J.D. Vance (R-Moscow)
The Ukraine-criticizing senator has taken to spreading anti-American fake news.
ATTENDING THE INTERNATIONAL SECURITY CONFERENCE in Munich over the weekend, J.D. Vance continued his criticism of Ukraine’s defensive war against Russia (“there’s no clear end point,” Vance said). Fully embracing his role as a MAGAer-than-thou Republican, the junior senator from Ohio has repeatedly made headlines in recent months for his militant opposition to military aid for Ukraine—and, in particular, for a blatantly misleading memo he sent to every Senate Republican last week asserting that the Ukraine aid bill contained a provision that could lead to a new Trump impeachment in 2025 for trying to negotiate peace. Vance also earned plaudits from Sputnik, the Russian propaganda network, for telling Tucker Carlson that Ukraine needed to be defunded for its own good, since Democrats “want to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian drop of blood.”
Given his stance and his prominence on U.S. policy toward Ukraine, it’s worth taking a moment to look back on a Vance tweet from February 9 riffing on Carlson’s much-hyped interview with Vladimir Putin:
If you read this tweet and come away bewildered because you’ve never heard of “Duglas Makki” and because Vance appears to be criticizing the Putin regime and Carlson, you’re not the crazy one. The tweet is a troll job. And if you dig into what it means, you’ll better understand why this MAGA senator is parroting vile Kremlin talking points about Ukraine.
THERE IS NO “DUGLAS MAKKI.” The reference is to Douglass Mackey, whose alter ego “Ricky Vaughn” was a notorious alt-right social media figure during the 2016 presidential campaign. In January 2021, shortly after Joe Biden’s inauguration, Mackey was prosecuted for election interference. The charges stemmed from posts on Twitter—where he had 58,000 followers and was rated a major election “influencer” by MIT Media Labs—urging Hillary Clinton supporters to vote by text message. (There is, of course, no such option.) What’s more, the tweets were specifically geared to black and Latino voters. In March of last year, Mackey was convicted by a federal jury in Brooklyn.
Why does Vance know or care about Mackey? Because he’s a cause célèbre on the right. The narrative pushed by Carlson, erstwhile presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, and many others is that Mackey’s prosecution was not only a dangerous assault on free speech but an outrageous demonstration of double standards. He was punished, his defenders say, for mocking Clinton supporters by inviting them to vote by text message and implying that they’re stupid enough to fall for such a scheme—while a left-wing Chinese-American comedian, Christina Wong, got away with the exact same joke mocking Trump supporters.
But in fact, it wasn’t even close to “the exact same joke.” Wong’s tweet, with a clearly humorous video clip in which she claimed to be “coming out” as a Trump supporter, did tell Trump voters to “skip poll lines” and “TEXT in your vote,” but gave no number to which votes could supposedly be texted. By contrast, Mackey clearly went to some trouble to make the memes he posted look like real campaign ads—complete with the Hillary for America campaign logo and “Paid for by Hillary for President 2016” fine print—and urged people to text “Hillary” to a specific number. Carlson asserted last March that “of course, in real life, no one did believe” that they could text their vote. But in fact, according to the Justice Department, nearly 5,000 people did text “Hillary” or some variation to the number in the fake ad, though we don’t know how many were actually tricked out of voting. Lastly, there was strong evidence that Mackey discussed strategies to suppress the black vote in private Twitter groups and mocked black people as dumb and “gullible.” (It’s also worth mentioning that Mackey’s “Ricky Vaughn” Twitter account was overtly white nationalist and filled with racist and antisemitic vitriol, and Mackey admitted at the trial that those were his genuine opinions at the time; in his later interview with Carlson, he described his content as merely “pro-Trump memes [and] jokes.”)
Obviously, Mackey’s repulsive speech is protected under the First Amendment. There are also some legitimate differences of opinion about his election interference case; UCLA law professor and First Amendment expert Eugene Volokh has expressed some reservations about it, partly because the federal statute under which Mackey was convicted (unlike some similar state laws) mentions violence, threats, and intimidation but not deception. For what it’s worth, Mackey’s First Amendment defense was considered by the federal court which heard the case, and was rejected in a carefully argued 56-page opinion.
