Nick Shirley Is Fighting Back Against Gavin Newsom With This Huge Legal Move

They named a bill after a guy they didn't like. Let that sink in for a second. California didn't pass some broad reform aimed at a category of behavior, they wrote legislation targeted at Nick Shirley specifically, an independent journalist whose crime seems to be making content Sacramento found embarrassing. Now he's suing, and honestly, good. Somebody has to test whether a state government can just legislate a private citizen's career out of existence because the governor doesn't like his videos.

There's a reason laws aren't supposed to work this way. Bills of attainder, laws written to punish a specific named person without a trial, are the kind of thing the Constitution was built to prevent. Doesn't matter if you think Shirley is a provocateur or a straight shooter. The moment the state starts drafting statutes with an individual citizen's name effectively baked into the target, everyone's speech gets a little more conditional on staying in the good graces of whoever holds the governor's office.

Newsom's team will probably dress this up as consumer protection or platform accountability or whatever the talking point of the week is. Nobody's buying it. You don't need a specialized law with someone's name attached to regulate an industry. You write one when you want to make an example out of a person, and that's a very different thing.

This lawsuit isn't really about one YouTuber's grievance with one governor. It's a test of whether that kind of raw political muscle survives contact with a courtroom. We'd bet it doesn't, and we hope Shirley makes them defend it in front of a judge every step of the way.