I’ve spent 30 years drafting disclosure language for private placement memoranda. A disclosure has one job: warn the reader before he relies on something that might mislead him. New Mexico just tried to point that same tool at a joke.
The Babylon Bee, the Christian satire site known for headlines no one mistakes for news, sued New Mexico officials this week over House Bill 182. The lawsuit, filed by Alliance Defending Freedom in federal court, argues the state is forcing the Babylon Bee to slap a government-scripted warning label on its own political comedy, and that doing so violates the First Amendment.
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Start with the text, which is not complicated. Congress, and by incorporation the states, “shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” New Mexico’s law does not ban satire outright. It does something the Supreme Court has treated as nearly as serious: it compels speech the speaker would not otherwise choose to make. The court settled that question in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette and reaffirmed it when New Hampshire tried to force “Live Free or Die” onto every license plate in the state. The government cannot force a citizen to add its message to his own.
H.B. 182, passed in 2024 by the state’s Democrat-controlled legislature, requires artificially generated or manipulated political images, video, and audio to carry a prominent disclosure. It also creates a separate offense for distributing “materially deceptive media” close to an election when the speaker knows it falsely depicts someone and intends to mislead voters. Satire earns an exemption from that offense, but only if it carries the same disclaimer the Babylon Bee refuses to run. The complaint puts it plainly: the label “spoils the joke as it begins, each and every time.” Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-NM) flagged parts of the bill as ambiguous when she signed it. New Mexico’s own attorney general, Raul Torrez, concluded in a July 2025 opinion that applying the disclaimer to satire and parody was likely unconstitutional. The state’s Ethics Commission calls the suit baseless and notes it has never enforced the rule against a satirist. That is a strange defense. Nobody has to get arrested before he is allowed to ask a federal court whether the arrest would be legal.
New Mexico is not writing on a blank slate. The Babylon Bee has run this play in blue states twice already and won both times. A federal judge struck down California’s version of this law as a First Amendment violation. Then, in January, a federal district judge in Hawaii permanently blocked that state’s deep-fake statute, finding it discriminated based on content and speaker. Hawaii did not appeal. It paid more than $118,000 in attorneys’ fees for the privilege of losing. New Mexico taxpayers are next in line if this case follows the pattern, and the state’s own legal officers already told the legislature it would.
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None of this makes the underlying worry irrational. AI video that falsely shows a candidate saying something he never said is a real problem, and states have a legitimate interest in voters not being deceived. But legislators keep reaching for the same broken tool: a content-based exemption requiring government to decide, line by line, what counts as a joke. That is not a technology problem. It is an institutional design problem. Every time a legislature writes “news and editorial content is exempt, but satire must be labeled,” it is telling one class of speaker it is trustworthy and another it is not. The Constitution does not let the state make that call, and it never has.
The penalty here is modest by government standards, up to $1,000 per violation, capped at $20,000. That is not the point. A state does not need a large fine to chill speech before an election. It needs a small one and a vague standard, which is exactly what H.B. 182 supplies. New Mexico built a law that punishes a comedian for refusing to explain his own punchline. The First Amendment was written for exactly this fight, and on the current record, it is not close.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a Bachelor of Science in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.
