SHOCKING: Hamas Insurrection in the U.S. Capitol, Plus Douglass Mackey Sentenced to Prison for a MEME

All right, let’s we’ll show episode 450. Take one. The comments I’ve received from some of you. Yesterday on the show, I teased what we were going to talk about tonight. I said, I talked to a drum roll, please. John Bolton. Yes. That John Bolton about Iran and what we should do about Iran, what Israel should do in the wake of the terror attacks inflicted on them by Hamas.

And tonight, I’m going to show you that conversation. And you’ll have to wait just a few minutes because we have a couple of other things to get to. First, such as the Hamas insurrection at the Capitol and the sentencing of a man for sharing a meme that was insulting to Hillary Clinton. He is sentenced to seven months in federal prison.

We’re going to talk about all of that. But you got to stick around because this conversation I had with John Bolton. Listen, I’m not a neocon, nor am I an isolationist, but I do think that John Bolton has some very, very interesting things to say. And regardless of what you think about him, listen, you’ve got to be able to criticize everybody.

Join the fight. The most fun part about being a political commentator is that you’re not part of a campaign. You’re not part of anybody’s team. You’re not loyal to a particular politician. You can criticize anyone. And I challenge you, anybody who thinks, well, John Bolton wrote that terrible book criticizing Trump after he left office. Yeah, he did. I didn’t like that book either.

I thought it was in bad taste. And I don’t agree with him. Doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have something interesting to say about Iran now. So what I do is I challenge you to join me in having fun, being able to look at politicians or just political figures that you don’t like and find something interesting that they have to say.

Maybe it’s just entertaining, maybe you don’t agree with it, but it’s just interesting. And then find a politician that you like and say something critical of them. It is so liberating, so freeing, so fun. I invite you to join me and I will give you opportunity for that when I show you my conversation with John Bolton. But first, let’s talk about this Hamas erection that happened at the Capitol today.

Credit to that term has to go to the one, the only Julie Kelly. Of course, she coined the term. Of course she did. pro-Hamas demonstrators took over the US Capitol today surrounding the Capitol buildings, breaching the Capitol. And the video of this wall, I’ll show you for yourself, because I’ve heard I’ve been told reliable sources have told me that this is worse than Pearl Harbor.

This is worse than 911, that the trauma of this day is going to be imprinted in the minds of American democracy for the rest of our lives, are very republic is at threat because of protesters that entered the US Capitol. These are pro Hamas demonstrators that laid siege to the seat of American government. If you don’t feel tears running down your face, if you don’t feel that this is the end of everything that we hold dear, then you’re a raging hypocrite.

A raging, raging hypocrite. The house was put on many lockdown. This video actually does make me laugh. A Hamas protester was arrested by the Capitol Police and he cried like a tiny little baby as he was being arrested, whining and crying. Oh, the poor little thing. The poor little thing wrestled to the ground because he broke into the U.S. Capitol.

Let me tell you what charges he should face. He should face obstruction of an official proceeding. He should face charges of seditious conspiracy, trying to overthrow the US government. He should face charges of disorderly conduct. He should face charges of every single thing that the January six protesters face. In fact, he should face charges of resisting arrest, of assaulting a police officer or every charge that we saw against January 6th.

PROTESTER. Better be better be landed on these people. Otherwise, what kind of democracy are we living in? And by the way, Joe Biden has not made any comment up until this moment condemning the violence that is happening at the US Capitol, which must mean that he is the one personally orchestrating this violence, using dog whistles, verbal dog whistles, maybe facial twitches.

We’re not sure. We have to ask The New York Times and The Washington Post exactly how to interpret the facial twitches of a president of the United States to know that he’s directing from afar a conspiracy to overthrow the US government. I suppose we should expect any day now that Joe Biden will be banned from Twitter for inciting such an insurrection and then indicted and threatened with a lifetime in federal prison.

Based, of course, on the fact that we thought that he should make a comment about this, condemning it sooner than he actually did, which means, of course, that he is the ringleader in this in this whole thing. I want to show you a video. This video is not real. This video is why this video is the funniest video that you will ever see.

