A far-right social media influencer with thousands of followers has been convicted of interfering in the 2016 presidential election. Federal prosecutors said Douglass Mackey, who went by the name of “Ricky Vaughn” online, planned a “coordinated attack” on people’s right to vote by posting images to Twitter that resembled campaign ads for Hillary Clinton. The fine print on the bottom of the image stated that people could vote simply by texting “Hillary” to a certain phone number.
Straight Arrow News contributor Ben Weingarten argues the conviction is only the latest example of a woke government clamping down on any dissension and calls for all Americans to take on the “speech police.”
With political correctness having already prevailed for decades over America, then augmented by the imposition of Wokeism via a burgeoning civil society DEI administrative state, and reinforced by a public-private censorship regime, Americans’ right to think and speak freely was already under heavy assault.
But the recent escalation in the War on Wrongthink, under which dissent has literally been criminalized, has killed the First Amendment. The long-term consequences of our Ruling Class’s effort to crush its political foes are hard to foresee, but in the immediate term it would seem free speech is destined to face a big chill.
Consider some recent events, and the logical conclusions to which they lead us. While President Trump was being indicted in Manhattan, over in Brooklyn, Douglass Mackey, a social media influencer, was being convicted over a satirical meme — facing a long stint in jail for a literal thought crime.
He jokingly tweeted out to his followers that they could text a number to vote for Hillary Clinton in the days before the 2016 election, with the hashtag #ImWithHer. Forty-nine hundred people did text that number on or around election day — though we have no idea how many of them were actually eligible voters, whether they were actually trying to vote, and if they would’ve ever seen the tweet had the media not given it extensive coverage.
The government characterized this as a dangerous disinformation campaign, as a fraud, but didn’t charge it that way. Instead it convicted him of “Conspiracy Against Rights stemming from his scheme to deprive individuals of their constitutional right to vote.”
Mackey faces up to 10 years in prison under a law that punishes people who “injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate” others – that is, people who engage in actual aggression against others that violates or threatens to violate their rights, not for sending a meme, an obvious joke. To think his tweets are criminal is anything but a laughing matter.
