In response to Joe Biden entering the presidential race by coming directly at Donald Trump with an attack on his shitty-ass response to the white supremacist riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, and his “very fine people” crack, Trump has come up with a brand new attempt at alt-reality, claiming that not only was there nothing wrong with what he said in response, but that what he said was just perfect.
“If you look at what I said, you will see that question was answered perfectly,” Trump said outside the White House before heading to Indiana for a National Rifle Association event. “And I was talking about people that went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general.”
“Whether you like it or not, he was one of the great generals,” Trump continued. “I’ve spoken to many generals here right at the White House, and many people thought of the generals, they think he was maybe their favorite general. People were there protesting the taking down of the monument of Robert E. Lee. Everybody knows that.”
Daughter-in-law Lara Trump has taken this argument so far as to claim that it’s Joe Biden who was “race-baiting.”
Lara Trump denounced the[Biden] announcement as simple "race-baiting" with little substance or proposals for Americans. Though Biden will inarguably present himself as the most electable, most moderate, Lara Trump says he is now radicalized like Bernie Sanders.
"When you look at things like Bernie Sanders running on socialism … when he claims that the Boston Marathon bombers should have the right to vote — that is so far outside what I think most Americans can back."
There were actual live, breathing neo-Nazis marching in the streets, beating people and running them down with their cars, and this silly woman says that it’s Joe Biden who is race-baiting?
On top of this nonsense, you’ve had Kellyanne the Conjobber slap even more delusion grease on the wood pile.
WHITE HOUSE COUNSELOR Kellyanne Conway defended President Donald Trump's controversial remarks about the 2017 violence in Charlottesville, Va., as Conway argued that Trump's comments have been distorted and misunderstood.
She told CNN Sunday that Trump "condemned white nationalism and neo-Nazis and the KKK during the Charlottesville incident." Conway conceded that Trump said there were "very fine people on both sides." But she argued that the president "was talking about the debate over removing statues," notably a monument to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
Conway said, "When President Trump condemned racism, bigotry, evil violence, and then took it many steps further and called out neo-Nazis, white supremacists, KKK--that is darn near perfection."
In addition to Conway’s “darn near perfection” claims, Real Clear Politics has decided to defend Trump’s statement as well by claiming that he wasn’t calling the “neo-Nazis” the “very fine people.” He was supposedly talking about someone else, somewhere.
My colleagues seem prepared to dispute our own network’s correct contemporaneous reporting and the very clear transcripts of the now-infamous Trump Tower presser on the tragic events of Charlottesville. Here are the unambiguous actual words of President Trump:
“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 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.”
After another question at that press conference, Trump became even more explicit:
“I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists because they should be condemned totally.”
It is fair to claim that he did say that the “fine people” were others besides the neo-Nazis, but the immediate question is: Where exactly where those fine people? Did you see them? I didn’t.
The problem with this claim of phantom fine people being present is that all the neo-Nazis who came to the rally wore uniforms of khakis and polos with identifying insignia, and also carried shields with runes and white supremacist symbols specifically so that they would recognize each other.
Whether it was Identity Evropa, the Proud Boys, Vanguard America (who are now known as Patriot Front), League of the South, neo-Nazis, the KKK, or Skinheads, they all came dressed for the event and if you know what to look for, they were very easy to identify.
Exactly where were the “not-Nazis” during this event who were the “fine people?” Everyone not wearing one of these uniforms during the event was essentially a counter-protester. If you weren’t in proper garb, the neo-Nazis knew you weren’t on their side, and that’s how they knew who to attack.
In the original Vice video, you can see who is who, and what people were wearing.
Besides Heather Heyer and other protesters who were injured, there was a “tiki torch parade” the night before the main protest, and a librarian on the University of Virginia staff was beaten with torches until he suffered a stroke.
University of Virginia employee Tyler Magill, 46, was hit in the neck when he rushed to join students who were surrounded by torch-wielding white nationalists Friday — and suffered a stroke due to blunt force trauma on Tuesday, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports.