One may have misgivings about Mackey’s conviction. But it’s abundantly clear that Vance’s summary of the story is extremely misleading. To say that Mackey was arrested for “making memes” is like saying that a person prosecuted for terroristic threats made by phone was arrested for making phone calls. And if Mackey is an “independent journalist,” then Alex Jones is Walter Cronkite.
THERE ARE A FEW THINGS that stand out about Vance’s “Duglas Makki” tweet.
For starters, it shows how deeply the senator is embedded in the far-right fringe. The Mackey case is so obscure outside MAGA and MAGA-adjacent circles that many of Vance’s own followers didn’t get the joke and took the story at face value.
But the context of Carlson’s trip to Russia and interview with Putin makes Vance’s reference to the Mackey case particularly repellent.
The tweet was presumably a sarcastic rejoinder to those who criticized Carlson for failing to bring up Russian political prisoners, including journalists, during his two-hour interview with Putin. See, Vance is saying, here’s a case of a journalist being persecuted for speech in an outrageous way that you’d think happens only under a dictatorship like the one in Russia—but actually, it’s right here in the USA, he’s being persecuted by the “Biden regime,” and none of the journalists dismissing Carlson as not being a “real journalist” are interested.
But to see how despicable the moral equivalency is, one need only look at some of the real cases of people persecuted and imprisoned in Russia for speech critical of the war against Ukraine or of the Putin regime.
Exactly a year ago, Maria Ponomarenko, a journalist and mother of two in Barnaul, Siberia, was convicted of spreading “fake news”—that is, posting the truth about the Russian bombing of the Mariupol Drama Theater in the spring of 2022, in which hundreds of people sheltering inside, including children, were killed. Ponomarenko’s sentence was six and a half years in a penal colony. Years, not months. Contrast to Mackey’s seven-month sentence for “memes” that evidence showed, and the jury believed, were intended to keep at least some black and Latino voters out of the voting booth.
And just four days after Vance’s tweet, Russian academic and magazine editor Boris Kagarlitsky was given a five-year sentence for a video in which he discussed Ukrainian strikes at the Kerch Strait Bridge connecting Russia to Crimea and suggested that the bridge was a legitimate military target. Convicted of “justifying terrorism,” Kagarlitsky had been initially sentenced to a 609,000-ruble fine (about $6,700) with no prison time, but the prosecution appealed the sentence as unduly lenient, which the Russian legal system allows. The court obliged. Such harsh sentences for social media posts and other expressions of dissent are no longer the exception but the rule in Putin’s Russia.
Another victim of these draconian repressions is an American journalist—a dual Russian-American citizen, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty editor Alsu Kurmasheva. She was arrested in October for failing to register as a “foreign agent,” a designation she and RFE/RL dispute. In December, the authorities filed additional charges of spreading “false news” about the Russian military. Kurmasheva, whose offense was the distribution of a book about Russians who oppose the war in Ukraine, may face as much as fifteen years in prison. While Carlson brought up the case of the other detained American journalist, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, during his interview with Putin—and even, for once, pushed back on Putin’s evasive replies—he did not say a word about Kurmasheva. But that doesn’t seem to bother Vance, who clearly thinks this issue is a good occasion to troll “the libs.”
Back in the late Cold War, obnoxious leftists used to respond to critiques of the Soviet regime and its gulag with claims that the United States, too, had “political prisoners”—offering as examples the likes of Leonard Peltier, the Native American activist serving a life sentence for the 1975 murder of two FBI agents, and Mumia Abu-Jamal, the black activist and journalist sentenced to life without parole for the 1981 murder of a Philadelphia police officer. But now we have seen a stunning role reversal: It’s the MAGA right, including a sitting senator, that excuses and defends the Kremlin’s political repressions by trotting out faux “political prisoners” in America, be it Mackey or the January 6th rioters. The America-hating shoe is solidly on the other foot.