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A digital-age dirty-trickster who used Twitter posts that looked like Hillary Clinton ads to spread false information before the 2016 presidential election was sentenced on Tuesday to seven months in prison.

During a trial last spring, prosecutors presented evidence that the man, Douglass Mackey, had joined private Twitter groups where participants reveled in using lies and deceit on behalf of Donald J. Trump, carrying out what one participant termed the deep psyops of meme war.

Much of that activity was protected by the First Amendment, prosecutors said. But they argued that Mr. Mackey committed a crime days before the election when, using the name Ricky Vaughn, he posted images targeting Black and Latino voters that claimed it was possible to vote by text message. The idea, prosecutors said, was to suppress votes for Mrs. Clinton.

One of the images showed a Black woman and another one had a message in Spanish. Both included logos resembling the Clinton campaigns and fine print attributing them to Hillary for President.

Mr. Mackey, who was convicted in March of conspiring to deprive others of their right to vote, declined to address the court before his sentencing on Wednesday.

Before issuing his sentence, Judge Ann M. Donnelly, of Federal District Court in Brooklyn, said that Mr. Mackey had been one of the leading members of that conspiracy and that it had been nothing short of an assault on our democracy.

Mr. Mackeys lawyer had asked in a memorandum to the judge that his client be spared prison, saying his offenses had consisted only of computer clicks.

In 2018, three years before he was arrested, Mr. Mackey started psychotherapy and decided to change his life, the lawyer, Andrew J. Frisch added, writing: The Douglass Mackey who stands before the court for sentencing is not Ricky Vaughn of seven years ago.

Prosecutors asked that Mr. Mackey be sentenced to six months to a year in prison. They wrote that any changes in his life were not because of regret, but because of his unmasking in 2018 as Ricky Vaughn, a notoriously hateful figure who boasted of leveraging a troll army and was included by M.I.T. Media Lab on a list of top election influencers.

Referring to Mr. Mackeys actions as mere clicks minimized their impact, prosecutors said, because his true power was his ability to spread messages to convert his clicks into tens of thousands more.

Mr. Mackeys trial provided a glimpse into a crass world in which far-right activists in Twitter groups called War Room and Infowars Madman sought to sow chaos and division with the goal of boosting Mr. Trump.

I wanted to infect everything, testified one participant, identified only as Microchip, who began cooperating with the F.B.I. in 2018 and pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge related to his circulation of misinformation.

Evidence showed that participants discussed generating interest in emails stolen from the Clinton campaign by Russia; portraying Mrs. Clinton as a warmonger; and promoting the claim that she had cheated during the primaries to get supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders to hate not just Hillary, but the Democratic Party itself.

Mr. Mackey pushed the hashtag #WriteInBernie, evidence showed, and stated that women and naturalized citizens should not be allowed to vote. He also wrote that Black people were unintelligent and gullible and suggested spreading a hashtag, #NeverVote, in Black social media spaces.

On Twitter, the day after he posted the false voting meme showing the woman, prosecutors said, Mr. Mackey made his motive clear, writing that a key to a Trump victory would be to limit black turnout.

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Man Who Spread Misinformation on Trump's Behalf Sentenced to 7 ... - The New York Times

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Letter to the editor: We mustn't forget communism's many victims - Bozeman Daily Chronicle

Acclaimed Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare has talked about being smothered by "the hell of communism" and how writing helped him survive one of the worst dictators in the old Eastern Bloc.

The veteran writer -- an eternal bridesmaid for a Nobel literature prize -- was awarded France's highest honour Monday.

Despite being branded a traitor by Albania's communist leaders when he defected to France in 1990, Kadare was accused by some of enjoying a privileged position under Enver Hoxha, who presided over Europe's most paranoid and isolated regime.

But the author of "Broken April" and "The General of the Dead Army" told AFP those years were "hell" -- a living nightmare from which he forged some of his greatest works.

"The hell of communism, like every other hell, was smothering in the worst sense of the term. But literature transformed that into a life force, a force which helped you survive and hold your head up and win out over dictatorship," said the 87-year-old.

Several writers and artists were imprisoned and even executed under Hoxha's murderous rule. Kadare -- who came from the same small town and was made a member of parliament -- escaped prison but was targeted by the secret police.

He was sent into internal exile in 1975 after publishing a satirical poem called "The Red Pasha", a clear reference to the dictator.

