Veteran behind viral border wall GoFundMe has history of 'fake news' websites

The man behind a viral Internet fundraiser for President Donald Trump’s controversial border wall has been involved with questionable news websites.

Brian Kolfage, a triple-amputee Iraq war veteran, has raised more than $11 million from over 180,000 donors out of his $1 billion goal on GoFundMe by Friday. His fundraising page includes a large bolded section named “How do you know this is not a scam?” to break down his past in building right-wing—and arguably, fake news—websites.

Mr Kolfage encouraged users to look up his history, verified Facebook page, and wrote “I’m credible and a real person.” He told NBC News recently that he plans to use his connections in the White House to ensure that the money raised from the fundraiser will be used to fund the border wall.

“We have someone who is tied in with the White House that’s in their inner-circle,” Mr Kolfage said. “We can work on a way where we can guarantee with a contract where [the funding] can only go to the wall.”

The high-profile nature of the fundraiser said motivates the Florida man to ensure it runs smoothly and without any controversy.

“We have a lot of people watching this,” Mr Kolfage added, noting it would “serve as a motivating factor not to screw this up.”

But as NBC News noted, the viral internet fundraiser does not mention the Florida man’s most recent and business venture: Right Wing News, a Facebook page known to peddle fake news, and “a ring of affiliate sites that frequently trafficked in conspiracy theories.”

Right Wing News was shut down by Facebook when the social media network cleared out more than 559 pages known to have been “using fake accounts to drive traffic to their websites,” or “were ad farms using Facebook to mislead people into thinking that they were forums for legitimate political debate.”

A few days after Facebook pulled down Right Wing News, Mr Kolfage created another group called Fight4FreeSpeech. It accepts donations—a discrepancy that was not mentioned in the viral GoFundMe page.

Mr Kolfage told NBC News he didn’t mention Right Wing News or Fight4FreeSpeech because he “didn’t want it to be a distraction” to the mission of building a border wall.

“I don’t wanna mix the two,” he added. “That shouldn’t be the focus. My personal issues have nothing to do with building the wall.”

The Iraq War veteran also operated the affiliated sites of Right Wing News. The sites VeteranAF and Freedom Daily reportedly pushed unfounded conspiracy theories, including one that claimed 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was secretly concealing fatal illnesses and false stories about voter fraud days before the presidential election.

The sites relied on using outrage and click-bait headlines—often false, racist and provocative—to increase viewership and shares. Some of the headlines include “Obnoxious Black People Lose Their Minds When Victoria Secret Models Say This 1 Word On Live Video” and “Trump Just Released Embarrassing Vids Of Obama’s Muslim Friends That He Never Wanted Seen.”

Both FreedomDaily and VeteranAF posted identical stories on their sites, but used different bylines, NBC reported. For instance, some stories on FreedomDaily were written by a “Liberty Belle,” and on VeteranAF, it was “Lady Liberty.”

Those sites, however, stopped operating in March.

The impetus behind Mr Kolfage’s site being shut down came a month after Joel Vangheluwe, a Michigan resident, sued FreedomDaily among other right wing news sites for falsely identifying him as the perpetrator behind the car attack targeting peaceful protestors at the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. FreedomDaily, and other similar sites, began circulating photos of Mr Vangheluwe and falsely reported him to be the perpetrator of the attack. The lawsuit said FreedomDaily relied on 4chan as its primary source. Mr Kolfage was not listed as a defendant in the suit.

Mr Kolfage also grew popular after Facebook took his pages down. Right-wing media companies, like Fox News and Breitbart, interviewed or brought on Mr Kolfage to promote Fight4Free Speech, a group he started to combat “social media censorship.”

But despite his controversies, Mr Kolfage’s border wall fundraiser has raised millions of dollars.

“If there’s another big thing that comes up, somebody else is gonna have to take it,” Mr Kolfage said. “I have two kids and a wife. I wasn’t planning for this thing to be massive — maybe just in the conservative circle.”