It’s the media lie that just won’t die: the “very fine people” hoax in Charlottesville seven long years ago.
Democrats and the media ran with this lie for years. It was one of the first major narratives to paint the new Trump administration as irredeemably racist, poisoning the Donald Trump brand for moderates and justifying hysterical, often lawless, resistance from the left.
When the regime fact-checker Snopes finally debunked it in June 2024, it seemed like the hoax had finally died. But then the Kamala Harris campaign scurrilously resurrected it Monday with a backhanded tweet.
7 years ago today, white supremacists and neo-Nazis marched on Charlottesville, chanting racist and antisemitic bile and killing an innocent woman.
This is who Donald Trump calls “very fine people” pic.twitter.com/FfHJhWVR9B
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) August 12, 2024
Unfortunately for a deceitful political campaign, regular Twitter users now have the power to fact-check elites themselves.
A torrent of vigilante fact-checkers poured in to point out the very obvious lie.
As everyone should know by now, Trump spoke broadly on the crowd of right and left-wing protesters saying there were “very fine people” on both sides. He “totally condemned,” however, the minority of white supremacists and neo-Nazis who were also in attendance. The media disingenuously stripped these snippets of context to make him look divisive and hateful.
The “very fine people” comment was meant to be unifying: People can disagree politically but still come together to denounce the truly bad actors. This could have been a genuinely unifying moment if the left could admit that there are still some good people on the right, just as the right denounced the bad apples in their own camp. Yet with their blatant manipulation of this opportunity, the media showed us who they were for the first time.
They don’t want unity. They don’t want equal justice and standards. They want to demonize the right — the entire right — and shield the left no matter what they do. And they will blatantly lie in order to achieve this.
By propping up the lie seven years later, long after it’s been conclusively debunked, Harris shows us exactly how she will govern if she wins the White House this November.