The Charlottesville lie only continues to have life because Republicans and conservatives don’t know how to fight the information war. Here is Debra Heine:
Former vice president Joe Biden launched his 2020 campaign for president Thursday morning with a dark and divisive video based on the Charlottesville lie.
In the video, Biden calls the August, 2017 “Unite the Right” rally a “defining moment in our nation,” where “klansmen and white supremacists and neo-nazis came out in the open, their crazed faces illuminated by torches, veins bulging and baring the fangs of racism, chanting the same anti-Semitic bile heard in the 1930’s.”
These villains, with their “crazed faces, bulging veins and fangs” were met by “a courageous group of Americans,” he continued, “and violent clashes ensued and a brave young woman lost her life.” Biden conveniently forgot to mention that violent members of Antifa and Black Lives Matter were among the group counter-protesting.
Biden then disdainfully referenced the oft-repeated lie that President Trump referred to the racist group as “very fine people.”
“And that’s when we heard the words of the president of the United States that stunned the world and shocked the conscience of this nation,” Biden declared. “He said there were, quote, ‘very fine people on both sides.’”
As the camera moved in for a close-up of Biden’s face, he repeated incredulously,” VERY FINE PEOPLE?!” He added, “With those words, the president assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it.”
Biden was of course referencing Trump’s widely misquoted press conference three days after Charlottesville, when he said there were “very fine people” on “both sides” of the Confederate monuments issue. The organized left at the time had been calling for the removal of Confederate monuments in pubic locations, and at times were even attempting to tear them down themselves.
Here is what Trump said: “Excuse me, they didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group — excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. 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.” In answer to another question Trump explicitly condemned the racist group: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”
Read more: American Greatness
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