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Biden’s DOJ has found Douglass Mackey, better known for his online persona “Ricky Vaughn,” guilty in the trial concerning his anti-Hillary memes.
Mackey, 33, could face up to 10 years in prison for a meme he posted on Twitter one week before the 2016 election.
“Mackey has been found guilty by a jury of his peers of attempting to deprive individuals from exercising their sacred right to vote for the candidate of their choice in the 2016 Presidential Election,” stated United States Attorney Breon Peace.
The meme was reportedly an image of a black woman in front of an “African Americans for President Hillary” sign, according to The Gateway Pundit.
“Emblazoned on the picture was the message: ‘Avoid the Line. Vote from Home. Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925. Vote for Hillary and be a part of history,’” reports TGP.
An American neo-Nazi who went by online names such as “King ov Wrath” and “ilovehate5150” has been arrested for allegedly threatening to kill a reporter who was covering his terrorist organization.
Nicholas Welker was taken into custody by the FBI Tuesday after allegedly helping to create an internet meme that explicitly threatened the life of a U.S. journalist and then sending it directly to the reporter on Twitter. Welker has been charged with conspiracy to transmit threatening communications.
The reporter nor the outlet is not named in the court documents.
Welker was an alleged leader within the international neo-Nazi group, Feuerkrieg Division (FKD), according to court documents. In addition to his other pseudonyms, he also allegedly went by “DankTree2316.”
The Feuerkrieg Division is a now-disbanded neo-Nazi group that was openly accelerationist—meaning it wanted to hasten the collapse of society to build a white ethnostate from the ashes—and had ties to a plethora of violent crimes committed by young men, many of them minors. Members of the group have been charged with child abuse, assault, and plotting violent actions.
Like many other online neo-Nazi groups, the Feuerkrieg Division loves to use memes as propaganda. So when the group allegedly felt threatened by a reporter looking into them, Welker and his fellow neo-Nazis went to work.
The piece of propaganda in particular showed a photo of the journalist with a gun pointed at their head with messages “race traitor,” “journalist fuck off,” and ”you have been warned.” The meme also contained their name and place of employment. Welker allegedly had asked another neo-Nazi to create it and when he saw his vision come to life he responded with an emoji featuring a smiling face covered in hearts.
Welker then allegedly sent the threats directly to the reporter on Twitter asking him if he’s seen their latest work. According to the court documents, an FBI agent was able to ascertain Welker’s identity because of the work of antifascist researchers and remarkably sloppy operational security. After antifascist researchers outted Welker, he confirmed it within the Feuerkrieg Division chatrooms. A month later, he followed up by writing: “Nicholas Hazen Welker Santa Clara County Department of Corrections. That’s my information[.] In case I go missing”, before providing a date of birth.
The Department of Justice described the Feuerkrieg Division as a racially motivated violent extremist group that had “cells in multiple states.” The group took inspiration from Atomwaffen Division and was expressively accelerationist in nature. Like others within this community of groups, they drew from an aesthetic that embraced terrorism and violence.
The Feuerkrieg Division was initially founded in the Balkans by a 13-year-old Estonia boy who was going by “Commander.” The group became known for the violent actions of its members, death threats, and propaganda. In 2019, U.K. police arrested one member for plotting a mass shooting attack and sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl. One British teenager who was a leader pleaded guilty to 12 terrorism charges in 2021, making him one of Britain’s youngest convicted terrorists. The group was declared a terrorist organization by the U.K. in 2020.
Like other groups in this community, the Feuerkrieg Division had ties to the Order of Nine Angles, a satanic neo-Nazi group connected to child abuse and violent crimes.
On Monday, attorneys gave their opening arguments in the trial of internet meme maker Douglass Mackey, also known as Rickey Vaughn, with his lawyer Andrew Frisch telling a federal jury that Mackey wasn’t looking to trick voters when he posted Hillary Clinton memes in 2016 telling supporters to “vote from home” via text messaging.
Frisch said that Mackey was merely attempting to go viral, according to the New York Daily News, stating that Mackey was “sh*t-posting,” or “stuff-posting” as he told the jury.
“It means what it says — he was posting stuff,” Frisch said. “A lot of it was online trash-talking. Juvenile, sure, and some of it was vulgar.”
“Whatever your reaction when you hear his views … whether he was a great thinker or a neanderthal caveman, you will see that none of it is proof of a criminal conspiracy.”
According to Rolling Stone, Frisch argued that people had begun texting the number only after media outlets began covering the meme. He noted that two people texted “Hillary for prison” to the number.
Federal prosecutors claimed that Mackey worked with fellow meme makers to create the Twitter posts and make them as real as possible.
“This wasn’t about changing votes. This was about vaporizing votes, making them disappear,” said Assistant US Attorney Turner Buford.
“The number was real and set up to receive incoming messages,” he explained. “The release of these fake campaign ads was timed to flood the internet before Election Day.”
