CNN Pundit Slams Network for Lying About Trump and Charlottesville

Two years after the fact, CNN is one of many mainstream media outlets that continues to lie about President Donald Trump’s response to the Charlottesville violence. In the days after raucous conflict broke out in the city, Trump went out of his way – not once, not twice, but three times – to condemn the violence and to make it clear that his administration would not stand for hate.

But, Trump being Trump, he found it necessary to push back on the idea that “the right” was solely to blame for what happened. He noted in a press conference that there were “very fine people” on both sides. People who were there not to promote white supremacy but to preserve the statue of Robert E. Lee. Considering the biased bent of the coverage, this was a reasonable thing to point out.

But from the moment the words were out of his mouth, Trump’s detractors in the media began gaslighting the public by telling viewers that the president had called neo-Nazis “very fine people.” This was a lie from the moment it was first said, and it remains a lie to this day. But boy, you don’t want to bring up such a thing on CNN. They get very testy when you do that.

Thankfully, that didn’t stop commentator Steve Cortes from jumping into the water. When a CNN video tried to make it seem like Trump had lavished praise on the Charlottesville white nationalists, Cortes pointed out the lie. He recounted his attempt to preserve the truth over at RealClearPolitics.

“Just last week I exposed this falsehood, yet again, when CNN contributor Keith Boykin falsely stated, ‘When violent people were marching with tiki torches in Charlottesville, the president said they were ‘very fine people.’’ When I objected and detailed that Trump’s ‘fine people on both sides’ observation clearly related to those on both sides of the Confederate monument debate, and specifically excluded the violent supremacists, anchor Erin Burnett interjected, ‘He [Trump] didn’t say it was on the monument debate at all.  No, they didn’t even try to use that defense. It’s a good one, but no one’s even tried to use it, so you just used it now.’”

Except for the inconvenient fact that Cortes is right, and if Trump didn’t try to “use that defense” at the time, it was merely because those were his exact words!

But that doesn’t matter to CNN. They’ve become specialists at building a fact-free narrative and then convincing their viewers that their manufactured reality is the truth. Thank goodness there are still people who manage to get the actual truth past the gatekeepers…even if they are shut down by the guards almost immediately.