Dries Van Langenhove, a former member of the Belgian parliament and founder of the Flemish Identitarian movement “Schild & Vrienden”, was recently sentenced to one year in prison. Heimatkurier-correspondent Jonas Greindberg visited Dries at S&V’s headquarters in Belgium to talk about lawfare, migration, identity, and the future of Europe.
A court in Belgium convicted van Langenhove for being a member of a chat group in which politically incorrect memes were shared. Memes that did not even originate from him, but from third parties. The patriotic activist and founder of Schild & Vrienden is to be made an example of with this record penalty. We spoke to him.
Dear Dries, do you have a Belgian passport?
Dries Van Langenhove: I do have a Belgian passport, yes.
Do you also have a Belgian identity?
Not really, because there is no such thing as a Belgian identity. There are Flemish people in Belgium, there are Walloon people in Belgium, but Belgians don’t really exist. There’s no such thing as a Belgian identity, as a Belgian culture, there’s no Belgian language, not really a Belgian history either. So, one of my major political goals would be to create an independent Flemish nation state.
What does it mean to you to be Flemish?
Well, to be Flemish means having a link with our past, to strive toward a future where we can give the lands that belong to our ancestors, that were built with their blood, their sweat, their tears, to our descendants. Being Flemish means being a part of our history and a part of our future, our way of life, our culinary practices, our traditions, our way of communicating with each other.
What connects the Flemish people to the Dutch people?
We share the same language, a lot of the same traditions, the same faith in some regards as well. To preserve our nation, I think it would be wise to look at the possibility of more cooperation. Perhaps even creating a unified nation state of the Dutch and Flemish people, which would probably be called Dietsland. But at the moment it’s not really a hot topic in either Flanders or the Netherlands.
You are probably the most influential patriotic influencer in Belgium. What made you become an activist?
The most important thing is zingeving, it’s called in Flemish, a beautiful word. It translates to giving meaning to life. I would love to create a beautiful healthy, strong, and tight family, which is working out quite well at the moment. But I also want to be able to, when I reach old age, to be able to look my children, grandchildren, my descendants into their eyes and tell them that I have done everything in my power to be able to make sure that the land of our ancestors remains the land of our descendants. It may be that we will fail in our endeavors, but still we have to be able say that we did everything we could.
When did you realize that things are going wrong?
I think I’ve always realized that. I’ve always had a very strong sense of justice. The Flemish youth is in a situation that is completely unjust. A huge financial debt rests upon our shoulders as young people, created by generations of reckless politicians. Our environment is being polluted on a massive scale. A while ago in Flanders, we had a huge scandal with very, very harmful PFAS chemicals that never get broken down in nature. And they have contaminated most of the soil in Flanders. And now the government says that we cannot eat vegetables grown in our own garden. But most important is the destruction of the social fabric of our countries, of our nations, of the traditional family, of our demographic future. They are importing masses of immigrants from cultures and countries that will never be able to integrate. And that just creates a huge historical, unprecedented injustice for our people, for my people. I’ve always noticed that in some way, even when I was a child. But as I’ve grown up, I’m in a quite unique position. My social media accounts are among the biggest in Belgium. I reach about a million people every week. So it’s my duty, as it is everyone’s duty, to use all the capacities that I have to do something about this injustice to make sure that our children will have a better future than us.
You studied at the University of Ghent. How was it to be a right-winger at university?
At first, I was a student of political science at Ghent University and I also studied for my law degree at the same time. I was the first right-wing student who got elected to the Board of Governors which is the highest organizing platform of the university. You have to know that Ghent University is the biggest student city in the country, so it’s very relevant. My election was quite controversial because, for the first time ever, they had someone among them who was not of their leftist liberal mindset. It was also the first time for me, as you say in Flemish, that I kicked against the shins of the establishment. I spread the news about corruption, about money flowing in the wrong directions. I noticed that the regime started to attack and the regime never stopped attacking me since then. At a certain point, there was a national debate about transgenderism. Even though Flanders is quite a conservative region, nobody dared to go defend the traditional family on national television. So, I took up the gauntlet and debated a professor that is transgender and is currently serving as a minister in the Belgian government. That’s when the university tried to kick me out. I was able to defend myself successfully but eight months later when some politically incorrect memes were discovered in a private chat group, they came back. They kicked me out of the board of governors and out of university, too. This was only a few months before my graduation as a law student. I took them to court and won, but then I noticed that the rechtsstaat, I don’t know how to say it in English [The Dutch term rechtsstaat can be compared to the concept of “rule of law”], does not count for the leftists. Although the court ruled that they had to allow me back in, Ghent University just changed the rules. I had to get two private security officers with me every time, I went to university. I had to make an appointment two weeks in advance to be able to do silly stuff like visit the library or even enter buildings. So they made it impossible for me to return to university and I actually never finished my law degree, even though I was almost there and I had very good grades.
What are your experiences with Antifa at university?
