Rising This Week: 'Very fine people'
Dabbling in Charlottesville revisionism, Trump and his surrogates pick a side.
Nearly a decade has passed since hundreds of white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Va., carrying tiki torches and chanting racist slogans.
One of the Hitler-admiring attendees, James Alex Fields, Jr., is serving multiple life sentences for murdering peaceful protester Heather Heyer, and several others were successfully prosecuted for assaulting a Black man and conspiring to riot. They chanted slogans like “Jews will not replace us,” honored a statue of Confederate traitor Robert E. Lee, and intimidated passersby. A federal jury found organizers and participants civilly liable to the tune of $26 million, resulting in a judgment that still hasn’t been paid.
Last week, the Trump administration launched a campaign to whitewash that bloody history by pinning it all on a single informant on the payroll of the Southern Poverty Law Center. That effort is as obscene as it is insulting to anyone’s intelligence.
The ‘Charlottesville hoax’ hoax
On Friday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt floated a conspiracy theory absolving the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and other extremist groups of their crimes by labeling their riot the “Charlottesville hoax.”
“That is one of the most vicious and egregious smears that has been used against Trump over the last 11 years since he got into politics,” Leavitt claimed on Fox News. “This group funded some of the funders of that hoax that not only the media ate up like candy but the Democrats ran campaigns on.”
This cannot be soft-pedaled: With the help of right-wing media, Leavitt is lying about the indictment and running interference for white supremacist groups to try to retroactively exonerate Trump of his “very fine people” scandal.
A close read of the SPLC’s charges exposes Leavitt’s lies.
In the 14-page indictment, only one paragraph — which includes only three sentences — discusses any connection to the Charlottesville rally, and there’s no discussion of multiple “funders.” Those allegations relate to a single SPLC informant known as F-37, short for “field source.”
“F-37 was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ event in Charlottesville, Virginia and attended the event at the direction of the SPLC. F-37 made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees. Between 2015 and 2023, the SPLC secretly paid F-37 more than $270,000.00.”
Nothing in these three sentences comes close to depicting the Charlottesville rally as a false flag operation.
From the carefully worded language, there’s little evidence F-37 played any substantial role in organizing the rally. Prosecutors allege that F-37 was a member of an “online leadership chat group,” but they don’t say whether F-37 contributed to the chat as a leader or organizer. F-37 allegedly “helped coordinate transportation” for “several” people. Hundreds attended the rally, and prosecutors don’t say whether F-37 “helped” more than a handful of them find a ride in a van.
Over the course of eight years, F-37 made $270,000 from the SPLC — or roughly $33,750 per year. There’s no allegation that a single SPLC dollar funded the rally itself or paid the informant for services rendered specifically for organizing it.
Based on these allegations, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche described the informant in a Newsmax interview as the “man behind the curtain” of the Charlottesville riot.
Blanche must have known that was a lie because he admitted as much in a different interview.
Pressed by Laura Ingraham, Blanche acknowledged that he didn’t know whether a single informant listed in the indictment could be described as a “leader” of the Charlottesville rally.
“Whether they were the leaders or initiators, we know that will come out eventually,” Blanche said.
Asked what the money was used for, Blanche replied: “We don’t know.”
Blanche’s shocking admission on national TV that he had no evidence for his Charlottesville false flag allegations made no difference to the MAGA faithful. A right-wing podcaster clipped that interview over a photograph of white supremacists at Charlottesville slapped with the word “STAGED.” The dog whistle blown by Blanche ultimately mattered more than the on-screen contradictions to that premise.
‘Battle for the soul of this nation’
Why are Blanche and Leavitt so eager to clear Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other hate groups of the blame for their Charlottesville crime spree?
Leavitt gave away the game in her interview.
“If you recall in 2020, Joe Biden launched his campaign for president on the basis of the Charlottesville hoax,” Leavitt said. “It was a total lie, and it was funded by this organization that claims to stand against racism.”
She was alluding to Biden’s shock at Trump referring to “very fine people on both sides” at the Charlottesville hate rally.
For Biden, Trump’s remarks were representative of his 2020 campaign theme.
“Very fine people on both sides?
With those words, the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it. And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.
I wrote at the time that we’re in the battle for the soul of this nation. Well, that’s even more true today. We are in the battle for the soul of this nation.”
To this day, Trump plays down the public outrage over his comments as a “hoax” because of his other remarks at the same press conference.
“I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally – but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay?” Trump said at the time.
Certain fact-checkers even backed Trump’s interpretation of his press conference. The problem was, Trump’s comments could most charitably be described as incoherent and more accurately be called a whitewash. The Unite the Right rally was organized entirely by white supremacist organizations. Anyone who stood with them sympathized with their cause, and Trump’s “very fine people” had to have included them. The outrage and revulsion to Trump’s remarks was never a hoax.
By dabbling in Charlottesville revisionism, Trump and his surrogates have chosen a side. They are erasing the white supremacists’ crimes, attacking their enemies, exposing their turncoats, and suggesting that a storied civil rights group manufactured the entire problem for profit.
The far-right always knew what some of the fact-checkers didn’t: Neo-Nazis celebrated Trump’s “very fine people” comments in 2017. As investigative reporting has shown, the rally’s organizers clearly see what’s happening now.
Editor’s Note:
After this column was written, the White House Correspondents Dinner was upended by a would-be shooter allegedly attempting to assassinate Donald Trump. Conspiracy theories about the incident being “staged” quickly spread online, and Trump called those theories “sick.” Observers immediately noted that Trump and his MAGA movement repeatedly cast political violence as a “hoax,” from Charlottesville to the Jan. 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol.
No matter where it falls on the political spectrum, reporting on political violence should remain grounded on rigorous analysis of the facts and the public record. That’s how All Rise News will handle the criminal case of WHCD shooting suspect Cole Allen, whose case is expected to begin on Monday.
His case leads the weekly preview of the court docket below for paid subscribers.
