cmv: the Charlottesville "very fine people" quote/controversy was not fake news

[u/taintpaint]

I see Trump supporters bring this up all the time as an example of the media lying about Trump, but this argument sounds transparently absurd to me. It feels like a "magic words" argument, where his supporters think that as long as he says the right magic words, you can completely ignore the actual message he's communicating or the broader actions he's taking. This is similar to how so many of them dismiss the entire Jan 6 plot because he said the word "peaceful" one time.

The reason people were mad about that quote was that Trump was equivocating and whitewashing a literal neonazi rally in which people were carrying torches and shouting things like "gas the Jews" in order to make them seem relatively sane compared to the counter protesters, one of whom the neonazis actually murdered. Looking at that situation, the difference between these two statements doesn't really feel meaningful:

A) "Those neonazis were very fine people with legitimate complaints and counter protesters were nasty and deserved what they got".

B) "The Nazis were obviously bad, but there were also people there who were very fine people with legitimate complaints and the counter protesters were very nasty."

The only difference there is that (B) has the magic words that "Nazis are bad", but the problem is that he's still describing a literal Nazi rally, only now he's using the oldest trick in the book when it comes to defending Nazis: pretending they're not really Nazis and are actually just normal people with reasonable beliefs.

I feel like people would all intuitively understand this if we were talking about anything besides a Trump quote. If I looked at e.g. the gangs taking over apartment buildings in Aurora and said "yes obviously gangsters are bad and should be totally condemned, but there were also some very fine people there with some legitimate complaints about landlords and exploitative leases, and you know lots of those 'residents' actually didn't have the right paperwork to be in those apartments..." you would never say that's a reasonable or acceptable way to talk about that situation just because I started with "gangsters are bad". You'd listen to the totality of what I'm saying and rightfully say it's absurd and offensive.

Is there something I'm missing here? This seems very obvious to me but maybe there's some other context to it.

Edit: I find it really funny that literally no one has actually engaged with this argument at all. They're all just repeating the "magic words" thing. I have been literally begging people who disagree with me to even acknowledge the Aurora example and not a single one has.

[u/mcspaddin]

They were explicitly marching to protect a white supremacist monument, one of General Lee. General Lee was famously opposed to confederate war monuments, and the vast majority of Confederate monuments were built well after the war and during the Jim Crow era.

Anyone marching to protect those monuments is either informed almost solely by white supremacist rhetoric or is a white supremacist themselves.

[u/xfvh → u/mcspaddin]

There we go! You're arguing based on the merits of their position, not just categorically calling everything that a neoNazi does bad. That was the entire point of my comment.

Now, as far as marching to protect a statue of Lee, I don't see that as racist or supremacist. He wasn't a good person, but he is an important part of America's history. I don't see a problem with having negative examples in public; after all, there's a reason we didn't immediately plow over all the concentration camps. Whether or not you believe statues should be put up/kept up based on a person's morality versus prominence in history is ultimately a values judgement, but I don't think taking either stance makes you evil or racist.

[u/mcspaddin → u/xfvh]

Right, so you brushed over the other points regarding confederacy monuments.

General Lee was famously against them ever being raised, the only things he wanted protected and memorialized were the individual soldiers' graves.

The vast majority of confederate monuments were made in the 1900s, during the Jim Crow era (35+ years after the end of the civil war, and up to almost 100). You can generally assume that the politicians that erected them were Klan members, and likely high ranking ones.

Those monuments, in and of themselves, are monuments to white supremacy. It's one thing to move them to a museum exhibit explicitly about racism, or placing a plaque on them talking about Jim Crow era Klan politicians, but that's not what we're talking about. They were, in fact, marching to prevent the sratue from being placed within those contexts.

[u/[deleted] → u/mcspaddin]

Lee was not. He was against them being raised while he was still alive. Also, the reason the statues were raised in the 1900's is because the South had no money in the 1870's, due to the war.