(Ken Silva, Headline USA) It’s known in conservative circles as the “fine people hoax”—the unequivocally false notion that then-President Donald Trump called neo-Nazis and white nationalists “fine people” in the wake of the deadly 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally.
As Trump’s supporters have known for the better part of a decade, Trump in fact said the opposite.
“You had people there to protest the taking down of a very important statute and the renaming of a park to Robert E. Lee. You had people—and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis or white nationalists, because they should be condemned—but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists,” Trump said at the time.
“And the press has treated them absolutely terribly.”
However, apparently there are still wide swaths of the public who believe in the fine people hoax, showing just how deep Trump Derangement Syndrome runs.
“Remember Charlottesville when Trump called neo-Nazis very fine people? I only saw the full clip for the first time today It’s a must watch — he literally CONDEMNS the Neo Nazis and white nationalists,” Sequoia Capital partner Shaun Maguire said in a Twitter post that went viral.
Maguire’s admission drew mixed reactions. Some Twitter users wondered how Maguire didn’t know the obvious truth, but others said they were hearing the real story for the first time.
Wow I had no idea that this is the full story
— Mor Hogeg (@MorHogeg) June 16, 2024
While some are still waking up to the fine people hoax, most are still in the dark that many of the neo-Nazis and white nationalists at Charlottesville were, in fact, FBI informants—a fact exposed by Headline USA last September.
Indeed, as this publication detailed, the National Socialist Movement, which participated and committed violence in the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, was founded by an FBI informant and has had informants in high positions throughout its history.
Court records further show that the NSM was part of a larger neo-Nazi coalition called the Nationalist Front, an alliance comprising a number of other groups at Charlottesville that were infiltrated by the FBI, including the League of the South.
Moreover, a fourth member of the FBI-linked Nationalist Front, the now-defunct Vanguard America, was seen marching with James Fields—the man who killed counterprotester Heather Heyer with his car.
Vanguard America has since mutated into yet another group widely believed to be infiltrated by the FBI: the Patriot Front.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.