VICTOR JOECKS: The war on free speech is here

Supporting the First Amendment is now a partisan issue.

On Tuesday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed three bills targeting AI-generated political ads. Among other provisions, one bill bans election-related deepfakes months before and after Election Day. Deepfakes are AI-generated videos or other content that can be stunningly realistic.

“It’s critical that we ensure AI is not deployed to undermine the public’s trust through disinformation,” Newsom said about the bills.

There’s a legitimate concern here. AI-created videos could soon make it appear as though a politician said or did anything. The possibilities for dirty tricks are numerous.

But what Newsom wants to crack down on is parody. In July, the X account @MrReaganUSA released a mock two-minute ad for Kamala Harris, labeled as “parody.”

“I was selected because I am the ultimate diversity hire. I’m both a woman and a person of color. So if you criticize anything I say, you’re both sexist and racist,” the voice-over, which sounds almost exactly like Harris, states.

The ad is hilarious and hits many of Harris’ vulnerabilities. It drips with mockery.

Newsom was not amused. The elites never are when the commoners laugh at their folly.

“Manipulating a voice in an “ad” like this one should be illegal,” he wrote on X two days after the joke ad was posted. “I’ll be signing a bill in a matter of weeks to make sure it is.”

He did. He’s not the only Democrat eager to silence voices he disagrees with.

If social media sites “act as a megaphone for misinformation” then “we are going to hold you accountable,” Harris said in a 2019 speech.

“There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation,” now-Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz said in 2022.

Earlier this month, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said those involved in propaganda “should be civilly or even in some cases criminally charged.”

These are chilling sentiments. Individuals have a fundamental, God-given right to speak their minds. Censoring and arresting people for political speech is a gross abuse of governmental power. This right is so fundamental that the Founding Fathers enshrined it in the First Amendment.

Leftists will usually pretend to agree with that. What they claim to want to stop is inaccurate information. The problem is that people are fallible. They make mistakes, have biases and can be corrupt. If one group had the power to shut down speech, they’d soon use that power to silence their political opposition.

That’s no mere theoretical concern. During COVID, the Biden administration pressured social media companies to censor voices that disagreed with the regime. In many cases, the dissenting voices turned out to be right.

Harris herself is currently pushing misinformation. Two years ago, Amber Thurman died from complications after taking abortion pills. She went to North Carolina for the pills because her home state of Georgia had banned the murder of preborn children. Days later, she went to the ER in Georgia. It’s unclear why doctors didn’t perform a dilation and curettage or D&C soon after she arrived at the hospital. That would have been legal, because her babies were already dead.

But Harris attributed her death to “Trump abortion bans.”

Talk about misinformation. Abortion pills killed Thurman, and Harris blames an abortion ban.

Harris and other leftists have no problem peddling false information. What they want to silence is your ability to laugh at them and rebut their falsehoods.

Contact Victor Joecks at vjoecks@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4698. Follow @victorjoecks on X.