Alt-Right Garbage Sites Named In Charlottesville Lawsuit
Posted at 10:30 pm on February 17, 2018 by Susan Wright
Charlottesville. Remember all that?
While the white nationalist responsible for ramming a car into a crowded street and killing one woman in the process, James Alex Fields, rots in jail, another young man and his father are suing the alt-right publications that falsely fingered him in the crime.
GotNews, FreedomDaily, the owner of Gateway Pundit and 19 other individuals are named in the lawsuit, which was filed in a federal court Wednesday.
Joel Vangheluwe, a Michigan resident, and his father, Jerome, filed the suit, seeking damages for defamation, emotional distress, and invasion of privacy.
The Vangheluwe family were forced into hiding in August 2017, after the alt-right brainiacs behind the named websites splashed their names across the internet.
It’s kind of the same thing as when the alt-right social media warriors got together and spread news about a Washington, D.C. pizza parlor running a child sex ring in a back room.
In that case, a man from North Carolina felt compelled to drive to D.C., armed, and fired shots outside of the pizza parlor.
Only later, after being arrested, did the man admit that maybe he hadn’t done his due diligence in confirming the internet rumors were true.
They weren’t.
But back to the Vangheluwe family’s lawsuit:
“Defendants used the Vangheluwes as political pawns, shifting the blame from altright extremists to an innocent 20-year-old boy who never owned or drove the car in question,” the suit alleges.
So how did Vengheluwe get named?
He used to own the car, years prior. He’d sold it years before Charlottesville, and in fact, the car had come to be sold several more times before Fields came in possession of it.
“The torrent of accusations against the Vangheluwes accomplished the over-arching goal of the alt-right media to distract their readers into believing the attack was made by someone other than a member of the alt-right movement,” the suit claims.
And you can bet that was the goal.
So who else was named in the suit?
The would-be challenger of House Speaker Paul Ryan, Paul Nehlen.
Nehlen was recently bounced from Twitter for multiple, racially charged posts.
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