{"id":1913071,"date":"2023-04-11T09:56:48","date_gmt":"2023-04-11T13:56:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/a-pranksters-conviction-sends-a-message-anti-regime-speech-is-a-crime\/"},"modified":"2023-04-11T10:01:39","modified_gmt":"2023-04-11T14:01:39","slug":"a-pranksters-conviction-sends-a-message-anti-regime-speech-is-a-crime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/a-pranksters-conviction-sends-a-message-anti-regime-speech-is-a-crime\/","title":{"rendered":"A Prankster\u2019s Conviction Sends A Message: Anti-Regime Speech Is A Crime"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"float:left\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">22<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fa-pranksters-conviction-sends-a-message-anti-regime-speech-is-a-crime%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1913071&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div class=\"article-content\">\n<p>The trial of Douglas Mackey for \u201celection interference\u201d concluded earlier this month without much attention paid to it. But the fate of the internet prankster \u2014 who now faces 10 years in federal prison after being convicted by a federal jury in Brooklyn for the crime of \u201cconspiracy against rights\u201d \u2014 tells us as much as any other recent incident about the way the administrative state is eroding freedom of speech for those who dissent from the approved leftist orthodoxy.<\/p>\n<p>The determination of the Department of Justice (DOJ) to jail Mackey for posting a satirical internet meme during the 2016 election campaign should be considered a turning point in the saga of a corrupt regime\u2019s attempt to use the spread of so-called \u201cmisinformation\u201d to intimidate opponents.<\/p>\n<div class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-paragraph-2-long d-flex justify-content-center\" style=\"margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center; \" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-693568114\">\n<div id=\"div-gpt-ad-1379703300879-0\" class=\"mb-30\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div  class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-a758f8f0e7a11f1ac0cd1945ebcaeb54 fdrlst__b89e9-paragraph-2\" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-a758f8f0e7a11f1ac0cd1945ebcaeb54\"><\/div>\n<p>Mackey was an internet troll who ran a now-suspended account with 58,000 followers under the name @Rickey_Vaughn99, an evocation of one of the characters in the classic baseball film comedy \u201cMajor League.\u201d He used the account to post comic memes, many of which were unsavory. And some of those with whom he associated were known hatemongers, something that explains the reluctance of many to rush to his defense.<\/p>\n<p>But his legal woes are solely due to his posting a fake Hillary Clinton ad on Twitter prior to the 2016 election. <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/JoelWBerry\/status\/1641909866876002304\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The tweet<\/a>, which included a picture of Clinton and used the color scheme associated with her campaign, made the following preposterous claim: \u201cSave time Avoid the line Vote from home. Text \u2018Hillary\u2019 to 59925 and we\u2019ll make history together This November 8th.\u201d In small text at the bottom, the tweet added the following: \u201cMust 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Voting by text was still considered beyond the pale even in 2020, when Democrats used Covid-19 to remove almost all of the guardrails from the electoral system in most states, with vote harvesting, drop boxes, universal mail-in ballots, and expanded early voting. In the 2016 election, when the overwhelming majority of ballots were still being cast in person on Election Day, a call to vote by texting the first name of one of the candidates was clearly a joke.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">No One Was Fooled<\/h2>\n<p>It\u2019s true that 4,900 unique telephone numbers sent a text with the word \u201cHillary\u201d to the number or \u201csome derivative\u201d of it, as the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.justice.gov\/usao-edny\/pr\/social-media-influencer-douglass-mackey-convicted-election-interference-2016\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">press release<\/a> from the DOJ\u2019s Eastern District of New York said. But as Mackey\u2019s lawyer told the jury, some of the respondents, many of whom were, by definition, Mackey\u2019s Twitter followers, used it as an invitation to vent their animus for the Democrat with texts that said \u201cHillary for Prison.\u201d Conspicuous by its absence from the DOJ\u2019s triumphant missive about the conviction was anything about testimony from disappointed citizens who came forward to say they believed the tweet\u2019s promise and were thereby deprived of their right to vote.