In her memoirs, Hoxha's widow Nexhmije claimed the tyrant -- who fancied himself as a man of letters -- protected Kadare from other hardline Stalinists who wanted the head of the "bourgeois" writer.

His defenders say Kadare's genius was using allegory and metaphor to depict the horrors of what was going on around him in almost impossible circumstances.

- 'Always been true' -

"Writing under a dictatorship is very difficult, almost impossible, because it is impossible to write as you want to write," he told AFP.

"Which is why I am so grateful for literature, because it gives me the chance to overcome the impossible.

"I have always been true to my writing," he insisted. "It was the absolute goal of my life and it helped me get over all the difficulties. When art survives it triumphs," he said.

Kadare, who was made a grand officer of France's Legion of Honour by President Emmanuel Macron, drew a comparison with the late dissident Czech writer Milan Kundera, who also had to deny allegations he collaborated with the communists who banned his work.

"As Kundera said, 'Art never triumphs with its head bowed.'"

Kadare previously said that his fame both protected him and made him suspect.

Files from Hoxha's feared secret police the Sigurimi showed that he and his family were continually followed and persecuted.

Indeed recently uncovered papers quote Hoxha as describing the writer as a cursed "raven of doom" who brought him bad luck.

- Haunted by Hoxha -

That has not stopped some critics dismissing him as the "official dissident" the regime tolerated.

Yet several of Kadare's works written under Hoxha took aim at authoritarianism, often through the oblique lens of the Ottoman empire, which occupied Albania for five centuries, or classical allusions.

"The Palace of Dreams", published four years before the dictator's death in 1985, was banned as a veiled attack on the Politburo but not before it had become a bestseller.

Kadare said writers "must serve freedom". "The truth is not in my acts but in my books, which are a real literary testament," he told AFP in 2019.

Hoxha's looming presence haunts several of the writer's works, mostly notoriously "The Successor" which delved into the murky death of the dictator's closest ally, Mehmet Shehu, who was later denounced as a "foreign agent".

"Literature is my great and only love," Kadare told AFP in his Tirana apartment. "It has given sense to my life, given me courage to resist, happiness and the hope to overcome everything."

And he said he has never lost his appetite for storytelling.

"I write all the time. I write down ideas, little stories... Every time something is published it is like being born again, and it has always been like that for me.

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Writing triumphed over 'hell of communism', says Albania's Kadare - Yahoo News

THE first English language translation of Marx and Engelss Manifesto of the Communist Party opened with the following: A frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe. We are haunted by a ghost, the ghost of Communism. All the powers of the Past have joined in a holy crusade to lay this ghost to rest the Pope and the Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police agents.

So we see that anti-communism has a long and sordid history. Indeed, Yanis Varoufakiss preface to a recent edition of the Communist Manifesto is an anti-communist and inaccurate diatribe, with phrases like card-carrying Stalinists and now defunct Communist regimes. He also claimed that the Communist Manifesto was commissioned by English revolutionaries which is blatantly untrue.

By contrast, AJP Taylors introduction to the 1967 Penguin edition states: Anti-communism causes more trouble in the world than ever communism does or did.

Anti-communism is a terrible form of bigotry with tragic consequences for humankind and it needs to be recognised as such. Other forms of bigotry like racism, sexism, and homophobia really start their transition from respectable, normal, acceptable and even policy, to being clearly understood to be out of order when the victims make a clear challenge. So far, we in Britain have not really called out home-grown anti-communism.

Addressing a World Marxist Review symposium in the late 1980s, the late Bert Ramelson, legendary former industrial organiser of the Communist Party said this: Anti-communism is often referred to as a subjective phenomenon but it is an objective factor in todays world. Anti-communist hysteria has been with us for four generations and it would be unrealistic to believe that anti-communism in the West has not struck deep roots in politics, ideology and consciousness.

Anti-communism is also anti-humanity, for it impedes the development or progress of society to its full potential and keeps us in a dystopian rat race. The last sentence of Chapter 2 of the Communist Manifesto reads: In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

Anti-communism blocks our goal of achieving what John Lennon sings about in his classic track Imagine.

We call it out in other countries but not here, it seems. We demonstrated outside the Ukranian embassy in 2014 when that regime had banned the Communist Party. We need to do more of that sort of thing.

New members of Nato and the EU feel no shame in outlawing communist symbols, the most recent being Finland, that exemplar of social democracy. Anti-communist legislation is still on the statute books of a number of states in the US; Texas forbids members of the CPUSA from standing in elections to its local and state legislatures.

