The leftist Snopes “fact-checking” website has finally admitted that President Donald Trump did not call neo-Nazis and white supremacists at Charlottesville, Virginia’s Unite the Right Rally in 2017 “very fine people.”
But only seven years after the fact.
The confession opened the way for the Trump campaign to say that Joe Biden lied about it repeatedly, and debunks what Biden said was the reason he ran for president.
On X, conservatives said “we told you so.” Leftists are going ballistic, though, because the truth upends their bogus narrative about Trump.
The Claim
The lie about Trump goes back to August 15, 2017, when radical leftists and “far right” activists clashed over Unite the Right’s protesting the removal of Robert E. Lee’s statue from a park.
As the Snopes fact-check noted, Trump uttered “very fine people on both sides.” But he also specifically and repeatedly condemned neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
Snopes offered a transcript of a reporter’s questions and Trump’s replies:
Reporter: Mr. President, are you putting what you’re calling the alt-left and white supremacists on the same moral plane?
Trump: I am not putting anybody on a moral plane, what I’m saying is this: You had a group on one side and a group on the other, and they came at each other with clubs and it was vicious and 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’ve 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: You said there was hatred and violence on both sides?
Trump: I do think there is blame — yes, I think there is blame on both sides. You look at, you look at both sides. I think there’s blame on both sides, and I have no doubt about it. …
Reporter: The neo-Nazis started this thing. They showed up in Charlottesville.
Trump: Excuse me, they didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis, 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. George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner? So will George Washington now lose his [statues], are we gonna take down — excuse me — are we gonna take down statues of George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him? Okay good. Are we gonna take down the statue? [Because] he was a major slaveowner. Now are we gonna take down his statue? So you know what? It’s fine. You’re changing history, you’re changing culture, and 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? 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 the baseball bats, you got a lot of bad people in the other group too.
As well, Snopes continued, Trump posted similar sentiments on X and addressed the matter on his golf course in New Jersey.
Still, the left hoked up the false narrative that Trump described “neo-Nazis” and “white supremacists” as “very fine people.”
And Biden, again, said the rally and Trump’s remarks inspired his run for the presidency.
Biden called the leftists who attacked the “far right” protesters a “courageous group of Americans.”
But Trump’s comments inspired Biden to run.
“And that’s when we heard the words of the President of the United States that stunned the world and shocked the conscience of this nation,” Biden said:
He said there were quote “some very fine people on both sides.” Very fine people on both sides? With those words the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it. And in that moment I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime. I wrote at the time that we’re in the battle for the soul of this nation.
Reaction
But now, Snopes has called a lie not only what leftist media reported, but also what Biden said about Trump’s remarks. The narrative, it says, is “false.”
That invited Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt to call out Biden.
“The Charlottesville lie was another hoax perpetuated by the corrupt Democrats and their mouthpieces in the fake news media, just like the Hunter Biden laptop, the Russian collusion scandal and so many others, all in an attempt to smear President Trump,” she told Fox Digital. “Joe Biden’s campaign must end any advertising that pushes this lie because President Trump has, once again, been proven right.”
Conservative X posters joined in.
“We already knew,” Gunther Eagleman wrote. “It’s the sheep that need to hear it.”
“7 years later …” Libs of TikTok added. Many comments echoed that sentiment: Seven years is a long time to wait before fact-checking an obvious lie.
Leftists, on the other hand, needed smelling salts. A key ally had betrayed them.
“He literally said very fine people on both sides,” one wrote. “He said neo nazis are very fine people.”
Wrote another:
Are y’all retconning us? Did I miss the non-Neo Nazi statue protestors? Were they hiding behind all the Nazis? Because otherwise there were counter-protestors and Nazis, who Donald Trump called “very fine people.”
“He said there were very fine people on both sides and one side consisted purely of neo-Nazis and white supremacists,” a third wrote. “He said it. Him walking it back doesn’t negate that.”
A fourth accused Snopes of lying:
Why lie?
He said there were very fine people on both sides.
That means he called Nazi’s very fine people.
You can no longer claim to be a truthful site.
Other Hate-Trump, Pro-Democrat Hoaxes
One X poster helpfully provided a list of the lies and hoaxes the media perpetrated to destroy Trump and help Biden and the Democrats.
“This is pretty shocking,” BlindFaithBook wrote. “Even after SNOPES finally debunks this absurd, ridiculous, & obvious hoax, there are still people arguing that it is real. Same with the ‘drink bleach’ hoax. Imagine all of the less obvious hoaxes about Trump they believe & will believe.”
Among them were:
- the Russia Collusion hoax conceived by Hillary Clinton;
- the lie that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation”;
- the lie that Capitol Hill policeman Brian Sicknick was “murdered” during the mostly peaceful protest at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021;
- the infamous lie that then-U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was a rapist; and,
- the lie about the pro-life Catholic kids and the “Native American elder” they supposedly accosted.
H/T: Legal Insurrection
