‘In the Old America, This Would Provoke an Uprising’

November 15. 2023 by Jack Cashill

No stranger to hypocrisy, Hillary Clinton set a breathtaking new standard with her denunciation of convicted meme jokester Douglass Mackey.  The context was an April 2023 discussionwith former House speaker Nancy Pelosi at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, where Hillary is reportedly a professor.

“Democracy requires at least a minimal level of trust,” said Hillary with the semblance of a straight face.  “So if we are going to turn our politics over to people who — maybe just for the heck of it — are making up stuff to misrepresent leaders, or maybe because they know they can achieve it if they do, then where does this stop?”

Mackey’s crime was to pass along a meme he found online titled, “Save Time, Avoid the Line.”  This meme, said Hillary, who knows something about election subversion, “went from speech to action meant to subvert the election.”  Graced with a picture of a smiling Hillary, the meme then directed readers to text their vote to a given number.  Try as hard as they might, prosecutors could not find not a single one of the “thousands of people” Hillary claimed to have been affected by this transparent joke.

“He was one of the main people running memes against me in 2016,” said Hillary.  Mackey was no such thing.  A 27-year-old Middlebury College grad living in New York City at the time, Mackey was an unconnected and unpaid Trump-supporter.  He tweeted under the handle “Ricky Vaughn,” the Charlie Sheen “Wild Thing” character in the baseball comedy Major League.

Although Mackey did not take himself seriously, the Biden DOJ obviously did.  Seven days after the 2021 inauguration, more than four years after the purported crime, ten law enforcement officers, four of them FBI, made an unannounced 7 A.M. visit at his residence and led Mackey away in handcuffs.  It was not until his arraignment that he had the slightest idea what he was being accused of doing.

In March 2023, Mackey was convicted by a federal jury in Brooklyn of the charge of “Conspiracy Against Rights stemming from his scheme to deprive individuals of their constitutional right to vote.”  The DOJ boasted of the conviction and alerted other online comics that Mackey “faces a maximum of 10 years in prison.”  In October, he was sentenced to a seemingly merciful seven months.

In his recent conversation with the laconic Vermonter, Tucker Carlson focused on the issues of free speech and the abuse of government power.  For Hillary to cheer on the arrest of a political foe like Mackey, Carlson argued, was a step into “Idi Amin territory.”

Although Carlson did not mention Kristina Wong’s tweet from election morning, November 8, 2016, others have.  The tweet is still available on X.  “Hey Trump Supporters!” said Wong, wearing a MAGA hat.  “Skip poll lines at #Election2016 and TEXT in your vote!  Text votes are legit.  Or vote tomorrow on Super Wednesday!”  Wong, of course, has not been arrested.  She has not even felt compelled to delete her tweet, which is posted in video form.

Overlooked by Mackey’s supporters, however, is the most serious injustice of all: the failure of the DOJ to hold Hillary accountable for, as she put it, “making up stuff to misrepresent leaders.”  I refer specifically to the most epic attempt to “subvert” a presidential election in American political history, the Russia hoax, a hoax bought and paid for by Hillary and her minions.

The closest Special Counsel John Durham came to tying Hillary to this plot was the trial of FBI informant Igor Danchenko.  Although Durham accused Danchenko of lying to the FBI, he used the trial to highlight the role of the FBI, the Department of Justice, the Mueller investigation, and finally Hillary herself in this massive vote suppression scheme.

Through her cut-outs, Clinton had hired British intel op Christopher Steele to somehow link then-candidate Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin.  The result was the infamous Steele dossier.  As FBI supervisor Brian Auten admitted at trial, “Mr.Steele was offered anywhere up to a million dollars for any information, documentary, physical evidence, anything of that sort which could help to prove the allegations.”

The FBI made this offer in early October 2016, two weeks before it filed its first FISA application against American businessman Carter Page.  As Auten admitted, Steele did not and could not provide “anything.”  No matter.  Without any corroboration, FBI brass went ahead and filed not just one, but four FISA applications against Page with the unproven Steele information as its foundation.  In 2016, they had an election to win.

Upon learning that Danchenko was Steele’s principal source for the gossip contained in the dossier, the FBI hired him as a confidential human source (CHS).  At his trial, Durham revealed that Danchenko’s primary sub-source was a Democrat operative named Charles Dolan who had direct ties to both Hillary and to Russia.

In October 2022, I wrote of Dolan in these pages: “He just made stuff up and fed it to Danchenko who, in turn, fed it to Christopher Steele who fed it to the Clinton campaign, the media, and the FBI who collectively shared this unvetted nonsense with the world for several years.”

“Making up stuff to misrepresent leaders,” Hillary assures us, is bad for democracy.  The goal of the Hillary camp in making this stuff up was to subvert democracy by discouraging citizens from voting for Trump.  The bogus Trump-Putin news generated pre-election easily cost Trump a thousand times more votes than Doug Mackey’s tweets cost Hillary.

“Because they know they can achieve [victory] if they do,” said Hillary of subversives like Mackey, “then where does this stop?”  Well, in Hillary’s case, “this” did not stop with the 2016 election.  The Hillary-friendly DOJ, with an able assist from the media, kept the hoax alive for at least two more years, certainly through the November 2018 election cycle.

The plot thoroughly corrupted that election.  By any metric, things were going swimmingly in President Trump’s America as November approached.  The GDP was up 5.2% from 2017.  The unemployment rate declined to a 49-year low of 3.8%.  Inflation was only at 2.49% year-to-year.  The murder rate fell nearly 6%, the second straight year of decrease after a wild spike under Obama.  No new wars had been launched, and the American death count in Afghanistan had fallen to 3% of its peak eight years prior.

So how was it that the Republicans barely held the Senate despite having only nine seats at risk?  How too did the Democrats capture 41 seats in the House, their biggest gain in a midterm since the post-Watergate tsunami of 1974?  The answer is simple.  Lacking a real Watergate, Hillary and her allies created one.

And Doug Mackey goes to prison for a silly meme he did not even create?  Said Tucker Carlson, “In the old America this would provoke an uprising.”

Jack Cashill’s new book, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities,