Tag: memes

Trad Catholic Family Dragged Out of Home at Gunpoint, Locked in Van After FBI ‘Goaded’ Teen to Post Offensive Memes, Dad Says

Atraditional Catholic family was allegedly “dragged out of their home at gunpoint, handcuffed and locked in a van” earlier this year after the FBI “goaded” their 15-year-old son to post  “offensive memes” online. The teen, a volunteer firefighter and altar boy, was then hospitalized on mental health pretenses, according to his father, Jeremiah Rufini.

The FBI’s aggressive “investigation” only resulted in a misdemeanor conviction against the boy for breach of peace, but financially devastated the family with substantial legal expenses.

The FBI targeted the boy as part of a sting operation catfishing traditionalist Catholic teenagers with “extreme political content,” Rufini explained in the family’s GiveSendGo crowdfunding site. 

The family’s difficulties began early in 2023 when Rufini’s father became too ill from chemotherapy to work at the family business or care for his 93 year-old grandmother who lives in an in-law apartment at his home.

The home-schooled 15 year-old took on the responsibility of caring for his great grandmother until his father got home from work each day.

“It was a very stressful time, compounded by several unrelated deaths in the family that happened in the same time period,” Rufini explained. The long hours alone with his grandmother led the boy, equipped with a brand new cell phone, to become ensnared in an FBI scheme targeting trad Catholics.

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Elon Musk Warns Irish They Could Be Arrested For Having a Meme on Their Phone

Elon Musk has warned Irish people that they could literally be arrested and imprisoned for having a meme on their phone if new hate speech laws are passed.

The new laws were introduced in response to the Dublin riots, with authorities keen to punish people who were angry over an Algerian migrant stabbing three children in broad daylight.

The law creates a new crime of inciting violence or hatred againsts persons by possessing material which offends the “protected characteristics” of an individual or group.

Musk responded to the controversy by posting on X, “Language being proposed as law in Ireland means this could literally happen to you for having a meme on your phone.”

The post was accompanied by a video of a SWAT team smashing down a door and invading someone’s house.

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Tennessee to Pay $125,000 to Settle Lawsuit by Man Arrested for Posting Meme Mocking Dead Cop

The state of Tennessee will pay $125,000 to settle a First Amendment lawsuit filed by a man who was arrested and jailed for nearly two weeks for posting a meme mocking a dead police officer.

Joshua Garton, 29, was arrested in January of 2021 and charged with harassment following a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) probe into a pseudonymous Facebook post that appeared to show two men urinating on the tombstone of an officer who was shot and killed in 2018. A judge dismissed the charges a month later, and Garton filed a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging malicious prosecution, false arrest, and First Amendment retaliation.

In a settlement agreement filed earlier this month, two TBI agents and 23rd District Attorney General Ray Crouch did not admit any guilt, but they agreed to pay Garton to avoid further litigation costs.

“First Amendment retaliation is illegal, and law enforcement officials who arrest people for offending them will pay heavy consequences,” Daniel Horwitz, Garton’s lead attorney, said in a press release issued Monday. “Misbehaving government officials apologize with money, and Mr. Garton considers more than $10,000 per day that he was illegally incarcerated to be an acceptable apology.”

The TBI, Tennessee’s lead investigative law enforcement agency, launched an investigation into the offending Facebook post at the request of 23rd District Attorney Ray Crouch. Agents visited the officer’s gravesite and quickly surmised that the picture Garton posted was fake. It was in fact a doctored photo of the cover of “Pissing on Your Grave,” a single by The Rites, which originally depicted two men urinating on the tombstone of punk legend GG Allin.

Despite knowing that no one had physically desecrated the grave, the TBI continued its investigation, soliciting tips on Twitter about Garton’s identity. When it finally nabbed Garton, TBI put out a press release, complete with mugshot, announcing his arrest for “manufacturing and disseminating a harassing photograph on social media.”

As Reason wrote when Garton was first arrested, it was unclear how a dead person could be criminally harassed under Tennessee law, which requires that the subject be “frightened, intimidated or emotionally distressed.”

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He’s Going to Prison for Twitter Trolling. That’s Not Justice.

It took an FBI investigation, a three-week trial, and lots of taxpayer dollars, but the government finally got what it wanted this week: A Florida man is heading to federal prison for disseminating trollish memes during the 2016 election season that prosecutors alleged “deprive[d] people of their constitutional right to vote.”

In the months leading up to Election Day, Douglass Mackey, an erstwhile far-right social media influencer, posted a series of photos on his Twitter profile—which had about 58,000 followers under the name “Ricky Vaughn”—encouraging Hillary Clinton–supporters to cast their votes by phone. That obviously didn’t go so well for the people who fell for it. But however you feel about Mackey’s obnoxious brand of politics and feeble attempt at comedy, the case became about a lot more than him, raising questions about protected speech, overcriminalization, and a politicized Department of Justice.

