Conviction of Dries Van Langenhove: Impact on Vlaams Belang and Support from Unexpected Ally Elon Musk

2024-03-12 17:29:00

This Tuesday, March 12, Dries Van Langenhove, former member of the Flemish far-right party, was sentenced to one year in prison for violating the law on racism and Holocaust denial. He was also sentenced to 10 months suspended detention for violation of the law on possession of weapons, a ban on exercising his civil rights for 10 years and a fine. The former MP is accused of racist and Holocaust denial comments exchanged on Discord messaging with members of Schild en Vrienden. He is also known for his controversial comments once morest the LGBTQIA+ community.

Conviction of Dries Van Langenhove: “A historic victory with major consequences for Vlaams Belang”

And among the defenders of Dries Van Langenhove, there is one that we did not expect… Elon Musk, boss of X (former Twitter), defended the nationalist on his social network. “Someone else sent this meme in a group chat and you got jail time?” he wrote.

An astonishing support that the main party welcomed with open arms. “Yes. Even though the judge (and the media) admitted that I never sent any of these memes, he argued that I should have done more to stop other people from sending them and called the memes “ hate speech”, which is a punishable offense in Belgium”, replies Dries Van Langenhove to the American businessman, before launching into a presentation of his CV. “I founded @schildnvrienden, the largest and most influential youth political movement in Belgium, in 2017. It was banned from Twitter some time later, for no reason. We had (allegedly) a Facebook group with 900 activists and a Discord chat with several hundred users and in one of the groups someone said ‘post your boldest meme’. The most racy memes were posted in this thread. A conversation in which I was not part. Today, 7 years later, I am the leading nationalist activist in Belgium and the Netherlands and I am linked to the party that will win the next elections in Belgium. The regime wants to silence us and is therefore using memes posted by others 7 years ago to put me in prison.”

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