<\/p>\n<div  class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-b497085433a9c95e66efa0f6217e3438 fdrlst__b89e9-paragraph-6\" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-b497085433a9c95e66efa0f6217e3438\"><\/div>\n<p>Ordinary common sense would argue that Mackey\u2019s tweet \u2014 which he hoped would get under the skin of the Clinton campaign \u2014\u00a0was too silly to be taken seriously by a reasonable person, let alone anyone with the intelligence to cast a vote in a presidential election. But the DOJ persuaded a jury in a county that Clinton carried with 79.5 percent of the vote that it was a criminal conspiracy rather than satire. Using a federal law that was intended to prevent Jim Crow-era racists from intimidating or otherwise preventing African Americans from voting, the Biden administration claimed the meme as well as other fake pro-Clinton tweets constituted a conspiracy to defraud her supporters and \u201csteal votes.\u201d<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Exaggerated Influence<\/h2>\n<p>To back up this assertion, the DOJ made the fantastical claim that @Rickey_Vaughn99 was not the handle of a minor Twitter troll but more important in affecting public opinion than a major broadcast network such as NBC, a ubiquitous political comedian like CBS late-night comedy host Stephen Colbert, or even Newt Gingrich. Federal prosecutors cited a Massachusetts Institute of Technology study from February 2016 that labeled Mackey as \u201cthe 107th most important influencer of the then upcoming presidential election.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>How MIT came to this conclusion boggles the imagination since, as anyone who has actually been on Twitter could attest, even in 2016, having 58,000 followers was not a big deal in an environment where legions of influencers have hundreds of thousands if not millions of them.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Denying the First Amendment<\/h2>\n<p>The real problem here goes beyond the ludicrous inflation of Mackey\u2019s influence or even unproven assertions about vote theft. Even if Mackey were not a minor figure, the notion that a satire about voting for Clinton by text should be treated as a crime is an astonishing denial of the First Amendment and its protections of freedom of speech.<\/p>\n<div  class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-3c7245ad396ce7bd9e581c5726b71867 fdrlst__b89e9-paragraph-10\" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-3c7245ad396ce7bd9e581c5726b71867\"><\/div>\n<p>As we saw with the prosecution of former President Donald Trump, Democratic prosecutors and judges as well as grand juries in deep-blue constituencies are always ready to treat political opponents as criminals. Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis claimed the case was \u201cabout conspiracy and injury, not speech.\u201d As for the protections that the law affords satire, he asserted that was \u201ca question of fact reserved for the jury.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Yet no injury was proven and the idea that a jury, even in Brooklyn, has the right to decide a joke is illegal is an invitation to the abrogation of basic constitutional rights. It has, after all, never previously been considered a criminal act to poke fun at the supporters of candidates, as Mackey did with a post that treated Clinton backers as too dumb to know you can\u2019t vote by text.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Threatening Political Opponents<\/h2>\n<p>The timing of the prosecution speaks directly to the political implications of the case. Mackey wasn\u2019t arrested in an FBI raid on his home until Jan. 27, 2021, the week after Biden took office. The decision to try to jail him didn\u2019t take place until the supposedly moderate Attorney General Merrick Garland took control of the Department of Justice.<\/p>\n<p>The verdict may ultimately be thrown when Mackey\u2019s appeals reach higher federal courts. But even if this travesty of justice is overruled, the message Garland and the administrative state want to send to their political opponents is unmistakable. With such loose interpretations of the law being employed, anyone who posts a satirical meme on social media about elections must now think twice for fear it can be treated as an effort to mislead Democrats and lead them not to vote. If Mackey can be dragged into federal court and forced to spend massive amounts of money on lawyers with the possibility of prison awaiting him, then others can expect similar treatment from a corrupt establishment regime.<\/p>\n<p>Or at least they will if they are not Democrats. For example, in 2018, tech billionaire and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2018\/12\/26\/us\/reid-hoffman-alabama-election-disinformation.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">gave $100,000<\/a> to a group that created fake social media pages that targeted Republican voters in an Alabama U.S. Senate race. The pages were aimed at convincing conservatives who might have voted for GOP candidate Roy Moore to vote for a write-in candidate instead in a race that the Democrat donor\u2019s preferred candidate Doug Jones won by only 20,000 votes.<\/p>\n<p>While Hoffman apologized and The New York Times characterized the dirty trick as an effort to counter alleged Russian conspiracies to steal American elections, no one was punished. Nor should they have been. But, like Mackey, Hoffman\u2019s attempt to sabotage Moore was also a false-flag operation that, by current DOJ standards, could land a Republican in jail for trying the same dirty trick.