Magill, who works at the university library, locked arms with students at a statue of Thomas Jefferson on campus Friday night to protest the marchers chanting racist slogans.
“I was just thinking, be with them,” he said in an interview before the stroke. “I linked arms with them and they were on us, frothing … liquid splashed on us and then torches.”
So, were the ones who beat Tyler Magill the “very fine people”?
It may have happened two whole years ago, but for the sake of retaining some semblance of sanity, I also have to stop and point out that these people may be correct in noting that Trump did eventually condemn “neo-Nazis, white supremacists and others.” But he actually didn’t do that until his third try. Trump’s first try, on the day after the attack, was basically delivered as a virtual hostage video where he stood stone-faced and read a prepared statement that didn't even mention neo-Nazis at all. Instead, he said there was violence “on many sides, many sides.”
At a podium, Trump read a statement rebuking the violence, but without specifically mentioning or faulting the role of white nationalists.
“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides – on many sides,” Trump said.
He also took the occasion to boast about declining unemployment and new corporate investment in the United States. Afterwards, he ignored shouted questions from reporters as to whether he would denounce white supremacism and whether the car incident constituted terrorism.
So was that the “damn near perfect” statement?
Former Bush speechwriter David Gershon trashed this statement at the time.
Trump’s reaction to events in Charlottesville was alternately trite (‘come together as one’), infantile (‘very, very sad’) and meaningless (‘we want to study it’). ‘There are so many great things happening in our country,’ he said, on a day when racial violence took a life,” he continued.
“Ultimately this was not merely the failure of rhetoric or context, but of moral judgment. The president could not bring himself initially to directly acknowledge the victims or distinguish between the instigators and the dead. He could not focus on the provocations of the side marching under a Nazi flag,” Gerson added. “Is this because he did not want to repudiate some of his strongest supporters? This would indicate that Trump views loyalty to himself as mitigation for nearly any crime or prejudice. Or is the president truly convinced of the moral equivalence of the sides in Charlottesville? This is to diagnose an ethical sickness for which there is no cure.”
Or was the “perfect” statement made two days later, when he made another bloodless hostage video and finally mentioned the neo-Nazis? But then he turned around and attacked the media for criticizing his first lame statement, which the AP reported he made so slowly only because he was “loathe to admit a mistake.”
...Donald Trump was attacked as the moments ticked by while he avoided making a statement blaming white supremacists and Nazis for the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. The reason, according to an Associated Press report, was Trump’s pride.
“Loath to appear to be admitting a mistake, Trump was reluctant to adjust his remarks,” the AP wrote Tuesday.
Trump finally did come out Monday to denounce the KKK and Nazis after two days of refusing to do so. The AP cited White House advisers that said Trump wanted to emphasize the need for “law and order” but he was angry the media didn’t think he denounced the bigotry.
That same day he retweeted an alt-right conspiracy theorist activist name Jack Posobiec, and when CNN’s Jim Acosta grilled him over his response and original failure to condemn hate groups, Trump attacked and called him “fake news.”
“They’ve been condemned. They have been condemned,” Trump replied.
“And why are we not having a press conference today? You said on Friday we would have a press conference?” Acosta asked.
“We just had a press conference,” Trump said.
“Can we ask you some more questions?” Acosta wondered.
“It doesn’t bother me at all, but you know I like real news, not fake news,” Trump remarked. “You’re fake news.”
This prompted two of the survivors of that attack that killed Heather Heyer to ask: What took him so long?
Both Blair and Martin went on CNN to discuss the ordeal, and host Chris Cuomo asked them to evaluate Trump’s response to this weekend’s violent protests by white nationalists.
Blair immediately questioned Trump’s sincerity in his belated condemnation of white supremacists, which only occurred two days after Fields plowed his car into a group of demonstrators, killing protester Heather Heyer and injuring several more people.