This is Rashida Tlaib outside of the Capitol speaking to these pro-Hamas protesters. Now we’re seeing us leave actually is outside speaking. It’s not that’s not protesting. The part that is fake, of course, is the horns that someone superimposed on her head to make her look like the Q and on Sharma. And now this to me is just justice satire, because, of course, the tune on Shaman didn’t wrestle a police officer to the ground.

He didn’t cry like a baby when he was arrested. He didn’t vandalize any property. He simply walked through doors next to calm police officers who didn’t ask him to leave. And he became the face of the insurrection that threatens our democracy. And you have Rashida Tlaib. Was she not orchestrating this? Was she not aiding and abetting those who wish to overthrow the seat of the US government?

And if not, tell me why not? If this is different, tell me, how is this different? I would argue that this is orders of magnitude worse because the people today in the US Capitol are not only sympathizing with a terrorist that committed a deadly attack against Israel, they want that viewpoint, that ideology, that poison, that death cult brought here to the United States.

And they don’t care about how our government works. They’re resorting to breaking in the US Capitol to try to get this kind of media coverage for their poisonous ideology. It’s despicable. Every single one of them should be go trapped, their homes should be raided, pre-dawn raid by the FBI. They should be smacked and pretrial detention for a year without due process in a cell that’s barely big enough for them to lay down in.

Otherwise, we’ll be really be protecting our democracy, which is clearly at threat from this Hamas insurrection. Speaking of our democracy at threat and a real threat, this time, a young man was sentenced to seven years in prison for posting a meme that insulted Hillary Clinton. Might think that that’s a hyperbolic sentence. It’s not. We’re going to talk about that in just a second.

Douglas Mackey is the name of this young man. He used to have a Twitter account. He operated under the screen name of Ricky Von. And in the lead up to the 2020 or the 2016 election, when Hillary Clinton was running against Donald Trump. Ricky Vaughn. Douglas Mackey, I’m going to call him by his his legal name just for just for the purposes of being accurate.

Here, posted the following meme on Twitter. You can see this on your screen. For those of you who are listening, I’ll describe it to you. It is a meme that the only caption is hash tag I’m with her and go Hillary. It is a photo of a woman and the caption says, Avoid the line. Vote from home. Text Hillary to 59925.

Clearly this is satirical. You can’t vote by texting. It’s obviously a joke. He’s obviously you can think it’s funny or you can think it’s unfunny. It doesn’t really matter. That is the meme that caused the Department of Justice to charge Douglas Mackey with wait for it election interference. They claimed that he interfered with the 2016 election, that he deprived American citizens of their constitutional right to vote by misleading them into thinking they could vote via text message.

When you can’t vote via text message, you have to cast your ballot either in-person or absentee. Doesn’t matter. This is the exact charge. Douglas Mackey was later convicted of conspiracy to, quote, injure, oppress, threaten and intimidate one or more persons in the free exercise and enjoyment of a rights and privilege secured to them by the Constitution and the laws of the United States.

Douglas Mackey was not only convicted of this charge, he was sentenced to seven months in a federal prison for posting a meme on Twitter. Seven months. Now, this law that I quoted, the statute that I quoted, what he was convicted of is a law from the 1870s. This law, enacted in the 1870s, was designed to prevent white supremacist groups, particularly violent white supremacists, from violently preventing black American citizens from voting.

And yet now it was applied by the Department of Justice to a young man who posted a meme on Twitter. Was that the original intent behind the law? Is this the purpose of the statute? Is this the Department of Justice acting in good faith? Let me read you a quote from an attorney by the name of Andrew Tear.

He works for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. He says, and I quote, The First Amendment presumptively protects all speech unless it falls into a specific, narrowly defined category established by the Supreme Court. And the First Amendment does not make a general exemption for false speech. There are certain types of false speech, he says, that are established exceptions to the First Amendment, such as defamation or fraud.

But the meme Douglass Mackey posted falls into neither of those two categories, which means that this is a serious violation of Douglas Mackey’s Right. And you might be thinking, why on earth would the Department of Justice waste time on this? I mean, he looks like he’s about 25. I don’t know how old the guy is. Why would they waste time on this millennial kid who posted a meme on Twitter in 2016?

Why do they care? Don’t they have better things to do? Well, let me tell you exactly why they did this first. For context, I want to show this next photo. This is essentially the exact same tweet, the exact same type of meme. Only this time this was posted by a leftist who said hate Trump supporters skip pull lines at election 2016 and text in your vote.

