It is now illegal to read, post, or share satire in the state of California unless joke-killing disclaimers are added.
No joke: In July 2024, California Gov. Gavin Newsom tweeted that a parody video of Vice President Kamala Harris should be "illegal." Reacting to the governor's dog whistle, the California Legislature passed two laws that treat the First Amendment like the former USSR's constitutional protection for free speech: a revocable gift from the government. The new laws empower the government to decide what speech is and is not acceptable in public political discourse. California's Orwellian "Ministry of Truth" treats the citizens as hopelessly incapable of discerning for themselves the difference between fact, opinion, parody, or satire.
The first law, AB 2839, applies around election time to any person or group who distributes "materially deceptive content" about candidates, elected officials, and other election material. It also requires people to put disclaimers on satirical posts, which defeats the point of satire. Who decides what is "materially deceptive?" Those in power, of course.
The second law, AB 2655, requires large online platforms to become apparatchiks of the state by sometimes labeling and other times taking down posts with "materially deceptive content" about elections. It is set to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2025.
These two laws are a perfect roadmap for widespread government censorship. By using vague standards like banning content "likely to harm" a candidate's "electoral prospects," heretofore known as campaigning, AB 2839 allows government officials to punish people for posting political memes that the officials dislike.
The law prohibits people from posting and reposting certain content online. And if someone posts a political meme or satirical story on social media, the law allows anyone who sees it and disagrees with it to sue the person who posted the content and collect attorney's fees. This is a recipe for political retaliation. In a culture already deeply divided over politics, pitting neighbor against neighbor in court over political speech, satirical or otherwise, only adds fuel to the fire.
Furthermore, AB 2655 forces large online platforms to become government censorship arms. This is a deeply disturbing trend that the Biden-Harris administration has already engaged in, and it is a blatant violation of the First Amendment's protection against government censorship.
As a satirical news website that focuses on religious and political news, The Babylon Bee would be forced to censor itself and/or place disclaimers on nearly all of its stories under these laws, which would kill the jokes it is trying to make. Similarly, Kelly Chang Rickert is a family law and divorce attorney in Los Angeles, California who regularly engages in political expression with the public. She would like to continue sharing political memes with her large social media following, but these laws threaten to punish her for doing so. Alliance Defending Freedom filed a lawsuit on behalf of The Bee and Rickert challenging California's unconstitutional laws.
H.L. Mencken once said, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard." Mencken might think Californians who elected legislators and a governor so susceptible to the authoritarian impulses commonly seen in dictatorial regimes around the world "deserve" the results of unconstitutional laws like AB 2839 and 2655. But thankfully, there are still Americans who understand the lessons of history that freedom lost is seldom regained easily; free speech is the lifeblood of a democratic republic; and the answer to speech with which one disagrees is not censorship but reasoned debate.
(And if you are reading this, Gov. Newsom, that is no joke.)
Lathan Watts is vice president of public affairs at Alliance Defending Freedom.
