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Douglass Mackey is a free man. Almost a decade after he posted some innocuous memes that made Hillary Clinton big mad and nearly five years after the Biden DoJ came knocking at his door because of those memes, a bipartisan panel of judges finally dismissed his absurd, unprecedented conviction for interfering in the 2016 election. But the thing isn’t over. Now it’s Mackey’s turn. The hunted becomes the hunter.
Last Monday, on Donald Trump Jr.’s show, Mackey announced his intention to sue the pants off the US government for its years of baseless persecution. Although the Biden DoJ failed to send him to prison, the process itself was punishment, designed to sap his will to live and his financial resources and make him wish he was dead.
Mackey’s been through hell—more than most could ever handle.
To pursue justice, Mackey has retained big-shot attorney James Burnham, who recently served as general counsel for DOGE, and as general counsel to the president, the DoJ’s Civil Rights Division and the Attorney General’s office.
Mackey had previously suggested he would sue the DoJ after the case was overturned (assuming it was), but by hiring Burnham, he’s sending a clear message. Burnham is a serious guy—a very serious guy—who knows just how to handle a case like this and, most importantly, how to win.
During the interview with Don Jr., Burnham laid out the strategy he would pursue against the DoJ. The main priority, of course, is to secure some kind of fitting compensation for Mackey, whose entire life has been turned upside down for the better part of a decade. Before the Biden DoJ came for him, he had already endured high-profile media hounding and doxxing that led him to up sticks and move state to Florida in an attempt to reclaim his life and some privacy. It’s always hard to quantify intangibles like—I don’t know—feeling the federal government wants to annihilate you because of your political views, or even tangible things like missing the birth of your child, but I’d say millions of dollars is a good ballpark for what was done to Mackey. Mackey spent millions in legal fees, which he’ll be looking to recoup, but Burnham will also want to put a figure to all the lost opportunities, reputational damage, misery and stress as well.
The second part of the strategy will be more personal and involve suing individual attorneys for their role in the case, as well as lodging misconduct complaints with the bar. The DoJ is a huge faceless government department, sure, but it was individual lawyers with faces—bound, supposedly, by professional standards not to mention the law—who made the persecution real.
The third part is the most intriguing, because it signals the determination of Mackey and his counsel to understand the full extent of the Biden regime’s corruption and to prevent any US citizen from ever suffering the same treatment. Burnham will work with Attorney General Bondi and the DoJ to uncover exactly who greenlit the case against Mackey and why, and who, ultimately, needs to be held responsible, as well as how that can be done.
“We’re not going to stop at anything until we make sure there is never another case like this again, ever,” Burnham told Don Jr.
It’s worth remembering just how absurd the Mackey case actually was. Mackey was the man behind a popular Twitter account called Ricky Vaughn, named after the baseball-hat-wearing Charlie Sheen character. Vaughn was widely judged to have been one of the most influential pro-Trump accounts during the 2016 election. The MIT Media Lab, for example, ranked Vaughn as being more important than NBC News, Stephen Colbert and the Drudge Report in its list of the 150 top influencers of the election.
The actual memes that got Mackey in so much trouble were obviously satirical in nature: a series of fake posters that enjoined African American and Latino voters to cast their votes by text or by Twitter or Facebook hashtags. One of the memes featured an African American woman next a banner saying, “African Americans for Hillary: Avoid the line. Vote from home. Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925. Vote for Hillary and be part of history.”
It’s never been possible to vote by text message or social-media hashtag. During the trial, the prosecution couldn’t even show that a single person who had seen the meme had not cast a legitimate vote or had their rights infringed in any way. Not one person. Mackey didn’t even make the memes either. He saw them on 4Chan. He just reposted them.
Still, Mackey had to be guilty of something somehow, and the DoJ picked Title 18 USC Section 241 to prosecute him under, stretching the meaning and intention of the Section to breaking point and beyond.
Title 18 USC Section 241 started life as one of a series of statutes passed in response to the Ku Klux Klan’s violent attempts to suppress the black vote in the South after the end of the Civil War. It was used again during the Civil Rights era to prevent the same from happening.
Since January of 2021, however, Section 241 been used to persecute Trump supporters, including Douglass Mackey and also individuals and groups who were present at the Capitol on Jan 6th. All, it was claimed, were engaging in election interference one way or another.
Seen on its own, Mackey’s case is obviously absurd. But it becomes somewhat less so if we consider it as part of a broader war against President Trump’s most powerful allies. The people who helped get Trump elected had to be punished for it, by hook or by crook. Every last one of them. That meant Alex Jones, General Flynn, Roger Stone, Peter Navarro, Steve Bannon.
Mackey, however, wasn’t just punished for who he was or what he had done. He was punished for what he was—or, rather, what he represented: the American people, the ones who voted for Trump. The MAGA grassroots and the popular organizers from among its ranks.
President Trump has said, more than once, that his enemies aren’t really going after him: They’re going after you, and he’s just standing in the way. It’s true, but it’s also just as true of Douglass Mackey. The Democrats and the Deep State went after Douglass Mackey because they wanted to go after you. They fully intended his prosecution to be an exemplary punishment, designed pour discourager les autres, if you’ll pardon my mangled French.
No: you don’t have freedom of speech, whatever the Constitution says. No: you can’t speak up and ridicule the absurd baby-eating warmongers who’ve bled America dry for decades and sold out the nation’s future for stocks and shares. If you do—if you so much as even post a meme Hillary Clinton or some partisan busybody at the DoJ doesn’t like—you too could be subject to a prosecution under Title 18 USC Sec. 241 or any other piece of legislation the DoJ decides to weaponize to deprive you of your fundamental rights.
The intent was to have a chilling effect, of course. The Kyle Rittenhouse prosecution, and others like it, have been intended to do the same thing for the Second Amendment, by making clear-cut cases of self-defense subject to the whims of potentially hostile juries, whipped up and misinformed by the leftist media.
And the truth is, even though Rittenhouse and Mackey both eventually won in court, their enemies still prevailed, in a sense, because now some people really will second-guess their instincts to post a meme or comment, or pick up a legally owned firearm to defend their property and their person. Some probably have already. Not that we’ll ever know how many. That’s how insidious the whole thing is: It operates at the level of individual consciousness and habit, before actions even take place. It breeds self-censorship.
Mackey’s case is a clear reminder of how close America came to becoming a genuine tyranny under Joe Biden’s puppet presidency. There can be no doubt things would be even worse if, heaven forbid, Kamala Harris had won last November. Many of those people who helped build that embryonic tyranny have now left government, but others remain. Some of them went after Douglass Mackey, and now he’s taken their worst, he’s doing his part to root them out and make them pay. For that, he’s a hero twice-over. He’s doing all Americans a great service.