“What took you so long to do it?” she asked of Trump. “And now he’s blaming the media for starting the controversy. It was clear that that was an act of terror, an act of hate, it was done to scare the people of my city, scare the people of the world. And it’s like he needed his advisers or he needed someone else to say, ‘You need to do this.'”
And then on his third try on Tuesday, after making excuses for the slowness and weakness of his first and second attempts, Trump refused to say the attack was terrorism, then said a whole lot more than that, which was just plain wacko.
“The statement I made on Saturday, the first statement, was a fine statement but you don’t make statements that direct unless you know the facts,” Trump said. “It takes a little while to get the facts. You still don’t know the facts. It is a very, very important process to me. So I don’t want to go quickly and just make a statement for the sake of making a political statement.
“When I make a statement, I like to be correct,” he continued. “I want the facts.”
Trump later refused to call James Fields Jr.—the white nationalist who allegedly drove his car into a group of counter protesters—a terrorist, calling him a murderer and “a disgrace to himself, his family and this country.”
“Is it terrorism?” he asked. “Then you get into legal semantics. The driver of the car is a murderer. What he did was a horrible, horrible, inexcusable thing”
Remember, this is the guy who accused Barack Obama of being weak for not repeatedly saying the magic words “global Islamic terrorism.” But when Trump had a chance to say “white supremacist terrorism,” he choked—totally. Then he reversed the argument and began attacking the people who actually lived in Charlottesville and were merely trying to protect themselves from the invading neo-Nazis.
“What about the alt-left that came charging at, as you say, at the alt-right?” Trump later asked. “Do they have any assemblage of guilt? What about the fact that they came charging with clubs in their hands swinging clubs? Do they have any problem? I think they do.”
“I’m not finished, fake news,” Trump said as members of the media pressed him on his moral equivalency.
“If you were honest reporters, which in many cases, you are not, many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee,” Trump later said. “This week, it is Robert E. Lee … is it George Washington next? You have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”
One issue that Trump and the proponents of Confederate monuments tend to ignore is the fact that most of them were not built following the Civil War to commemorate the veterans of that conflict. Instead, they were created years later as part of the rise of the KKK and as tools of intimidation and terrorism against the civil rights movement.
The Confederate monuments in New Orleans; Charlottesville, Virginia; Durham, North Carolina, and elsewhere did not organically pop up like mushrooms. The installation of the 1,000-plus memorials across the US was the result of the orchestrated efforts of white Southerners and a few Northerners with clear political objectives: They tended to be erected at times when the South was fighting to resist political rights for black citizens. The preservation of these monuments has likewise reflected a clear political agenda.
[...]
The pursuit of white cultural unity through Confederate commemoration went hand-in-hand with the promotion of white supremacy. The Confederate monuments themselves were sometimes explicitly linked to the cause of white supremacy by the notables who spoke at their dedication. For instance, at the 1913 dedication of an on-campus monument honoring University of North Carolina students who fought for the Confederacy, white industrialist Julian Carr unambiguously urged his audience to devote themselves to the maintenance of white supremacy with the same vigor that their Confederate ancestors had defended slavery.
During the dedication speech, Carr praised Confederate soldiers not just for their wartime valor but also for their defense “of the Anglo Saxon race during the four years after the war” when “their courage and steadfastness saved the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South.” The “four years after the war” was a clear reference to the period in which the Ku Klux Klan, a white paramilitary organization terrorized blacks and white Republicans who threatened the traditional white hierarchy in the state. Then he boasted that “one hundred yards from where we stand” — and within months of Lee’s 1865 surrender — “I horse whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds because she had maligned and insulted a Southern lady.”
Although some of our founding fathers were slave-holders, like Washington and Jefferson, they are not specifically known for being part of the Southern rebellion, nor are they icons of the KKK or neo-Nazis. Monuments to them are not symbols of the racial terrorism that was implemented in America in the years following the Civil War. I’m sure there are people that don’t fully understand that profound distinction and may continue to support keeping these types of monuments on public land rather than on private areas, but the key point is that having them in public spaces, at public schools, courthouses, and state houses is a not-very-subtle ongoing endorsement for bigotry, racism, and violence. Ignorance of that reality is no excuse.
