I Don’t Want to Hear “There Were Very Fine People on Both Sides”
Antisemitism, opportunism, and selective concern
Last night, I was watching the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, when I heard something that I bristled at. In a heated exchange about the Israel-Hamas war, Vice President Harris cited Donald Trump’s infamous statement that “there were very fine people on both sides,” allegedly in reference to a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville in 2017.
President Biden has cited that remark and the events it succeeded as his reason for running for president in 2020. It is a remark that comes up quite often among Liberals in the discourse around why former President Donald Trump is unfit for leadership.
Only, this remark is known to be taken out of context and extrapolated onto the neo-Nazi marchers. Snopes (a fact-checking organization which many right-wing people consider to be left or center-left) has debunked this misappropriated statement in full detail, as have many other organizations.
Trump was specifically referring to the protesters and counter-protesters who had marched for and against the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville (Robert E. Lee was a Confederate general during the Civil War).
