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Days after a 12 August 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia — in which a white supremacist mowed down a group of counter-protesters with a car, killing one and injuring dozens — various right-leaning web sites published reports claiming that the driver was actually a left-wing, Hillary Clinton-supporting Democrat. We do not yet know very much about 20-year-old James Alex Fields Jr. of Maumee, Ohio, but such evidence as we have places him squarely in the camp of Charlottesville protesters who marched under the white nationalist banner. One of Fields' former high school teachers, Derek Weimer, told the Cincinnati Enquirer that the young man's political views were extreme and flavored with Nazism: Photos taken earlier on the day of the attack show Fields standing shoulder-to-shoulder with members of Charlottesville's Vanguard America, wearing the group's standard uniform and holding a shield with their logo, the fasces: According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the basic tenets of Vanguard America's philosophy are as follows: All of the above notwithstanding, the unreliable web site YourNewsWire.com declared that the mainstream media were suppressing proof that the vehicular attacker was a left-wing operative at the heart of a false flag designed to spark civil war, introduce martial law, and take away the rights of conservative groups to assemble peacefully: Another right-leaning web site, Freedom Daily, didn't mention Fields at all, blaming the attack instead on an Antifa terrorist involved in a left-wing false flag conspiracy: Neither site has a leg to stand on. YourNewsWire provided no evidence that Fields was a left-wing operative. Freedom Daily joined Gateway Pundit, Alt Right Real News, GotNews.com, and other reliably unreliable sources in regurgitating misinformation put out by Internet sleuths who blithely fingered an innocent teenager for the crime. These sites accused Joel Vangheluwe (who turned out to be the son of a former owner of the attack vehicle) of being the Charlottesville killer: Vangheluwe, who is from Macomb County, Michigan, has been the target of death threats since these web sites named him, according to local news reports: The Michigan State Police responded to the threats against Vangheluwe by affirming that there is no known Michigan connection to the Charlottesville attack: Some of the sites that got it so egregiously wrong — Gateway Pundit, for one — quietly deleted their erroneous posts and moved on without issuing corrections or retractions. Others, such as GotNews.com, published corrections — and then congratulated themselves for doing so. Freedom Daily updated their page to identify the right suspect, but perpetuated their leftists did it scenario by claiming the driver lost control while trying to escape anti-fascist demonstrators who were allegedly throwing things at his car, and never meant to hurt anyone (a claim directly contradicted by Charlottesville's police chief, who described the vehicular attack as premeditated). All these reports dovetail into a grander conspiracy theory peddled by InfoWars founder Alex Jones and his ilk, exemplified in the rambling, hour-long video rant below, part of an InfoWars.com post entitled Virginia Riots Staged to Bring in Martial Law, Ban Conservative Gatherings. In brief, Jones claims that the violence in Charlottesville is but one example of a well-orchestrated plot by billionaire leftist George Soros, former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), globalists, the deep state, Jewish actors pretending to be neo-Nazis, and God only knows who else to foment unrest, start a race war, bring down President Trump, and pave the way for martial law in the United States: These are quotes, Jones said, but when we attempted to verify that Clinton actually uttered the words What are we going to do to keep control of them? Keep them in the dark, keep them desperate, we found nothing in any public sources, including WikiLeaks.org, to confirm it — and in point of fact, we found no published statements even vaguely resembling those. We were able to confirm something Hillary Clinton did not say, however, namely: We want to keep people in their mother's basements as baristas. Ironically, the place we were able to confirm it was Jones' own web site, InfoWars.com, which in October 2016 reposted an article from pro-Putin news site Russia Today alleging that Clinton had described rival Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders' younger supporters as basement dwellers and baristas — which wasn't really accurate either. Here's what Clinton really said, transcribed from an audio clip posted on InfoWars (and elsewhere): To recap, there's virtually nothing accurate in Alex Jones' statement purporting to quote Hillary Clinton and WikiLeaks. We've addressed an inquiry to InfoWars for clarification, and await their reply.
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