These monuments are not symbols of the “glory of the South.” They are symbols of the Klan. But Trump is apparently unaware of this, as shown in his third response.
The president later insisted his ability to bring in good jobs will “have a tremendous positive impact on race relations.”
“I think there is blame on both sides,” Trump later restated. “You look at both sides. I think there is blame on both sides. I have no doubt about it. You don’t have doubt about it either. If you reported it accurately, you would say that.”
The actual “alt-left” that Trump was talking about here were actually given credit by members of an interfaith clergy group that included Dr. Cornell West for saving their lives during some of the violence that day.
Religious protesters who spoke to ThinkProgress were mostly spiritually devoted to nonviolence, and some expressed ambivalence about the tactics of other demonstrators, such as the black-clad Antifa, whose members often challenge racism with their fists. There appeared to be little coordination between the two groups over the weekend: At one point, Whispelwey said, Antifa protesters mistakenly thought clergy were trying to protect the white supremacists (who had no known faith presence). It took a rapid-fire conversation to set things right.
But the groups found a way to work together eventually. As tensions mounted on Saturday morning, some clergy broke away to stage an even more dramatic—and far more dangerous—protest. A faction that included professor West, Smith, and Wispelwey formed a line across the entrance of the park and linked arms, blocking white supremacists from entering.
[...]
“A group of white supremacists broke through our line with shields,” Wispelwey said. “Some of them were screaming and spitting slurs [as they] physically shoved clergy aside with their shields.”
Clergy rearranged their positions to try and hold off another wave of white nationalists. But when the “the alt-right instigated their violence” down the street against counter-protesters, a group of Antifa intervened. The clergy took moment as a chance to disperse.
“That’s when Antifa saved our lives,” he said.
But of course, Trump was again clueless of any of that and instead failed to make a condolence call to Heather Heyer’s mother. And not long after that, the Daily Stormer sent protesters to harass those attending her funeral. One year later, Trump hosted neo-Nazi bikers at the White House on the anniversary of Heather Heyer’s death.
Bro was also bothered by Trump meeting with bikers, some of whom had racist tattoos, at the White House on the anniversary of her death.
“On the anniversary of her death I believe he had a large crowd of bikers come to the White House, and I have nothing against bikers, in general, except for the ones that are proudly displaying their Nazi slogans and tattoos, many of whom were at the White House, and again, he was delighted with the crowd,” she said. “I took that as a dog whistle.”
This would not seem to be the act of someone who really meant it when he supposedly “condemned Neo-Nazis.”
At the time of the rally, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell responded by saying “There are no good neo-Nazis,” and then-House Speaker Paul Ryan said “You can’t be a very fine person and a white supremacist.” So are they “race baiters” like Joe Biden, too? But on the other hand, then-Trump adviser Steve Bannon praised Trump’s speech at the time because it “fully abandoned the globalists.”
“Steve was proud of how [Trump] stood up to the braying mob of reporters” at President Trump’s circus-like press conference, Axios reports.
“Bannon saw Trump’s now-infamous Tuesday afternoon press conference not as the lowest point in his presidency, but as a ‘defining moment,’ where Trump decided to fully abandon the ‘globalists’ and side with ‘his people,” Axios explained.
Before joining the Trump campaign, Bannon was chief executive at Breitbart.com, which he described as a “platform” for the so-called Alt-Right.
“Both Trump and Bannon are of one mind, and, within the White House at least, theirs is a minority view. They saw the backlash to Charlottesville as an example of political correctness run amok and instinctively searched for ‘their’ people in that group of protesters,” Axios said. “Bannon has told associates that Trump, on Tuesday afternoon, took it to the next level for the country by asking where does it end?”
I believe we can judge the seriousness of Trump’s comments at the time by looking at what’s he’s done and said since then. For example, according to famed journalist Bob Woodward, after making his second set of comments condemning neo-Nazis at Charlottesville, Trump said it was “the biggest fucking mistake I’ve made.”
