8chan/8kun QResearch Posts (1)
#18298653 at 2023-02-07 02:58:45 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #22425: AMAZONAS-6 Edition
>>18298648
Now, the DOJ claims that the law's scope includes possibly tricking someone with a meme on Twitter.
At the risk of being tedious, we will explain: memes promoting incorrect election dates are old hat. People have been making them online and in print since at least 2000, and who are we kidding, probably well before that. They're either a humorous indication of one's desire to win a race, or else a political in-joke - "Man, Democrats/Republicans are so stupid they'd probably believe someone telling them election day is Wednesday!"
And of course, it doesn't matter if some people were too dumb to get the joke. As the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in the 2013 case Farah v. Esquire:
But it is the nature of satire that not everyone "gets it" immediately. For example, when Daniel Defoe first published The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, an anonymous satirical pamphlet against religious persecution, it was initially welcomed by the church establishment Defoe sought to ridicule. See James Sutherland, English Satire 83-84 (1958). Similarly, Benjamin Franklin's "Speech of Miss Polly Baker," a fictitious news story mocking New England's harsh treatment of unwed mothers, was widely republished in both England and the United States as actual news.
Is the joke a very good one? People can disagree. But it's absolutely a joke that existed long before 2016, and until the Biden DOJ decided otherwise, it was never a crime.
This bears mentioning over and over again, if necessary: the law has never been used in this way before. This case is a drastic escalation in the use of "disinformation" as an excuse to target dissenting political voices. A regime that previously relied on deplatforming or doxing (both of which have already been used on Mackey) now makes use of outright felony prosecutions with the threat of decade-long prison sentences.
The case against Mackey is facially ridiculous. The charges, first brought two whole years ago, should have been immediately tossed out in court. Yet, incredibly, in mid-January, Mackey's bid to have the case thrown out was rejected by Clinton-appointed district court judge Nicholas G. Garaufis.
Yet reading through Garaufis's ruling rejecting the motion to dismiss does all the work necessary to show how repugnant and feeble the case is.
"This case is about conspiracy and injury, not speech," writes Garaufis. Yet the government has produced no injured party, and there is no conduct that has occurred besides Mackey's speech. Then, Garaufis proceeds to make one of the darkest, yet also most ridiculous comparisons imaginable: