Posted on by Californiacontrarian

Did He Say That ?

“Hands up, don’t shoot!”
Those words, rose to the public consciousness following the August 2014 shooting of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri.
As noted in Politico on 12/14/15, this phrase subsequently took off, becoming a rallying cry for protesters and others trying to draw attention to the death of Brown and other African Americans at the hands of police officers.
In November 2014, some members of the St. Louis Rams ran out on the field during pregame introductions with their hands raised above their heads, an action repeated by four members of the Congressional Black Caucus on the House floor in December 2014.
One problem here: He never did that or said that! (According to Eric Holder’s DOJ report released in Mar., 2015, Brown never surrendered with his hands up, and Wilson was justified in shooting Brown.)
How do these things that never actually happened get wings and then take off?

Fast forward to an unrelated conversation that I had with a liberal friend who accused President Trump of a “racist” reaction to the 2017 tragedy in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a white nationalist plowed his car into a crowd, killing one and injuring several others. She insisted that Trump downplayed the horror of the Charlottesville tragedy by stating there were “good white nationalists and bad white nationalists” or “good neo-Nazis and bad neo-Nazis”.
Now at that time I was unfamiliar with what President Trump actually said, but this did not sound like the Donald Trump that I was familiar with. In fact, after looking in to it, it turns out there was one major problem here: He never said that! How do these things that never actually happened get wings and then take off?

Similarly, just recently Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel referred to Trump’s Charlottesville response to blame him for the Jussie Smollett hoax. “This is a President who drew a moral equivalency between people who are trying to perpetuate bigotry and those who are trying to fight bigotry. … When you go back to Virginia, this is a person who said, and I quote, ‘There are good people on both sides!’”
One problem here: President Trump did not say that. How do these things that never actually happened get wings and then take off?

In his widely misquoted press conference three days after Charlottesville, Trump said there were “very fine people” on “both sides” of the issue of whether it is appropriate to display Confederate monuments in public.
Here is what Trump said: “Excuse me, they didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group — excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.”
In case there was any doubt, Trump, in response to another question, said, “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”
The next time I hear that President Trump supposedly said something that just does not ring true with me, I am going to first suspect that he probably did not say it!


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