<\/p>\n<p>Mackey is no hero, but what happened to him is proof of the depths to which a politicized two-tier justice system is willing to sink to punish its foes. Like the Trump case, the one against Mackey is a crossing of the Rubicon for the American political system. The DOJ has now established it is willing to imprison its opponents. You don\u2019t have to admire Mackey or think his joke was funny to understand we are now living in a very different republic than the one we were in when he hit send on that tweet.<\/p>\n<div  class=\"fdrlst__b89e9-2eec2122ebab16adc2cac2849d64b9f4 fdrlst__b89e9-after-post-content\" id=\"fdrlst__b89e9-2eec2122ebab16adc2cac2849d64b9f4\"><\/div>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\">\n<div class=\"article-author-description fst-italic\">   Jonathan S. Tobin is a senior contributor to The Federalist, editor in chief of JNS.org, and a columnist for Newsweek. Follow him on Twitter at @jonathans_tobin.<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-tags bdr-top-black mt-30 mt-sm-60 pt-15 pt-md-45\">\n<ul class=\"list-unstyled d-flex flex-wrap align-items-center mb-0 mx-n10 p-0\">\n<li class=\"mt-10 mx-10\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/tag\/rickey_vaughn99\/\" class=\"btn btn-black btn-small\">@Rickey_Vaughn99<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"mt-10 mx-10\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/tag\/department-of-justice\/\" class=\"btn btn-black btn-small\">Department of Justice<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"mt-10 mx-10\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/tag\/douglas-mackey\/\" class=\"btn btn-black btn-small\">Douglas Mackey<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"mt-10 mx-10\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/tag\/election-integrity\/\" class=\"btn btn-black btn-small\">election integrity<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"mt-10 mx-10\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/tag\/election-interference\/\" class=\"btn btn-black btn-small\">election interference<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"mt-10 mx-10\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/tag\/first-amendment-rights\/\" class=\"btn btn-black btn-small\">First Amendment rights<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"mt-10 mx-10\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/tag\/free-speech\/\" class=\"btn btn-black btn-small\">free speech<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"mt-10 mx-10\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/tag\/hillary-clinton\/\" class=\"btn btn-black btn-small\">Hillary Clinton<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"mt-10 mx-10\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/tag\/merrick-garland\/\" class=\"btn btn-black btn-small\">Merrick Garland<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"mt-10 mx-10\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/tag\/misinformation\/\" class=\"btn btn-black btn-small\">misinformation<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"mt-10 mx-10\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/tag\/nicholas-g-garaufis\/\" class=\"btn btn-black btn-small\">Nicholas G. Garaufis<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"mt-10 mx-10\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/tag\/reid-hoffman\/\" class=\"btn btn-black btn-small\">Reid Hoffman<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"mt-10 mx-10\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/tag\/satire\/\" class=\"btn btn-black btn-small\">Satire<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"mt-10 mx-10\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/tag\/twitter\/\" class=\"btn btn-black btn-small\">Twitter<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The trial of Douglas Mackey for \u201celection interference\u201d concluded earlier this month without much attention paid to it. But the fate of the internet prankster \u2014 who now faces 10 years in federal prison after being convicted by a federal jury in Brooklyn for the crime of \u201cconspiracy against rights\u201d \u2014 tells us as much<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":559,"featured_media":1913072,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[546],"tags":[7251,15927,7204,5776,24124,5774,4554],"class_list":["post-1913071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-federalist","tag-anti-regime","tag-conviction","tag-crime","tag-message","tag-pranksters","tag-sends","tag-speech"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1913071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/559"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1913071"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1913071\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1913072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1913071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1913071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1913071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}