Gavin Newsom has declared war on satire

Billionaire Elon Musk shared a video last week that purported to be a presidential campaign ad for Kamala Harris.

The video kicks off with a Harris-like voiceover thanking current president Joe Biden for ‘exposing his senility’ and allowing her to take his place in the race. She also boasts about being ‘the ultimate diversity hire’. ‘I’m both a woman and a person of colour’, the voiceover says, ‘so if you criticise anything I say, you’re both sexist and racist’. Musk reposted the video on his X account, with the caption, ‘This is amazing’, followed by a crying-with-laughter emoji.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the video is not actually Harris herself. It includes jokey references to Harris’s many weird and wacky motivational quotes, such as ‘What can be, unburdened by what has been’. This AI-d Harris also refers to herself and Biden as ‘deep-state puppets’. It is obviously intended as satire.

Fake as it may be, the video certainly resonated with more people than Harris’s actual campaign ads. The real video that the AI parody was inspired by received 1.1million views on YouTube, whereas the parody has racked up almost 130million hits on X.

One person who failed to see the funny side was California’s authoritarian governor, Gavin Newsom. Calling Musk out on X, he raged: ‘Manipulating a voice in an “ad” like this one should be illegal. I’ll be signing a bill in a matter of weeks to make sure it is.’ Musk then responded by saying that he had ‘checked with renowned world authority, Professor Suggon Deeznutz, and he said parody is legal in America’. What a time to be alive.

Still, his teenagery joke aside, Musk is surely right to push back on Newsom and his authoritarian crackdown on parody videos. The Harris fake was clearly made as a joke – not an attempt to deceive voters. You would have to be incredibly media illiterate, to the point of being basically Amish, to fail to see that it is satirical.

This is not the first time Musk and Newsom have clashed. Earlier this month, Musk announced that the headquarters of both X and SpaceX, his rocket-manufacturing company, would be moving out of California. According to Musk, the ‘final straw’ was a new piece of legislation that will ban schools from requiring teachers to notify parents if a child begins identifying as trans. Newsom reacted by accusing Musk of having ‘bent the knee’ to Donald Trump.

Since taking office in 2019, Newsom has introduced a whole host of laws pandering to gender extremists, including forcing shops to have gender-neutral toy sections. Given that Musk recently revealed his deep regrets about allowing one of his own children to be prescribed puberty blockers, it’s no wonder he would want to get out of one of America’s wokest states.

Newsom has been disastrous for California in general. His green policies have proved ruinously expensive, pushing up energy bills for consumers and making manufacturing unviable. He is also no friend to free speech online, passing legislation that requires social-media platforms to censor controversial content under the guise of protecting children.

As of last year, California also made it compulsory for schools to teach ‘media literacy’ as part of the curriculum. The aim of this is, ostensibly, to help kids spot conspiracy theories and other pieces of ‘fake news’ online. But, as you would probably expect, the curriculum has a clear bias. No doubt any anti-‘deepfake’ law Newsom brings in will have similar biases. It will be used to restrict what views people are allowed to express on the internet – and which political figures people are allowed to mock.

Fundamentally, Gavin Newsom does not trust Californians to use their own brains. He really thinks that ordinary people are incapable of telling fact from obvious fiction without the help of censorship. His humourless authoritarianism poses a far bigger threat to democracy than any AI parody.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.