The 1st Amendment, Douglas Mackey, and the corrupt DOJ

[Tim Steelersfan]

I remember reading about this, then it fell off the radar. Now, rightfully, it's back as a national story. Huge 1st Amendment case.

MTG sends BLISTERING letter to Merrick Garland Regarding Mackey “Meme Trial”​

Things are certainly heating up in the biggest free speech trial in the country: The DOJ vs Douglass Mackey.

As you likely know by now, Mr. Mackey is facing 10 years in prison for sharing an anti-Hillary meme.

Revolver covered the story of this monumental “free speech” case in a bombshell article that highlighted why this is the most important First Amendment trial in the country.

Things are certainly heating up in the biggest free speech trial in the country: The DOJ vs Douglass Mackey.

As you likely know by now, Mr. Mackey is facing 10 years in prison for sharing an anti-Hillary meme.

Revolver covered the story of this monumental “free speech” case in a bombshell article that highlighted why this is the most important First Amendment trial in the country.

You might not know much about Mackey’s case. It’s far less notorious than the January 6 prosecutions, or the murder trial of Kyle Rittenhouse. But in terms of how much the speech matters for American liberty, it is as important as either of those — perhaps more so.

In January 2021, shortly after the January 6 incident inaugurated a national anti-MAGA crackdown, the Department of Justice charged Mackey with “conspiring … to deprive individuals of their constitutional right to vote.”

Mackey’s offense? Illegal memes.

Specifically, the DOJ claims that the above meme merits a prison sentence of up to ten years, for violation of 18 U.S. Code § 241. The law, which concerns “Conspiracy against rights,” is a subset of the Enforcement Act of 1871, better known as the Ku Klux Klan Act.

The DOJ’s argument is that, by posting the above memes on Twitter in 2016, and designing it to resemble a Hillary Clinton ad, Mackey deceived the public into casting invalid text message votes, as part of a conspiracy to deprive them of the right to vote.

The trial started on Monday, and has gotten even more attention, thanks to Elon Musk taking interest.

A tweet from businessman Joe Lonsdale, expressing concern about the case caught the eye of Elon Musk. Joe stated “This sounds concerning” and Elon responded with a very simple, yet extremely powerful, “Yeah.”

That one word is all it takes for this important case to get a much-needed bright spotlight shining down on it.



And since then, the case has exploded all over the internet.

Tucker covered the trial during his Tuesday night show.



In addition, famed journalist Glenn Grenwald has also chimed in on the case:



And now, thanks to all of this attention, Mr. Mackey’s case has finally reached the halls of Congress.

Marjorie Taylor Greene has just sent Merrick Garland a blistering letter regarding Mr. Mackey’s case.

Here’s what MTG said in her letter to Garland:

Attorney General Garland:
I write to you expressing my profound dismay at the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) case against Douglass Mackey over his posting of memes on Twitter in 2016.1 Shockingly, Mr. Mackey is being charged with 18 U.S.C. § 241 2 , which is a subset of the Enforcement Act of 1870, also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act.3 The charge that Mr. Mackey was “conspiring with others in advance of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election to use various social media platforms to disseminate information designed to deprive individuals of their constitutional right to vote”4 is not only laughable, but also a clear indication that the DOJ does not have a sound grasp on how to interpret the law.

First of all, it is an affront to African Americans lynched and murdered by the Ku Klux Klan that the DOJ is equating their treatment at the hands of racist terrorists to a Florida man posting memes on Twitter. That the DOJ thinks these two things are commensurate should be concerning to anyone. The law Mr. Mackey is accused of violating is clearly intended to criminalize physical violence and intimidation used to prevent people from exercising their rights as outlined in the Constitution, not the sharing of memes on social media. Mr. Mackey caused no one physical harm, did not threaten or intimidate anyone, and certainly did not kill anyone.

The question, then, is whether the DOJ is deliberately contorting this statute to apply to the free speech exercised by individuals with dissenting political views. All the evidence points to this being the case. Unfortunately, these tactics are nothing new for the DOJ since your appointment as Attorney General. We have seen individuals charged with felonies for obstructing legal proceedings on January 6, 2021, despite, in many cases, being nonviolent protestors exercising their constitutional right to freedom of assembly. Mr. Mackey’s case is perhaps even more concerning because he was not involved in any sort of riot or protest, but rather he simply posted funny images on social media that the DOJ did not like.

