Osler's Razor

Yesterday, President Trump said that some of the White Supremacists at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville are "very fine" people. Really:

REPORTER: The neo-Nazis started this thing. They showed up in Charlottesville.
TRUMP: 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.

He also said this:

“The night before people innocently protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee,” Trump said, in reference to the group of white supremacists who spent the evening carrying torches, shouting Nazi slogans, and delivering Nazi salutes. “You had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. And nobody wants to say that, but I’ll say it right now. You had a group on the other side that came charging in — without a permit — and they were very, very violent.”

Here is an intriguing view of those "very fine people":



Trump acts like he is focusing on actions-- but he isn't, given that one side killed a woman and hurt many others. Worse, he is ignoring the difference in ideology: one side represents ideologies that this nation has decried and combated for centuries. That matters.