Text votes are legit. Or vote tomorrow on Super Wednesday. This was posted by a leftist named Christina Wong. And if you look at the number of views down in the bottom left corner on that tweet, that video has been viewed 843,000 times. And yet Christina Wong walked free. Christina Wong was not charged with election interference. Christina Wong was not convicted of trying to deprive an American citizen their constitutional right to vote by misleading them about invalid ways to cast their ballot.

Christina Wong is not serving seven months in a federal prison. Now, our first question should be, well, why is that? The answer is because Christina Wong is a leftist and Douglas Machi is a Republican Trump supporter. The New York Times at the moment that Douglas Mackey was convicted several months ago, he just had his sentencing this week. But at the time that he was convicted, The New York Times said this is the first criminal case in the country involving voter suppression through the spread of disinformation on Twitter.

And that sentence gives us a clue of exactly why the Department of Justice went after Douglas Mackey. What we’re going to talk about in just a second. So let me tell you the left’s playbook. Let me tell you why the Department of Justice, under the Joe Biden administration targeted Douglas Mackey specifically, but didn’t even glance at Christina Wong four, doing the same thing, posting a satirical stupid meme or video on Twitter, misdirecting people to invalid ways to vote.

I mean, if you are stupid enough that you would fall for that. I don’t have sympathy for you. I really don’t. But this is the playbook. The Department of Justice, the Biden administration, and the left at large want to criminalize speech. This is not easy to do because in our country we have a constitutionally protected right to free speech.

So how are they going to do that if they want to make what you and I say our dissent, our opinions, maybe even our religious views, certainly our political views, criminal, they want to ban us from being allowed to utter words they don’t like. How do they go about doing that when they when we have the Constitution at our back?

Well, first, they use the culture to stigmatize speech so they don’t like this is the origin of cancel culture. Once speech has been stigmatized to the point that the public at large feels uncomfortable when they hear someone say, I’m a Trump supporter, I’m pro-life. I believe in that Marriage is between one man and one woman. I think the 2020 election was fishy.

It was rigged. It was probably stolen. Once they have stigmatized these phrases culturally, it’s very easy for the left to redefine these words. They’re not just words that should make you uncomfortable. They’re not just words that are untrue. They’re not just words that are bad. They are actual violence. They will hurt someone else if you say that, because violence, of course, is not protected by the First Amendment.

Violence. The government has the justice authority to regulate, to punish people who commit violence against another. So if the left can just redefine speech to be violence, then they can circumvent the First Amendment. That is what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to set precedents, legal precedent through these prosecutions of individuals, laws that most people have never heard of, cases that most people are not familiar with, people that aren’t that prominent of individuals maybe don’t have the money to make it a huge media storm when they’re getting targeted.

And then the left, once they’ve gotten convictions like they did with Douglas Mackey, once they have a sentence throwing him in jail for a meme he posted on Twitter, for goodness sakes, they hold up that legal precedent the next time you. The next time I the next time anybody that we know says something that the left can label as voter suppression and attempt to interfere with an election by depriving a US citizen of their constitutional right to vote, they have the precedent to get that conviction.

They have neatly sidestepped the First Amendment by redefining the definition of what a word is. It is not speech. It is not. Sticks and stones may hurt your bones, but words will never hurt you. Words are sticks now. Words are stones. Words are violent weapons that can harm other. And the government has every right to stop you from hurting someone else.

This is Department of Justice’s way of censoring people, especially on Twitter. Now that Elon Musk’s owns it and is committed to free speech. And of course, this disinformation that they label as election interference, who determines what what disinformation is? Oh, well, the fact checkers that are preordained by the left, that would be fact checked out of work and lead stories.

And the AP places that are so far in the pocket of the left that they’re essentially sniffing the bare feet of the leftist politicians in whose pockets they reside. Let me tell you something. If Republican attorneys general across the country do not immediate indict the leftists and yes, plural, it wasn’t just Christina Wong. If they do not immediately indict the leftists who did the exact same thing as Douglas Mackey and get convictions for the exact same thing that Douglas Mackey is going to spend seven months in a federal prison cell for.

