WorldNetDaily got a big boost to one of its favorite deceptive narratives, thanks to a fact-checker that probably should have known better. Bob Unruh gleefully wrote in a June 23 article:
For seven years, a long list of leftist “fact-checkers” have claimed that President Donald Trump called neo-Nazis “very fine people.” Chuck Schumer repeated it on the Senate floor. Joe Biden launched a presidential campaign based on the now-debunked allegation.
Now Snopes has broken ranks, admitting it was a made-up charge.
The truth is that Trump said there were “very fine people, on both sides” of the dispute which at the time involved leftist demands that statues of and references to some of America’s historic figures be destroyed because they do not align with today’s leftist values. Specifically, some of the icons that were condemned were heroes, to the South, in the Civil War.
[…]Fox News reported that Joe Biden “was chief among those critics, citing the supposed incident as a mean reason for launching his 2020 campaign.”
In fact, when Biden unleased his 2020 campaign announcement video, the first words he said in it were “Charlottesville, Virginia,” a series of allegations that Snopes now has conceded is false.
Biden, in fact, falsely claimed, “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’d ever seen in my lifetime.”
Snopes’ new explanation aligns with the explanations that have come from the Trump campaigns and Trump’s White House for years.
Unruh offered no evidence that Snopes is a “leftist” fact-checker, and interestingly, he quoted nothing from the Snopes article itself.
Managing editor David Kupelian invoked the Snopes claim in a June 27 column that was otherwise dedicated to his hypocritical whining that Trump gets likened to Hitler:
It’s been perhaps the most damning and most repeated allegation President Joe Biden has made regarding his predecessor, President Donald Trump – that Trump is a Nazi, or approves of Nazis. Biden made the charge when he first accepted the nomination to be the Democrats’ presidential candidate in 2020. In fact, according to the Washington Post in “For Joe Biden, Charlottesville defines the Trump presidency,” Biden claimed it was his very reason for running for president. He repeated it in his inauguration speech. And he has probably repeated it more often than any other accusation toward Trump.
Unfortunately for Biden, his favorite method of tying Trump to Nazis and Hitler – the so-called “Charlottesville lie” – was recently shot down, for the umpteenth time, by the leftwing factcheck site Snopes.
“No, Trump Did Not Call Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists ‘Very Fine People'” announced Snopes, a full seven years after the incident occurred that gave rise to the allegation. In reality, Snopes’ clarification shouldn’t have been necessary, since many other news and factcheck entities, on both left and right, have long ago debunked the absurd claim that Trump praised Nazis and Klansmen.
Kupelian also failed to quote anything from the fact-check itself beyond the headline. Meanwhile, Larry Elder — who has continually pushed the pro-Trump narrative on this — cheered the article in his June 27 WND column.
But Snopes botched this. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump wrote, Trump made numerous comments about Charlottesville, and those sticking only to words ignore the context in which he said them — namely that the rally was organized by white nationalists:
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.
[…]
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.
Parker Molloy wrote at the New Republic:
One of Trump’s strategies has always been to stake out every possible position on any given topic. That’s exactly what he did here. He talked himself into a knot. He used doublespeak, and Snopes fell for it.
Did Trump specifically say, “Some neo-Nazis are fine people?” No. Did he say that there were “very fine people on both sides” of a neo-Nazi rally? Yes!
[…]Labeling this as “false” without acknowledging the nuance of Trump’s doublespeak misrepresents the reality of his rhetoric. This is not just about parsing words; it’s about understanding the implications of those words in their entirety. Failing to recognize this allows history to be rewritten in a way that sanitizes the dangerous equivocation of those in power.
Snopes, in its eagerness to fact-check, missed the forest for the trees. In doing so, the site inadvertently aided in the revisionist effort to downplay the true nature of Trump’s remarks. We must remain vigilant against such simplifications, ensuring that the full context and impact of public statements are considered to safeguard the truth from being obscured by clever manipulation.
WND, of course, cares nothing about context and nuance. It has that misleading headline from Snopes, and it’s going to run with it, no matter what the facts actually say.