After just seven years, the left-leaning fact-checking website Snopes has finally acknowledged that former President Donald Trump never called the neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville “very fine people,” a falsehood that has been regularly spread by President Joe Biden.
The media-fueled controversy has its roots in the so-called “Unite the Right” rally that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. The demonstration brought together groups from across the political spectrum, including neo-Nazis, white supremacists, people protesting the removal of Confederate statues, and progressive counter-protesters.
The protests turned violent when James Fields Jr. intentionally drove his car into a group of counter-protesters, killing civil rights activist Heather Heyer and injuring more than 30 others. Heyer was sentenced to life in prison on federal hate crime charges.
Days after the deadly attack, then-President Trump held a press conference where he was asked by a reporter about the neo-Nazis who had been at the rally. Said:
I didn’t think they were neo-Nazis, and there were some very bad people in that group, but there were some very fine people on both sides. And there was a group of people in that group, and I saw the same picture as you, and there were people in that group who were protesting the removal of a statue that was very important to them and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to something else.
Despite the availability of Trump’s Aug. 15, 2017, remarks, Snopes waited almost seven years to dispute media reports that the former president had called neo-Nazis “very fine people.”
On Thursday, Snopes published a fact check. article The headline reads, “No, Trump Didn’t Call Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists ‘Very Fine People’.”
As one left-leaning fact-checker pointed out:
Speaking at a news conference after a rally against plans to remove Confederate statues, Trump said there were “very fine people” on both the protesters and counter-protesters sides. His statement did not mention neo-Nazis or white supremacists, whom he said “are completely condemnable.”
Snopes was inundated with complaints from liberal readers about the fact-checks, and published an editor’s note the next day.
Editor’s Note: Some readers have objected that this fact check seems to assume that Trump was right when he said that “there were very fine people on both sides” of the Charlottesville incident. This is not true. This fact check is not intended to verify whether Trump’s statements are true or false, but rather to verify what he actually said. For the record, nearly every source that covered the Unite the Right riots has concluded that the riots were conceived, led, and participated in by white supremacists, and therefore that Trump was wrong.
Since Trump’s “very fine people” comment, many Democrats have misinterpreted his words and jumped on his remarks. Biden has regularly spread the biased and misleading “very fine people” hoax in an attempt to hurt Trump politically. Snopes reports that the misinformation has “spread like wildfire” andcornerstone“Biden’s 2020 motionYou can see examples of Biden weaponizing Trump’s rhetoric here. here, hereand here.
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