The way the history books -- especially school textbooks -- will cover the past four years will be entirely fictional. Russiagate, COVID, the alleged effectiveness of lockdowns, the "very fine people" hoax, etc. A non-sociopath should write an authentic chapter and post it online
— Tom Woods (@ThomasEWoods) January 11, 2021
If you have heard libertarian historian/podcaster Tom Woods, he is obsessed with at least a couple of topics: One is the Sandmann/Covington Catholic High-Nathan Phillips kerfuffle; a brief video of a MAGA-cap wearing teenager smirking at an older Native American approaching him beating his drum became viral on the social and national media. The students and the Native Americans were parts of different marches on the day. A group of black religious militants on the scene was taunting both groups. Phillips would later falsely claim to be intervening between the blacks and "racist' white students. There was a national backlash against the students because of brief videos taken out of context. As longer, larger-scope videos became available, the kerfuffle dissipated, but Woods saw it as representative of political correctness and the progressive media run amuck.
Then there's the matter of the "very fine people" "hoax". From Woods' point of view, Trump had condemned neo-Nazis, white supremacists, etc., at the notorious press conference. In a very narrow sense Woods is correct, but this time it's Woods taking things out of context, as I'll show.
The GML guys (Nate Thurston and Chuck Thompson) also absolutely fixated on the "lie" that Trump had praised neo-Nazis and white supremacists as "very fine people", when he paid lip service to rejecting them at the press conference. On one podcast, Nate must have ranted for at least 15 minutes how the media could get away with outright lying.
Understanding the kerfuffle requires context. Part of the context is that Trump has always been very reluctant to alienate his "passionate" supporters. He's paid lip service to following the law, but in one memorable case, he promised to pay the legal bills for anyone roughing up protesters at his rallies; he's encouraged "rough rides" (unsecured vulnerable suspects transported by police), and said police should not be "too nice" to suspects. When two supporters, inflamed by Trumps anti-immigration views, came upon a sleeping homeless Latino and beat him with a lead pipe and pissed on him. Trump's response was classic:
“We need energy and passion, but we must treat each other with respect,” Trump said....During a press conference earlier this week, Trump said that while he hadn’t heard about the Boston incident, it would “be a shame.” But he didn’t stop there, as he quickly went to applaud those who echo his views. “I will say, the people that are following me are very passionate,” Trump said. “They love this country, they want this country to be great again."
We saw the same type behavior on the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. By all accounts, he was reluctant to call off his mob. When he finally did, he first noted that their reaction to a "stolen election" was a righteous cause. He expressed his love for those who had participated in the mayhem, even as he paid lip service to law and order. When McCarthy reportedly called Trump that day to call off his mob, Trump's reaction was of a nature that "I guess they just care more about the stolen election than you do."
This type of equivocation (very fine people on both side) is classical manipulative behavior; Trump tries to turn the tables on his "hypocritical" adversaries, to suggest that bad behavior amongst his followers is no worse than what you see on the left, which he claims the media hypocritically ignores. In fact, according to sources on Jan. 6, Trump originally tried to blame the attack on the Capitol on Antifa.
Part of the problem here is Trump's incompetent communication skills and his intellectual laziness, his lack of due diligence in detail, like when he stupidly refers in the infamous phone call with Zelensky to the fired corrupt Ukraine prosecutor general Shokin as a "very good man" (Trump had deluded himself that Biden, through his son Hunter, was taking bribes from the oligarch, and Shokin threatened his good fortune by going after Burisma, his subsidiary.)
To understand how Trump messed up the Charlottesville reaction, you have to understand the timeline of the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally and Trump's quixotic culture war over Southern statues, military generals, etc. With respect to the latter, recall the circumstances of the only Trump veto override: he had vetoed the defense appropriations bill because it had a provision renaming bases named after certain Confederate generals/figures. I can only speculate that he sees his response against political correctness as part of his political base/appeal.
