WorldNetDaily’s Bob Unruh made a familiar complaint in an Aug. 12 article:
Along with the other failures of his administration – an inflation-ridden economy, an open southern border and the national security threat that involves, his transgender and abortion ideologies – Joe Biden is handing down his “Charlottesville lie” to Kamala Harris, freshly picked by the Democrat party’s [sic] elite as their candidate for 2024.
In a Harris-promoting email dispatched from a joebiden.com return address on Monday, Biden wrote, “Today we mark seven years since white supremacists descended on Charlottesville, Virginia. The hate summoned on that day is forever etched in my memory.”
He cited the violence from a confrontation between protesters objecting to sanitizing American history and the leftists who planned it and said, “In that darkest of moments, a stunned nation looked to Donald Trump. And do you remember what he said? ‘There were very fine people on both sides.'”
He then handed it off to Harris, stating, “We can’t allow hate to be given safe harbor on our shores. We can’t let the MAGA movement succeed at ripping away our freedoms and destroying our democracy. I know that Kamala and Tim can finish the job we started together.”
But Biden’s claim about what Trump said is a lie.
[…]Biden also had his “Charlottesville lie” in his acceptance address when the Democrats officially made him their presidential nominee in 2020.
Commentator Larry Elder addressed the fact that Biden won’t let the lie die.
“In March, President Joe Biden, in Brussels, Belgium, repeated the lie. At a press conference, ostensibly about Ukraine, Biden told the world that Trump’s alleged racist response to Charlottesville inspired Biden to enter the 2020 presidential race: ‘I had no intention of running for president again, and – until I saw those folks coming out of the fields in Virginia carrying torches and carrying Nazi banners and literally singing the same vile rhyme that they used in Germany in the early ’20s or ’30s. …,'” Elder wrote.
Harris, herself even has used the lie.
During the 2020 campaign, WND reported, “Among numerous false statements by Kamala Harris in the vice presidential debate Wednesday was the oft-repeated and easily refuted ‘Charlottesville lie’ that Joe Biden says was the catalyst for his decision to run for president.”
Her false claim was that regarding a clash over a Robert E. Lee monument Trump called neo-Nazis and other white supremacists “fine people.”
As we’ve repeatedly pointed out, the group that organized the rally to oppose removal of the Lee statue, American Warrior Revolution, considers itself a militia and later effectively blaming counterprotester Heather Heyer for her own death in getting mowed down by a car driven by white supremacist James Fields Jr.
Unruh’s defense of Trump was reprinting his word-salad take on it, and well as claiming that “Even the leftists in the so-called ‘fact check’ industry agreed” through a Snopes article on it. But if every fact-checker is a “leftist” — something Unruh provides no evidence to back up — why suddenly trust Snopes on this one? Unruh didn’t explain the flip-flop. And as we’ve noted, Snopes’ article on this is flawed, taking his words out of the context in which he said them and that what he said can clearly be interpreted as supporting a neo-Nazi rally.
Unruh is really twisting himself into knots trying to keep his employer’s dubious narrative alive. Of course, he stopped being a real journalist years ago when he joined WND and is now nothing more than a sad, lazy right-wing hack.
UPDATE: Unruh lashed out at Biden again in an Aug. 20 article after he referenced Charlottesville at the Democratic National Convention (the name of which Unruh gets deliberately wrong):
Joe Biden on Monday night at this year’s Democrat party convention [sic] delivered what is expected to be his farewell to the 2024 presidential race, his party’s support and much, much more, including a political career that has spanned decades.
But like myriad earlier speeches, he couldn’t get by without telling a falsehood, or two. Or more.
He criticized “political violence,” but didn’t address the lawfare his party has launched, with multiple court cases against President Donald Trump, including one about possession of classified documents – an offense Biden also committed but for which he faced no charges. But Trump was charged with a long list of counts.
Then he trotted out his story, which is false, about the race violence that happened in Charlottesville, Virginia.
He said, “Extremists coming out of the woods carrying torches. Their veins bulging from their necks. Carrying nasty swastikas. Chanting … antisemitic bile … white supremacists, neo-Nazis.”
He said those people saw President Donald Trump as an ally.
“President was asked what he thought…’There are very fine people on both sides.’ MY GOD…. That is what he said and what he meant.”
Trump didn’t of course, and even leftist fact-checkers have documented how Biden’s often-used story is a fabrication.
Unruh repeated many of his earlier dubious defenses, censoring the fact that the “leftist” fact-check by Snopes (whom Unruh doesn’t prove is “leftist”) has been questioned. Also note that Unruh identifies Trump as “president” but not Biden even though he is, in fact, the president and Trump is merely a former president. That dishonesty presumably comes straight from the to; editor Joseph Farah denies that Biden is a legitimate president, dismissing him as a “presidential pretender.”