https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/306784...
Most of us think one guy lied more and worse than the other. But which one can we trust to appoint the people who determine which were lies and which not? Me: neither.
This seems to be possible in other cases like ACCC in Australia dealing with false claims in advertising https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/advertising-and-promotions... - yes, to they're not perfect and I know of at least case where they misunderstood the context, but I think the outcome is positive overall.
It's like Snopes and Twitter community notes - they'll still get things wrong, but on average they're a massive improvement over having just the random claim online.
1. https://communitynotes.x.com/guide/en/under-the-hood/ranking...
> For the record, virtually every source that covered the Unite the Right debacle concluded that it was conceived of, led by and attended by white supremacists, and that therefore Trump's characterization was wrong.
When it's clear to everyone that it's entirely a group of white supremacists, and someone says many of them actually are very fine people, to many that demonstrates an attempt to protect and legitimize the group and defend its atrocities by whitewashing the nature of its character.
There's a lot of historical evidence of Trump's affinity for white supremacist groups and of their affinity for him in return (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_views_of_Donald_Trump) so it's not like this was out of the blue.
Personally I would say the given context above makes Biden's statement basically correct and Snopes's tag misleading (ok, I guess I did comment on it), which is I guess subjective.
Trump was pushing back on the journalist’s attempt to paint everyone who opposed tearing down confederate statues as white supremacists. That was wholly reasonable. My Italian American neighbors oppose tearing down statues of Christopher Columbus. Are they Nazis too?
If the way they express their feelings is by joining the Nazis For Christopher Columbus march where the way they express their support for Christopher Columbus is by chanting "Jews will not replace us", that would probably answer the question for us.
Trump was trying to equivocate, to offer support in principle, even though every single one of the people in that rally was actually in the class of people who he was supposedly condemning, and he knew it.
Quite aside from the fact that there is no ethical reason to oppose taking down confederate statues that were erected for explicitly white nationalist reasons:
https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544266880/confederate-statues...
One way not to associate with that would be to walk away from it, rather than join in.
> In a news conference after the rally protesting the planned removal of a Confederate statue, Trump did say there were "very fine people on both sides," referring to the protesters and the counterprotesters. He said in the same statement he wasn't talking about neo-Nazis and white nationalists, who he said should be "condemned totally.
Trump’s statement eliminates any ambiguity about what he meant with regard to white nationalists.
The addendum to the fact check is talking about the factual issue of who was at the protest. Trump understood the protestors to include people who opposed taking down the statue of Robert E. Lee. He makes this explicitly clear in the same paragraph where he made the “fine people” comment:
> 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.
He returned to that many times, and had a whole aside about whether taking down statues of George Washington was next. The reporter had attempted to paint all of those people as white nationalists and he pushed back on that.
The Snopes fact-check says that Trump may have been wrong about who was in the protest. But Trump was unambiguous about condemning white supremacists, and the Snopes article doesn’t walk that back.
After that it's just a question of how much you buy the ignorance.
The idea that there were fine people "on both sides" has to be interpreted in terms of who the two sides were.
One side was made up entirely of white supremacists and white nationalists. That was the reason they were there -- it was also, one imagines, why they were all happy marching behind people shouting "Jews will not replace us":
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/16/charlottesvi...
The only reason to say "on both sides" -- and he stressed "on both sides" -- was to create an equivalence between those sides. When there is no equivalence. One side was an organised white nationalist anti-semitic, racist protest, and the other side was a pretty disorganised bunch of people who think things like that are unamerican.
He had one job, to condemn the Unite The Right protest, and he chose words that made it explicitly clear he did not.
No, it has to be interpreted in terms of what he said. He was explicit about what he said: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.” Nobody operating in good faith could interpret that as ambiguous.
At most Trump was mistaken about who else was in the park. Be repeatedly said that “there were protesters who 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.” Maybe he was wrong about that fact.
> He had one job, to condemn the Unite The Right protest,
But that’s your real argument, isn’t it? That it was insensitive of Trump to address the larger context of the protests (which was about tearing down confederate statues) instead of just sticking to condemning the neo-Nazis. Maybe that’s true. But it’s utterly dishonest—a point-blank lie—to say that he didn’t condemn neo-Nazis and white supremacists when he did, using those exact words.
The thing is: that left nobody. It was a white nationalist parade. He was absolutely, deliberately, trying to equivocate his condemnation, so as not to upset his base.
The confederate statues are also unambiguously white nationalist monuments. That's why they were all put up, so many years after the fact. There's no simple "pride in loss" motive: it was deliberate, planned white racist powerplay signalling to litter the South with confederate memorials, and that is pretty well-documented.
No president of the whole USA should be defending that.
Most southern people do not know that. They do not think confederate symbolism is any different from say the British or French flag (which may have been associated with negative periods of history, but has meaning apart from that). https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/02/politics/confederate-flag-pol.... Whatever the original intention, confederate imagery transformed into a generic cultural marker. More “fuck New York” than anything else. When I was growing up in the 1990s in northern Virginia, even in liberal circles the notion that confederate flags were “heritage, not hate” was a mainstream position.
Unlike Nazi imagery, confederate imagery was not condemned immediately, and had more than a century to develop alternate connotations. Have you seen Dukes of Hazzard? It’s a liberal show about fighting small town corruption with vaguely environmentalist sentiments. They made a movie of it in 2004 with Jessica Simpson and nobody complained about the confederate flag. That’s what a large swath of the country grew up with.
Most people around the world will not condemn their ancestors, and will put up with a great deal of cognitive dissonance in order to avoid doing so. Japan has never formally apologized for its atrocities in WWII: https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/08/14/shinzo-abe-regrets-but-.... Does that mean you can infer that present day Japanese embrace and support the motivations of their ancestors that raped and murdered women in Nanjing? No, that would be fundamentally dishonest.
The deep irony of your comment is that Trump was the grownup in the room. He was addressing an important point that you cannot treat everyone that opposes taking down confederate monuments as white supremacists. That’s what the reporter was incorrectly trying to do, and he correctly pushed back on that.
But you could, correctly, characterise everyone taking part in that march as having white nationalist sympathies. Because it was a white nationalist march: that was the point.
There cannot be "good people" on the side shouting "jews! will not! replace us!", because if they were good people they wouldn't have been there at all.
Trump was trying to create a false equivalence because he knows those people are his people. And he did it again more than once. "Stand back and stand by".
Fuck him, fuck excusing this stuff and fuck bad-faith pretence that Trump was talking about some bigger picture: he was talking about the people at that rally.