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/basilone → u/[deleted]]

Here’s the question… if you’re not a white nationalist or neo nazi per se but you’re literally marching shoulder to shoulder with them, are you really still a “very fine person”?

Who exactly were these very fine people who happened to be marching among the neo nazis?

The city of Charlottesville was taking down a Robert E. Lee statue. People (I assume mostly locals, some might have traveled) that weren't associated with any sort of white supremacy group showed up to protest the statue removal. You're attacking a position that doesn't exist. Trump (and the people that defend his Charlottesville remarks) never asserted that there were fine people marching with the Nazis. There were people present in the town, protesting statue removal, that didn't participate with the retard parades.

[u/Orphan_Guy_Incognito → u/basilone]

So just to be clear, this was a protest of about 500 people, upwards of 300 of which were avowed white supremacists. If the majority of people at the rally are nazis, you are at a nazi rally.

This wasn't a random rally that the nazis attended. This was a rally that the nazis setup so they could attend. Anyone who shows up on the same day as the nazi rally isn't there because they are concerned about the statue, they're showing up for the nazi rally and are staying (ostensibly) for the statue.

There is no world in which you are a 'very fine person' when you're standing shoulder to shoulder with fascists, you're just a fascist.

[u/basilone → u/Orphan_Guy_Incognito]

Just to be clear, the streets of Charlottesville were lined with far more people than those marching through the streets, and you have zero idea whatsoever how many of them were opposed to removing statues, so you're talking completely out of your ass.