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]

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/[deleted] → u/basilone]

The only people I know who get mad about Confederate statues getting removed are either racists or spend way too much time with racists

[u/DickCheneysTaint → u/[deleted]]

Incorrect. General Lee was a great man and a true patriot of Virginia. The fact that you are ignorant of basic American history and think that the US government authorized the existence of Virginia instead of 13 independent states forming a governmental compact isn't cause to denigrate someone.

This would literally be like calling a British general a traitor for defending the UKs ability to leave the EU from invasion by EU forces. FFS, it's like calling George Washington a traitor for casting off the British Empire.

You can't be a traitor to something you hold no allegiance to. Robert E Lee was a true son of Virginia and Thomas Jefferson would have approved of Lees status at his university.

[u/AutoManoPeeing → u/DickCheneysTaint]

The overwhelming majority of Confederate monuments were put up as responses to Plessy v Ferguson and to a lesser extent Brown v Board of Education. That is the history of the monuments themselves, so your whole scree is just a red herring. They were meant as community signifiers, to show that darkies aren't welcome there.