WND’s Alexander Forgets That The Law Cares Nothing About Irony

Rachel Alexander began her Oct. 23 WorldNetDaily column this way:

Democrats commit election fraud and few brave prosecutors and judges dare to ever punish them, so they get away with it. Whereas when a Republican merely pretends to commit an election crime in order to be a funny troll, the Democratic-controlled justice system puts him in prison.

Alexander forgets that the law cares nothing about irony — if you are pretending to commit an election crime, you are still committing an election crime. Her whine continued:

Douglass Mackey tweeted fake images in 2016 encouraging Democrats to vote for Hillary Clinton by sending the text message “Hillary” to a number. The Biden DOJ sentenced him to seven months in prison this month for “conspiracy to interfere with potential voters’ right to vote.”

Breon Peace, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said Mackey engaged in “weaponized disinformation in a dangerous scheme to stop targeted groups, including black and brown people and women, from participating in our democracy.” Judge Ann M. Donnelly of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, who was appointed to the bench by Barack Obama, said his tweets and memes were “nothing short of an assault on our democracy.”

The law Mackey ostensibly violated prohibits conspiracies “to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person … in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution.” It was passed in 1870 to stop the Ku Klux Klan from intimidating blacks from voting.

The Department of Justice said several thousand people texted the number, but there is no indication prosecutors ever produced a single person who had said it stopped them from voting. Obviously, most of them were texting the number merely to see what would happen, and when they didn’t receive a response, they weren’t likely to think they had actually voted.

With all the heavy scrutiny on ballot security, and people extremely concerned about merely voting by mail, no one would realistically think you could vote for president by text. When people started hearing about his memes, they joked about them; no one took them seriously.

The fact that several thousand people retweeted Mackey’s number showed that they did, in fact, take him seriously. Alexander continued:

The DOJ hyped everything up, including claiming that an “analysis by the MIT Media Lab ranked Mackey as one of the most significant influencers of the then-upcoming presidential election.” Mackey had only 58,000 followers, no way near enough followers to be considered very influential. The DOJ accused him of targeting minorities since one of the memes was in Spanish and another featured a photo of a black woman.

But the number of followers is not the only measure of influence. As Huffington Post reporter Luke O’Brien told a Vermont radio station in 2018:

O’Brien used two methods to assess just how how far Mackey’s reach extended during the presidential election: the MIT Media Lab’s quantitative analysis of social media and news influencers, which found the Ricky Vaughan Twitter account “was more impactful … than several major media outlets and figures such as NBC News and The Drudge Report.”

He also assessed Mackey’s influence as Ricky Vaughn based on his reporting on the alt-right and the white nationalist movement.

“I saw [the] Ricky Vaughn account appearing everywhere,” O’Brien said. “People were re-tweeting this, white nationalists were re-tweeting this, mainstream Republicans were re-tweeting this account. It was impossible not to notice the impact of Ricky Vaughn if you were paying attention to far-right politics during the election.”

That’s right — Mackey is a alt-right figure who promoted racist and anti-Semitic content along with his other stuff. Funny how Alexander failed to mention that fact.

Alexander then tried to play whataboutism:

Josh Hammer at The American Mind didn’t think Mackey would actually be convicted since the case was so weak, and pointed out that a leftist who engaged in the exact same conduct, Kristina Wong, wasn’t prosecuted. Her tweet is still up.

[…]

If Mackey deserves to be prosecuted, then Wong does too, and the Justice Department should also be investigating voter suppression by Democrats who disenfranchised Republicans. Otherwise it’s selective prosecution and evidence the U.S. has become a banana republic.

Alexander omits inconvenient facts here too. First, Wong is a known comedian. Second, she offered no text number with which to vote. Third, Alexander offers no evidence that a single person acted on Wong’s obviously joking advice, whereas thousands were documented acting on Mackey’s advice.