To prosecute Mackey, the government leveraged a law from 1870, a century and change before Twitter trolling would become a sport. That legislation was passed to deter the Ku Klux Klan from trying to prevent black people from voting, as they were known to do. According to the indictment, the DOJ alleged Mackey conspired to “injure, oppress, threaten and intimidate one or more persons in the free exercise and enjoyment of a right and privilege secured to them by the Constitution and laws of the United States, to wit: the right to vote.”

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Meme Artist Douglass Mackey is Sentenced To Seven Months in Prison For Hillary Clinton Voting Meme

Douglass Mackey, a once well-known creator of memes on Twitter, has been sentenced to seven months in prison.

The conviction marks a dramatic escalation in how free speech is being handled in the United States. Rendered in the New York criminal court, Mackey was declared guilty of perpetrating a “conspiracy against rights”—the right to an unobstructed election being the one in focus here.

Mackey, who operated under the alias Ricky Vaughn, had made and shared memes critical of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 Presidential race. His memes humorously suggested that Clinton supporters cast their ballots through text messages – a patently invalid method of voting.

Although such an improper method was clearly ineffective, Mackey was still convicted over the notion of election interference.

Quite interestingly, many have noted, other internet users who shared similar content regarding the option of text voting for Donald Trump were neither charged nor convicted.

The absence of evidence showing any voting attempt made following Mackey’s meme did not deter the US Department of Justice from declaring it an interference. Despite Mackey professing his mere intent of creating a viral meme, similar to those which his fellow Clinton detractors had created; he was singled out and penalized.

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High school student sues Tenn. school district after getting suspended for social media posts

A Tennessee high school student is suing a school district, saying the district violated his first amendment rights when administrators suspended him for posting three memes of his principal on Instagram.

One meme depicts the principal holding a box of fruit and vegetables with the words “my brotha” and “on god” over the screen. Another shows the principal as an anime cat and wearing a dress. Court papers say the third meme shows the principal’s head superimposed on a hand-drawn cartoon meant to resemble a character from the online game “Among Us,” with a cartoon bird clinging to his leg

Court papers say the student posted them to his personal Instagram account last summer joking about their Tullahoma City school principal.

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The world’s top H.P. Lovecraft expert weighs in on a monstrous viral meme in the A.I. world

Artificial intelligence is scary to a lot of people, even within the tech world. Just look at how industry insiders have co-opted a tentacled monster called a shoggoth as a semi-tongue-in-cheek symbol for their rapidly advancing work.

But their online memes and references to that creature — which originated in influential late author H.P. Lovecraft’s novella “At the Mountains of Madness” — aren’t quite perfect, according to the world’s leading Lovecraft scholar, S.T. Joshi.

If anyone knows Lovecraft and his wretched menagerie, which includes the ever-popular Cthulhu, it’s Joshi. He’s edited reams of Lovecraft collections, contributed scores of essays about the author and written more than a dozen books about him, including the monumental two-part biography “I Am Providence.”

So, after The New York Times recently published a piece from tech columnist Kevin Roose explaining that the shoggoth had caught on as “the most important meme in A.I.,” CNBC reached out to Joshi to get his take — and find out what he thought Lovecraft would say about the squirmy homage from the tech world.

“While I’m sure Lovecraft would be grateful (and amused) by the application of his creation to AI, the parallels are not very exact,” Joshi wrote. “Or, I should say, it appears that AI creators aren’t entirely accurate in their understanding of the shoggoth.”

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Anti-Hillary Election ‘Meme’ Case Could Open The Floodgates To More Gov’t Censorship, Legal Experts Warn

Douglass Mackey’s Friday conviction for an election “meme” he posted on his account with over 58,000 followers has legal experts raising alarm bells about its impact on free speech.

A jury convicted Mackey for conspiring to deprive others of their right to vote through a meme he posted during the 2016 election, which advertised a way to vote for Hilary Clinton via text message. First Amendment experts say Mackey’s conviction is based on an expansive interpretation of a Conspiracy Against Rights law that could impact other forms of speech, from satire to lies in election campaigns.

While the First Amendment allows for punishing fraud, “it’s not clear Mackey’s actions qualify as fraud in a legal sense,” Aaron Terr, director of Public Advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“Fraud generally requires a speaker to make a false statement to obtain money or something of material value from the injured party, who relies on the false statement to their detriment,” he said. Even if Mackey’s actions did qualify, Terr also noted that the Justice Department indicted him using a statute that goes beyond fraudulent speech.

“It criminalizes conspiring to ‘injure’ or ‘oppress’ someone in the exercise of any constitutional right,” he said. “If that vague language covers speech that deceives people into voting improperly, it raises the troubling possibility of the government also applying it to allegedly false statements about political issues or candidates that discourage people from voting, not just misrepresentations about the logistics of exercising the franchise. Anyone who cares about free speech should be concerned about how the government might abuse this vague and broadly worded law to chill the spirited public discourse on which our democracy depends.”

After being charged with Conspiracy Against Rights, Mackey faces up to ten years in prison. Eugene Volokh, Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA, told the DCNF there are two primary routes he could take for an appeal.

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