Following the 7-month prison sentence of Douglas Mackey who was charged over memes he created during the 2016 presidential election, Jack Posobiec hosted Gavin Wax of the New York Young Republicans to discuss the implications of the sentencing on his show, Human Events, on Wednesday.
“The United States government just threw a man in jail for posting memes,” Posobiec said.
Wax added that “this is a type of sentence … that you would expect from these third world dictatorships” despite appearances that the United States has a “moral high ground.”
He argued that there are different justice trajectories for different tiers of people in the US and predicted that in the future, there will be two sets of justice: one for the elites and one for everyone else.
They won't even separate the everyday people from conservatives,” he noted, touching on the recent outrageous sentences of right-leaning January 6th protesters versus other liberal rioters across the country. “If you're not in the club, you will be treated by a different set of standards.”
Wax declared that “we need wholesale reform at the federal level, reviewing all statutes … making sure that a lot of these things that can be abused and used are tossed out” and said that he hopes a Republican president in 2024 will combat the abuses from left-wing prosecutors.
Posobiec agreed that, should Donald Trump take the presidency, Douglas Mackey would be pardoned “day one.”
He likened the creation of memes to a “modern political cartoon” before asking Wax his thoughts on the importance of, essentially, the illegalization of memes.
Wax stated that “the art of the meme is a huge part of the modern political landscape… And obviously, the left recognizes that. The left has always been caught on the back foot. They've always been a few steps behind the right.”
Both posited that this conviction of “conspiracy against rights” ie “election interference” and sentencing will set the tone for how political memes being shared via social media could be potentially handled going into the 2024 election.
“We're going to see more sentences like that. This is just the first step. They're testing the waters they're seeing if they could get away with it. They're seeing how the public's reaction is going to be,” Wax concluded.
