Political satirist Christopher Kohls, better known as "Mr. Reagan," and Minnesota state GOP Rep. Mary Franson are asking the full 11-judge 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to revisit a ruling that effectively rewrote Minnesota's deepfake law from the bench. A three-judge panel ruled last month that Kohl's "was not actually at risk of prosecution" because he labels his parodies "as such by default." The problem: nothing in the statute says that matters.
The petition, backed by the Liberty Justice Center, Southeastern Legal Foundation, Upper Midwest Law Center, and Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, argues the panel invented a parody exception that the legislature never wrote. With less than eight months until the midterm elections, the stakes are not academic. The law, as written, criminalizes AI-generated political speech with no safe harbor for satire, no exception for disclaimers, and no limiting principle a speaker can rely on before hitting "post."
Minnesota's deepfake statute is straightforward in the worst possible way. Just the News reported from the petition:
"To qualify as a deep fake under the statute, a video must be so realistic that a reasonable person would believe it depicts speech or conduct of an individual who did not in fact engage in such speech or conduct."
The plaintiffs' petition lays bare the obvious conclusion:
"That's it. There is no parody exception, no political-speech exception, no safe harbor for proper disclaimers, and no other exception that one may think of."
Kohls's best-known video is a fake campaign ad for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, featuring an AI-generated voice and labeled as "parody" only in the title. It drew enormous traction on X, with 62,000 reposts on Kohl's own post and another 227,000 on X owner Elon Musk's repost. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., called for X to remove the Harris video because of her fear of voter confusion.
The video is satire. It is obviously satire. But the statute doesn't care about the obvious. It cares about "realistic." And the three-judge panel's solution was to declare that a parody label somehow "makes the speech unrealistic to the reasonable person," neutralizing the legal threat. That reasoning exists nowhere in the text of the law.
The public interest law firms framing the appeal cut straight to the jurisprudential problem. They argue the panel should be reviewed:
"Because the panel departed from textualist principles by either mistaking the context of the word 'realistic' in the Minnesota anti-deepfake law or silently applying the canon of constitutional avoidance to create a parody exception."
The Liberty Justice Center and Southeastern Legal Foundation invoked the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who held that a reasonable reader must be "conversant with our social linguistic conventions" and that statutory meaning is derived "from the context in which it is used." The word "realistic" in the Minnesota statute, they argue, plainly describes the visual and auditory quality of a deepfake, not whether a viewer might guess it's a joke based on a title card.
Their brief puts the interpretive problem in sharp terms:
"By its ordinary meaning, in context, the law proscribes Christopher Kohls' deepfake of Kamala Harris, with or without a parody label ... because its visual realism could fool people."
The alternative, the firms argue, is a regime where courts read statutes to mean "what a judge thinks a legislature meant instead of what the words say." That approach, they note, only works until a different judge thinks the legislature meant something else. A satirist operating under this law has no way to know in advance whether a future prosecutor or judge will extend the same courtesy the panel did.
The procedural history of this case is its own indictment. The panel upheld Franson's legal standing to sue but denied her request for a preliminary injunction because she "unreasonably delayed in seeking relief." Franson challenged the law 16 months after voting for it as a state representative, a timeline the panel found disqualifying.
Kohl's, meanwhile, was told he faces no real threat because of his labeling habits. U.S. District Judge Laura Provinzino rejected the plaintiffs' motion for a preliminary injunction based on "lack of irreparable harm, not likelihood of success on the merits." In other words, the court never actually decided whether the law violates the First Amendment. It simply concluded that nobody standing in front of it was hurt badly enough yet.
X's separate legal challenge, which alleges the Minnesota law is preempted by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, has been stuck since December 2025, when a judge found the platform "isn't likely to face enforcement and hence lacks legal standing." So the social media company that hosts the speech can't challenge the law, the satirist who creates the speech supposedly doesn't need to, and the lawmaker who reposted it waited too long. The law stands unchallenged on its merits while the clock ticks toward another election.
The petitioners' brief calls the panel's standing analysis "inconsistent with the Supreme Court's standing jurisprudence" and argues the approach "deprives a litigant of their day in court without the benefit of an opinion imposing that limiting construction on the statute."
Layered on top of the standing question is what the petitioners describe as a circuit-wide confusion about the standard for preliminary injunctions. They point to a Supreme Court 2020 ruling against New York's COVID-19 restrictions on religious gatherings and argue that some 8th Circuit panels started misapplying it "to our knowledge" in 2022, replacing the qualifier "arguably" with "actually" when assessing whether a movant's position is supported by existing law. The petitioners call the other circuits that adopted the stricter standard "wrong" and note that the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 9th, and 10th circuits have all weighed in, creating what the Upper Midwest Law Center and Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute describe as "growing confusion over important First Amendment and preliminary-injunction principles."
Judge Provinzino herself acknowledged the standard was "not entirely clear," which is a remarkable concession from the bench in a case about whether the government can criminalize political speech.
One detail in this saga deserves more attention than it has received. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison's office got caught submitting an expert declaration containing an "AI hallucination," a fake journal article. The expert, Jeff Hancock, founding director of Stanford's Social Media Lab, admitted to using ChatGPT but not carefully vetting its citations.
Judge Provinzino said she didn't consider Hancock's "stained or corrected declarations" in rejecting the plaintiffs' motion. But the state's willingness to submit AI-fabricated evidence in a case about AI-fabricated speech is the kind of irony that writes itself. The attorney general's office is asking courts to punish citizens for producing AI content that might mislead people, while its own AI-assisted filings actually did mislead a court.
The petition asks the full 8th Circuit to do what the three-judge panel avoided: read the statute as written and evaluate whether it survives First Amendment scrutiny. The petitioners argue the panel's approach of reading in a parody exception "shows a trend toward narrowing state law to avoid a constitutional conflict, in this case by holding that the law does not criminalize constitutional parody despite no written parody exception." That is judicial rewriting dressed up as interpretation.
Minnesota is not the only state grappling with deepfake laws. California already lost a challenge brought by Kohls. Hawaii has similar legislation. But the 8th Circuit's handling of this case will set the tone for how aggressively states can regulate AI-generated political speech heading into the midterms.
The question before the full court is not complicated. A state passed a law with no parody exception. A panel said a parody exception exists anyway. The plaintiffs are asking the court to read the words on the page. In a legal system that claims to care about textualism, that shouldn't be a heavy lift. But the law remains on the books, the election approaches, and every satirist in Minnesota operates under a statute that says their work is a crime, regardless of what one three-judge panel chose to imagine it says.
