Douglass Mackey, a Vermont-based libertarian-turned-Trump supporter with a Middlebury College background and corporate past, faced arrest in 2021 over a 2016 "shit post" meme urging voters to text Hillary Clinton—an action he claimed was harmless satire. The FBI raided his home in January 2021, seven days after Biden’s inauguration, alleging election interference, though Mackey insisted his unpaid Twitter activity was just reposted humor with no intent to sway votes. Clinton later framed the meme as voter deception, but Mackey dismissed it as a baseless political weaponization of federal laws against opponents, exposing how memes can spark years-long legal battles under vague statutes. [Automatically generated summary]
If someone had told you even 10 years ago that you could be indicted by the federal government and go to prison for 10 years for making fun of Hillary Clinton on social media, you would not have believed it.
It's a free country.
We have free speech.
But it turns out not only is that possible, it has likely become much more common because the actual war is over information.
One of its first casualties is a man called Doug Mackey, who during the 2016 election made fun of Hillary Clinton on Twitter.
And then a few years later, found himself the subject of a federal raid, an indictment, and then a conviction.
It's a shocking story.
It's hard to believe it's happening in this country, but it is.
I thought he was a breath of fresh air for the country.
I think that his analysis of the problems with the country, with the ruling class of the country, I liked what he was saying, and I thought he had a positive vision for the country.
There was just a trial in Brooklyn where a guy who had been one of the main, I guess he was one of the main people running memes against me in 2016, he went from what you could consider free speech.
I mean, both Nancy and I have pretty thick skins.
People say all kinds of things about us.
But he went from that to running a very deliberate effort to mislead people about where and how to vote.
So it went from speech to action meant to subvert the election because thousands of people who they targeted through their algorithms, oh, I can text my vote for Hillary Clinton.
I knew that politicians could be vindictive, and the federal government sometimes could be influenced by those politicians, and I know that they can sort of get very creative with federal statutes.
If I was the enemy of their candidate, then I thought maybe they could cook something up.