Legal Docket: The Babylon Bee, free speech, and the law

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s The World and Everything in It for this 22nd day of September, 2025. Thank you for joining us today. Good morning! I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s time for Legal Docket.

Today, satire, deepfakes, and the First Amendment.

A year ago, the Christian news- satire site, The Babylon Bee dropped a video parody dripping with irony:

NEWSOM: Hi, I'm Gavin Newsom, the governor of California. This is a message for the people of America given in my authentically recorded non AI voice. Thanks to my leadership over the last several years, that almost 1 million people are now fleeing the state every year. We even ran out of U- Hauls On my watch, the cost of living and homelessness have skyrocketed. Schools are failing, drug dealers and human traffickers are pouring across the This isn't a deep fake, and you can rest assured that it isn't, because I just signed an unconstitutional law outlawing deep fakes. No one would dare violate it. Thank you and science bless America!

That parody wasn’t random. As you heard the Fake Governor Newsom say, he’d just signed a law targeting “deceptive” AI political content. That part was the true part. The Bee made the video to force a legal test of that law—and it landed both comedically and constitutionally. Last month, a federal judge considered a lawsuit the Bee filed and struck the law down.

REICHARD: Last week, I spoke to the CEO of the Babylon Bee, Seth Dillon:

DILLON: We were ready to go, we knew it was coming. He had announced that he was going to do this. And we were working on a concept for how the moment he made this unlawful, we would immediately challenge it by violating that law, we were going to parody him immediately. It got a lot of attention. It generated a ton of attention.

One major issue was compelled speech. The Bee would have to post a disclaimer and set it in the largest font on the page.

THE BABYLON BEE: Definitely defeats the purpose because It kills the joke. It’s also compelled speech because it’s a disclaimer we don’t want to say….When you lead off your joke with ‘what I’m about to tell you is a joke,’ and then you give the joke, and then “what you have just read is a joke,” (laughs) it just totally kills it.

Because the law targeted content and viewpoint, the court applied the most rigorous level of constitutional review: strict scrutiny. The court found California law did satisfy a compelling government interest to protect elections, but it did not meet the second prong of that strict scrutiny test: that it was narrowly tailored to achieve that compelling purpose.

EICHER: Phil Sechler of Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented the Bee, explains why:

SECHLER: The court pointed at the fact that the statute was very broad and didn't even require an actual injury like fraud or defamation to be able to bring a claim against the content creator. Second, the court pointed to the fact that anybody in California who saw the content could seek remedies. It wasn't limited to the person who was injured. And third, of course, the court pointed to the fact that even satire and parody could be swept up.

REICHARD: The judge said that chilled political discourse, and ruled the state cannot play “minister of truth.” I reached out to Governor Newsom’s office and to the state attorney general by email and phone. My first message was actually blocked. The AG’s office wrote back that it was reviewing the ruling, and referred me to advisories about healthcare and consumer law.

EICHER: The case comes as comedians are under scrutiny. Just last week, late-night host Jimmy Kimmel was suspended after wrongly linking Charlie Kirk’s accused killer to the MAGA movement.

Some say it shows a double standard. Seth Dillon sees it differently:

DILLON: I'm not one of those people who's like, well, if my side's doing it, I'm okay with it, if their side’s doing it, I’m not. …these are principles that we have to uphold in any circumstances….When we're talking about our rights, what we're defending in this case is… the First Amendment, right and government using its power to suppress certain speech that is protected. That's a violation of the First Amendment. So if there's government enforcement or coercion or threats involved, you've got to look at that seriously….because that can be a violation of the First Amendment… If it's public pressure, that's different, you know, if there's a public response and backlash to something that somebody said, and the network decides that they want to part ways with that person, that person's voice hasn't been stamped out by the government. It's not like it's criminal for them to say what they say. They faced backlash and consequences for what they said, but it wasn't government censorship violating their First Amendment rights.

REICHARD: Much as the Bee stings, Dillon told me, even in tense cultural times satire can heal.

DILLON: One of the ways that humor treats the disease of bad ideas is by exposing them for what they are. I talk about satire is being like a scalpel. It does cut and people often feel the sting of satire. But you gotta think of it as a scalpel not a knife that you’re just running around stabbing people with. We’re talking about a scalpel that’s being used to cut out some kind of social cancer. You know, and that’s a good thing, a healing thing. It’s cutting for a healing purpose.

EICHER: Defending it costs time and energy, but Dillon says it’s worth it:

DILLON: You know, it’s advantageous for us to be involved in those fights because they look like the fools who are trying to silence comedians.

And he’s found some surprise allies along the way:

DILLON: I remember very distinctly when we were going through it with Twitter and Twitter had suspended our account. Bill Maher did a segment on it talking to his audience and guests about how, it may not be satire that I think is funny, and you know it’s Christian satire? I thought Christianity itself was satire, you know, he’s taking jabs at us. But at the same time defending our right to speak. So yeah, every now and then you find strange bedfellows where you weren’t necessarily expecting support but you got it.

REICHARD: Even when speech is offensive, lawyer Phil Sechler says the remedy is more speech, not government bans.

SECHLER: The other thing to keep in mind is what the judge said in California. He said the antidote is not stifling content creation, but encouraging counter-speech, rigorous fact checking, and the uninhibited flow of democratic discourse.

EICHER: Seth Dillon sees that same antidote at work outside the courtroom. He says humor — even sharp satire — can serve the cause of open debate. That’s one reason among many Dillon says the loss of his friend Charlie Kirk is so profound. Kirk embodied that spirit — a fan of the Bee who mixed argument with wit and humor to make his points.

DILLON: Charlie was an encourager to me. I don’t know that any of us have a lot of people in our lives who just proactively reach out to people to be an encouragement. But he was that person. He would just randomly text to say something nice—He would see something that you did that he appreciated and he would let you know. He did it publicly too but just privately behind the scenes, just privately saying, you know, keep it up, oh, I know that’s really hard, ‘I’m with you, I’m here for you, I’m praying for you’—and then sending a scripture verse along with that…to encourage his friends and allies so that they didn’t feel like that they were alone.

REICHARD: For Dillon, that kind of support is what the Bee hopes to offer in its own way — to encourage, to challenge, and to keep people laughing.

DILLON: Charlie’s death is a reminder of the darkness out there. I think Charlie would want us to move forward with a focus on what really matters. He’d want us to encourage each other, and he’d want us to continue to laugh. And so that’s what the Bee is going to try to do, to continue to bring levity.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket!

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.