This week, a federal judge said that Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) ban on memes is against the Constitution.
Judge John A. Mendez of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California said that Newsom’s AB 2839 “unconstitutionally stifles the free and unfettered exchange of ideas that is so important to American debate because it acts as a hammer instead of a scalpel.”
Chris Kohls, the satirist who fought to try to get rid of the rule, wrote on X, “VICTORY! We have won our lawsuit against Newsom.”
It looks like Elon Musk’s sharing of a Kohls joke may have sparked Democrats’ push for the ban. He wrote, “The court has stopped California’s unconstitutional law that violates your freedom of speech.” Yay!”
Online, Kohls goes by the name Mr. Reagan. On July 26, he shared a fake Kamala Harris campaign ad. The video had many of the same images as real Harris ads that were going around at the time, but it had a new script that was read by an AI that sounded a lot like Harris.
In the almost two-minute video, an AI voice says, “I, Kamala Harris, am your Democrat choice for president because Biden finally showed how stupid he is at the debate. I got the job because I’m the perfect example of diversity. I’m a woman and a person of color. You are both sexist and racist if you disagree with anything I say.”
“That’s okay to parody in America.”
A lot more people saw the movie after Elon Musk retweeted it, and it now has hundreds of millions of views. Democrats, both inside and outside of Harris’s campaign, were, of course, shocked.
A Harris campaign spokesman, Mia Ehrenberg, told the Associated Press, “We think the American people want the real opportunity Vice President Harris is giving; not the fake, twisted lies of Elon Musk and Donald Trump.”
Newsom also seemed upset about how popular the spoof video was. He wrote, “It should be illegal to change a voice in an ‘ad’ like this one. In just a few weeks, I’ll sign a bill to make sure it is.”
