[zahlman]

> The most charitable steel-man interpretation I can give of his words is

In my view, he said this and more, plainly and as comprehensibly as can be expected.

> Most charitably, Trump wasn't talking about those folks; he was talking about some more moderate, reasonable pro-Lee-statue protestors who were there before the tiki torch mob showed up.

He said very directly and explicitly that he was talking about the non-violent protestors:

> There were people in that rally — and I looked the night before — if you look, there were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. I'm sure in that group there was some bad ones. The following day it looked like they had some rough, bad people. Neo-Nazis, white nationalists, whatever you wanna call them. But you had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest — and very legally protest — because I don't know if you know, they had a permit.

He draws a very clear contrast between who he considers "rough, bad people" and who he considers to have "innocently protested".

> Problem is, that second point clashes hard

Only because of a human tendency to assign people to ingroups and outgroups and commit the fallacy of composition. Logically speaking, there is no contradiction whatsoever.

> I think people's skepticism that such a moderate protest group actually exists varies

It shouldn't, first off because they were seen and documented (even if some of the footage may have been suppressed) and second because of a general base-rate assumption that protests have a reasonable basis and are mostly conducted by non-violent people (and fair, intellectually honest discussion doesn't throw that assumption away just because the idea expressed is in the "wrong" general direction).

Put another way: the consensus estimate is that the George Floyd protests in 2020-2021 caused close $2 billion in damages (mainly to property), including over half a billion within Minneapolis–Saint Paul, along with (per Wikipedia) 19 confirmed deaths and over 14,000 arrests. However, this became a global phenomenon with protests spread across thousands of cities and towns, with probably millions of people involved (I can't readily find an estimate) directly in the streets and many more simply taking actions such as putting BLM logos on their webpages. So even with that extent of violence and damage, it's perfectly reasonable to believe that a "moderate protest group actually existed". Right-wingers like to meme about news networks (CNN in particular as I recall) speaking of "mostly peaceful protests" against a background of widespread arson and looting seen on camera; but as it turns out this is not actually a contradiction.

> if your skepticism is dialed to 100%, it's real easy to conclude Trump meant the "Jews will not replace us" crowd

I saw the footage. I heard "You", not "Jews". In some cases, the "Y" may have sounded somewhat like a "J" because of interference from the trailing "s" of the previous iteration of the chant. But I didn't hear an "s" on the end of the word. That would come from a mental auto-correction after already hearing "Jew" and realizing that "Jew will" is ungrammatical.

[shadowgovt]

I concur with most of this, with one minor exception.

> I saw the footage. I heard "You", not "Jews".

I believe your personal experience, but you didn't see the whole story. Both chants were given. Hilariously, one possible explanation is that a subset of the protestors performed mental auto-correction: hearing the "you" chant coming from other protestors, filtered through their own biases, they heard "Jew," went "Oh, we're finally doing this!" and started chanting "the quiet part loud," as it were. Given that "Blood and soil" was also chanted, it may be reasonable to infer that at least a subset of the protestors had mental priors that would make that substitution likelier than not.

(Not terribly important, but as a sidebar: your pull quote is an excellent example of what I mean when I say "word salad" regarding the current President. "There were people in that rally — and I looked the night before — if you look, there were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee." is the kind of thing that would make a sentence diagrammer light their own hair on fire. He has a speaking style that leaves his words very open to multiple interpretations).

[zahlman]

> Hilariously, one possible explanation

Entirely plausible. I don't think we have solid evidence, though. People showed me chants where they believed "Jews" was said and I didn't really hear it. At most it sounded as if a minority of them might have been saying it. That would make you technically correct, but I don't think the claims that are generally made accurately represent the situation.

> Given that "Blood and soil" was also chanted

I agree that this originates in hateful, extremist circles. I also think that people who hear it could validly assign different meaning to it and use it with that different meaning, and may validly feel that extremists don't get to decide what it means.

In my experience, very few people who oppose immigration (in majority-white or formerly-majority-white countries) consider themselves to hold a belief in the inferiority of non-white races. Certainly many more of them say things that understandably give the impression of such a belief. But many of them are of those races, too, and give no impression of an inferiority complex. If anything, they resent that they abided by rules that are now (in their view, at least) not being enforced against others of the same race.

----

As regards "word salad":

> "There were people in that rally — and I looked the night before — if you look, there were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee."

This is just Trump speaking the thoughts as they come to mind rather than taking the time to organize them into proper sentences. Taken literally the overall structure is ungrammatical. They are not a prepared speech being read aloud. But it takes little effort to refactor them. I understood this quote as:

> There were people in that rally who were very quietly protesting the fact that a statue of Robert E. Lee was being taken down. I know this because I looked into it the night before. If you had looked into it, you would know this too.