Bob Unruh wrote in a Jan. 9 WorldNetDaily article:
Political and election memes appear in floods during election years, and often in between.
One recent one had an image of Barack Obama telling Joe Biden, “I’m endorsing you.”
Biden, with his known history of mental lapses, flubs and blunders, responds, “For what?”
But one meme is being used by prosecutors to try to sent a comic to jail, and he’s now fighting back.
A report from Revolver News explains Douglass Mackey was convicted in New York of “election interference” for sharing a satirical anti-Hillary Clinton meme online.
The political jokester passed along, online, a meme that said “Save Time, Avoid the Line” and it directed readers to text their vote.
Of course it was all a joke.
Then nearly a dozen police pounded on his door, he was arrested, and then convicted for “conspiracy against rights” by those who claimed he was scheming to deprive people of the right to vote.
Now he’s appealing.
Unruh is deliberately omitting many of the relevant facts of the case. As we pointed out when WND columnists Rachel Alexander and Jack Cashill did something similar when rushing to Mackey’s defense, it’s highly unlikely that Mackey was “joking about Hillary,” as Unruh’s headline claimed. Mackey is an alt-right Twitter troll who posted under the name Ricky Vaughn, and he has also said that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote and that black people are easily deceived (not a lot of chuckles to be found there). The tweet in question showed a photo of a Black woman with a Clinton campaign sign, encouraging people to “avoid the line” and “vote from home” (to which thousands responded); at the same time, he was also sending tweets suggesting that it was important to limit “black turnout” at voting booths. As such, he was convicted of conspiring to deprive individuals of their right to vote — not of telling a joke.
Still, Unruh uncritically repeated Mackey’s dubious defense that lies are constitutionally protected:
He has written in a request for the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse the decision, and he’s arguing that if the government’s case against him stands, the results necessarily would criminalize not just political misinformation and satire, but also “lies about also whether and for whom to vote. Such a sprawling political speech code is in the teeth of every applicable canon for reading criminal laws, and grossly offends the First Amendment.”
[…]The appeal contends, “The premise of this prosecution is that [the law] criminalizes anything, even deceptive speech, that may ‘hamper,’ ‘frustrate,’ ‘slow,’ or ‘prevent’ voting. […] Consider the repercussions of that interpretation[.]”
Unruh added that “Additionally, a ‘progressive’ activist told Donald Trump supporters to vote by text, but she was not prosecuted.” As we also noted, the “activist” in question, Kristina Wong, is an actual known comedian, unlike Mackey.