Politics
Snopes Quietly Corrects Charlottesville ‘Very Fine People’ Hoax After Seven Years
Snopes, a popular fact-checking website with a history of bias towards Democrats and left-wing causes, has finally admitted that former President Donald Trump did not call neo-Nazis “very fine people” after the Charlottesville protests in 2017. The correction comes nearly seven hours after the hoax — which has been frequently referenced by the Biden campaign — was concocted.
The hoax was born after then-President Trump decided to address the media after the controversial incident that saw far-left and far-right protesters clash in the streets after a protest against the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue. While fielding questions from reporters, Trump took issue with the mainstream media’s one-sided coverage of the day’s events, which failed to mention left-wing rioters armed with clubs who converged on the group after police controversially disbanded the rally, causing a clash.
One counter protester, Heather Heyer, was killed after being run over in the ensuing chaos.
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During his remarks, then-President Trump repeatedly condemned extremists, stating that they need to be “condemned totally.”
He also noted that some people were simply there to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee and did not engage in any violence, nor did they have affiliation with any extremist groups. He also noted that far-left activists were present and engaged in violence themselves, which was well documented but largely ignored by mainstream media outlets.
“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. You had people in that group – excuse me, excuse me, I saw the same pictures you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name,” Trump said.
After another question, Trump once again reiterated that he was not talking about extremists. “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists because they should be condemned totally,” he stressed.
Instead of quoting the full transcript, left-wing pundits and politicians have for years falsely claimed that Trump called neo-Nazis and white supremacists “very fine people.” President Biden has claimed that the debunked quote was what propelled him to run for office, while the lie has been repeated ad-nauseam throughout the 2024 campaign.
On June 20, more than seven years after the hoax was first launched, Snopes quietly issued a new fact check. “On Aug. 15, 2017, then-President Donald Trump called neo-Nazis and white supremacists who attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, ‘very fine people,” reads the claim, which was finally graded as “false.”
“We looked into these claims, and found that while Trump did say there were ‘very fine people on both sides,’ meaning both the protesters and the counterprotesters, he also condemned neo-Nazis and white nationalists outright and said he was specifically referring to those who were there only to participate in the statue protest,” Snopes wrote.
“In sum, while Trump did say that there were ‘very fine people on both sides,’ he also specifically noted that he was not talking about neo-Nazis and white supremacists and said they should be ‘condemned totally.’ Therefore, we have rated this claim ‘False.’”
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