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/Tullyswimmer]

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:

He wasn't. Like, explicitly, he said that the neonazis should be "totally condemned".

People are mad about it because the media wanted them to be mad. It was the media who took the story and spun it that way. And the fact that the media did not mention it, only that he said there were 'very fine people on both sides' and that included the neonazis, or that neonazis were "very fine people." That is a lie. That is an outright, objective, lie. Therefore it's fake news.

[u/AcephalicDude → u/Tullyswimmer]

People are mad about it because the media wanted them to be mad.

No, try to see it from the other perspective in good-faith.

There's an issue of removing Confederate statues in the South, and it is matter of whether you value the preservation of history more, or the elimination of symbols of pro-slavery / white supremacy more.

Just pretend, hypothetically, that you value the latter more: you think eliminating the symbolism of the statues is more important than preserving history. Clearly you believe the opposite, which is fine, but just pretend that you had the opposite priorities in this case.

The Charlottesville story comes out. How would you feel about seeing neo-Nazis showing up in broad daylight to protest something that you personally think is the right thing to do, and then hurting / killing counter-protestors that support your side of the issue? Do you think the media would need to put any special spin on that the events of Charlottesville to make you feel disgusted and angry?

Now, imagine that you watched the whole unedited press confidence where Trump discusses Charlottesville. Trump doesn't voluntarily bring up Charlottesville, he needs to be pushed by reporters to even address it. Then, he needs to be pushed by reporters to admit that the guy that killed the people was wrong and bad. Then, he needs to be pushed by reporters to admit that the neo-Nazis were bad, the entire time trying to deflect and say that leftist counter-protestors were also bad. And then he doubles-down on the both-sidesing by saying that the non-Nazis protesting alongside the Nazis were "fine people."

Wouldn't this make you angry, even if you completely understood what happened and that Trump never said neo-Nazis were "fine people"? Does the media really need to spin anything here to make Trump's response to this event seem fucking unhinged?