If Douglass Mackey is guilty of election interference, what about Google?
Douglass Mackey.
You probably know him as “Ricky Vaughn,” that Twitter guy from 2016 who posted the funny memes about Hillary Clinton—“Avoid the line. Vote from home. Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925”—and got in a lot of trouble for his efforts. So much trouble, in fact, that he’s been convicted of election interference under a Reconstruction-era anti-Klan statute and is due to spend almost a year in federal prison if his current appeal fails. I pray it doesn’t.
Douglass Mackey’s case is one of the most egregious miscarriages of justice in recent times. A testament to the degree to which American justice has been politicized and is being wielded in a partisan manner to destroy not just the leaders, but also the followers, of the American populist movement created by Donald Trump.
The great victory of 2016, the biggest upset in American history, must never be allowed to happen again, and the best way to do that, the regime clearly feels, is to prosecute those who made it happen in the first place. The prosecutions serve as individual punishment and demonstration to all those who might seek to emulate Trump, Bannon and even a humble sh*tposter like Ricky Vaughn.
What is now Title 18, USC Section 241 was one of a number of statutes passed in response to the Klu Klux Klan’s violent attempts to suppress the black vote in the South after the end of the Civil War. In 1871, passage of the Ku Klux Klan Act brought nine counties in South Carolina under martial law, leading to thousands of arrests. Eleven years later, the act was declared unconstitutional and repealed, but by that point it had done its work. The threat from the Klan had largely subsided. A century later, Title 18, USC Section 241, with new additions like Section 245, was used during the Civil Rights era to provide remedy for renewed attempts to prevent black Southerners from voting.
Since the events of 6 January 2021, Title 18 USC Section 241 has been used as a bludgeon against anybody the regime wants to put away for the simple crime of opposing it, and not just Douglass Mackey. Trump, Rudy Guiliani, the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys have all found themselves wrapped up in federal suits under Section 241.
But Mackey’s case is particularly chilling, because it directly concerns the First Amendment and the sacred right to free speech that, along with the right to bear arms, is the basis of American political life. As legal scholar Eugene Volokh has said, there’s no reason to believe it’s constitutional to prosecute lies that prevent people from voting (although it’s worth noting, in the Mackey case, that the prosecution couldn’t even establish that—they provided no evidence anybody who saw the “Text Hillary” meme was actually prevented from voting in the normal manner). Politicians lie all the time for momentary and long-term advantage. We all know this. Should they be charged with voter suppression under Section 241? Yes or no? Why?
Mackey’s prosecution under Title 18, USC Section 241 is spurious. Totally. It’s unconstitutional, as I say. But that doesn’t mean the legislation, in itself, lacks merit or application today.
Here’s one application I would suggest: Use it to pursue Google, and anybody else—any individual or organization—that can be shown to have colluded with the tech giant in suppressing access to information about former president Donald Trump and the events that took place on that fateful day in Butler, Pennsylvania, two weeks ago.
Yesterday, users reported that searches for “assassination attempt on tr” were completed by Google’s search engine with “assassination attempt on Truman” and other searches totally unrelated to Trump’s dice with death.
Typing the entire phrase “assassination attempt trump” yielded no autofilled results at all.
It was like the whole event had been erased from the digital realm.
Soon enough, Twitter owner and newly minted Trump donor Elon Musk weighed in, tweeting a picture that showed the search engine completing the phrase “President Donald…” with “president Donald duck” and “president donald regan.”
“Wow, Google has a search ban on President Donald Trump! Election interference?”
You betcha that’s election interference. If Douglass Mackey tweeting a meme he didn’t even make, to a few hundred thousand people, without any discernible impact on voting behaviour, is election interference, then we’re talking election interference times a million. Whereas Mackey’s intent was simply to make people laugh—mission accomplished—Google’s intent is absolutely to influence the outcome of the election, something it’s more than capable of doing as the great arbiter of our digital age.
Google’s not alone. Google, the other Big Tech companies and the mainstream media all want the public to forget that Trump came with millimetres of death on that stage in Butler. They don’t want the public to see that stunning picture of Trump, bloodied, defiant, fist raised aloft—FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!—beneath a trailing Stars and Stripes. They don’t want the public to find out as much as they can about the absurd incompetence of the Secret Service and law enforcement and maybe even the deliberate malfeasance that could have ended Donald Trump’s life in front of the whole world.
They want you to forget, because they know that Trump’s bloody stand alone could propel him to the White House for a second term, and that no amount of astroturfing on social media—“Kamala is brat!” “Childless cat ladies for Kamala!”—can match the transcendent power of that image. They want you to forget about it all and believe this is an election where Trump, not the regime, is the threat to democracy. If you hear anything it should be FBI Director Christopher Wray’s weasel words about “shrapnel” and if you read anything, it should be his agency’s pathetic statement about “bullet fragments,” followed by a Newsweek piece on how Trump wasn’t even shot at all.
Assassination attempt!? What assassination attempt!?
This is coordinated, all of it, and everyone involved, from those who gave the order to change the algorithm to the programmers who did it should be charged with election interference. Throw the book at them.
The problem, of course, is that there isn’t enough time before the election to do this. The best we can hope for is that popular outrage and political pressure will make Google and the other Big Tech firms back off, if not fully, then at least partially. We must keep the information flowing.
But when Trump gets in, he really must go after Big Tech, starting with Google. Make them pay. Big time.
Oh yeah, and pardon Douglass Mackey too.