I swear I’m going to leave the GOP. The left is savage. The left will do anything they can to stop us and silence us. And if we don’t fight back, if our elected officials don’t fight back, then why do we sit here and bellyache about these things? How is that productive? We have the just authority of government on our side.

Republicans in office use it. Otherwise we’ll be looking back five years down the road from now, ten years down the road, and we will put a pin in the Douglas Mackey case and say, well, if only we’d done something at the time. That was the tipping point. That was the moment that the left codified this idea, this false idea that words are violence and not protected by the First Amendment guarantee of free speech.

And now we’re ready to talk about John Bolton. Let me tell you, before I show you this interview, let me tell you, before I show this interview, I wish people would allow themselves to see the fun in politics. I know nothing about the horrible tragic terror attacks that Hamas inflicted on Israel is fun. That’s not what I mean, of course.

But when we have a controversial political figure, which I think we can all agree, John Bolton has been a controversial political figure, we don’t have to fully ostracize or fully embrace anyone ever unless they are so poisonous and so bad, like perhaps the people staging the Hamas selection. That’s not your typical politician. Politics is not a game of absolute loyalty.

And sometimes it’s fun to hear what the people who you might not agree with have to say about a certain situation. I thought it would be fun if we talked to John Bolton, so I’m going to show you that in just a second. All right. Without further ado, I present to you Ambassador John Bolton, and one of the most interesting conversations that I have had all week.

Watch it with an open mind and then let me know what you think. I know you will. Let me know what you think, but I’m looking forward to it. Here you go. With me now is Ambassador John Bolton. Ambassador, thanks for joining me. And I want to start before getting into all the nitty gritty of what the U.S. should do, what Israel should do, how to eradicate Hamas.

I just want to stop and say you were very controversial figure in the Trump administration and in the immediate aftermath. But it seems that you were entirely correct about Iran. Well, it’s unfortunate, but I think the threat that Iran poses that we’ve been worried about on the U.S. side for Iran’s support for terrorism and its pursuit of nuclear weapons has continued unabated.

And after nearly three years of the Biden administration trying and failing in its effort to get back into the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and it’s very naive, believes that through negotiation, you could get Iran back into the civilized world. We’ve seen, sadly, on October the seventh and thereafter, what the what kinds of people Iran associates with and how they do business.

They remain the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism. And we’ve just seen that unleashed against Israel that is a narrative that the Biden administration simply will not accept, because if they do, if they point the finger of responsibility at Iran, they’ll have to take the consequences for the mistakes they’ve made over the past three years. And the consequences, unfortunately, tragically, that we’re now seeing this played in Israel.

Yeah. And I would maybe even categorize it as more of a mistake. The deliberate appeasement of Iran played directly into empowering this ambassador. This is the burning question that I have for you. This is why I invited you on the show, because I identify as neither a neocon nor an isolationist. You’ve called for regime change in Iran, and here’s my question for you.

A lot of conservatives who might be opposed to the idea of regime change aren’t opposed to it because in a vacuum they have a problem with toppling a state sponsor of terror regime. They’re opposed to it because of the consequences that we’ve seen in recent history, whether it was in Libya, whether it was in Iraq, that it begot these forever wars, these vacuums where terrorism was able to thrive.

My question to you today is how do you impose regime change on a country that arguably deserves it, like Iran without it leading to one of these consequences that are that are not palatable to the American public, like a vacuum for terrorism or a forever war. Right. Well, let me just take one second here on this question of neo conservatism.

I’m not a neocon. And for those whose memory doesn’t run back this far. The term neo conservative came up at the beginning of the Reagan administration, and it was defined as a liberal who has been mugged by reality and all I can say is I’ve never been a liberal, so I’m not a neo con, I’m a just a plain old conservative.

The case of Iran is a good example of a direct threat to the United States, both through Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and its support for terrorism. It was Ronald Reagan who put Iran on the list of state sponsors of terrorism in 1987, the first country we name under that authority. And it’s the fact that ever since 1979, when the Islamic Revolution took power in Iran, one of the first things they did was seize American diplomats as hostages, leading to one of the the worst crises of the Carter administration, demonstrating his weakness and really helping very much to lead to Ronald Reagan’s election.