It seems the DOJ is intent on criminalizing “disinformation,” a legally undefined term, in order to squash freedom of speech. These Soviet-style methods of enforcing the law seem better suited for the governments of China or Iran, not the United States of America. There is no evidence that Mr. Mackey’s meme-posting prevented anyone from voting in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, and there are no individuals claiming that it did. This case is simply the DOJ, on behalf of its puppeteers in the White House, versus Douglass Mackey, a.k.a. @TheRickyVaughn. This flagrant assault on free speech and political participation is utterly un-American, undemocratic, and incredibly dangerous.

I call on you, as Attorney General, to order the charges against Douglass Mackey to be dropped by the DOJ, and to immediately thereafter resign as Attorney General of the United States before your gross incompetence and twisted sense of justice further deteriorates the rights enumerated in and protected by the Constitution, and destroys the lives of more Americans.

 

[Tim Steelersfan]

Story gets even more strange. Fired Liberal HuffPo AntiFA reporter interfering with witnesses for Mackey's cases.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1635718422246850581.html

Massive and disgraceful breaking news in the @DougMakey case.

Disgraced Antifa journalist Luke O'Brien has just interfered with an expert witness in the case which has led to a request for a delay from Makey's team.
Luke O'Brien who was fired from HuffPo last year has harassed the defence's leading expert witness causing him to withdraw as a witness.
O'Brien attempted to portray the expert witness - Hawley - as an extremist based on emails that O'Brien presented to him. O'Brien pressured the witness by presenting him with the apparently hacked emails and asking if his employers knew about his testimony.

O'Brien - who is no longer a journalist - is supposedly writing an article for the SPLC where his long-time friend and fellow harasser Michael Hayden works. Both of these have a long history of harassing employers of people who call out their unethical and stalking behavior...
In 2019 I wrote an article - based on now peer reviewed research - which showed that O'Brien and Hayden are Antifa journalists...

It’s Not Your Imagination: The Journalists Writing About Antifa Are Often Their CheerleadersSydney. London. Toronto.https://quillette.com/2019/05/29/it...ng-about-antifa-are-often-their-cheerleaders/

In response both Hayden and O'Brien contacted several of my employers - just as O'Brien did here - and made false statements to try and paint me as an extremist - again - just as O'Brien is doing here with an expert witness.

How they ruin you: inside a smear campaign by activists and journalistsIn a recent article for Quillette, I presented the results of a study into the concerning relationships between Antifa and national-level journalists.https://thepostmillennial.com/how-t...-smear-campaign-by-activists-and-journalists/

Hayden and O'Brien recently ran a hit piece on me when my Antifa research was published in a respected Springer Peer Reviewed Data Science journal. They lied about how O'Brien had been locked out of his Twitter for several months for harassing me.


Gizmodo, Cronyism and Narrative Building: A Case Study of Modern ‘Journalism’On Friday 3rd December 2021 Gizmodo published an article about Twitter’s new rule for posting personal media without consent. The article claims the new rule is being weaponized by fascists who can no…https://open.substack.com/pub/dreoi...ding?r=c4fhb&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

O'Brien has used the 'I'm writing a story about you, does your employer know?' threat that he used here on Mackey's expert witness against me too. It's a dirty tactic. He believes the threat of being named in a public paper would scare me off of my research.

And most importantly, O'Brien uses hacked and faked materials to intimidate people who he sees as a threat or enemy. He got his most recent position - at the soon to be shut down Shorenstein Centre - after impressing the boss, Joan Donovan, by introducing her to a hacker.

Not only should O'Brien be the journalistic pariah he is but he should be facing harassment, hacking & now witness tampering charges. He survives because of his family DNC connections & because Antifa journo friends like Hayden are willing to lend SPLC credentials when needed.

Thanks to @LiaS814 for bringing the law and crime article to my attention.

