By: Mark Glennon* | Wirepoints
There’s something telling about what Gov. JB Pritzker wrote during Thursday’s presidential debate that’s utterly disheartening, and it’s about more than Pritzker.
Instead of criticizing Donald Trump with honesty and facts — material for which is abundant — Pritzker chose to repeat a lie. More importantly, it’s a lie widely known and easily shown to be a lie, as Pritzker surely knows.
Pritzker wrote on X, “When neo Nazis marched on Charlottesville chanting ‘Jews will not replace us’, Donald Trump called them very fine people. And now he says it’s all a lie. It’s not a lie, Donald Trump is just a liar.”
That claim has been thoroughly debunked over and over again by sources on both the left and right. When Trump said “very fine people on both sides” he specifically noted that he was not talking about neo-Nazis and white supremacists and said they should be “condemned totally.”
Here’s the video. It can’t be more clear that he wasn’t talking about neo-Nazis.
Left-leaning Snopes is among the latest to debunk Pritzker’s claim. Its conclusion: “In sum, while Trump did say that there were ‘very fine people on both sides,’ he also specifically noted that he was not talking about neo-Nazis and white supremacists and said they should be condemned totally. Therefore, we have rated this claim ‘False.’” Snopes included both the video and a transcript. See it yourself.
Here’s CNN’s Jake Tapper on video saying Trump condemned Neo-Nazis and white supremecists, and that Trump was not including them in his “very fine people” remark.
Pritzker’s comment on X has over 420 replies, almost all of which say that Pritzker was lying.
The question therefore becomes: Why would Pritzker use a claim that’s so widely known to be a lie?
Read on here.
*Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints.