A Sense of Doubt blog post #3528 - NOPE SNOPES - "Very Fine People" and Other Nazi Lies of Donald Trump
In baffling fact check, Snopes debunked that Trump said "very fine people on both sides" about the Neo-Nazis at the Charlottesville rally, chanting "you will not replace us."
NOPE, SNOPES.
Granted, Donald Trump condemned the hatred, violence, and bigotry of the neo-nazis.
Nope.
check out this resource:
Nearly seven years after Donald Trump infamously stated that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the deadly Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, internet fact-checkers at Snopes.com have published a piece declaring it “false” that Trump was referring to neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
This conclusion, however, fails to recognize the intricacies of Trump’s rhetoric, which serves as a prime example of doublespeak.
The “night before” that Trump was referring to included the infamous tiki torch march, the one with people chanting “Blood and soil!” and “You will not replace us!” and “Jews will not replace us!” Those were the people Trump was specifically referring to in his defense of attendees.
According to Trump, there were “very fine people” in both of the two groups, which included the people who went to the rally organized by neo-Nazis and people who protested the neo-Nazis. Those were your “sides.” Trump, here, said that within the group of people at the neo-Nazi rally, where “the night before” they were marching with tiki torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us,” there were “very fine people.”
the rest of the article here:
https://newrepublic.com/article/183082/nopes-trump-very-fine-people
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/06/28/what-trump-said-with-his-very-fine-people-comments-vs-what-he-meant/
What Trump said with his ‘very fine people’ comments vs.
what he meant
Trump and his supporters like to remove his comments from
his broader effort to downplay the actions of white supremacists in 2017 in
Charlottesville.
June 28, 2024 at 3:51 p.m. EDT
During the first presidential debate on Thursday, Donald Trump eagerly defended himself against criticism he has faced for nearly seven years.
Moderator Jake Tapper asked President Biden whether he believed that those planning to vote for Trump were “voting against American democracy.” Biden suggested that they were, offering examples of Trump’s rhetoric that demonstrated the former president’s anti-democratic impulses. Among them was Trump’s reference to “very fine people” having participated in a 2017 rally in Charlottesville organized by white nationalists.
“Jake, both of you know that story has been totally wiped out,” Trump responded, suggesting that criticism for his use of that phrase had been proven unfounded. He offered a muddled explanation (“when you see the sentence, it said, 100 percent exoneration on that story”) before accusing Biden of having invented it.
“You’ll see it’s debunked all over the place,” Trump claimed. “Every anchor has — every reasonable actor has debunked it. And just the other day it came out where it was fully debunked. It’s a nonsense story.”
On Truth Social, his social media platform, someone posted a video snippet from 2019 suggesting that even Tapper himself had dismissed the allegation that Trump was calling neo-Nazis “very fine people.”
The article that came out the other day on the subject was from the hoax-busting site Snopes. Its headline was: “No, Trump Did Not Call Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists ‘Very Fine People.' ”
The article got a lot of traction on the pro-Trump internet because it provided precisely the headline that Trump has long sought on the subject. But supposedly exonerating Trump’s response to the violence that unfolded in Charlottesville depends heavily on ignoring the context for what he said and when he said it — in context, Trump was indeed downplaying the action of the racist actors involved.
A timeline is useful. A collection of white nationalists and neo-Nazis announced a rally in Charlottesville on Aug. 12, 2017. It was called “Unite the Right” explicitly because it sought to unify the country’s racist right-wing fringe with the Republican Party more broadly, a once-unthinkable unification that seemed more feasible seven months into Trump’s administration. (White nationalists were enthusiastic about Trump’s 2016 victory.)
The night before, a group of white nationalists and neo-Nazis held a torchlight march in a park where the city planned to remove a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Clips of the rally were shared online; marchers chanted such antisemitic slogans as “Jews will not replace us.”
