In a satirical video posted on YouTube last year, The Babylon Bee invited viewers to visit California, saying “It’s America’s future” while showing images of homeless encampments, smog, wildfires and traffic.
“California is a premium state with premium ideas,” the narrator says. “We’ve got the highest housing prices, gas and taxes of any state, and more is always better.”
It was but one effective salvo the Babylon Bee has tossed in the direction of Gov. Gavin Newsom, who, despite his efforts to reach out to conservatives, remains a popular target of the right. And the Bee now has a new win in its column, with a federal judge ruling that a California law that prohibits some deepfake images and videos of politicians is unconstitutional.
The fact that the latest ruling seemed to call the Babylon Bee’s style of humor “lowbrow” will no doubt become a badge of honor for the brand, much like the attempted insults “garbage people” and “deplorables” were embraced by Donald Trump supporters.
“Our job is hard enough when our jokes keep coming true, as if they were prophecies,” The Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon said in a statement issued by the Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented the Bee and other parties on the suit. Dillon added: “We’re pleased the court recognized the First Amendment secures our right to tell jokes, even ones the government doesn’t like.”
California has long straddled the line between being a cutting-edge state and a wacky one. Newsom himself teeters along that line as governor — on one hand, proposing serious thinking about the troubles of boys and young men; on another, engaging in slapstick-style comedy on social media, mimicking Donald Trump’s tweets in a way that was genuinely funny, at least for the first couple of days.
The impetus for legislation appears to have been a doctored video of Kamala Harris that Elon Musk shared without noting that it was parody. It’s hard to imagine that anyone would think the fake “campaign ad” was real — it’s about as believable as those “baby Trump” videos on X.
But, per The Center Square, California enacted two laws: AB 2839, which banned “materially deceptive” content about candidates and election officials 120 days before and 60 days after elections, except for cases of parody in which “parody” was clearly marked on the content; and AB 2655, which required internet platforms with more than 1 million users in California to take down such content.
The creator of the Harris video, Christopher Kohls (who goes by name Mister Reagan on X) challenged the legislation, the first of which was struck down by a federal judge last month.
Friday’s ruling did not garner nearly so much attention save for this subtle dig: “Novel mediums of speech and even low-brow humor have equal entitlement to First Amendment protection and the principles undergirding the freedom of expression do not waver when technological changes occur.”
The business of deepfakes, and the potential for bad actors to do serious mischief is real, whether in politics, business or our personal lives. As the decision said, “political deepfakes pose a risk to election integrity and California has a compelling interest in regulating this arena.”
But, it went on to say, “the tools (the state) deploys to achieve its interest must be the least restrictive means of achieving such goal when significant speech issues are at stake.”
In other words, even in California, Americans have the capacity to figure out when something is a joke or not. But just to be on the safe side, let me just say:
That “Visit California” ad? It’s totally fake.
Van Jones is making sense on CNN
Other than both having worked in the White House, Van Jones and Scott Jennings don’t seem to have a lot of common politically.
But both men are now frequently seen on CNN, putting their collective experience in politics to use, Jones having worked for Barack Obama, and Jennings, for George W. Bush.
Jennings is evolving ever more into a firebrand, though maybe not as extreme as Jones used to be. (Some might remember that, pre-White House, Jones once used an expletive to refer to Republicans.)
It’s refreshing to see, then, Jones’ comments over the weekend about how political the workplace has become — and his argument that we need to move past this.
“This is not going to make me popular,” he said, adding that the constant parade of controversies had gotten “ridiculous.”
“If I’m an employer and at a certain point, your Slack channel just turns into Vietnam every other day because something happened that had nothing to do with the workplace ... and then people would not speak and got mad and you have to bring in all kind of counselors. This is not camp, guys, we’re trying to make money.”
He concluded, “I enjoyed the moment for a while when we having our reckonings about everything, but we done recked. ... We need to move on.”
An apology done wrong
Meanwhile, former talk show host Rosie O’Donnell had her own reckoning over the weekend, apologizing for surmising that the Minneapolis shooter was “a white guy, Republican, MAGA person” and a white supremacist."
“I did not do my due diligence before I made that emotional statement, and I said things about the shooter that were incorrect,” O’Donnell said in an apology posted to TikTok Sunday.
She went on to say, “the truth is, I messed up, and when you mess up, you fess up. This is my apology video, and I hope it’s enough.”
It wasn’t, because while apologizing, O’Donnell compounded her initial statement by saying, “I assumed, like most shooters, they followed a standard MO and had standard, you know, feelings of… you know, NRA-loving kind of gun people" — slamming millions of God-fearing, law-respecting Americans who own guns and belong to the NRA.
It’s deeply unfortunate that O’Donnell chose to politicize a day that gutted the nation. Those of us who sit beneath stained-glass windows every Sunday will not soon forget it. And yes, we will continue to offer our thoughts and our prayers.
Recommended reading
Deseret News Editor Sarah Jane Weaver had an experience we all dread: someone shouting “There is a shooter” amid chaos in her neighborhood. She recounted this personal story as an online debate swirled about “thoughts and prayers” in the aftermath of the Minneapolis church shooting.
“As commotion buzzed around me, I stood behind the police tape doing the only thing I could. I prayed. That is what Kathy and those sitting on her floor did too. And it is what dozens of my neighbors did as they searched for their children and tried to make sense of the violence that had robbed us of peace.”
When a shooting happened in my neighborhood, prayer and action both saved us
Economics professor Michael Kofoed says that monetary policy and politics don’t mix and warns that history shows the folly of trying to combine them.
“Inflation is a result of expectations for the future. If firms think their costs will rise tomorrow, then they will begin to increase their prices now. If consumers think dishwasher or car prices will go up, then they will try to move future purchases to the present, pushing demand up, and creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
History’s stark warning to U.S. manipulation of monetary policy
A few years ago, Dunkin’ Donuts managed a major rebrand without revolt from its customers. Why couldn’t Cracker Barrel do the same? Keira Farrimond offers a postmortem on the “master class in marketing missteps.”
“It also helped that consumers already used the nickname Dunkin’ for the store. Similarly, Kentucky Fried Chicken was already known by KFC before the company made its change.”
‘History is rife with bad rebrands’ — How Cracker Barrel’s attempt went wrong
End notes
Over the past few months, I’ve been watching as the much-talked-about struggles of boys and men has moved from the space of social science into politics. Could this shift mean that some real change might be coming? The experts in the field are hopeful. Read more here:
Another fascinating story was the child born in July after being frozen as an embryo for more than 30 years. There are so many mind-boggling aspects to this story — I can’t stop thinking about the divorced father who created the embryo with his then-wife in 1994 now seeing a photo of his biological son being born to a couple in Tennessee.
But I was equally interested in how a doctor with a thriving fertility practice near Washington D.C. had a change of heart brought on by thoughtful questions from his wife — and made the decision to move to Tennessee and start the clinic that brought this “world’s oldest baby” to life.
Read more here, and see some fantastic photographs showing the work that goes on at Rejoice Fertility:
The ‘world’s oldest baby’ is challenging what we think we know about IVF
As always, thank you for being part of the Right to the Point community. You can email me at Jgraham@deseret.com, or send me a DM on X, where I’m @grahamtoday. And if you, too, celebrate summerfall, send me a picture.