I want to dig into this, since my book VERY FINE PEOPLE comes out today, and it's in large part about precisely this sort of polemic trickery in service of bullshit apologia of supremacy.
There's a sleight of hand at the start that catapults us into a massive lie.
Let's do the sleight of hand, first. The article chooses to answer the question "Did Trump call Neo-Nazis and white supremacists 'very fine people'?
This answers the wrong question, which is what is done when the goal is avoiding the actual questions.
Trump, a malignant narcissist, knows the trick of using weasel phrasing and world salad to give himself deniability for anybody who wants to exonerate him, to pick and choose and take at face value whatever phrases will let him say what he means while holding himself innocent of saying it.
What Trump said is that there are "very fine people on both sides."
That would be the side counter protesting against the Nazis who organized a pro-Confederacy protest.
And then the side full of Nazis and those who found common cause with Nazis. That's the "both sides."
So yes, Trump didn't come out and say 'The Nazis are very fine people." But this isn't the actual problem with Trump's words, and it never was, and the first problem with the Snopes article is that it pretends that was the problem, and frames it as a fact check.
The actual complaint isn't that Trump directly called the Nazis "very fine people," but rather that there is a distinction to be found between Nazis and those aligned with Nazis, and that the distinction is meant to be meaningful specifically because these allies, unlike Nazis, are "very fine."
The other critique is that Trump, by saying there are "very fine people ON BOTH SIDES," draws moral equivalence between those who unite and demonstrate with Nazis, and those who demonstrate against them.
Those are the actual criticisms, which Snopes ignores. Which changes the subject.
Presto!
There are two reasons I think the actual question gets ignored in these cases. The first reason Snopes decided to answer the wrong question instead of the actual complaint is simple: It's easier to answer, particularly if you want to take Trump's words at face value.
I'm reminded of the Thomas Pynchon quote "If you get them asking the wrong questions, you don't have to worry about the answers."
One way to get people asking the wrong questions is if you pose the question on their behalf and then answer it to your benefit.
Enter Snopes.
The 2nd reason is the main one: Our dominant cultural spirit is supremacist, so our dominant cultural instinct is to exonerate supremacy.
People need a reason to dismiss unignorable instances of supremacy. It doesn't need to be a good reason.
Snopes gave them one.
Presto!
So that's the sleight of hand. Now the big lie.
The big lie is that nobody with "very fine" qualities can be a white supremacist or a Nazi; therefore nobody can ever be considered a Nazi as long as they present some good quality or another.
But the opposite is true.
The now-buried truth is no group ever committed atrocities until it first convinced itself it was too good—uniquely good, even—to commit atrocities.
The now-buried truth is that it is precisely the lie of "very fine people" that allows supremacy to rise.
Nazis and Confederates and Christian nationalists and other supremacists only ever rise on the permissive shoulders of masses of very fine people willing to lend their moral authority to a monstrous cause—their energy, their normalcy and niceness and well-scrubbed politeness, too.
On one side were those who marched to defend their heritage: a celebration of traitors who murdered their fellow citizens in order to preserve the institution of chattel slavery.
Trump asked: How dare we impugn them, just because of the apparently coincidental direct allyship of overt Nazis?
Trump, like all cheap hucksters, knew which lies people would believe, knew what lies people wanted to hear, and knew well the lies they depend on for fortune and identity.
So he told the lie of the very fine people.
It’s a popular lie. It’s a traditional lie.
That's the truth buried deepest.
Supremacism is the belief that some people matter and others don't, and those who matter can do whatever they want to those who don't, because those who matter deserve to dominate & those who don't deserve domination.
It's our dominant cultural belief—because it is accommodated.
And who accommodates it? Who listens to the rationales and excuses and deniability word salad of supremacy and accommodates it?
Well, Snopes, for one. But I think it's many of us, who haven't ever faced the ways we depend on supremacy for fortune and identity.
We are "very fine" people, too.
Supremacist belief is hateful. It's ugly. But it's the instinctive accommodation of that belief that makes us a supremacist culture.
Accommodators can be very respectable and nice. Very fine people. They can run fact-check websites for example. Or read them.
Accommodating exoneration is what supremacy needs.
Supremacy believes itself to not only be good but uniquely good—the best ever. Selected by God for a manifest destiny. A city on a hill. The greatest country ever. Those who practice it INSIST on being told that they are very fine.
An ideology that believes itself supreme believes itself perfected. Exceptional.
Which means that cannot countenance improvement. Which means that it it sees improvement itself as an enemy.
Even knowing true things about itself. Especially that.
So of course supremacists need to hear a story of exoneration, particularly when they've done something so overtly supremacist as align with Nazis who invaded a city and murdered a counter protester.
My question today is: why do so many of us want to hear that story, too?
The answer isn't so comforting I'm afraid. The truth of the matter is that for many of us the idea that very fine qualities don't exonerate us from supremacy is a distressing one. A lot of us, even if we don't march with Nazis, still want to hear the lie of the very fine people.
And the reason many of us want to hear the lie of the very fine people is that, in ways that we have never really faced, we too rely upon supremacy for fortune and identity. For those of us who want to hear exonerative lies about supremacy, there are those who will provide them.
Who are the supremacists in a land with a supremacist dominant cultural narrative? How often do we, too, assure ourselves that we are very fine people?
The answer isn't comfortable to many of us, if we have listened to comfortable lies.
Us? Me.
The answer isn't comfortable to me.
Anyway, I'd like to thank Snopes for their supremacist-exonerative bullshit, which so brilliantly illustrates my premise, right on cue. VERY FINE PEOPLE is out today, available wherever books are sold.
It's about the exonerative lies we tell ourselves.
We? Me.
www.the-reframe.com/vfp-e-book-n...