Flanders has been conquered by the Dutch, by the Spaniards, by the Germans, by the Austrians, by the French. I don’t think there is any nation in Europe that hasn’t conquered us at some point. We always say that you have to “keep your head in between your shoulders”, which works against us very often. We’re not a people of daring, especially in comparison to the French who are a revolutionary, assertive people. We have a very pacified way of doing politics. There isn’t a very strong extreme right in Belgium and there’s also not really a very strong extreme left in Flanders. One day in Ghent, Antifa occupied a university building and they had these huge banners calling for open borders. I went there by myself, just one right-wing student against about 30 Antifa activists. I tore down all their banners and there were like one or two or three of them who started being a little bit violent with me, but I immediately made clear that that would not work against me. And I was able to tear down their banners. So Antifa in Belgium is just like the right-wing is in Belgium. If I compare the extreme left in Belgium and Flanders to Germany, Sweden or Austria, it’s a completely different world. If I look at how violent they are, how would they even try to kill right-wing activists, kill right-wing politicians?
Can you talk about the beginning of Schild & Vrienden?
At Ghent University, Antifa once used violence against people that were just there to listen to a moderate right-wing politician called Theo Franken who was at that time the state secretary for asylum and migration. I think the university has to be the place where freedom of speech has to be able to take place. About half a year later, when this politician returned to the university, I called upon right-wing students to volunteer and make sure that violence would not be used again against students by being voluntary stewards. I thought about 20 people would show up, but there was like 95 or even 100 people who showed up, which is very much for Flanders.
And then out of that initiative Schild & Vrienden grew, the Flemish Identitarian Nationalist Movement. We have some differences with other Identitarian movements such as Génération Identitaire or Identitäre Bewegung. Flemish Independence, for example. We also focus more on conservatism, Catholicism, the traditional family, whereas Identitarian movements often focus more on migration solely. It became a huge movement in no time. We gained up to about a thousand members. And, of course, the regime noticed that it would become a threat because we became the biggest and most influential political movement in the country, ready to write history.
If you look at places like Molenbeek in Belgium, couldn’t you say that it’s already over, that the Great Replacement has already happened and can’t be reversed?
No, not at all. I’m quite positive when it comes to that. Of course, those sites in Antwerp, in Brussels, in Vilvoorde, many other places in Flanders, and in Europe don’t make a man happy. But I still think there’s a lot of hope. I’ve been an activist, I’ve been a politician. I know what can happen. And I’ve seen with my own eyes that this great replacement, this omvolking, has been the result of deliberate policies. That means that our political elite has betrayed us. But it also means that our situation can be turned around by policy. And I am very confident that we can and will turn this around with policies that are beneficial not only to our people, but also to the many groups of migrants in Europe that will never be integrated. And I’m sure that we can turn this around, even in the worst of places where the Great Replacement has been fulfilled already.
Many opponents of remigration on the right say that it would be more opportune to work together with conservative Muslims, for example, against the LGBTQ agenda. Is that a possibility?
Well, there are a lot of opportunities of working together with people. I really pay a lot of attention to biodiversity, to the cleanliness of our environment, our soil, sustainable and ethical meat production. And there’s a lot of allies on the left when it comes to that. Also, during the corona crisis, we’ve seen that people from a lot of different backgrounds can work together. For example, I was protesting the harsh COVID lockdowns a few years ago. To the left of me there was a hippie with dreadlocks, and to the right of me there was a Muslim woman with a headscarf. I don’t think there’s any problem in working together with people whom you might disagree with on a lot of other different topics. I think we should and must work together with religious people, be it Christians, be it Muslims on topics such as gender ideology. In Flanders, we can make a case for that because even the moderate nationalists have implemented gender ideology in all the different schools. And the Flemish people will hear their children say in the evening: “we learned at school that you can change your gender.” The Flemish people will be angry but they won’t speak up, they won’t act. Whereas Muslims in the cities, when they see their children coming back from school with this gender ideology, they will speak up. They will demand this gender ideology to be removed.
In 2018, the public broadcaster VRT aired a documentary about Schild & Vrienden that led to a nationwide scandal. What happened and what were the consequences?
As I explained, Schild & Vrienden became the biggest and most influential political youth movement in the country. We were ready to write history because we had members from different political parties. We had very good contacts. Ministers even who are in government at the time would call me and ask to send a few young men or women to them for certain jobs that they had to fill in. They were calling me for advice all the time. So the regime noticed and they launched this hit piece of a documentary where they claimed to have found politically incorrect memes in our, that’s very important, private group chats. Memes that were posted under a thread where someone said: “Hey guys, post your edgiest meme, post your darkest humor.” That’s the kind of a challenge that they gave to mostly teenage students. And, of course, people would go on the internet and look up the edgiest memes that they could find. Very soon, you will end up with memes about racism, about transgenderism, about Jews and Holocaust, about the Nazis and Adolf Hitler. Very important to say, a thread in which I did not participate and did not even see. I didn’t see it because there were hundreds of people in these group chats, it went so fast, I couldn’t possibly moderate all this stuff. Fast forward many years, police raided my house three times. They did 20 other house raids and 50 interrogations with other activists from Schild & Vrienden. An investigation that took about five years in which they spent millions of taxpayers‘ money. They found nothing but some allegedly politically incorrect memes and then they used those against us. The judge labeled them as hate speech and hate speech is illegal in Belgium.
