> If you want to claim the media somehow mislead everybody on what he said then show me one of those "good people" he's talking about - who are apparently fine people despite going to an explicitly neo-nazi and white supremacist rally.
I will do this - but again I will reiterate that it is one thing entirely to say that the President got his facts wrong, and another thing to say that he knowingly called White Supremacists very fine people. Those are completely different things.
Good people like you and I can also be guilty of the first when we incorrectly reference the wrong people. In the second case you are talking about someone who knowingly references a group of white supremacists as good people. This is contradicted by his own words.
Again, I really don't want to derail the original point, but since I used this as an example, I feel like I should back everything up with facts so that it's clear that I'm making these points from a position of having researched the topic thoroughly.
As for the statue debate and the very fine people - I will first set the context of the statue debate because it is very common that people simplify it as "everyone against the removal was a White Supremacist", so let me tackle that line of thinking first.
The context is that the vote in the city council to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee passed 3-2. The Mayor of Charlottesville Mike Signer and councilwoman Kathy Galvin were the people against this. The Mayor wrote about his reasoning here in this article
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/05/24/...
The Mayor's op-ed discusses several reasons for his vote. Quoting from article:
> One striking finding in the commission’s official report: “Numerous Charlottesville African American residents who have lived through decades of suppression of their history oppose removal on the grounds that it would be yet another example of hiding their experience. For them, transforming the statues in place forces remembrance of the dominance of slavery and Jim Crow white supremacy.” This echoed what I heard in town hall meetings at black churches and private conversations with dozens of members of my community. One noted leader of an African American mentorship organization, for instance, told me he believes the statues should remain as a “teachable moment” about our history.
> Local civil rights legend Eugene Williams, who was recognized by the Virginia General Assembly in 2015 for his pioneering work in affordable housing, has spoken out against removal, saying he wants the city stopped “from trying to destroy history.” So has Earvin Jordan, an African American Civil War historian at the University of Virginia, who says “Civilization should be constructive rather than destructive,” noting, “Charlottesville has enough space to erect new statues.”
This is all to say that the backdrop of the statue removal was already a complex issue involving both white supremacists and very fine people who were against the removal. This was not an issue as simple as "the only people against the removal of the statue are White Supremacists".
The day of the "Unite the Right" rally was actually one of many events concerning the statue in 2017. Previous events were held in May and July of 2017 as well, one of which was organized by White Supremacist Richard Spencer and another by the KKK.
On the "night before" the Richard Spencer event in May (not the Unite the Right Rally), there was a candle-lit peaceful vigil to protest the arrival of Richard Spencer and his gang the next day. This crowd included the Mayor as well, thus being a composition of "very fine people on both sides" and "the night before". It's quite likely that Trump mixed up the Spencer event of May with the Kessler event of August. In my opinion (feel free to disagree), I'd argue that the media should have picked up on this and checked with him. The media didn't follow-up on this. I'm a random person in another country. If I know these facts, the media should have been able to piece this together too and call him out for having his facts mixed up. He has done this stupidly before by saying "did you see what happened in Sweden last night?". The media instead went with another story. A sinister one.
The night before the Kessler event in August, there was also a peaceful protest attended by 500 members of clergy and others. It's unclear whether the Mayor was present, or whether the civil rights leader Eugene Williams were present, but the chances that there were zero people who were against the removal of the statue, are quite low.
As for the day of the August Rally (Unite the Right), the New York Times interviewed a woman named Michelle Piercy, who was there with a militia group: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/us/politics/trump-republi....
Michelle Piercy is part of a militia group called "American Warrior Revolution". These guys were present at the May event as well. There's Facebook videos on their page from the May event where they make their opinions of the statue removal known (against removal). They were present at these events because of previous run-ins between Antifa and the Alt-Right in other parts of the country. Their stated purpose is to be a "peacekeeping force" to ensure that everyone has free speech. On the day of the Unite the Right Rally, African American members of their group were present as well, including Michelle Piercy's partner. Along with them there were several other militia groups who were present for the same reasons. Eventually they were asked to leave by the police, and eventually sued by the city, and were asked to sign a document swearing they would never return to the city while armed again.
This would satisfy many examples of "very fine people" who were against the removal of the Lee Statue, many of whom were present across multiple events at Charlottesville.