Protecting the statue was also the putative focus of the Aug. 12 rally, a rally that attracted both a wide array of right-wing groups and counterprotesters. There were scuffles and fistfights between the demonstrators and antifascists wearing all-black outfits. In the early afternoon, a white supremacist named James Fields Jr. drove his car into a group of counterprotesters, killing a 32-year-old woman named Heather Heyer.
Trump made his first comments about the rally a little later at an event originally focused on veterans.
“We’re closely following the terrible events unfolding in Charlottesville, Virginia,” he said, reading from prepared remarks. “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence” — he looked up and spoke off-the-cuff — “on many sides. On many sides. It’s been going on for a long time in our country. Not Donald Trump. Not Barack Obama. It’s been going on for a long, long time.”
This pattern is by now a familiar one. Trump is given scripted comments, but he strays from them to more robustly defend himself. So he interjects that racist violence isn’t his fault or predecessor Barack Obama’s fault. And he suggests that the violence unfolded “on many sides” — not just on the side that overtly supported his presidency. (Three years later, almost to the day, Trump would refuse to denounce adherents to the radicalized QAnon movement because “they like me very much.”)
After the event concluded, reporters shouted questions, including whether Trump felt he’d denounced white nationalism strongly enough. Trump ignored them.
There was an outcry over Trump's use of the term “many sides.” So on Monday, Aug. 14, he presented prepared remarks from the White House. This time, he didn't go off-script.
“To anyone who acted criminally in this weekend's racist violence, you will be held fully accountable,” he said. “Justice will be delivered. As I said on Saturday, we condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence.” He did not reiterate the “on many sides” part of that sentence.
“Racism is evil,” he added later, still speaking from the teleprompter, “and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacist and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear.”
Early in 2016, Trump had come under fire when Tapper asked whether the presidential candidate would denounce the endorsement of former KKK leader David Duke. Trump didn’t do so, saying he “knew nothing” about Duke and asked for a list of groups Tapper wanted him to condemn so that he could research them. After all, Tapper might “have groups in there that are totally fine,” which would be “unfair.” Tapper asked whether he couldn’t denounce the KKK out of hand; Trump didn’t.
Duke was a scheduled speaker at “Unite the Right.”
On the following day, Trump was scheduled to hold a news conference at Trump Tower to discuss infrastructure. It was the first opportunity reporters had to ask questions about Charlottesville, and Trump, once again speaking without notes, undercut the White House presentation from the previous day.
“The statement I made on Saturday, the first statement, was a fine statement,” Trump insisted when asked why he waited so long to denounce the neo-Nazis. “But you don’t make statements that direct unless you know the fact. And it takes a little while to get the facts.” He insisted that he didn’t “want to go quickly and just make a statement,” the same argument he used with Tapper in 2016.
“As I said on, remember this, Saturday, we condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence,” he added, again skipping the “many sides” part.
“You said there was hatred and violence on both sides,” a reporter pointed out.
“I do think there is blame — yes, I think there is blame on both sides,” Trump replied. “You look at, you look at both sides. I think there's blame on both sides, and I have no doubt about it, and you don't have any doubt about it either. And, and, and, and if you reported it accurately, you would say.”
“The neo-Nazis started this thing,” a reporter pointed out. “They showed up in Charlottesville.”
“Excuse me, they didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group,” Trump said. “But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group — excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.”
He later expanded on this.
“You had people — and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally — but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay?” Trump claimed. “And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats — you had a lot of bad people in the other group, too.”
Trump later suggested that at the nighttime rally on Aug. 11, an event entirely populated by white nationalist or neo-Nazi groups chanting antisemitic slogans, there were “people protesting, very quietly, the taking down the statue of Robert E. Lee.” He said there might have been “some bad ones” there, too, as there were at the Unite the Right rally. But the white nationalist rally organizers “had a permit,” he noted. “The other group didn’t have a permit. So I only tell you this: There are two sides to a story.”
