The old saying about how “wonders never will cease” definitely applied last Friday after Snopes.com finally got around to fact-checking the media/Dem-perpetuated “very fine people” lie on then-President Donald Trump’s August 2017 comments about the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally that has persisted for nearly seven years.
As RedState reported, Snopes declared at the end of their surprising write-up that “while Trump did say that there were ‘very fine people on both sides,’ he also specifically noted that he was not talking about neo-Nazis and white supremacists and said they should be ‘condemned totally.’ Therefore, we have rated this claim ‘False.'”
It was, of course, met with cheers on the right including from the Trump campaign, and jeers on the left, the latter of which were big mad that one of the many fact-checkers that typically do the left’s bidding had suddenly and inexplicably veered off course.
READ MORE: Snopes Finally Gets Around to Fact-Checking the Entire Basis of Biden’s Presidency, and Libs Are Big Mad
While I won’t deny the fact check was a welcome change, coming just a few days before the first presidential debate, I’m not so eager to award Snopes with the golden cookie, either.
What took them so long? It wasn’t like this was the type of fact check that might have taken a few days or weeks to get all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed, certainly not the kind where you needed to get quotes from those “in the know” on background about the action/statement being fact-checked. And it wasn’t the type of fact check that required any leaning on so-called “experts” to decipher/translate what was said and or done.
Trump’s comments were readily available to listen to/watch on video and via transcript immediately after the fact, including from notoriously far-left news outlets like the Los Angeles Times.
They always fall for the fake news propaganda Scott pic.twitter.com/rtWqrcvo8c
— Ryan (@SavnRyansPrvate) March 20, 2019
And yet the Usual Suspects on the left including the media and, not surprisingly, the Never Trump right, persisted in pushing the false narrative regarding what Trump said about Charlottesville.
In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s comments, the New York Times declared that he gave “White Supremacists an Unequivocal Boost.” The New York Daily News headline blared “Trump calls white supremacists ‘very fine people.'”
Numerous news outlets like the Washington Post carried on with the lie well after 2017, too, for instance, fact-checking then-Vice President Mike Pence’s remarks about Trump’s Charlottesville statement during the 2020 vice presidential debate with then-Sen. Kamala Harris, using a fact check they had written in 2019.
Joe Biden used the lie as the catalyst to launch his 2020 presidential campaign. Here’s what he said at the time:
“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,” Biden said. “And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I’d ever seen in my lifetime.”
Watch:
The core values of this nation… our standing in the world… our very democracy…everything that has made America — America –is at stake. That’s why today I’m announcing my candidacy for President of the United States. #Joe2020 https://t.co/jzaQbyTEz3
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) April 25, 2019
In short, the media and fact-checkers alike repeatedly failed the American people by refusing to push back on the narrative. In fact, they played a starring role in misleading readers and viewers as to what was said at the time.
Though one (Snopes) has gotten around at long last to correcting the record well after the fact, that doesn’t change the fact that they went close to seven years looking the other way as others in the media and the Biden administration continued to run with the lie.
This is further confirmation, as my colleague Jeff Charles observed, that voters must do their own due diligence in order to draw informed conclusions about what public figures say and do:
If there is anything the “fine people” hoax — along with the multitude of other lies the media has told us — demonstrates, it is that we cannot afford to take any narrative at face value. Instead, we must train ourselves to look at different angles and sources for the information we receive to verify whether we are being given the truth or a convenient political narrative. Otherwise, there is no telling how many hoaxes we will be deceived by.
‘Nuff said.
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