Hacker News Reader

Comment by ecjhdnc2025 | Hacker News Reader

ecjhdnc2025

That is not a lie -- it is a substantial truth.

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.

View on HN

> That is not a lie -- it is a substantial truth. The idea that there were fine people "on both sides" has to be interpreted in terms of who the two sides were

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.

> 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.

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.

> The confederate statues are also unambiguously white nationalist monuments.

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.

Ok, then there’s a very simple response to that. Where are all the statues of Longstreet? Why didn’t he deserve any?

Precise and to the point.

> He was addressing an important point that you cannot treat everyone that opposes taking down confederate monuments as white supremacists.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com