Part of what Trump gets very wrong, and neither Woods or the GML guys acknowledge this at all, is the lie that the "unite the right' rally included conventional peaceful conservatives. This is a fiction which has been refuted by multiple sources (e.g., here). This rally was planned by white supremacists and neo-Nazis. The local GOP had distanced themselves from them. There were two phases of the rally; the organizers had organized a march to the University of Virginia campus on Friday night, 8/11/17. Then there was a planned march to Emancipation Park (recently renamed from Robert E. Lee and one of the grievances sparking the rally) on Saturday, 8/12/17. On this day, the racist marchers were accompanied by heavily armed right-wing militias who didn't necessarily have a position on the cultural kerfuffle over Confederate symbols but were there to confront the counter-protesters, who were determined to stop the rally. The Trumpkin militias tried to spin their presence as protecting the First Amendment rights of right-wingers. But Trump's attempt to portray the militias as peace-loving conservatives against removal of Confederate symbols was pure nonsense and a state of denial. There are lots of real conservatives, like Brion McClanahan and me, who value Southern heritage and oppose the cultural assault on Southern heritage, but we would never have anything to do with white supremacists or Neo-Nazis or join their marches.
There is a grain of truth that both sides, the protesters with their militia supporters and the counter-protestors, got violent at points, including fist fights, throwing sticks, stones/bricks, chemicals (pepper spray, mace, foul liquids), water bottles, paint balls, etc. at each other. There were 13 minor injuries, no reported property damage. (Among other things, a militia had stopped in front of a minority public housing project and got reportedly pelted by bricks.) The police had planned for the protesters to enter the park at a secured entrance but it appears like the protester converged on the park from different directions putting them in direct contact with counter-protesters surrounding the park.
Long story short, the police found the situation out of control, declared the status quo an unlawful assembly and canceled the rally at 11:35 AM but that didn't stop the confrontations. Most notable in the aftermath was when white supremacist James Alex Fields engaged in an act of domestic terrorism, at 1:40 PM driving his Dodge Challenger full speed into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one woman and injuring 35.
Trumps' responses were pathetic. at 1:15 PM, he tweeted calling for unity, and then at 3:30 PM, he addresses the violence on "many sides", as if you could morally equate a mass casualty terror act to incidental minor injuries.
Part of the problem in analyzing Trump's statements is that he's constantly changing his story. So he does, in one of his pressers, condemn white supremacists, Neo-Nazis, etc. in passing. But consider when he said this:
No, no. There were people in that rally, and I looked the night before. If you look, they were people protesting very quietly, the taking down the statue of Robert E. Lee. I’m sure in that group there were some bad ones. The following day, it looked like they had some rough, bad people, neo-Nazis, white nationalists, whatever you want to call ’em. But you had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest, because you know, I don’t know if you know, but they had a permit. The other group didn’t have a permit.
The first claim, about the march to UVA on August 11, is an outright lie. The tiki torch bearing white supremacist march did not include these conventional peaceful conservatives that Trump seems to imply. {In fact, the alt-right groups despise "cuckservatives" and vice-versa.) So these "very fine people" he is referring to on August 11 are, in fact, white supremacists that he seemed to exclude in a passing formulaic reference, which Woods and the GML guys are obsessed with.
And note the last statement where Trump seems to be shifting the blame, despite his morally ambivalent both sides at fault, to the counter-protesters who he thinks should have applied for a permit to protest the alt-right rally in order to exercise their First Amendment rights.
And now let's review Trump's naive claim the rally was about Lee monuments. As Vox points out:
Although the rally was initially planned in support of the Lee Monument, which the Jew Mayor and his Negroid Deputy have marked for destruction, it has become something much bigger than that. It is now an historic rally, which will serve as a rallying point and battle cry for the rising Alt-Right movement. [Andrew Anglin]
In Discord chats and discussions revealed by legal proceedings that have taken place since Unite the Right, attendees and organizers stated again and again what the point of the event was: “If you want to defend the South and Western civilization from the Jew and his dark-skinned allies, be at Charlottesville on 12 August.”
I can still remember when a REAL POTUS, George HW Bush, rejected former KKK leader David Duke as Louisiana governor. He didn't worry like Trump does about losing political support from fringe group supporters.