Mackey posted the memes on November 1, a week before the election, and Frisch said that the meme’s message was “ludicrous to anyone with a basic knowledge of how presidential elections work,” the New York Daily Mail reported.
Last month, Revolver profiled the Biden Administration’s persecution of former Twitter anon Doug Mackey, who was a famous pro-Trump voice back in 2016 under the moniker of Ricky Vaughn.
For those whose memory is foggy, a quick review: In the late stages of the 2016 race, Mackey posted several memes, designed to resemble Hillary Clinton campaign images, claiming that supporters could vote by simply texting a phone number.
The memes were a Twitter-generation version of the common joke about telling one’s political opponents to turn out for the election next Wednesday. But, in an unprecedented move, the Biden Administration says Mackey violated the Ku Klux Klan Act by systematically acting to strip Americans of their civil rights. The KKK Act was passed to prevent literal assaults and terrorism that prevented black Americans from voting, but now the DOJ’s prosecutors say it applies to satirical online speech — they say Mackey broke the law, even though they can’t produce a single person who failed to vote due to Mackey’s stunt.
(By the way, you can donate to Mackey’s legal defense here or here or here).
All of that is bad enough, but newly-unsealed documents released on Wednesday reveal new, sinister depths to the DOJ’s agenda.
Last fall, we warned about a new tool in the arsenal of weapons used by the regime to justify censorship and rolling back the basic rights of Americans. With this new tool, corrupt journalists like Taylor Lorenz can dox, harass, and lie about anyone they want and enjoy total immunity from criticism. Why? Well, if you dare to criticize a journalist like Lorenz, someone, somewhere, might become outraged and decide to commit an act of violence. With this remarkable censorship tool, the media’s attack dog journalists are magically absolved from any criticism because some nut job, somewhere, maybe, at sometime, might act violently upon this criticism.
Those viral online imitations — memes, as they’re called — can be more than just funny or annoying.
They can be terrorizing.
“A click, a save, a retweet…yeah, a like, that was one of the techniques we learned about today in the panel,” said Gina Ligon, director of the National Counterterrorism, Innovation, Technology and Education Center (NCITE). “Even liking them can alert a terrorist you’re sympathetic to their ideals.”
She’s referring to Thursday’s international panel discussing terrorists’ use of memes. More than 200 government officials and members of the public joined online.
“I first started studying them when ISIS was using them to recruit English speakers,” Ligon said. “They would do memes with ISIS fighters with kittens, and they would spread like wildfire online because they were so desperate to have a kitten with an ISIS fighter…and now, one of the reasons we held this, after the Buffalo attack this summer…that shooter had a ton of memes in his [posts].”
“We’re not just concerned about violent memes, we’re concerned about how violent memes might impact as violence in real life,” said NCITE researcher and panelist Kat Parsons.
Parsons is one of more than 50 NCITE researchers at universities across the nation. She shared some of her current studies into how memes can be used to spread violent beliefs. She was joined on the online panel by Oliver Goodman of U-K- based Moonshot, which “works to develop technologies and methodologies to expose threats, disrupt malicious actors, and protect vulnerable audiences online” as well as Arthur Bradley, the open source intelligence manager at Tech Against Terrorism.
Douglass Mackey is alleged to be one of the many anonymous Twitter users who made the 2016 election so different, so memorable, and so important.
Like other anonymous internet memesmiths (anons), Mackey had no external reason that anyone should care what he said. He held no office. He had no byline at an elite publication. He had no vast pool of wealth that conferred legitimacy, deserved or undeserved, on what he had to say.
Mackey’s notability, like that of Bronze Age Pervert or Libs of TikTok, came exclusively from what he had to say, and that people found it funny and compelling. Over the summer and fall of 2016, Mackey allegedly went by the nom-de-tweet Ricky Vaughn (after Charlie Sheen’s character in Major League) and collected tens of thousands of followers who found him funny and compelling. Mackey was not single-handedly responsible for getting Donald Trump elected. But the work he allegedly did along with dozens of others is what made Trump’s victory possible. An MIT analysis estimated that Ricky Vaughn was a bigger influence on the 2016 election than NBC News.
But for the regime, the specter of anonymous individuals making the system tremble was too much. And so, for more than two years, the regime has been battling to send Mackey to prison.
You might not know much about Mackey’s case. It’s far less notorious than the January 6 prosecutions, or the murder trial of Kyle Rittenhouse. But in terms of how much the speech matters for American liberty, it is as important as either of those — perhaps more so.
In January 2021, shortly after the January 6 incident inaugurated a national anti-MAGA crackdown, the Department of Justice charged Mackey with “conspiring … to deprive individuals of their constitutional right to vote.”
The latest batch of Twitter Files, released on Friday by independent journalist Matt Taibbi, showed that Rep. Adam Schiff’s office repeatedly contacted Twitter requesting the removal of posts critical of Joe Biden and staff at Schiff’s office.