According to a leaked excerpt obtained by the Washington Post, Trump deeply resented being forced to come out and specifically condemn white nationalists after being advised by aides that he needed to do so to make clear that he was opposed to racism.
“That was the biggest f*cking mistake I’ve made,” Trump told advisers shortly after giving a speech that condemned Nazis, according to Woodward’s sources, who also say Trump called the speech “the worst” he’d ever given.
And when Trump and his people later claimed he really didn’t mean that some of the “fine people" were in the KKK, according to author Michael Wolff he was “desperate to say something nice about white supremacists.”
“This is a little insight into how he felt about the KKK” Camerota said before reading an excerpt from the book. “‘Privately, he kept trying to rationalize why someone would be a member of the KKK – that is, they might not actually believe what the KKK believes, and the KKK probably does not believe what it used to believe, who really knows what the KKK believes now?'”
“Why else would you join the KKK? Do they have good benefits? Is there an insurance plan that goes along with it?” co-host Chris Cuomo asked as his guests — Daily Beast editor John Avlon and RealClear Politics correspondent A.B. Stoddard — began laughing.
“Why else would you join?” Cuomo asked again.
“This is insightful, A.B.,” Camerota chimed in. “He wanted to be able to say there are good people on both sides, so he’s is ruminating ‘surely they’re not as bad as we all heard. Maybe there’s something in it for everybody?'”
Let’s also recall that Trump went out of his way to call protesting black football players “sons of bitches,” but he didn’t say anything like that about any of the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville.
“Trump used harsher language to describe Kaepernick than he used for the Neo-Nazi who killed Heather Heyer,” Christiana Mbakwe, a writer for “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah,” tweeted.
“Colin Kaepernick is a real patriot and a fantastic human being,” another user wrote. “Donald Trump is a tool and a traitor.”
It should also be noted that Trump refused to condemn Roseanne Barr’s comments when she called former Obama adviser Valerie Jarret a cross between the “Muslim Brotherhood and a monkey.”
“Racism occurs, people look to the White House — leader of the country — for response,” [CNN Host Kate] Bolduan explained. “And [Trump] seems to go out of his way to just not call it out: David Duke, Charlottesville, Roseanne Barr’s tweet. Why can’t he get this right?”
“Of course he should condemn it,” [Gov] Kasich agreed. “I couldn’t believe the stuff that was in that tweet.”
“It’s ridiculous,” the governor said of Trump’s refusal to rebuke Barr. “I went through this [after the white supremacist rally] in Charlottesville. Of course it should be condemned. But I also want us to think about the way we behave.”
Some GOP reps claimed that Charlottesville was part of a plot organized by George Soros and an Obama sympathizer, and there was another GOPer who claims that the rally was staged by Obama.
Republican lawmaker in Idaho recently shared a conspiracy theory on Facebook that claims former President Barack Obama may have orchestrated the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.
“I’m not saying it is true, but I am suggesting that it is completely plausible,” Idaho Falls Rep. Bryan Zollinger wrote on Facebook, according to the Idaho Falls Post Register.
His post linked to an article published at the American Thinker that claimed the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville could have been staged by Obama, with the help of the mayor of Charlottesville and billionaire George Soros.
In the wake of the attack, there was a South African white nationalist who marched at Charlottesville who told CNN that Trump was his “ray of hope.”
Although Roche denies being a racist or a neo-Nazi, CNN reveals that he demonstrated alongside neo-Nazis at the infamous Charlottesville riots, and he had nothing but praise for the demonstrators who chanted “Jews will not replace us.”
“The guys did a superb job,” Roche said in a voice message to his followers in South Africa after the Charlottesville demonstrations. “The people behaved themselves respectfully and decently.”
Roche tells CNN that he was particularly heartened by a Trump tweet this summer that ordered an investigation into the treatment of white South African farmers shortly after a segment about white South Africans aired on Tucker Carlson’s program on Fox News.
