Readers of the Bee,

Ten years.

That’s how long we’ve been competing with CNN for the top spot in funny fake news.

That’s how long we’ve been trying to come up with jokes that are funnier than whatever Democrats are doing in real life.

That’s how long we’ve been fighting for free speech against the censors.

Ten years.

It’s an improbable story. The Babylon Bee was born in March of 2016 without any funding or staff. It was just a good idea floating around in the mind of Adam Ford until he decided to make it a reality. He had no staff. No funding. No business model. Just a Wordpress template and a domain name – and a belief that bad ideas must be ridiculed. 

That was 2016. In the ten years since, the Bee has grown from a one-man operation into the most popular satire site in the world. We’ve published thousands of headlines. We’ve been fact-checked, smeared, and censored. We’ve testified before Congress and won victories in the courtroom. We’ve been invited onto the largest platforms to talk about our story. We’ve used the God-given gift of humor to speak truth into the culture, including the most important truth of all – that Jesus Christ is the savior of the world.

And despite all the opposition we’ve faced, we’re still here ten years later.

Some of you might remember when Twitter locked us out of our account for a joke we made about Rachel Levine. USA Today had named Levine, a man wearing a dress and makeup, their “Woman of the Year.” In response, we published an article naming Levine our pick for “Man of the Year.” Twitter called it “hateful conduct” and told us to delete the tweet. But they didn’t just want us to take it down. They wanted us to check a box saying we’d engaged in hateful conduct. They wanted us to lie and censor ourselves.

We said no.

We knew what that meant. Losing access to millions of followers. A huge chunk of our traffic and revenue, gone. But there are things you can’t put a price tag on, and the freedom to say what’s true is one of them.

Elon Musk felt the same way. He bought Twitter and restored the Bee, which felt like a huge win until we handed him an IOU for $44 billion. 

But here’s what I really want you to know. None of this happened because we had funding from the outside. It all happened because of you.

Our readers — and especially our subscribers — are the reason the Bee exists today. When we lost our Twitter account, our subscribers kept the lights on. When advertisers backed away, our subscribers closed the gap. Every time someone tried to shut us down, it was our subscribers who made sure we could keep going. 

We don’t answer to investors. We don’t answer to advertisers. We answer only to you. That’s the way it should be, and it’s the only reason we’ve been able to take the costly stands that we have.

Some of you haven’t been in a position to support us financially. That’s okay. We’d never ask you to do something you can’t afford. Leave that to your wives or Joel Osteen.

But the rest of you can make a real difference. You can keep us in business for another decade. You can even help us pay down our debt to Elon Musk.

This is your opportunity to buy our forgiveness for not subscribing sooner.

So here’s my humble ask: Will you join us in the fight and become a paid subscriber? If we’re going to make it another ten years, we need all the help we can get. And we won’t accept funding from anyone else – not even Israel.

We’ve got big plans in the works. Movies and shows and books and more of the comedy that made you a fan in the first place. Ten years in, the mission hasn’t changed: tell the truth, make people laugh, and never apologize for any of it.

Thanks for standing with us for a decade. With your support, the next will be even better.