Re your question: because people were already responding to and protesting the local govt decision to remove the Robert E. Lee statue.
I don't agree with the characterization focusing just on the removal of the Robert E. Lee Statue. That narrative would suggest it was merely some sort of concerned citizens arguing about municipal policy. That's not what was going on. The folks directly responsible for what transpired were organized and active before there was talk about statues. They actively and clearly and aggressively represented a white supremacist viewpoint and the statue was simply their latest outrage.
I'll give an analogy that may or may not hold: BLM didn't create the George Floyd controversy. But they organized rallies to protest it. I marched in a BLM organized event here in Chicago. Does that make me a BLM supporter? Does every characteristic of BLM now flow to me? Do all people who march in Free Palestine protests also now support Hamas or anti-semitism if we can trace the origins of the organization of those protests to anti-semites or Hamas-friendly organizations?
First, I don't think it's fair to compare BLM with the Unite the Right people. The mission and outlook of the Unite the Right group had no colorable basis whatsoever that could be considered reasonable, understandable or supportable.
Second, yes, in some scenarios your active involvement with a group absolutely does put you in their company. I don't think your involvement in a BLM event automatically makes you a BLM supporter. There was a broader and nuanced set of social questions getting considered and was changing and evolving over the course of 2020 and beyond. As much as people argue against BLM, at its core at some point was the implied notion that Black Lives Matter "too". If so and phrased as such, that's not hateful.
If someone is marching in a Free Palestine protest and arm in arm with a group that is, say, chanting death to Israel and applying well-known anti-Semitic tropes, then yeah, it may well be fair to say that that person is now aligned with the vilest of the bunch. Maybe definitely so if the march is actually organized around those most vile concepts.
You don't need to get out a detective kit and apply a complex clue-deciphering tool to understand what Charlottesville was about. Look at who organized it, drove it, populated it, what they said, what they advocate, what they did, what torches they carried, what means they used, what their aims were. Given what's been published, it would be awfully surprising if stragglers joined a Unite the Right rally and took up screaming and chanting while totally oblivious to what was going on.
Re Trump's words: I try to read everyone's words/thoughts generously. I don't like the man, but it is a fact that he explicitly stated:
“And you had people — and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists — because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists.” What more could he have said to convince you?
Yes, by that parsed view, he said he doesn't believe neo-Nazis are very fine people. What people are objecting to is the notion that it was some "neutral" event that some bad apples happened to attend. That's not what happened (in the description I'm sharing based on what I've read about the event). Trump's description and his equating the counter-protesters with the torch-bearing, vile chant-shouting crowd is what is drawing criticism.
Maybe he was wrong and those people didn't attend this rally, maybe he wasn't referring to the rally/march in particular but to "sides" to the debate over the statue (like you are doing now),
I don't follow this part fully ("like you are doing now"). I don't mean that I take offense to it; I mean I'm really not following.
or maybe he was not speaking very carefully (something he doesn't do and I think is a huge mark against any presidential candidate). But he never claimed that neo-nazis or white supremacists were "very fine people." That's just flatly untrue.
I agree he SAID he was not condoing neo-Nazis. The objection people are making is that the Unite the Right rally at its very core was wholly one of white supremacy and you can't distinguish good guys and bad guys among the group. It wasn't a statute march (according the point of view I'm arguing regardless of whether statues were the current rage justifier).
I comment on this issue because there are many ways to criticize Trump but making things up or unfairly quote mining him is counterproductive and, more importantly, unfair.
If the question is whether Trump overtly said that he thinks neo-Nazis are very fine people, I agree with you. But I don't think that's what the critics are saying. I think they are saying he glossed over a really bad thing and mischaracterized what was going on and what the full group represented.
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