“No,” proclaims the longtime fact-checking site Snopes, “Trump Did Not Call Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists ‘Very Fine People’.” It’s a puzzling headline, published yesterday and making the rounds through social media as users try to figure it out. Do they remember this wrong? Is Snopes wrong? What’s going on?
The headline refers to the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the home of the University of Virginia. Virginia was, at the time, removing monuments to the Confederacy that had been erected around the state mostly in the early and mid 20th century as a response to the civil rights movement. Although calls for the monuments to be removed were as old as the monuments themselves, they took on a sense of urgency when, in 2015, a white supremacist shot and killed nine members of a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina.
The rally was organized and attended primarily by white supremacists, including the League of the South, the National Socialist Movement, the Ku Klux Klan, Identity Evropa, the 3 Percenters, and other far-right movements. It was, fully and completely, a white nationalist rally.
Counter-protesters came out and the rally descended into violence, including a vehicular attack by a white supremacist against counter-protesters, killing one and injuring thirty-five others. What, exactly, caused the rally to descend into violence is still open for debate. Jewish worshippers at synagogue Beth Israel left out a back exit on Saturday morning because there were armed neo-Nazis with semiautomatic rifles outside, for example. Keep in mind this was before the rally was scheduled to begin. It was never particularly peaceful, and it only got worse, because, and this is important, the people who showed up espousing views like “Jews are Satan’s children” and carrying semi-automatic weapons were looking for a fight, and they showed up to a college town. College students are known for their decorum and would never huck a water bottle at a Nazi just to watch it bounce pleasingly off their big dumb head.
As mentioned, by the time the whole thing broke up, one woman – Heather Heyer, 32 – was dead and, by most estimates, over fifty were injured in various clashes. Two state troopers died in an accidental helicopter crash related to, but not caused by, the event.
Asked about the rally after the fact, Trump explained his views: “You had a group on one side and a group on the other, and they came at each other with clubs and it was vicious and horrible and it was a horrible thing to watch, but there is another side.” This doesn’t really mean anything; it’s impossible to parse this into a sentence that is meant to mean something. There was one side and they came at another and there is another side? Okay, sir. Try again?
“There was a group on this side, you can call them the left. You’ve just called them the left, that came violently attacking the other group. So you can say what you want, but that’s the way it is.”
Who is the other group, sir?
“I think there is blame on both sides. You look at, you look at both sides. I think there’s blame on both sides, and I have no doubt about it, and you don’t have any doubt about it either… they didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”
Trump waivered on this, trying to insist that the people behind the Unite the Right rally “didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis,” which is true for some of them. Some, you know, did, though. The National Socialist Movement is unquestionably a neo-Nazi group, because national socialism is the hollow formal name given to the ideology of Nazism (the National Socialist German Workers Party, in German the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, is the origin of the term Nazi). For the others, well, we’re sort of splitting hairs here. American slavery predates the Nazis, so neo-Confederates can’t be said to be neo-Nazis? But that seems sort of wrong, in part because Nazisim was inspired by American racial segregation and in part because neo-Nazis aren’t exact photocopies of 1930s Nazis, they take from whatever ideologies suit them the most.
When it comes to the neo-Nazis, Trump said “they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay?” Who are those other people?
Snopes, in its fact check, explains that because Trump specifically disavowed neo-Nazis and white nationalists, then we should accept that Trump “did not call Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists ‘very fine people.'” But that requires a strict, nuance-free reading of Trump’s statement. He disavowed the neo-Nazis, so who is he praising? Were there really people marching alongside Confederate or Nazi flags who do not believe the things those people believe?
Excuse me, they didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.
Donald Trump
Why split that hair but not a further one? Trump disavows white nationalists, but Snopes says he disavowed white supremacists. Hang on, those are different words. They have slightly different meanings. How extremely, obnoxiously specific are we supposed to get?
The truth is important. But the truth isn’t just words. Trump, in his statements following the events in Charlottesville, argued that by not ‘putting themselves down as neo-Nazis,’ it was improper to call the people yelling anti-Black and anti-Jewish slogans “neo-Nazis.” This is rubbish and it’s right and proper to call it rubbish. When he tries to distinguish who he wants to praise, it is right and proper to call it rubbish. No one marching between the flag of Nazism and the flag of the Confederacy is honestly and earnestly opposed to Nazism or white supremacy, and Trump was disingenuous when he claimed to be praising this imagined person.
Trump claimed that he was praising people “there to innocently protest — and very legally protest” and condemning “Neo-Nazis, white nationalists, whatever you wanna call them.” Well, if it’s up to whatever I want to call them, then everyone at the protest marching alongside the Nazis was, you know, a Nazi. There’s no one left for him to have been calling a “very fine person.”