I wrote the wrong @ in my first tweet. @DougMackeyCase is the correct @ to follow this case.

 

[Tim Steelersfan]

More.

The Persecution of Douglass Mackey​

https://contra.substack.com/p/the-persecution-of-douglass-mackey

Under the Twitter pseudonym “Ricky Vaughn,” Douglass Mackey had more influence on the 2016 election than NBC News, Stephen Colbert, and Newt Gingrich. He is best known for viral memes like “Draft our Daughters,” which suggested that Hillary Clinton would start a conflict if elected and render women eligible for the draft. The irony, of course, is that what was a meme then has become a reality now.

In 2021, Congress moved toward requiring women to register for the draft with an amendment offered by Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, a Pennsylvania Democrat and former Air Force officer, to the House version of the fiscal 2022 National Defense Authorization Act. Houlahan was distraught when lawmakers killed the measure. Her spokeswoman said it would have been an “overdue change” that would strengthen American national security. Mackey said the same thing. But nobody’s laughing now.

Mackey was arrested on January 27, 2021. The Justice Department alleged that he used “various social media platforms to disseminate misinformation designed to deprive individuals of their constitutional right to vote.” Jury selection began today, March 13, and the stakes feel high. “Doug’s case, which goes to the heart of the First Amendment, is going to trial,” James Lawrence, a lawyer for Mackey’s legal defense fund, told me by text.

Lawrence served as a senior attorney in the administration of former President Donald Trump and is now general counsel of Mackey’s legal defense fund. He and other legal experts believe that the outcome of Mackey’s case could have a “chilling effect” not only on election discourse but on any topic deemed out of bounds by the powers that be.

“As we’ve argued in court filings, if the content the government alleges is at issue in this case is enough to send a man to prison, we are opening up a Pandora’s Box that will have a further chilling effect on satire and other speech used to critique power,” he added.

A federal judge recently rejected Mackey’s motion to dismiss by arguing that his tweets were protected by the First Amendment. There is a good overview in brief of his case in Myth Pilot for the uninitiated. It also includes steps that anyone can take to help.

I’ve written about Mackey before, focusing mainly on the thing that got him in the most trouble: a stunt where Mackey encouraged people to vote for Clinton by text message by posting a flyer online. According to the Justice Department, about 4,900 unique telephone numbers texted the number.

When I wrote about this for The American Conservative, I contacted iVisionMobile, the company that owned the text code listed in the memes posted by Mackey. My question was, is it possible that media coverage of Mackey’s memes contributed to people texting the number? A representative said it would be hard to tell, but it was certainly possible.

Mackey posted the text code “on or about November 1, 2016, and November 2, 2016,” according to the Justice Department. BuzzFeed ran a story about it on Nov. 2, which featured one of the memes posted by Mackey that read: “Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925.” Forbes and attn: ran their own stories linking to BuzzFeed’s original report. Just these three publications attract an enormous amount of traffic. I reported in The American Conservative:

In October 2016 alone, [BuzzFeed] attracted 77.4 million readers. And after BuzzFeed broke the story, attn:, a media company that boasted 2 billion monthly impressions and over 500 million monthly video views in 2018, also ran its own feature on November 2 with screenshots and information on how to text the number Mackey shared.

Importantly, the media only took note of Mackey because Robert McNees, a physics professor at Loyola University, surfaced his memes from the right-wing echo chamber into which they were cast while scouring his feed. BuzzFeed credited McNees with the discovery in its reporting.

There’s a good chance that there were people who only texted the number because they saw a story about it in BuzzFeed or elsewhere. Indeed, a few days after the media began covering—and spreading—Mackey’s memes, a left-wing influencer named Kristina Wong pulled the exact same stunt. She filmed herself wearing a “Make American Great Again” hat and told Trump supporters they could vote by text. “Skip poll lines at #Election2016 and TEXT in your vote!”



It’s also an open question as to how many people—including Mackey’s own followers—texted the number he posted out of curiosity. For example, the attn: reporter appears to have texted the number as part of the story. Simply put, it is hard to believe, as prosecutors allege, that every single one of those roughly five thousand texts came from someone who believed they were voting for Clinton—to say nothing of the role of the media in amplifying Mackey’s reach. But that all may be beside the point.

