When agents of the deep state hector you about “the rule of law,” laugh in their faces. By Roger Kimball.
The Czech novelist Milan Kundera published The Joke, his first novel, in 1967. It traces the fortunes of Ludvik, a young student, after his politically correct girlfriend shows the Communist authorities a postcard he had written to her as a joke: “Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky! Ludvik.” As a result of this whimsy, Ludvik finds himself expelled from the Communist Party, the university, and is eventually conscripted to work in the mines.
That’s the way things are in totalitarian societies. No jokes allowed, especially not jokes told at the expense of the regime.
Thus it is that North Korea banned sarcasm and irony.
Poor Ludvik suffered for his joke. But he got off easy compared to Douglass Mackey, a social media “influencer” who wrote under the pen name “Ricky Vaughn.”
During the 2016 election cycle, Mackey/Vaughn posted a funny meme urging Hillary voters to “avoid the line and vote from home” by texting “Hillary” to a certain number.
Who would be stupid enough to fall for such a joke? No one. But his satire was effective enough to get him banned from the pre-Elon Musk era Twitter. And the feds thought — or said they thought — that it was part of a “plot to disenfranchise black and women voters.” I guess that shows you what they think of black and women voters.
It sounds stupid. It is stupid. But Mackey was charged with a felony and on Friday was convicted in the Eastern District of New York. He faces up to 10 years in jail for (as an official announcement crows) “his scheme to deprive individuals of their constitutional right to vote.” ..
[This] merely confirmed the corruption and politicization of our judicial system….
This is Soviet-style intimidation. …
Tucker Carlson was right to call the verdict against Mackey “the most shocking attack on freedom of speech in our lifetimes.” There is absolutely no evidence, Carlson pointed out, that anyone’s “sacred right” to vote was impinged by Mackey’s meme.
But the same cannot be said of the thousands of people who were essentially disenfranchised by the Democratic machine in 2016, 2020, and 2022. The entire “Russia collusion” hoax, for example, was cooked up and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and put into action by a coalition of the willing in the media, the Justice Department, and the intelligence services of the United States. Its initial aim was to suppress the vote of Trump supporters and, when that didn’t work, to drive Trump from office and make him radioactive to voters forever after. …
“No one is above the law” is a lie:
It has been amusing, in a macabre sort of way, to see how the phrase “no one is above the law” has flooded the zone from the Left. …
What makes that mendacious exercise infuriating as well as amusing, of course, is the fact that many, many people are “above the law,” with such names as Hunter Biden, Sam Bankman-Fried, Hillary Clinton, Andrew McCabe, John Brennan, Peter Strzok, and Kevin Clinesmith.
But don’t try this if you are a supporter of Donald Trump or his populist agenda, or even if you are just not hostile to it to the point of wanting to bin our Constitution. Then you can expect dawn raids from the FBI or personal visits from the IRS, as the journalist Matt Taibbi just experienced to his surprise.
The melancholy truth is that the United States has become a banana republic (but without, as some wag put, any bananas).
In such corrupt regimes, the ruling party intimidates, persecutes, and prosecutes rival parties and anyone who challenges its prerogatives …
Unequal application of the law is tyranny:
Since Douglass Mackey, a Trump supporter, has been convicted of a felony for making a joke, what about Kristina Wong? She did the same thing that Mackey did in the 2016 election, only her meme supported Hillary. …
Where is that wretched U.S. attorney who was just pontificating about “the sacred right to vote,” “subvert[ing] the ballot box,” etc.? Where is she? Where is the slimy, fake-news media? True, Wong suppressed no more votes than Mackey did. But Mackey faces a decade in the slammer while Wong is serving as an elected official on a neighborhood council in Los Angeles and acting as a “performance artist.”
When agents of the deep state hector you about “the rule of law,” etc., laugh in their faces. Then remind them of what the next president of the United States said about retribution.
The US has lost its moral standing to lecture other nations on democracy and justice. (As the President of El Salvador pointed out this week.)
No one is above the law … but the law is only applied to right wingers.
English Civil War, 1642 – 1652. About leadership, the spoils of government, and equal application of the law.