It was only in 1991 that Communist Party members were no longer denied jobs in Britains Civil Service departments.

In this country, the first place to tackle anti-communism is the labour movement. Officialdom within the Labour Party and trade unions, with notable exceptions, carried on a crusade against the Communist Party from its formation.

The Communist Party History Group, in the Appendix to Noreen Branson and Bill Moores July 1990 pamphlet Labour-Communist Relations 1920-1951, listed 71 organisations on the proscribed list, of which only two were fascist the rest were the sort that Communist Party members were or might be part of.

In 1933, Labour proscribed the European Anti-fascist Congress and in 1934 the Relief Committee for Victims of German and Austrian Fascism and in 1941 it proscribed the Anti-Fascist Relief Committee and in 1950 the League for Democracy in Greece. Aside from banning organisations which opposed fascism, it also banned 41 peace and solidarity organisations, although CND was too big to ban.

The post-war Labour government led by Clement Attlee was involved in fighting communism in Greece and Malaya, and during the McCarthy era, he wrote in the US quarterly review Foreign Affairs: We are pardonably annoyed at being instructed by a beginner like McCarthy. The British Labour Party has had nearly 40 years of fighting communism in Britain.

In the Chicago Daily Tribune he wrote, The British Labour Party and I myself have been vigorously opposing the Communist Party in this country ever since its formation long before Senator McCarthy was ever heard of.

Instead of being ashamed of his anti-communism, he proclaimed it. This was despite British communists having held up a banner saying British Battalion Major Attlee Company International Brigade. He dishonoured those who had honoured him.

Let us make clear our rejection of and contempt for anti-communism wherever it rears its ugly head.

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Opinion Showing anti-communism the red card - Morning Star Online

Interest in revolutionary politics is on the rise, with up to 20% of young people describing communism as their ideal economic system.

When the Minnesota Daily published a hit piece, we Students for Socialist Revolution were shocked to find no trace of our political ideas in it. Instead, the article was full of lies backed up by social media and blog posts.

Instead of a story on why communism is surging in popularity with college students, the Daily chose to publish a piece that would not look out of place at TMZ or some other gossip rag.

One of the main criticisms levied against the International Marxist Tendency, our parent organization, was that it charges money.

The fraternities and sororities on campus charge students thousands of dollars a semester to affiliate. Out-of-state tuition at the University of Minnesota is $33,818 a year. The University of Minnesota Foundation has an endowment of $3.3 billion. How that money is distributed is unclear. Meanwhile, students with loans after a four-year degree from the University have an average student debt balance of over $25,000.

At least in our student group, unlike everywhere else under capitalism, we all vote how things are run.

Who does it really serve to attack a left-wing student organization?

The Daily has joined the right-wingers in saying our student group should not be allowed to operate on campus.

This is a political attack on communist students.

The Daily took at face-value the accusations from students, two of whom went on record, that the International Marxist Tendency supports rapists. It references an incident of abuse that was investigated by the Canadian section, over a year ago. The abuser was expelled within eight days of the complaint.

A public statement by the Canadian chapter was published at the time, responding in full to these allegations and detailing the concrete steps taken. While the Daily linked this statement in the original online version of the column, none of its contents were directly quoted in the opinion column itself. Thus, important context was de facto left out, and a one-sided picture was presented.

The International Marxist Tendency takes cases of abuse very seriously. Can the same be said of the University or any other capitalist institution?

In 2017 fewer than half of sexual assault cases were investigated by Minnesota colleges and universities. In 2016, the University paid off a settlement of $500,000 to protect the football team from allegations of rape.

Students for Socialist Revolution fights against all forms of oppression including transphobia, for an end to sexual harassment and the liberation of all of humanity. No one should be able to bribe their way into a sexual act or get out of the consequences of being found out by handing their victims a wad of cash or a promotion.

Millions of youth in the U.S. are realizing there are no small solutions to these big problems and that humanity has the resources, science and technology to provide a dignified existence to every human on this planet. A better world is possible and we must organize to make it a reality. Vandalized posters will not stop us from working towards this goal.

The building of a mass communist party is necessary. We invite all students who feel the same to get in touch with us.

Cal Zeman is a member of Students for Socialist Revolution and submitted the letter on behalf of SSR.

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Letter to the Editor: The Minnesota Daily is against communists ... - Minnesota Daily