“Staff of House Democrat @AdamSchiff wrote to Twitter quite often, asking that tweets be taken down,” Taibbi wrote. “This important use of taxpayer resources involved an ask about a ‘Peter Douche’ parody photo of Joe Biden. The DNC made the same request.”
Taibbi said that Schiff’s office pestered Twitter to remove the parody photo after former President Donald Trump retweeted it.
“To its credit, Twitter refused to remove it, with Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth saying it had obvious ‘humorous intent’ and ‘any reasonable observer’ – apparently, not a Schiff staffer – could see it was doctored,” Taibbi wrote. “Schiff staffer Jeff Lowenstein didn’t give up, claiming there was a ‘slippery slope concern here.’”
Over the past couple of months, the corporate press has inundated itself with endless articles celebrating a pro-Ukraine “meme army” called NAFO (short for the North Atlantic Fellas Organization), which has helped to raise money for a shadowy, unaccountable foreign organization to support Ukraine’s fight against Russia. The NAFO keyboard warriors, which label themselves the “fellas,” operate as internet attack dogs (who sport Shiba Inu logos) in the information war against Russia.
Over the weekend, however, NAFO ran into major controversy. Internet sleuths and researchers discovered that the founder of NAFO, a man named Kamil Dyszewski, identifies politically with neo-Nazi ideology, as an avowed antisemite, Hitler admirer, and Holocaust denier.
Star Wars megastar Mark Hamill was recently named an ambassador for United24, the fundraising platform of the Ukrainian government, where according to The Times his attention will center on “the procurement, repair and replacement of drones as well as pilot training.”
From The Times:
“In this long and unequal fight, Ukraine needs continuous additional support. That’s why I was honoured President Zelensky asked me to become an ambassador for the Army of Drones,” Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker, said in a statement. “I know for certain that Ukrainians need drones to protect their land, their freedom and the values of the entire democratic world. Right now is the best time for everyone to come together and help Ukraine stand up in this war with the evil empire.”
In a statement thanking Hamill for his support, Zelensky said: “The light will win over darkness. I believe in this, our people believe in this. Thank you for taking on this difficult mission of being the first ambassador to help Ukraine raise funds for the Army of Drones to support our defenders. It is really important!”
Hamill, 71, is among an expanding list of celebrities who have lent their support to United24, which Zelensky launched in May. The website is reported to have raised nearly $188 million in donations, including a recent $5 million contribution from the Pfizer Foundation to support Ukraine’s medical needs.
Last week Barbra Streisand announced that she would also serve as an ambassador, hailing the “capability and courage” of the Ukrainian people as an “inspiration for all those worldwide who promote democracy and fight authoritarianism”.
So for the record if you were under the impression that this proxy war could not possibly get any more Disneyfied, you were wrong.
Hamill celebrated his new position by tweeting a graphic showing a Star Wars spaceship wearing the Ukrainian flag colors, which the actor captioned in Polish because Hollywood is brain poison.
Other recent Twitter PR shenanigans for this proxy war includes the Ukrainian government account talking to its “Crimea” account in the cringiest imitation of viral brand tweets you could possibly imagine.
“hey @Crimea what’s new?” tweeted the Ukraine account in lowercase letters just like the cool kids do.
“@Ukraine getting unchained, on my way home,” the Ukrainian government’s “Crimea” account replied.
To most of the world they are just amusing pictures of an adorable cartoon bunny sitting beside, or sometimes inexplicably amidst, a bowl of rice. But in China, where these images have been circulating on social media, they carry a deeper, and more serious meaning.
“Rice bunny” (米兔), as this collection of images and emojis are known, emerged in 2018 as part of the global #MeToo movement among women to expose sexual harassment. In China, where state censorship saw hashtags related the campaign being blocked, internet users had to find an alternative to coordinate the movement in their country. Enter the rice bunny. As an image it looks innocuous enough, but when the words for the two seemingly unrelated subjects are said aloud, the true meaning becomes clear – they are pronounced “mi tu”.
Through the use of this translinguistic homophone, women in China were able for a time to share their stories and spread the word about the #MeToo movement within a country that can be highly suspicious of organised social movements.
On the surface, internet memes are a ubiquitous source of light entertainment – a way for people to express themselves through cleverly remixed templates of text, images and videos. They are arguably the wallpaper of our social media feeds and often provide us with a few minutes of idle, amusing fodder for procrastination during our day.
Internet memes “are one of the clearest manifestations of the fact there is such a thing as digital culture”, says Paolo Gerbaudo, a reader in digital politics and director of the Centre for Digital Culture at Kings College London.
Gerbaudo describes memes as a “sort of a ready-made language with many kinds of stereotypes, symbols, situations. A palette that people can use, much like emojis, in a way, to convey a certain content”.
According to social media site Instagram, at least one million posts mentioning “meme” were shared every day in 2020. But what is it that makes the internet meme so popular and why is it such an effective way of conveying ideas?
Hellbound and Down 
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