It’s hard to imagine in a regime worse than the ayatollahs taking power because of their pursuit of nuclear weapons, because of their regional and global support for international terrorism and because of their repression of their own people. We just passed the one year anniversary of the murder of Marzia Mini four, violating the Islamic dress codes. I think the regime in Tehran is weaker now than any point since 1979, and I think that in this case it’s the people of Iran who are prepared to do the heavy lifting for us if we just give them the potential to do it, which includes reversing the Biden administration’s loosening of the sanctions imposed on Iran after the Trump

administration withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal and enforcing the other sanctions that are in place. This regime is weaker than people think and indeed, I think the launching of the of the Ring of Fire strategy now speaks to the desperation of the ayatollahs. So this is this is not the point to negotiate with them or placate them or appease them.

This is the moment to really apply the pressure. So let me make sure you under. I understand. So when you say that that regime change should be advocated for by American politicians or that should be our policy. You’re not advocating that we topple the regime, but that we enable the Iranian people to do it themselves because they both have a palate for that.

And the government itself is as weak as it’s ever been. And there are ways that we can help them. Regime change doesn’t mean American troops marching on their capital. It can come about in a lot of different ways. We used to be pretty good at it. I don’t see any philosophical reason in defense of America to do what we need to do to protect our interests.

Then this is not an abstract crusade for democracy. This is about protecting American and American interests. And I can’t think of a better place to carry it out than in Iran, where the popularity of the regime has never been so low, where the conditions of the people that the possibility they see of getting past this this rule by religious fanatics, who’s attitudes deal with the ninth or 10th century, I think the ground is fertile.

They just need some assistance. And I don’t think, frankly, either in the Trump administration or the Biden administration, we’ve done anything like what we should be doing to support them. Do you foresee, should something like that happen, should a regime change take place by the Iranian people with assistance from Western nations? Would you foresee that meaning American troops on the ground in in Iran or possibility for fighting?

And if so, for how long? I don’t see any need for American forces to go in. I think this is this is this is how it needs to be done in the circumstances of Iran as it currently stands. That’s different from other countries. I think I think the Biden administration made a catastrophic mistake. Following Trump administration policy, withdrawing from Afghanistan, where we may not have had a perfect situation by any stretch of the imagination, but I think everybody should take note.

The American presence in Afghanistan accomplished the mission that we went to do in part in 2001, which was to make sure America was never attacked again by terrorists based in Afghanistan as long as we were there, then held true. Now, the Biden administration itself has testified that foreign terrorist fighters are going back into Afghanistan, and the terrorist threat emanating from there is increased Again, I think the people of Iran are very sophisticated, very well-educated.

They know they can live a different kind of life. They just need help with this totalitarian government that’s been oppressing them for over 40 years now. Let me ask you about specifically what happened in Israel, Hamas waging this horrendous terror attack against Israel. There’s been limited reporting. We don’t have a lot of information yet about whether Israel had intel that would have warned them beforehand.

I know Egypt claimed that they warned Prime Minister Netanyahu that they had some kind of intelligence about something big that was being planned by Hamas in Gaza. Netanyahu denies this. In your analysis, can you can you give us your thoughts on this intel failure? I think a lot of people around the world were surprised, given Israel’s prowess in the in the intelligence sphere, that that an attack as large as this slipped by.

Well, there’s no doubt, both with respect to Israeli intelligence and American intelligence, this is a catastrophic failure not to have seen an attack of this size coming is inexplicable, not just for Israel, but for us with all of the means we have. And I wonder just how much of that failure comes from our declined to focus adequately on what Iran was up to.

Look, there’s been reporting in The Wall Street Journal after the attack based on sources citing to Hamas and Hezbollah that Iran was very deeply involved in this. And I have no doubt about it. This is the strategic reality in the region. So so when you hear after a catastrophe, a huge intelligence failure like this, people saying, well, I told them something was coming, you’re going to need to examine it.

There’s got to be a complete, total, thorough forensic examination at some point of what went wrong. But what we’ve heard out of the American intelligence community, the same kinds of after the fact statement saying, well, we said something was going to happen, if you just say and I’m paraphrasing, of course, but if you say something bad is going to happen in Gaza, well, no kidding.

