Former President Barack Obama said it shouldn’t be hard for Americans to denounce Nazis, as he took a swipe at President Trump who accused “both sides” of participating in violence at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., last year.
“We are Americans. We’re supposed to stand up to bullies, not follow them,” Obama said during a speech at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Friday. “We’re supposed to stand up to discrimination, and we’re sure as heck supposed to stand up clearly and unequivocally to Nazi sympathizers.
“How hard can that be? Saying that Nazis are bad,” Obama added.
Obama also attacked Trump by name on Friday — marking a first for the former president — as he claimed that Trump was a “symptom, not the cause” of division being sown in American politics.
The Aug. 12, 2017, Unite the Right rally, which was organized to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, resulted in the death of counterprotester Heather Heyer, who died after a self-identified neo-Nazi drove a vehicle into a crowd. Virginia State Police Troopers Lt. H. Jay Cullen III and Trooper-Pilot Berke M.M. Bates were also killed in a helicopter crash while policing the event.
Trump’s first comments elicited backlash after he said “both sides” were responsible for the violence. He later signed a resolution in September 2017 that condemned white nationalists and supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and other hate groups.
