Way back in August 2017 there were the Charlottesville protests. Three or four dozen National Socialists, White Supremacists, KKK remnants, etc. became a flashpoint in a larger protest between Antifa and others who wished to remove historical statues related to the Confederacy and historians, First Amendment types, and others uncomfortable with the state rewriting history by airbrushing out the parts it doesn't like.
It all ended in tragedy when one of the neo-Nazis drove his car into the crowd of protesters resulting in a fatality.
On the first or second day of the protests, Trump held a press conference in which he referenced good people on both sides of the protest, referring to the advocates for removing statues and advocates for keeping them in place.
Some media outlets accidentally or deliberately mixed the two issues and very shortly there were mainstream media reports of Trump referring to good people on both sides between the Antifa crowd and the National Socialist White Supremacists.
It only took a single review of the video of the conference to see that while Trump's wording and speech flow was awkward, that he clearly was not referring to good neo-Nazis.
And yet the press kept repeating this "fake" news. OK, you can't get upset about everything and while this seemed unwise for journalists to be advancing such an easily checkable lie, I simply ignored it and eventually it disappeared from my radar screen.
But apparently it is still circulating to the point that Scott Adams has had more than one of periscope session dedicated to the fraud and has now even released a primer tweet for refuting the lie.
To debunk the "fine people" in Charlottesville hoax, I put together the following resources in this thread for you to retweet as needed.
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) March 26, 2019
First, to describe the fake news in context, two articles:@CortesSteve - https://t.co/Nw5x4HqRID
Or @joelpollak - https://t.co/MX3cF5DZrb
Click for thread.
I thought Adams was being over-alarmed by what must be seen as a false claim.
Adams is a brilliant man but this blindsided me. I thought this thing had died and was not in circulation. I don't know whether Adams is seeing this fake news when I am blind to it, whether we access sufficiently different media such that it is present and I don't know. Or something else. Perhaps the mainstream media have let it go but not the fringes?
But apparently it is in circulation.
They are grasping at straws to hold onto the Charlottesville Hoax as true. Here's a link to the NY Times article that interviewed one of the non-racists at the Charlottesville Hoax: https://t.co/V7TbSetKMx https://t.co/1tbX4233zq
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) April 1, 2019
Click for thread.
This is sort of startling. The whole point of a First Amendment is, in part, to foster a marketplace of ideas. Accurate information should be driving out inaccurate.
It is quite astonishing, and to a degree, alarming, that such a ham-fisted hoax is still being reported as if it were true and indeed even being defended.
The “Charlottesville Hoax” Hoax
— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) April 1, 2019
Trump's supporters are trying to gaslight you. Again. https://t.co/k4utgx37nr via @BulwarkOnline
Click for thread.
It strains credulity that there are sentient people peddling this, much less believing it.
True believers.
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