“We saw a ray of hope,” he says of Trump’s tweet. “Maybe there are people out there who know and care and have power and influence. Only time will tell how much is smoke and mirrors — shadows and dust.”
Former FBI agent Erroll Southers linked bombs sent to Democrats to an ”uptick” in white supremacist recruiting since Charlottesville.
An ex-FBI agent who specializes in domestic extremism explained to MSNBC Wednesday the link between an “uptick” in white supremacist and white nationalists groups recruiting since Charlottesville and the bombs that were mailed to prominent Democrats and CNN earlier in the day.
“We have a politically inspired organization or individual that’s targeted prominent officials” from the Obama administration,” Erroll Southers, author of “Homegrown Violent Extremism,” told host Ari Melber and a panel of intelligence officials.
“We’ve had an uptick in the last 14 months since Charlottesville of organizations working together and being more overt in what they are doing,” the ex-FBI SWAT team member said. “We are seeing lectures on college campuses and recruitment efforts in the way of flyers.”
Nearly a year after Charlottesville, then-DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen also refused to condemn white nationalists and played the same “both sides” game as Trump.
Under Nielsen, the Department of Homeland Security disbanded its Domestic Terrorism Unit, even though our greatest current global terrorism threat now comes from white supremacists.
The recent massacre of 50 Muslim worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand is the latest confirmation that white supremacy is a danger to democratic societies across the globe.
Despite President Donald Trump’s suggestion that white nationalist terrorism is not a major problem, recent data from the United Nations, University of Chicago and other sources show the opposite.
As more people embrace a xenophobic and anti-immigrant worldview, it is fueling hostility and violence toward those deemed “outsiders” – whether because of their religion, skin color or national origin.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has reacted with outrage to the idea that Trump’s rhetoric has contributed to any of this violence.
When asked about conservative commentator Matt Dowd’s remarks over the weekend — that President Trump needs to understand how his rhetoric “inflame a part of what is going on in America” — Sanders called the insinuation “outrageous.”
“I don’t think anything could be further from the truth,” she said. “The President has condemned not only this act, but all acts of evil and hatred and racism and bigotry and we will continue to do that. And again, this is an outrageous statement and something that is a complete misrepresentation of who the President is.
He has said the words, reluctantly, but the question is does he mean them—and do the racists believe it?
We’ve since learned that the Tree of Life synagogue shooter was clearly responding to allegations that Jews are paying for the immigrant caravans.
Before he opened fire in a mass shooting that killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on Saturday, witnesses say the gunman shouted, “All Jews must die.”
But the particular moment he (allegedly) chose for his massacre, and the place he chose to do it, show that what radicalized the assailant to the point of violence was a specific manifestation of anti-Semitism: blaming Jews in America for bringing in an invasion of nonwhite immigrants who would slaughter the white race.
His last post on the pro-hate-speech social-media site Gab, posted minutes before the synagogue massacre, spells it out — with a reference to HIAS, the Jewish nonprofit that resettles refugees in the United States:
This view exactly matches a claim by Trump and Fox News programs about—you guessed it—George Soros:
Also, the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque shooter specifically named-checked Trump in his manifesto:
The Australian-born suspect who shot and killed dozens of Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand, has published a manifesto praising US President Donald Trump and Anders Breivik, the Norwegian white supremacist who murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011.
The 74-page dossier, which has been described by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison as a "work of hate", hailed Trump as "a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose".
I think Trump may reluctantly say the “right” words, but he doesn’t mean them, and these vicious murdering white power terrorists know he doesn't mean them. It doesn’t matter whether he convinces us of anything. What he needs to do is convince some of them that they aren’t the “fine people” he’s been talking about.
Frankly, I don't think he’s capable of it—not if he thinks condemning the racists at Charlottesville was the “biggest fucking mistake he’s made”.
Joe Biden has every reason to go after Trump over this. In fact, Biden should be far from alone.