Bob Unruh began an Oct. 31 WorldNetDaily article by repeating a lie:
Back in 2016, Douglass Mackey, known online as Ricky Vaughn, went to social media with a joke about voting for Hillary Clinton in that year’s presidential election via text message.
It was, actually, just an updated version of an election meme that’s been around for years. Depending on the political persuasion, it has appeared before as “Democrats vote on Tuesday, Republicans on Wednesday,” or vice versa.
That one’s comedic value obviously is that an election, for generations in America, has been on a Tuesday, so a Wednesday vote is valueless. Likewise with Mackey’s, as there is no accepted process for voting “via text message.”
A report at RedState explained, “While most people saw this particular meme and thought, ‘Haha, can you imagine anybody being that stupid,’ scolds at the Justice Department tightened up their britches and set about squashing the man.”
In fact, Mackey was arrested, charged with election interference, specifically., “conspiring with others in advance of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election to use various social media platforms to disseminate misinformation designed to deprive individuals of their constitutional right to vote.”
The Deep State feds in Washington, the report said, held the premise that “somebody might have actually believed the meme and thus had their vote stolen away by trying to cast it as a text message.”
Mackey was convicted and sentenced to seven months in prison, although he contested that at the appellate court level.
But, the report said, “Under that same premise, it must be assumed that Trump supporters might be duped by Kimmel’s suggestion and attempt to vote on Thursday or Friday after Election Day. Thus, they would be deprived of their vote as well. Kimmel must be investigated and charged with the very same crime.”
As we documented when other WND writers pushed this story, Mackey is a racist and misogynist alt-right Twitter troll — he has also said that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote and that black people are easily deceived — and it’s highly unlikely that he was joking. Indeed, there was no indication of a joke in his tweet, despite the assertion of “comedic value.” (The RedState article — written by Rusty Weiss, a a onetime blogger at NewsBusters — stated that “most people saw this particular meme and thought, ‘Haha, can you imagine anybody being that stupid,'” which ignores the fact that Mackey’s goal was to prove that black people are indeed that stupid.)
The point of rehashing this bogus was to claim that KImmel’s joke was no different than what Mackey said; Unruh uncritically quoted Weiss’ assertion that “Kimmel did exactly what Mackey was arrested for.” No, he didn’t, and there are major differences: Kimmel has a comedy show and his joke was made in that context, while Mackey is a racist who set out to deceive people, no matter how much he denies it now. It wasn’t funny then, and it’s even less so now.
Retconning a lie into a joke is a bad look. WND and RedState should know better — but because they don’t, they do provide more copy for us.