The Sconi

For the past seven years Steve Cortes has led the charge in combating the “Charlottesville Hoax"—misinformation that has been perpetuated by the mainstream media and Democrats following former President Donald Trump's now infamous 2017 press conference in which he condemned neo-Nazis for their role in a violent protest over the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue at the University of Virginia. 

In 2018, Cortes appeared in a video that went viral for debunking the narrative that Trump referred to neo-Nazis and white nationalists as “very fine people.” 

Cortes resurrected the video following the Sept. 10 presidential debate that saw Vice President Harris parroting the hoax to 67 million viewers on ABC. In a post on X, he described the misinformation as “one of the most disgusting lies in American politics." 

In an interview with The Sconi, Cortes described how the Charlottesville hoax has managed to live on despite being disproven years ago.  

“Biden used it as the predicate for his race in 2020,” Cortes told The Sconi. “He established his entire presidential race on a complete fabrication line on a proven lie. But he didn't stop there. He repeated it throughout his term in office. He repeated it during his debate against President Trump. And then Kamala Harris resuscitated the lie and used it in her debate against President Trump.”

In the video produced by PragerU, Cortes analyzed Trump's Charlottesville speech frame-by-frame, showing the moments when the former president made the remarks about “very fine people”—referring to both those who were for, and against, the removal of Robert E. Lee's statue, recognizing peaceful assembly and protest despite varying viewpoints. 

“I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists because they should be condemned totally,” Trump said during the press conference. "But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists.” 

“The media reported that President Trump described neo-Nazis as very fine people,” Cortes said in the video. “Only he didn’t. In fact, he didn’t even hint at it. Just the opposite. He condemned the neo-Nazis in no uncertain terms."

Cortes characterized the hoax as a “political zombie lie that just refuses to die” noting that politicians have continued to campaign on the issue, like Harris did during the Trump debate.  

“Let's remember Charlottesville, where there was a mob of people carrying tiki torches spewing anti-Semitic hate. And what did the president then at the time say? There were fine people on each side,” Harris said during the debate with Trump. 

However, unlike the former president, Harris was not fact checked when she made the false claims, leading many to criticize ABC for being biased in their live “fact checking” process. 

Critics argue that ABC's David Muir and co-moderator Linsey Davis disproportionately fact-checked Trump while allowing Harris to evade scrutiny on multiple false claims, including her assertion about Charlottesville. 

According to The New York Post, ABC News has been facing backlash and significant rating drops following its moderation of the Trump-Harris debate, with Muir's “World News Tonight” losing nearly a million viewers—representing a 12% decline that highlights a growing public frustration with media bias. 

Cortes refers to the Charlottesville hoax as a “foundational lie” that framed Trump in a way that has been difficult for many passive media consumers to overcome. 

“Once you've established in somebody's mind that Trump is a bigot then almost nothing else he says matters,” Cortes said. “It's like once you've made him into this monster, this prejudicial monster, well then his policies don't matter. The effects of his presidency don't matter. That's why I say it's a foundational lie. It was so important for them to establish that myth, as being reality even though it's not reality. But since then, obviously, a million more and smaller smears. All of them untrue and all of them hurtful, but in my mind, not as consequential as that foundational lie.” 

Snopes has also debunked the hoax. 

Cortes, who served as a spokesman for Trump in 2016 and 2020, said that while some of Trump’s comments can be hard to walk back, the Charlottesville hoax was entirely fabricated by corporate media and never openly corrected to set the record straight.  

“Believe me, as somebody who was a spokesman for President Trump in both 2016 and the 2020 race, that's not always the easiest job,” he said. “He's a guy who shoots from the hip. He says things at times that are difficult for a spokesman to defend or to try to parse. Look, I get it. Sometimes he says things that seem at least at the time, to be hard to defend. But in this case, he did not. I mean, he just didn't, this is just completely manufactured.”

Cortes recalled when Dennis Prager, the conservative radio host behind PragerU—a non-profit that "promotes American values through short, educational videos for people of all ages," according to its website—asked him to record the video outlining the hoax. 

“He had read my Real Clear Politics article where I debunked the whole myth, the whole hoax,” Cortes said. “He was fascinated by it. And particularly, I think it mattered a lot to him as a devout Jew to prove to the American people that not only did Trump not praise hateful bigots in Charlottesville, people who hated Jews, as a matter of fact, the exact opposite. Right? He explicitly condemned them.” 

Underscoring the voracity to preserve the false narrative, Cortes was let go from CNN for his role in the viral video. 

“I will tell you that I paid a bit of a personal price for this stance,” he said. “I was working for CNN in 2019, and as a contributor, I was one of their lone on-air paid conservative voices. And once I put that PragerU video out, which went very viral, thankfully, I was sidelined by CNN and then eventually fired by CNN. And they told me explicitly that the reason I was taken off the air was because of my Charlottesville video where I debunked a lie that they kept repeating constantly on the air.”

Cortes lamented that corporate media has increasingly lost its way in the years following the events in Charlottesville. 

“It's obviously only worsened, unfortunately, and become more corrupt and more brazen in its left wing partisanship unfortunately,” he said. “I'll tell you this. I've had off air conversations with some pretty significant cable news hosts from CNN and other establishment networks and they will acknowledge to me off air that, yes clearly Trump did not praise bigots in Charlottesville, and yet they will still go on air and condemn them for exactly that false accusation. So it's maddening to me and unfortunately, as I said, I think we've done damage to the lie, but we haven't killed the lie.” 

Steve Cortes is the founder of the League of American Workers, an organization that advocates for American workers facing wage declines and reduced political influence. A former Spokesman and Senior Advisor for Strategy for Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns with a focus on Hispanic voter outreach, Cortes is a Georgetown graduate and resides in Tennessee with his wife and four children.