by WorldTribune Staff, October 31, 2024 Contract With Our Readers
What’s the difference between a late night talk show host and a conservative meme specialist?
About seven months in the slammer.
Jimmy KimmelIn his opening monologue on Wednesday night, host Jimmy Kimmel informed viewers:
“I don’t know if you know about this, but we have an election coming up. I feel relaxed about it, I’ve really been enjoying the week. It’s times like these it’s important to remember that cannabis is legal in our state.”
Kimmel continued: “Vote early, vote early. If you can’t vote early, vote on time. If you want to vote for Trump vote late, vote very late. Do your voting on Thursday or maybe Friday.”
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In 2016, Douglass Mackey, under the Twitter handle @TheRickeyVaughn, posted a meme joking that Hillary Clinton supporters should “Avoid the line. Vote from home,” along with an instruction that votes could be texted in.
For the Hillary meme, Mackey was prosecuted.
That prosecution began when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took office in 2021 and appointed Merrick Garland as attorney general.
Mackey was sentenced to 7 months in prison for posting the meme below:
The Biden-Harris Department of Justice claimed that the meme was “election interference” though no evidence was provided that anyone who saw the meme believed it and was deceived into voting by text.
“The complaint,” the DOJ said in 2021, “alleges that in 2016, Mackey established an audience on Twitter with approximately 58,000 followers.”
The Post Millennial’s Libby Emmons noted: “Jimmy Kimmel has over 1.7 million viewers per episode and his show airs every night. It is consistently one of the highest rated shows in late night. In 2016, there were only about 313 million users on Twitter in total. Kimmel clearly reaches a wider audience than Mackey did during the meme wars of 2016, yet as of Thursday morning, it does not appear that he will be prosecuted for telling a joke that, were it told by a conservative memester in 2016, would be classified as a federal crime.”
Mackey’s sentence was stayed and he filed an appeal with the Second Circuit, a case which is still pending. Mackey has vowed to take the case to the Supreme Court should he lose the appeal.
“This ruling is huge because it means that the appeals court decided that my appeal presents ‘substantial’ and ‘debatable’ issues of law that, if resolved in my favor, will result in my conviction being vacated. The prosecution, on the other hand, argued that my appeal was frivolous and that this was a typical election crime case like any other in U.S. history,” Mackey said in December 2023.
Also in the lead up to the 2016 election, leftist activist Kristina Wong posted a meme telling Trump supporters to “skip the polls” and text their vote. Wong was not prosecuted by the DOJ.
After seeing the Kimmel clip, Mackey posted to X: “Charles Clymer sent out his texts to thousands of actual voters. Jimmy Kimmel told his joke to an audience of millions. The joke meme I sent out didn’t even reach more than 100 people until Buzzfeed and Wired reported on it.”
Charlotte Clymer is a trans activist whose Super PAC sent out texts to voters telling them they had already voted even when they hadn’t in a voter suppression scheme that Clymer says was regrettable. The texts from “AllVote” read “Records show you voted” and linked to a Pennsylvania state voting information website. The campaign from AllVote was flagged by election officials as a scam.
Clymer told The Inquirer the texts were a well-intended reminder-turned-disastrous mistake, thanks to a typo committed by staffers.
“We are mortified by this mistake and the confusion it has caused,” the organization said in the statement.
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Jimmy Kimmel paid well to make comedy with Trump voter misinformation; Doug Mackey was sentenced to prison added by Editor Two on October 31, 2024
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