place where I can change my name but it’s not. You still need to go to each areas [sic] (state, postal office, etc) and change your name. It’s useless place [sic] where they charge you money for nothing.”

The Madison County, Alabama, sheriff’s office went as far as to issue a warning to consumers about Dillon’s ConcealedCarryServices.org, stating, “We do not advise you to pay for information that is available to you from your sheriff’s office.”

A Wisconsin domestic violence shelter warned victims of domestic violence about using the website to apply for restraining orders.

In 2019, Dillon transferred the ownership of Volentric to James Zugelder, admissions director at Dillon’s alma mater, Palm Beach Atlantic University. Dillon also claimed in a 2020 interview to have donated $300,000 to the university to start a new master’s degree program in an unnamed discipline.

From Babylon Bee to Not the Bee

After purchasing The Babylon Bee from Adam Ford in 2018, Dillon launched a sister site called Not the Bee, with the tagline “your source for headlines that should be satire, but aren't.”

Despite the claim to be “humor-based,” many Not the Bee stories feature strongly anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-immigrant themes.

Nearly 600 stories on the site were tagged “Illegal Immigration,” “Biden’s Border Bloodbath,” “Border Crisis,” “Deportation Now,” “Build the Wall” or “Great Replacement,” while the word “illegals,” a dehumanizing word used to refer to undocumented immigrants, was used in 109 stories.

More than 800 stories were tagged “Transgenderism,” “Transgender Craze,” “LGBT,” “Trans Cult” or “Trans the Kids.” These stories frequently misgender and mock the appearances of trans people, and some refer to Bible quotes about “millstones” being tied around the necks of LGBTQ+ people. Another 96 stories were tagged “Libs of TikTok,” promoting content from Chaya Raichik, an anti-LGBTQ+ extremist. Bee owner Seth Dillon stated on Twitter in 2022 that he “worked out a deal” with Raichik to financially support her and her videos.

In 2022, the social platform Twitter, now known as X, suspended the Babylon Bee account for hateful posts aimed at U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Rachel Levine, a transgender woman. Eight months later, after Elon Musk took over the platform, Twitter reversed its decision and reinstated the account. Not the Bee was not suspended by Twitter.

Not the Bee is not so secure

The Not the Bee website’s publicly viewable source code exposes contact information for several dozen authors, including the real names of many of the most prolific pseudonymous content creators. The source code, visible to anyone with a web browser and not requiring an account on the site to view, also revealed email addresses, IP addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, social media accounts, subscription and payment information, and more.

Dan Dillon, brother of Seth Dillon, took credit for programming the Not the Bee website and told users that “your name/location/email will never be shared if you don’t want it to be.” Dan Dillon’s exposed author data shows his email address, IP address, date of birth, phone number and billing information. These data points match those of other authors in the system, including “David Doppelganger” (11 articles) and “Thinkr” (5 articles). Thinkr is a technology company also associated with Seth Dillon’s Volentric.

Dan Dillon replied to a request for comment by characterizing this article’s findings as “not interesting.” He did not reply to a question regarding the exposure of pseudonymous authors’ personal information.

Adam Ford, founder of Babylon Bee and Disrn, a news website that was later folded into Not the Bee, has written about 140 articles for the site under his real name. Ford’s contact information in the data exposed by the website is similar or identical to that listed for several other pseudonymous authors, including “Harambe” (1,330 articles), “Hamilton Porter” (1,074 articles, mostly about sports), “Doc Holliday” (466 articles), “Edward Teach” (374 articles, mostly about education) and “Neo” (105 articles, mostly about technology). The source code for another author, “Holly Ash” (569 articles), displayed information that connects to a YouTube profile featuring videos of Adam Ford.

Articles published under these pseudonyms call a pediatrician a “child butcherer,” refer to a trans athlete as a “little farce” and described a Pride event at a major hospital as being “about being who you are,” even if that’s a “groomer and predator.”

Ford declined to respond to a request for comment and instead insulted the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Joel Berry, who is the managing editor of The Babylon Bee according to his LinkedIn profile, has written about 20 articles for the site under his own name. However, the data exposed about Berry by the website also matches to a pseudonymous writer, “Davy Crockett,” who has written 140 articles, nearly all of which stoke fear about immigration with headlines about migrant crime waves and “illegal invaders” taking American jobs.

One such story written by “Davy Crockett” used a pro-Biden flyer supposedly found at a migrant aid center to bolster an argument that the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory is actually “cold hard facts.”

Berry did not respond to a request for comment.

Exposed site data shows that writers “Harris Rigby” and “Harriet Rigby” are Drew Anthony Glover and Julia “Julie” Auburn Glover Martinez, who are siblings originally from Alabama. Martinez has posted over 550 articles on Not the Bee. Glover, now residing in Tennessee, has posted nearly 3,000 articles, including pieces calling the “great replacement” conspiracy theory “obvious,” stating that a doctor is “a professional baby killer” and referring to LGBTQ+ Pride Month events as part of a “nationwide effort to sexualize kids.”

Glover and Martinez did not respond to requests for comment.

The user “Planet Moron” has maintained a separate web presence as a blogger for nearly 20 years, but since 2020 has written over 600 articles for Not the Bee. Exposed author information indicates that “Planet Moron” is the pseudonym of Jonathan D. Fotos, a fitness instructor from Arlington, Virginia. “Planet Moron” is a prolific writer on culture-war issues. One article mocks transgender children as “mentally ill tween[s]” who are “the economic lifeblood of the multi-billion-dollar trans industry.”

Fotos did not respond to a request for comment.

“Dr. Subtilis” has written nine pieces for the site. The author information exposed by the website matches to Withers Grant Horner II, a professor of English at The Master’s University. In at least one article, “Dr. Subtilis” confirms that he is a professor. Articles published under his pseudonym contemptuously cover higher education. The writing mocks the former president of Harvard University for “wearing the costume of impressive intellectual prowess” and for being a “senior scholar who is caught lying.”

Horner did not respond to a request for comment.

The author going by “Cardinal Pritchard” has penned more than 1,700 articles. Exposed author data matches that of Taylor “TJ” Sellnow of Wisconsin. “Cardinal Pritchard” writes articles calling LGBTQ+ Pride Month parade attendees “pedos” and deriding transgender people as a mutilation cult.

Sellnow did not respond to a request for comment.

Peter Heck has written over 600 articles for the site using his real name and profile photo. Heck is a public high school teacher who works for the Eastern Howard school system in Greentown, Indiana. Heck’s political activities were the subject of a 2015 article discussing whether the relationship between church and state in Greentown schools was too close. Heck himself has argued that “the Bible be taught, discussed, analyzed, explained and understood in every public school in the United States.” On Not the Bee, Heck has referenced his position as an educator in articles that mock transgender children and call on teachers to intervene when students want to change names or pronouns, even if it represents a safety issue for the students.

Heck did not respond to a request for comment.

Elias-John Fernandez-Aubert contributed to this story.

Image at top: Photo illustration by the SPLC