It is true, as the Snopes headline indicates, that Trump said that he was not talking about the white nationalists when offering praise for some of the participants in Unite the Right. But as The Washington Post’s Fact Checker pointed out in a 2020 assessment of the controversy, it’s not clear that there were any participants who weren’t allied with the white nationalist elements that announced the rally in the first place. The Washington Post reported Aug. 10 that there would be a “white nationalist rally” in Charlottesville; does someone who attends a white nationalist rally deserve rhetorical distance from white nationalism?
The reason that “very fine people” lingers over Trump is that it is a shorthand for his eagerness to downplay the explicit pro-Trump, white nationalist origins of a protest that led to a woman being killed. He was “exonerated” to the extent that he said he was not talking about the white nationalists but, instead, about theoretical people who joined a white-nationalist-led rally. He was not exonerated on assigning blame for the brawling to both neo-Nazis and those protesting the neo-Nazis. He was not exonerated for suggesting that Heyer’s death was part of violence on “many sides.” He was not exonerated for suggesting that the counterprotesters’ lack of a rally permit somehow established moral equivalence with those they were protesting.
Incidentally, it's also not true that Tapper ever “debunked” Trump's comments. In the 2019 CNN segment linked by Trump's team on Truth Social, Tapper goes on to raise the same point made above.
“Again, he didn't refer to Nazis as very fine people. He referred to the people protesting with the Nazis,” Tapper said. “And I don't know who are the good people there. Friday night was 'the Jews will not replace us.' Saturday, somebody was killed. At what point were there good people there?”
Trump’s team didn’t include that part in the video it shared.
Nazi flags Twitter post
Near Palm Beach right now. All Nazis are Trump voters. Sickening. pic.twitter.com/EKazokbJ0W
— Lesley Abravanel 🪩 (@lesleyabravanel) October 13, 2024
No, Trump Did Not Call Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists 'Very Fine People'
Reporter: "Mr. President, are you putting what you’re calling the alt-left and white supremacists on the same moral plane?"
Trump: "I’m not putting anybody on a moral plane. What I’m saying is this: You had a group on one side and you had a group on the other, and they came at each other with clubs -- and it was vicious and it was horrible. And it was a horrible thing to watch.
"But there is another side. There was a group on this side. You can call them the left -- you just called them the left -- that came violently attacking the other group. So you can say what you want, but that’s the way it is.
Reporter: (Inaudible) "… both sides, sir. You said there was hatred, there was violence on both sides. Are the --"
Trump: "Yes, I think there’s blame on both sides. If you look at both sides -- I think there’s blame on both sides. And I have no doubt about it, and you don’t have any doubt about it either. And if you reported it accurately, you would say."
Reporter: "The neo-Nazis started this. They showed up in Charlottesville to protest --"
Trump: "Excuse me, excuse me. They didn’t put themselves -- and you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides. You had people in that group. Excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name."
Reporter: "George Washington and Robert E. Lee are not the same."
Trump: "George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner? So will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down -- excuse me, are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him?"
Reporter: "I do love Thomas Jefferson."
Trump: "Okay, good. Are we going to take down the statue? Because he was a major slave owner. Now, are we going to take down his statue?
So, a few days ago I finished a video about the idiotic rightwing lie that the Hells Angels were going to Aurora, Colorado to fight a Venezuelan street gang. Sorry I just need a moment to accept that that’s a sentence a person can say in the year of our lord 2024. When I finished it, I decided I had no desire to address the various other rightwing lies about immigrants currently floating around. And then this happened.
Look, on the one hand, this is great. If you didn’t watch the US presidential debate, Kamala Harris successfully baited Trump into a giant meltdown, which resulted in this explosion. For people who are not terminally online, this looks completely batshit. Surveys the next day showed that this tactic worked very well, and most people agreed that Harris won the debate and Trump is a raving lunatic.
On the other hand, a former US president just stood on a stage in front of 60 million viewers and shouted Nazi propaganda. And it’s still a close race.
