The Patriot Post® · Hillary Memer Gets Seven Months
(A critically important Leftmedia “fact-check” about this story is now appended to the bottom.)
To borrow one of Joe Biden’s most frequent lines, “Not a joke.”
Actually, it was. A Florida man posted memes and he’s going to jail for it.
Douglass Mackey, a.k.a. Ricky Vaughan online, was sentenced to seven months for posting some memes about voting for Hillary Clinton back in 2016. We suppose it’s obvious that United States District Judge Ann M. Donnelly didn’t get the joke because she — let’s just call her Karen — punished Mackey for election interference.
Great, now do Hillary.
Indeed, it is beyond ironic that Clinton interfered in the 2016 election — though we suppose we have to grant that she was a candidate — by paying for the Steele dossier and thus seeding the entire collusion hoax supposedly involving Russia and Donald Trump. It was fake, fabricated, and entirely phony, but it nearly saved herself from her own criminal email scandal that itself was meant to disguise possibly illegal Clinton Foundation pay-to-play shenanigans. The Russia hoax failed to elect Hillary, but it totally succeeded in undermining Trump’s only term, as he was weighed down by deep state actors doing Clinton’s bidding and then by congressional Democrats who impeached him the first time because the collusion hoax laid the groundwork.
It also set the stage for interference in the 2020 election via media suppression of the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop and Joe Biden’s own influence-peddling scheme. It was — get this — Russian disinformation, said 51 “intelligence experts” who interfered with the election and who now often enjoy gigs as cable news commentators.
Anyway.
Back to poor Douglass Mackey. “You are not being sentenced for your political beliefs or for expressing those beliefs,” Judge Karen assured him. “Each one of us has the right to hold opinions and express those opinions.”
So, if he had posted “Vote Trump” memes, he’d also be imprisoned? That’s rhetorical, of course, because Donnelly, a nominee of Barack Obama, used the Left’s new favorite slogan to berate Mackey: His behavior, she hyperbolically asserted, was “nothing short of an assault on our democracy.”
A look at mainstream media headlines also indicates the two-tiered justice at play: Mackey was a “far-right Twitter troll,” lampoons the New York Daily News. The New York Times headline called him a “Man Who Spread Misinformation on Trump’s Behalf.” The first words of the article are “A digital-age dirty-trickster…”
Biden’s “Justice” Department issued a statement about the case, saying Mackey was being punished “for his role in a conspiracy to interfere with potential voters’ right to vote in the 2016 election.” With a Twitter audience of roughly 58,000, the DOJ argued Mackey was able to influence a lot of people. Here’s its explanation:
For example, on November 1, 2016, in or around the same time that Mackey was sending tweets suggesting the importance of limiting “black turnout,” the defendant tweeted an image depicting an African American woman standing in front of an “African Americans for Hillary” sign. The ad stated: “Avoid the Line. Vote from Home,” “Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925,” and “Vote for Hillary and be a part of history.” The fine print at the bottom of the deceptive image stated: “Must be 18 or older to vote. One vote per person. Must be a legal citizen of the United States. Voting by text not available in Guam, Puerto Rico, Alaska or Hawaii. Paid for by Hillary For President 2016.” The tweet included the typed hashtag “#ImWithHer,” a slogan frequently used by Hillary Clinton. On or about and before Election Day 2016, thousands of unique telephone numbers texted “Hillary” or some derivative to the 59925 text number, which had been used in multiple deceptive campaign images tweeted by Mackey and his co-conspirators.
As we noted in January 2021, Mackey faced up to 10 years behind bars, which sort of makes seven months seem like a deal.
We don’t know the guy, and we aren’t here to defend his particular views, though we will note his wife did just have a baby this week. If you have even a basic understanding of elections, his memes were pretty humorous. And if anyone was actually dumb enough to fall for it, well, they might not ought to be voting in the first place.
We understand the difference between attempting to disenfranchise someone and a typical meme, but this is ultimately yet another instance of the Left not being able to handle humor. It reminds us how often we’ve been dinged by social media “fact-checkers” for telling a joke they didn’t get — or, more accurately, just didn’t like. The humorless Left wields enormous power.
As this is a story about memes and going to prison for crossing a Clinton, we’ll conclude by saying Douglass Mackey didn’t kill himself.
Update: USA Today is ON IT. The “fact-checkers” there have a very important note about stories regarding Mackey’s sentencing. Titled “Twitter user convicted for false voting information, not Hillary Clinton memes,” BrieAnna J. Frank informs us of the truth: “Making memes disparaging political figures is not illegal. Mackey was sentenced for posting memes that encouraged Clinton supporters to vote via text message, which is not a valid way to vote.”
We didn’t modify anything we originally wrote because nothing we said was untrue or even subject to USA Today’s “fact-check.” But doesn’t it just illustrate the point about leftists and humor all too well? They can’t take a joke, and they can’t allow an opinionated interpretation of events that makes them look bad.