What is the role of the legal system, of police, of secret services in that?
Well, they are all part of the same regime. In Belgium this regime sees Flemish independence as a threat to their status quo. And I’m very much linked to the biggest party in the country who is winning the polls right now. A party called “Vlaams Belang”, a real nationalist party. In the polls we get about 30 percent of the votes, which is huge of course. Attacking a political party, banning a political party, is harder than attacking and banning an activist such as myself and an activist group such as Schild & Vrienden. They are using the media, who have been writing the most horrendous and outrageous slander about me for the past seven years. They are using politics to slander me, to write new legislation, to be able to ban us. And they are also using lawfare, which is the use of court cases as a weapon against to force us to spend all of our money on lawyers, on fines, on court fees.
You were lately quote tweeted by Elon Musk on X and Joe Rogan talked about you on his podcast. How can you talk about censorship if the most influential people in the world talk about you all the time?
Yes, it is fair to say so. It’s actually quite ridiculous that the owner of X, Elon Musk himself, is interacting with my tweets, and saying how disgraceful it is that someone in Belgium is being sentenced to an effective jail sentence for memes that were shared in a private group chat. At the same time, I’m being shadow banned and search banned on his own platform for many, many years. I was quite hopeful that once Elon took over that very soon my shadow ban and my search ban would be lifted. But it has never happened and the only thing that has actually changed for me on X is that I now have to pay for my own censorship. On Facebook, I have not been allowed to post any images or videos the past month. On TikTok, my videos get removed all the time. A good example is that huge influential figures who have their own talk shows wanted to invite me, but because of the censorship and the slander in the mainstream media, they don’t really dare to invite me.
We are currently seeing more and more cracks in the unipolar world order led by the United States. We see China emerging. We see BRICS growing. What do you think would be the optimal world order for the European people?
We could say that we are shifting from a unipolar to a multipolar world. However, Russia is facing, as you know, big difficulties. China is facing a demographic shift unprecedented in China’s history, which will put it in front of a huge array of challenges and difficulties. To say that because of the American decline, we are shifting towards a multipolar world could be a bit shortsighted, but still in the geopolitical sphere, we are seeing some major changes. We have banned ourselves from taking on a role in the geopolitical theater because of this original sin that was the Second World War. This burden has even been taken up by those nations that claimed they defeated the evil by defeating Nazism. And other nations like China, Russia, and the United States have filled this vacuum and that has been detrimental for Europe. For example, it would be in the interest of Europe to have peace with Russia. And you see now that America is using us as a tool against Russia. The sanctions that have been implemented against Russia are detrimental for Russia, but also for the European Union. And they have, which is quite perverse, some benefits for America even. We have Nord Stream that’s been sabotaged either by America itself or by some of its proxies, be it Poland or Ukraine or some other NATO member states. The European Union is just sitting idly by as some of our most critical infrastructure is being bombed. Erdogan, for example, is right now taking a more sensible position in regards to the Russia-Ukraine conflict than Europe itself. Ursula von der Leyen, the Belgian Prime Minister Alexander de Croo or Charles Michel, the President of the European Council, they are talking nonsense when it comes to geopolitical conflicts and that’s shameful.
Some argue for a Pan-European solution where Europe becomes a pole in the emerging multipolar world and pushes back against liberalism. Are you in favor of a stronger European cooperation or do you see the solution in the nation state?
What I miss is often a pragmatic and concrete solution to many of these problems. I think we’ve been evolving towards a more liberal, egalitarian, universalist way of thinking in the West ever since the French Revolution or the American Revolution. To say that we can just turn that around and create an alternative for liberalism, I think that it’s quite a big challenge. What I personally think is that we need not a European Union, but a Europe with more intergovernmental cooperation. The power and sovereignty have to lie with the nation states. And, of course, the influence of America on Europe will have to be weakened. I don’t want America itself to be weakened, but I think that the influence right now coming from America on Europe is very detrimental. What the Soviet Union was not able to do in 40-50 years in Poland, I fear that America will be able to do in 5 years. If we see how quickly Poland is being transformed right now, I fear that the American influence will have them import migrants, have them indoctrinate their youth with gender ideology, stuff like that. I think the best defense against that is a healthy nation state with healthy families, a healthy demographic social fabric would be the best defense against that.
Thank you very much!
You can support Dries in his legal battle against the Belgian deep state on GiveSendGo and follow Dries on X.