by zahlman | 2025-09-15 16:14:41+00:00
My purpose in this post is not to convince you of anything (because I don't believe this is possible at this point), but to make the logical fallacy in your rhetoric as clear as possible to onlookers. This problem is a matter of basic logic, not of opinion; thus you cannot change my mind about it. It's clear that this is not a discussion (https://thoughtcatalog.com/brandon-gorrell/2011/03/how-to-ha...) so I will not reply further.

> of course he was talking about the "Unite the Right" protestors.

There were many protestors with a wide variety of views on many topics among them, who conducted themselves in a wide variety of ways. (All the same is true, of course, of the counter-protestors). To say "there were many fine people on both sides" is to say that each group contained people who were worthy of praise.

You say they were "a group of racists, anti-semites, KKK and neo-Nazis", but not all of them were racists, not all of them were anti-Semites, not all of them were KKK members, and not all of them were neo-Nazis.

Your initial claim was:

> when right wingers killed Heather Heyer, Trump called them "very fine people"

This means that you are saying that he described murderers this way; and then you went on to conflate "right wingers" with a variety of other terms of abuse.

This is blatant and flagrant logical fallacy (the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition). It is not logically valid to take a statement made about people "being on a side" (i.e. in a group) and represent it as a judgement of the "side" in general, nor of other people on that "side".

James Alex Fields Jr. killed Heather Heyer. "Right wingers", objectively, did not. "Unite the Right protestors", similarly, objectively, did not.

Donald Trump did not call James Alex Fields Jr. a very fine person. He did not refer to racists as "very fine people". He did not refer to anti-Semites as "very fine people". He did not refer to KKK members as "very fine people". He did not refer to neo-Nazis as "very fine people". He did not describe murder, racism, anti-Semitism, KKK membership or neo-Nazism as virtuous.

He also did not refer to "right wingers" as "very fine people", although of course he presumably believes there is nothing wrong with being politically to the right.

As said by Snopes even in the article headline, Trump did not "call neo-Nazis and white supremacists 'very fine people'. As explained in the article, he explicitly "condemned neo-Nazis and white nationalists outright and said he was specifically referring to those who were there only to participate in the statue protest." As shown in the original quotation, he explicitly described the violence as "vicious and horrible and it was a horrible thing to watch". Immediately before the pull quote, he explicitly said "and you had some very bad people in that group" (meaning the Unite the Right protestors). He explicitly elaborated the point: "But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly." When the reporter went on to ask a rhetorical question hinting at the same fallacy of composition, Trump explicitly distinguished the people he was praising from those he was criticizing: "The following day it looked like they had some rough, bad people. Neo-Nazis, white nationalists, whatever you wanna call them. But you had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest". Which is to say, he explicitly agreed that neo-Nazis and white supremacists are "rough, bad people", which is in fact the opposite of calling them "very fine people".

You use this as a talking point because you are trying to paint Trump as someone who praises murderers. But you know, or at least reasonably ought to know, that your narrative is contradicted by the evidence, because the evidence has been shown to you multiple times. The plain meaning of what Trump said is very nearly the opposite of what you're presenting it as.