From the moment the lie about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio hit social media, everyone who works in the area of radicalization and hate groups immediately recognized it as a Nazi talking point. The classic BIG LIE used by bigots to stir up hatred against a marginalized group is blood libel, which is the idea that Jewish people ritually murder Christian children to take their blood and use it to make matzos for Passover. There have been many variations on this throughout the past two millennia, but the gist is always that the Jewish people are evil, predatory, savage, and even subhuman, and most importantly a dangerous threat to civilized society. That’s why it’s so powerful and has directly led to the persecution of Jews throughout history.
That’s why the experts immediately clocked this new lie as a Nazi invention: a persecuted group, in this case Haitian immigrants, are said to be so evil, predatory, savage, and subhuman as to come to our wholesome towns and EAT OUR BELOVED PETS. They are clearly a dangerous threat that must be countered, huh?
While I agreed with the experts that this was obviously a Nazi talking point, I didn’t realize at first quite how right they were. I knew that the lie started because of an upsetting video of police body cam footage, showing a woman experiencing a serious mental breakdown and trying to eat a cat. The woman was not Haitian, not a recent immigrant (or possibly even an immigrant at all), and not in Springfield, Ohio.
So how did that video end up being used as “proof” that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio are eating people’s pets? Hold on to your monocle: a Nazi started it.
Just a few weeks ago, a man spoke at the Springfield City Commission meeting. Here’s what he had to say.
Now, the journalist who posted that said he’s Nathaniel Higgers from “Blood Pride,” which isn’t quite right. First of all, that’s not his real name, that’s an anti-Black slur that stupid bigots think is clever. His real name is Drake R. Berentz, a well known white supremacist who is the 2nd in command of a neo-Nazi group called Blood TRIBE. He was with them when they marched through Nashville, Tennessee back in February of this year, where he appeared on camera assaulting someone. Anti-fascists have fully cataloged everything this disgusting chud has done, including taking note of his Nazi hand tattoos, so he’s pretty easy to recognize.
So yeah, this lie was actually dreamt up and spread by literal Nazis, before Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance picked up the story and posted it to his Nazi-adjacent fans on Xitter, where it racked up more than a hundred thousand likes. After the town of Springfield went on the record to say the entire thing was a dangerous lie, Vance posted an even more disgusting follow-up:
“In the last several weeks, my office has received many inquiries from actual residents of Springfield who've said their neighbors' pets or local wildlife were abducted by Haitian migrants. It's possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.
Do you know what's confirmed? That a child was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here.”
He goes on, but I want to pause here, because this is another lie that was also repeated by Donald Trump at the debate with Harris. And somehow it manages to actually be even worse than the pet-eating lie, and until I read that I didn’t think that was even possible. Here’s why: not only does this lie also stoke hatred against Haitian immigrants, but it does so by exploiting a dead child and his grieving family.
In 2023, a man accidentally crashed his car into a school bus, tipping it over. Many children were injured and one, 11-year old Aiden Clark, was killed. The man responsible was a Haitian immigrant, and the incident is largely what kicked off a heated debate over Springfield’s policies on welcoming immigrants to save a dying industry town.
I can’t imagine what it must be like to not only lose a child, but to then be thrust into the middle of a political debate and to see your son used by bigots to further a hateful agenda. So I can’t describe it, but Aiden’s dad, who is actually named Nathan, gave this incredible speech about it.
Friends, I SOBBED the first time I watched that. I should admit that it hits a bit close to home, as I lost a kid I used to babysit when a drunk driver hit his school bus. But even without that connection, you’d have to be a monster to use this tragedy for scoring political points in a debate, much less for using it to sow fear and hatred against a group of marginalized people who are trying to make a better life for themselves against tremendous odds.
So yeah, you know, I laughed during the debate when Trump went on his unhinged rant about immigrants eating cats and dogs, but I can’t laugh about it anymore. The man in serious contention to once again become the President of the United States just mindlessly repeated TWO actual Nazi lies on the world stage. We have a moral obligation to make sure these disgusting losers never gain power again.
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| https://www.splcenter.org/news/2017/08/15/people-groups-and-symbols-charlottesville |
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2410.15 - 10:10
- Days ago: MOM = 3392 days ago & DAD = 048 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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