The conviction of a conservative social media comedian and meme artist has set off a firestorm of criticism from right-leaning internet personalities and pundits over the fairness of the judicial system.
Douglass Mackey, a 33-year-old from West Palm Beach, Florida, who operated on social media under the pseudonym Ricky Vaughn, was convicted on March 31 by a grand jury in Brooklyn, New York.
Mackey was found guilty of conspiracy against rights in connection with a social media scheme.
According to a Department of Justice press release from the Eastern District of New York, Mackey conspired with other Twitter influencers to mislead voters during the close presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016.
As proven at trial, Mackey used various tactics to confuse potential voters, such as encouraging Clinton supporters to vote via text message or social media, neither of which would count toward the election results. He worked with influencers, private online groups, and others to spread this information.
Memes that targeted black Americans in particular drew the ire of the Justice Department. Mackey’s tweets just days before the election suggested he felt it was important to limit “black turnout.”
While those were not intentionally misleading, the ones that followed — such as the photo of a woman standing in front of an “African Americans for Hillary” sign with instructions below it on how to vote via text — “crossed a line into criminality,” claimed U.S. Attorney Breon Peace.
Mackey also posted a version of the meme for Spanish speakers. Both memes used fonts similar to those used by the Hillary Clinton campaign and included the #ImWithHer hashtag made popular by Clinton.
“The first amendment as we know it died today,” wrote conservative journalist Greg Price on Twitter. “This is a completely outrageous decision by a jury in Brooklyn to send this man to jail for tweeting a meme. We are truly living in a third world banana republic.”
Republican presidential candidate and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy also argued that the conviction represented a dangerous threat to constitutional rights.
“Our country is becoming unrecognizable to anyone who understands our Constitution,” Ramaswamy wrote on Twitter. “We don’t have long to fix it. We aren’t some banana republic where the ruling party uses police power to arrest its political rivals (like Trump) or regular citizens (like Douglass Mackey) who poke fun at thin-skinned politicians.”
Conservatives also pointed to a tweet from a Democratic comedian and activist that they claimed highlighted the DOJ’s political bias.
The video shows comedian Kristina Wong making similar jokes to Douglass Mackey’s posts, urging Chinese-American Trump supporters to vote on the wrong day and to vote by text.
David Giglio, a former Republican candidate for U.S. Congress in California, responded to her tweet.
“Remember this video the next time Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray go in front of Congress and tell you there’s no political bias at the [Justice Department] …”
Others, however, celebrated the conviction and called for more legal action against social media influencers who supported Trump’s campaign in 2016.
“Douglass Mackey aka ‘Ricky Vaughn’ GUILTY…” wrote Leah McElrath, a widely followed professor at Smith College. “Now we need to go after the people who supported and directed his activities, as well as those of the rest of the front line MAGA3X operatives. That’s where the real story lies.”