That could be true any day of any week of any month. You have to have what we call actionable intelligence. It has to be specific enough and credible enough that people should take note of it. Now, whether the Egyptians had that, I don’t know. I don’t know what they’ve told the Israelis. It would be hard to believe that Shin Bet and Assad and the other security services in Israel that do have extraordinary records miss this.

But but we’re going to have to await the the examination and we should need it. And I think, honestly, in both countries, heads should roll here for this failure. Yeah, the red flag for me was when a spokesman of the Biden administration said there will be a time to analyze American intel failures, but the time is not now.

That says to me that the time is certainly now to examine that, that we might have or there might have been information that we should have known that we didn’t had. We’ve been prioritized for one reason to do it, one reason to do it right now is, having missed this, the most pressing question for Israel and the United States is what else have we missed?

Other words, what other threats are out there that for whatever reason, didn’t come up in in our searches? And that could be really a very urgent matter. Assessing blame for it can come later. But right now we need to know what else we should be worried about. Yeah, it’s almost a scary thought to think that if this if this terror attack by Hamas of Israel got by.

What else is in the plan? My last question for you is about Israel’s course of action now. I mean, I think we’re all watching the news. We’re all seeing what they’re doing. They’re warning Gazans to leave because they’re going to conduct airstrikes. They have been conducting airstrikes. The Hamas terrorists are preventing Palestinians from leaving. What should Israel’s course of action to eradicate Hamas be?

Should it be focused on Gaza? Should it be focused on Iran? Should it be focused on Qatar? What should they do to prevent this from ever happening again? Well, to be clear, the Israelis have a perfectly legitimate right in the exercise of self-defense, not simply to respond to this Hamas attack proportionately, but to respond to the attack by eliminating the threat.

After Pearl Harbor, we didn’t respond proportionately by sea, sinking an equal number of Japanese ships as we had lost on December the seventh. We destroyed the Japanese government and that was our legitimate right to eliminate that threat as we eliminated the Nazi threat as well. So Israel’s entitled to take pretty dramatic action here. I don’t think they’re going to target civilians, but it’s just as much an indication of how barbaric Hamas is that they’re endangering their own population by using them as human shields and by really offering to sacrifice them in order to put Israel in a bad light.

I think Israel has the obligation to its own people, and that’s what governments are fundamentally for, to defend in the first instance against foreign threats. Israel’s going to do that. I also think at some point, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but at some point, Iran has to feel physical damage. Right now, they’re fighting through surrogates. Israel’s on the front line.

Hamas is on the front line today. Hezbollah may be on the front line tomorrow, but Iran is calling the shots and they need to know they can’t do that without pain. If you want to establish deterrence, if you can’t get to regime change, the the adversary needs to know that when they inflict costs on Israel or on the United States, their response is far greater cost on that, then maybe they won’t do it the next time.

What about Qatar? Qatar’s harboring the the leaders of Hamas, really, they’re saying in luxury resorts in the capital over there. The United States doesn’t seem to do anything about it, at least under the Biden administration. What should be done? Well, I think anybody that’s responsible for for what Hamas did on October the seventh and a lot of other things, they do need to be subject to being brought to justice.

And I think Qatar could easily lose a few Hamas leaders to the Israelis or to the Saudis who would turn them over to Israel. And I think it’s entirely correct to ask for that. Anybody who committed acts of terrorism needs to be held to account for it, period. It didn’t used to be a controversial opinion. These days, it seems to, at least among the protesters in cities, unfortunately, in America and in other Western countries around the world.

Ambassador Bolton, thank you for being on the show. I really appreciate it, sir. Glad to do it. Thanks for having me. Now, what did I tell you? Was that knowledge and you don’t have to agree with everything you said. I don’t. But I thought it was pretty interesting what he had to say. And that’s indisputable that his predictions about Iran were correct.

Now, whether you feel that his answer was adequate to my question. My question about regime change and won’t this lead to a forever war? Will this lead to a vacuum where terrorism thrives? I don’t know if he adequately answered that question to my satisfaction, but it was interesting to hear him say that he doesn’t think that regime change in Iran requires US military presence on the ground.

Let me know what you think. Let me know on x. Dot com slash Liz underscore Wheeler and at Liz Wheeler dot com. Thank you for watching today. Thank you for listening I’m Liz wheeler this is the Liz Wheeler show.