President Joe Biden repeated the Charlottesville “fine people hoax” in an interview with Robert Costa on CBS News’ Sunday Morning.
Biden falsely claimed, as he has since he launched his campaign in April 2019, that then-President Donald Trump praised neo-Nazis who rioted in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. In fact, as the transcript reveals, Trump condemned the neo-Nazis.
Breitbart News confronted Biden himself in 2019 over his apparently deliberate misquoting of Donald Trump, to no avail:
The hoax has been debunked, over and over again, on live TV.
Costa did not correct or challenge the president, who went on to connect Charlottesville to the January 6 riot.
Instead, Costa, a former reporter for the conservative National Review, asked the president whether he believed there would be a peaceful transfer of power, implying a connection between Charlottesville and future violence.
The “very fine people” hoax is one of the most enduring lies in American politics. It is fervently believed by Democrats and it is bolstered by journalists, many of whom either do not know it is false, or are happy to allow it to be repeated, despite being false.
It is the basis for a variety of other claims of racial bias by Trump, though it was — and remains — untrue, no matter how often Biden repeats it.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of “”The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days,” available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.