Yesterday, Twitter suspended the account of satirical site The Babylon Bee for a post that jokingly named Rachel Levine, the transgender Assistant Secretary for Health, “Man of the Year.” Here, editor-in-chief Kyle Mann, co-author of “The Babylon Bee Guide to Wokeness,” explains why he isn’t going to back down to the social media giant’s demands.

Well, it finally happened (we’re kind of surprised it didn’t happen sooner): The Babylon Bee has been locked out of our Twitter account.

The satirical article that offended the Twitter overlords? “The Babylon Bee’s Man Of The Year Is Rachel Levine.” For the simple offense of labeling a biological man a man, through a satirical headline, we have lost access to all 1.3 million of our followers on Twitter.

A world where you can state a simple biological fact and face censorship, the loss of revenue and your livelihood, and excommunication from the public square for stating truth, no matter how satirical tongue-in-cheek your tone is, is a scary one indeed. As the famous Ron Paul saying goes, “Truth is treason in the empire of lies.”

Boy, are we feeling that today. (Can I still say “boy” or will that get me banned too?)

Of course, there’s some nuance here: we’re satire. We’re comedy. The primary goal of our satire is to bring levity and laughter to our audience. The fact that a purely comedic account can get banned for a joke — admittedly one that’s particularly spicy in our current cultural climate — should worry everyone about the health of our society. When cultural revolutions happen, the comics and entertainers are the first to be targeted by the revolutionaries. Those looking to upend our society know the power of entertainment and satire, for they use it to great effect as they spread their ideas to the next generation.

Control the comedians, control the messaging, and you control the minds of the people.

And indeed, it’s control over our minds that Twitter wants. They can’t just delete the offending tweet and let us back in. They want us to go into our account and click the delete button ourselves. We have to bend the knee, kiss the ring, bow to the towering statue of LGBTQ politics when the trumpets play, or we stay on timeout indefinitely. We have to promise to do better, implicitly agree that calling a man a man is hate speech, and then we’ll be allowed the right to speak on Twitter’s platform.

Well, we’re not going to do that. We’re fighting back. We’ll do whatever we have to do to retain our integrity here. As Orwell wrote, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

If we give that up, if we agree to succumb to their ideological madness simply to access a wider audience, we’re giving up our minds, the last holdout against tyranny. We’ll wait Twitter out, we’ll appeal Twitter’s decision, we’ll spread the message far and wide that we’ve been kicked out for “hate speech” simply for telling a joke Big Tech did not like.

It’s time to take a stand, and that time is now. If we wait any longer, we may no longer have that chance. We’ve been incredibly blessed at The Babylon Bee in that we have a healthy number of paying subscribers who help us keep the lights on, and we’re going to use that to stand firm here and do what’s right. We’ll continue to spread our comedy and tell our jokes that communicate truth to a culture that hates truth on whatever platforms will allow us to, and we’re grateful for those who stand alongside us in this fight.