Donald Trump Says Charlottesville's 'Unite the Right' Rally Was 'Fake'
Donald Trump: “And it was done to make me look bad. And it turned out to be a total fake. It basically was a rigged election. This was a part of the rigging of the election.”
We saw the video with our own eyes:
Hundreds of angry White men walking in mass, carrying torches and chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”
White nationalists, dressed for battle in helmets and body armor, brandishing weapons of every sort, violently attacking counter-protesters who had come to take a stand against their hate.
Neo-Nazi Alex Fields plowing into a crowd inside his Dodge Challenger, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring more than 30 others.
Now, President Donald Trump and his MAGA allies want us to believe that we did not see what we thought we saw in Charlottesville, that it was not disturbing evidence of the rise of hate in America.
In the president’s own words, “It was fake.”
This latest Trump conspiracy theory involves the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally where as many as 1,000 white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other hatemongers descended upon the Virginia town for an event that would quickly turn deadly.
After a trial lasting more than four weeks, with more than 900 exhibits and 35 witnesses, an 11-person jury found the white nationalist organizers liable for some $26 million dollars in damages for what transpired that August weekend.
As the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled, the “Unite the Right” organizers “planned for months to provoke Antifa and its followers into a violent battle.” One man, Jason Kessler, “sought to “rais[e] an army.” That included “discussing whether someone could drive a car through a crowd of demonstrators.”
Another prominent figure believed that “violence might be necessary to secure [a] white ethnostate.” And, according to the court, “he wasn’t alone.”
Here’s what you probably have not seen in any mainstream media.
In his most recent conversation with 60 Minutes—part of the extended interview that did not make it into the broadcast—President Trump insisted that “Unite the Right” was really a leftist plot ginned up by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The president repeatedly referred to the SPLC as the “Southern Law.”
“Charlottesville was all funded by the Southern Law,” Trump told correspondent Norah O’Donnell in that extended interview posted by CBS News.
“And it was done to make me look bad. And it turned out to be a total fake. It basically was a rigged election. This was a part of the rigging of the election.”
The president claimed SPLC “spent millions and millions of dollars” on “bad, bad groups,” and the civil rights group “kept ‘em going.” Trump falsely claimed investigators “have checks to the Ku Klux Klan and many others.”
“These are not just allegations,” he insisted.
Those comments were reposted on X by Trump’s rapid response account.
Here are the facts
As I have previously noted, the actual indictment returned by a federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, makes no such allegation about the SPLC funding the events in Charlottesville.
It only says the Southern Poverty Law Center paid an informant who somehow was included in the leadership chat group for “Unite the Right” and was involved in arranging transportation for “several” attendees.
It does not identify the informant as an actual leader in the movement, nor does it say that SPLC paid for organizing the event or for transporting participants.
Still, that has not stopped MAGA influencers from claiming that “Unite the Right” was really an SPLC plot.
In response, one event organizer, Richard Spencer—who was among those found civilly liable for the tragedy—has mocked the MAGA conspiracy theories, comparing them to the useless “Epstein Binders” released by AG Pam Bondi.
Another Charlottesville figure, who now goes by the name Augustus Sol Invictus and was convicted for his role in the tragedy, had a similar reaction.
“Every ‘right-wing’ influencer pushing this lie that Unite the Right was an SPLC psyop is dead to me,” he wrote in a lengthy post on X.
Despite Trump’s claims, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche admitted to reporters last week that investigators only have payments to informants inside various hate groups, not to the groups themselves.
When you’ve lost Jared Taylor…
In fact, a frequent target of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hate investigations is also expressing skepticism about the DOJ’s indictment.
“I am no friend of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and I suppose I take a detached sort of amusement in its current struggles,” said Jared Taylor, who publishes a white nationalist website called American Renaissance.
Commenting on the criminal case during AmRen’s Radio Renaissance podcast, Taylor said the SPLC indictment “doesn’t make sense to me.”
“They were paying people to go spy, and that’s the sort of thing that these so-called watchdogs do,” he continued. “They send people in and they try to get the hot dope on all of these ‘nasty haters.’ I just don’t think that many of the donors would be upset that the money was spent for that purpose.”
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SPLC’s website describes Taylor as someone who “projects himself as a courtly presenter of ideas that most would describe as crudely white supremacist—a kind of modern-day version of the refined but racist colonialist of old.”
His group hosts an annual conference at Tennessee’s Montgomery Bell State Park where, in SPLC’s words, “racist intellectuals rub shoulders with Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists.”
“These people are swine, top to bottom, but I don’t think they deserve to go to jail for what they were doing,” Taylor insisted.
What do you think?