My second book, The White Privilege Album: Bringing Racial Harmony to Very Fine People…on Both Sides, was not only a smash hit of political satire, but I spent a great deal of time trolling “the very fine people” hoax and mocking how the left used it as a decade-long lie that acted as the foundation of the “Trump is a racist” narrative. (RELATED: A.J. Rice’s White Privilege Album Is a Vaccine for the Woke Mind Virus)
I have done hundreds of interviews mocking the “very fine people” hoax, and had no idea that my jokes about the fraud would become real life.
So what did Joe Biden know about the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Charlottesville hoax, and when did he know it? (RELATED: Eventually, the Grift Does Get Exposed)
There’s a lot packed into that question. So let’s unpack it.
When Joe Biden announced his run for president in 2020, he said he decided to make the run at his advanced age because he just couldn’t stand to hear President Donald Trump declare that the Unite the Right protest-turned-deadly-riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 involved “very fine people on both sides.”
As the rally involved some white supremacists and neo-Nazis along with mainstream conservative figures and voices, and people on the far left too, the implication Biden made was clear: Trump was declaring Nazi white supremacists to be “very fine people.” (RELATED: The Spectacle Ep. 412: The Jig Is Up on the SPLC!)
Trump has never believed or said such a thing in his long public career. Not once. He was a Democrat or Independent for most of his life. He supported Reverend Jesse Jackson for president in 1988.
Biden’s spin on what Trump said was a lie. Biden probably knew it at the time. His entire career was built on plagiarism and outright lying. He rehashed that quote over and over again during his presidency, which, according to him, was founded on that quote. This insanity is why I wrote my book.
In the full quote, Trump called out the people who instigated violence on the right and left, and said there were some “very fine people on both sides.” And later in the quote, he said: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay?”
Clear enough? Nope. The media, Democrats, Biden — the entire left — ran with the “very fine people” part, and left the other part out — the part in which Trump explicitly condemned the neo-Nazis. Biden rode it to the White House in 2020. We’ve known Biden’s and the media’s take on Trump’s Chancellorsville quote was dishonest for years. That hoax has long been exposed. (RELATED: Busted! Feds Charge SPLC With Funding Klansmen, Neo-Nazis)
Now we know there was an even deeper, more sinister hoax happening at Charlottesville. And it flips recent history on its head.
The Southern Poverty Law Center was created decades ago with a singular mission: to sniff out and expose organized racism, such as the Ku Klux Klan. The SPLC stuck to that very fine mission for years, but in more recent times, it seemed to find the racism business a drying well.
It created a “Hate Map” that named mainstream conservative and Christian groups, such as the Family Research Council, as hate groups. The map looks like America is suffering from a growing cancer of hate all over the fruited plain, bleeding red (no coincidence on that color choice) everywhere.
The “Hate Map” matters. Putting the FRC on it inspired a madman to assault and shoot up the FRC’s offices in Washington, D.C.
You might think the SPLC changed its ways after that. Nope. The Hate Map lives on. It kept right on labeling just about everyone on the right in American politics with the broad brush of hate in one way or another. (RELATED: The SPLC and the Radicalization of Charlie Kirk’s Killer)
Hate was good business for the SPLC. As of late 2024, it had an eyewatering $787 million in cash and employed over 250 people. It paid its executives lavish salaries. Hate pays, especially when you know how to play the game.
And the SPLC, according to the charges, played a very deft — and dishonest — game.
According to a recent federal indictment, the SPLC switched to funding — paying with real money, millions of dollars — informants and leaders within white supremacist groups. For about a decade, from 2014 to 2023, the indictment says the SPLC pumped about $3 million into the racist groups it was racking up donations to fight against.
What’s $3 million to a group that’s sitting on three-quarters of a billion dollars?
It’s sort of like if the Philadelphia Eagles paid Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones to ensure the team exists, and also be terrible at the same time. Be a bogeyman, sometimes look like a threat, but don’t be too strong a bogeyman. Just look strong enough to keep Eagles fans interested and buying tickets, but not strong enough to knock them out of the playoffs. Unthinkable, right?
The indictment says that was what the SPLC was doing. It was funding the ultimate straw man, then turning around and pointing at that straw man to generate more donations.
Remember, Charlottesville and “very fine people” happened in 2017. Smack in the middle of the alleged SPLC scheme.
And Unite the Right was among the groups the SPLC was allegedly funding behind the scenes. It’s explicitly listed in the federal indictment.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche lays out the purpose of the scheme: “The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence. Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked.”
“Manufacturing racism.” Including Charlottesville in 2017.
Without Unite the Right — SPLC-funded, according to the indictment — and the deliberate distortion of the “very fine people,” it’s more than fair to wonder if Joe Biden would ever have been president. Would our borders have been left open for four years? Would the debacle in Afghanistan, which humiliated the United States in front of the whole world, have ever happened?
Trump had had to fight Democrat and media lies during his entire presidency, and then the COVID crisis of 2020, but still rode a robust economy at the time and had, among other things, launched a new Middle East peace with the Abraham Accords. His first term was notably successful by most measures.
It took a multi-million dollar hoax instigated by a group that was in the business of “manufacturing racism” because it couldn’t find enough of the real thing, and one of the most dishonest politicians in American history riding that hoax to unseat him.
Personally, I feel vindicated; the use of irreverent humor to expose truth has never failed me.
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A.J. Rice is the host of the Dangerous Laughter podcast, serves as president & CEO of Publius PR, editor-in-chief of The Publius National Post, and author of The White Privilege Album: Bringing Racial Harmony to Very Fine People…on Both Sides.
