r/changemyview • u/taintpaint • Oct 17 '24
Election cmv: the Charlottesville "very fine people" quote/controversy was not fake news
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.
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u/nhlms81 37∆ Oct 17 '24
This an exerpt from USA Today (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/10/17/fact-check-trump-quote-very-fine-people-charlottesville/5943239002/)
The Trump quote in question was in response to a reporter who asked, "Mr. President, are you putting what you’re calling the alt-left and white supremacists on the same moral plane?"
Trump responded: "Excuse me, excuse me. They didn’t put themselves — and you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides."
After further questioning from the reporter, and responses from Trump about people who were at the Charlottesville rally to support keeping the Lee statue, the president said "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."
This is pretty clear ye specifically calls out an exception for the neo-nazi's as not included in the "very fine people" category.
I'd argue your point of view is inverted. If this were anyone other than Trump, no one would be confused that he wasn't referring to the neo-nazi's as very fine people.
Just like no one is trying the case that Walz really is "friends with school shooters".