Snopes Finally Debunks Biden’s Charlottesville Lie
“The internet’s definitive fact-checking resource” waited seven years to tell the truth, and even then…
Welp, the amateur “fact-checkers” at Snopes are at it again, though this time they got it right. Too bad it was seven years too late.
The issue was the claim that during Donald Trump’s press conference on August 15, 2017, he “called neo-Nazis and white supremacists who attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, ‘very fine people.’” That is false, Snopes concluded in a fact-check dated June 20, 2024. It’s not an update to a previous fact-check. It’s a new one, marking the first time Snopes bothered to check this long-running claim.
Mark Alexander correctly called it a lie on August 16, 2017.
The basic context, according to Snopes:
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.”
Lest anyone think these clowns are giving the Bad Orange Man any credit at all, the rest of the “fact-check” makes clear that there weren’t very many, if any, fine people on one side. And a day later, the editors appended a note:
Some readers have raised the objection that this fact check appears to assume Trump was correct in stating that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the Charlottesville incident. That is not the case. This fact check aimed to confirm what Trump actually said, not whether what he said was true or false. 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 was wrong.
It’s a relief to know they still don’t like Trump.
PolitiFact waited until April 2019 to put Trump’s comments “in context.” A year later, in May 2020, Washington Post “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler weighed in, giving Trump “four Pinocchios” for his remarks. USA Today’s “fact-checker” waited until October 2020 to issue a ruling supposedly debunking Trump’s defenders.
As for Snopes, the last we heard from that bunch of left-wing goons was when they changed their rating on Ashley Biden’s diary. The long-overdue Charlottesville fact-check was prompted by a rise in social media activity about the rally this spring, as Trump’s opponents ramp up for the November election. But the belated nature is a problem for a simple reason. To quote Snopes again, the original claim “spread like wildfire, with then-presidential candidate Joe Biden making Trump’s comments on Charlottesville a cornerstone of his campaign.”
That’s right. Joe Biden based his presidential campaign on the “battle for the soul of this nation” against a guy who would call neo-Nazis “very fine people.” The self-appointed Leftmedia arbiters of truth let him get away with a big lie unchallenged.
In his April 2019 presidential campaign announcement video, literally the first words Biden uttered were “Charlottesville, Virginia.” Because of Trump’s “moral equivalence” about this supposedly rampant threat from his neo-Nazi cadres, Biden went on to say, “Our very democracy … is at stake.” From it sprang his tired clichés about the need to “protect our democracy,” which he eventually yelled while in front of that Nazi backdrop of his. He has told the Charlottesville lie numerous times over the years.
(Side note: An already old and feeble Joe Biden sure has aged a lot since that announcement video.)
As Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt put it, “The Charlottesville lie was another hoax perpetuated by the corrupt Democrats and their mouthpieces in the fake news media, just like the Hunter Biden laptop, the Russian collusion scandal, and so many others, all in an attempt to smear President Trump.” Certainly, Trump is not always careful with his words, but Biden is a liar. That anyone expects anything else from him is astounding.
Just a couple of months ago, Biden had his own episode of moral equivalence about the very fine people violently “protesting” on behalf of the Hamas terrorists. His other very fine people are the Black Lives Matter rioters and the sexual deviants grooming kids.
Never forget that the Leftmedia “fact-checkers” exist to suppress, hide, and distort the truth. Never underestimate the power they have to censor speech on social media. They are opinion checkers with a left-wing ax to grind. The only reason I can think of that Snopes broke ranks on this one is that its “fact-checkers” want Biden out of the way to have any hope of winning in November.