In May 2021, Reuters reported there had been “a strategic shift by the Department of Justice” on pursuing people who “interfered” in the 2016 election, which is an interesting way of putting it. People with knowledge of the discussions told Reuters that prosecutors “debated for years whether and how to pursue criminal cases against Americans suspected of disseminating false voting instructions to manipulate the election.”

While some officials wanted to bring a multitude of charges, others felt it would be too difficult to bring a voter-suppression case based on online messaging, the people said. The hurdles include free-speech rights, the difficulty in establishing intent and the challenge of showing that anyone failed to vote because a specific person misled them.

But after former President Trump's Attorney General William Barr resigned in December, a compromise emerged: One charge to start, against a demonstrably influential person, where evidence pointed to a real impact, the sources told Reuters.

The Justice Department selected Mackey as the one who would be made an example of in the end. And if they succeed, they won’t stop with him.

 

[xjx]

But he made a meme about Hillary. The queen of communism in America. He must pay.

 

[JMM]

Hillary is bad,,,m-kay...
The DOJ is bad,,,m-kay

 

[Djfan]

Isn't it about time for us to admit that the whole process is corrupt beyond hope, and make other plans going forward?

 

[wig]

I assume the Wong lady is next on the docket. Given that Mackey went down and she did the EXACT same thing.

If they don't go after her, your D.O.J. is utterly corrupt and you already don't have a country anymore.

 

[Steelr4evr]

Isn't it about time for us to admit that the whole process is corrupt beyond hope, and make other plans going forward?

That's been my conclusion for a good long while. I may vent and hope about things on here, but I know what the deal is.

They've proved it beyond any doubt. I had held out some hope we could get a constitutional convention, but even that is just a pipe dream now.

Whatever is in motion will have to run its course. Nobody is coming to save us from ourselves. Game,set&match!

 

[Djfan]

I had held out some hope we could get a constitutional convention, but even that is just a pipe dream now.

I always felt that a constitutional convention would be hijacked by the left, and things changed, like removing the second amendment. That is why I opposed it.

 

[Booted]

That's been my conclusion for a good long while. I may vent and hope about things on here, but I know what the deal is.

They've proved it beyond any doubt. I had held out some hope we could get a constitutional convention, but even that is just a pipe dream now.

Whatever is in motion will have to run its course. Nobody is coming to save us from ourselves. Game,set&match!

As I browse Facebook, Twitter and other social media, I have resigned myself to the fact that most of the young people don't want this country anymore.

 

[Booted]

This is the immediate future.

 

[Steelr4evr]

I always felt that a constitutional convention would be hijacked by the left, and things changed, like removing the second amendment. That is why I opposed it.

That wouldn't happen. You could never get enough states to ratify that. As it stands now 26 states alone have constitutional carry.

 

[Steelr4evr]

As I browse Facebook, Twitter and other social media, I have resigned myself to the fact that most of the young people don't want this country anymore.

Yeah it's a complete **** show with so many embracing communism and socialism. They feel victimized and entitled. That's what happens when you don't teach history. They should teach political history as well.

Everyone should know all of the brutal details of the communists and how they came into power. Their crimes against humanity and their continued brutal oppression of their people.

 

[DBS1970]

It's getting to the point where I no longer want to avoid Balkanization. Let the Commies have the BC-New England corridor, Chicago to Minneapolis and the west coast and they can do as they please. I have no interest in being fellow countrymen with Communists.

 

[Djfan]

It's getting to the point where I no longer want to avoid Balkanization. Let the Commies have the BC-New England corridor, Chicago to Minneapolis and the west coast and they can do as they please. I have no interest in being fellow countrymen with Communists.

I couldn't agree more

 

[Ron Burgundy]

You'd think the ACLU would be on this.

 

[JMM]

You'd think the ACLU would be on this.

On this or in on this?

 

[Ron Burgundy]

On this or in on this?

They're supposed to be on the side of free speech but I think we know it's usually only Liberal free speech.