Snopes Finally Admits that Charlottesville ‘Very Fine People’ Coverage was False, 7 Years Later

The self-described “fact-checking” website Snopes finally corrected the record on one of the earliest and most infamous hoaxes against President Donald Trump, after seven years of the mainstream media twisting and spinning the original incident.

As reported by the Daily Caller, the website conceded that when President Trump delivered his remarks on August 15th, 2017, in the aftermath of a protest turned deadly in Charlottesville, Virginia, he referred to “very fine people” on both sides of the protest. The mainstream media repeatedly and falsely claimed that he was describing neo-Nazis as “very fine people,” when in fact he declared in the same sentence that neo-Nazis and White supremacists should be “condemned totally.”

“In a news conference after the rally protesting the planned removal of a Confederate statue, Trump did say there were ‘very fine people on both sides,’ referring to the protesters and the counter-protesters,” Snopes admitted in its post. “He said in the same statement he wasn’t talking about neo-Nazis and White nationalists, who he said should be ‘condemned totally.’”

Snopes cited multiple social media posts containing his full remarks, and also included an uncensored transcript in the post summarizing the newly-evaluated fact-check.

In response to a reporter’s question about whether or not he was putting the left-wing counter-protesters on the “same moral plane” as the right-wing protesters, the president responded that he was “not putting anybody on a moral plane.”

“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,” said President Trump at the time. “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.”

The Charlottesville incident, and the frequently-manipulated clip of President Trump’s remarks, was used to attack the president and his supporters, with many on the Left falsely claiming that it was proof that “White nationalists” were on the rise in the United States. Joe Biden launched his campaign by referencing Charlottesville, claiming that the incident and Trump’s response was his motivation for running for president.

The protest took place on August 12th, 2017, when right-wing protesters gathered to show support for an historic statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, which local authorities were considering removing as part of a broader wave of anti-Confederate sentiment that had been on the rise at the time. The peaceful group, which included a small handful of radicals bearing Nazi imagery, was eventually attacked by Antifa and other left-wing counter-protesters, leading to an all-out street brawl.

One of the right-wing protesters, James Alex Fields Jr., was attacked in his car by multiple left-wing assailants, who repeatedly struck his vehicle with blunt weapons. In a panic, he sped forward and accidentally crashed into another car that had been driven to the edge of the larger crowd. The shock of the crash caused one of the left-wing protesters, Heather Heyer, to die of a heart attack.