Fact Check-Biased: Snopes shows it uses different standards for Democrats

Snopes showed its true colours when it rated Representative Maxine Waters comments during the 1992 LA Uprising very differently than those made by former president Trump prior to the storming of the Capitol.

Earlier this weeks, prior to the Derek Chauvin verdict, California Representative Maxine Waters took to the streets of Brooklyn Center and stated that "We’ve got to stay on the street. And we’ve got to get more active. We’ve got to get more confrontational. We’ve got to make sure that they know that we mean business."

Snopes rated 'true' the fact that Waters had urged people to "get more confrontational", but added that while "responding to partisan criticism over the remarks, Waters described herself as nonviolent and said she was referring to confronting problems in policing and the justice system by 'speaking up' and pushing for legislation."

Waters' statements lead many to dig into the vault and bring up comments she made during the L.A. Uprising of 1992. The uprising occurred as a result of four police officers being acquitted after beating up Rodney King. The verdict ignited protests, many of which turned violent. The L.A. neighbourhood of Koreatown was hit particularly hard.

According to Snopes, during the uprising, Waters said it "was a response to legitimate and unaddressed grievances in the community that included depressed economic conditions and police abuse." She went on to describe scenes of "mothers who took [the uprising] as an opportunity to take some milk, to take some bread, to take some shoes." "Maybe they shouldn’t have done it", she said, "but the atmosphere was such that they did it. They are not crooks. ... Goddamn it! It was such a tear-jerker. I might have gone in and taken them for her myself."

Waters called the violence “a spontaneous reaction to a lot of injustice and a lot of alienation and frustration".

Despite all this, Snopes adamantly defends Waters, stating that she did not condone violence, rather, she "said she understood the pain and anger that drove members of the community to riot in the face of racial injustice, while also urging calm and speaking out against violence and looting."

Contrast this to how the fact-checking site talked about Trump's comments preceding the Capitol riots. Snopes rated the claim that "Trump told supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol to delay the constitutional process that would affirm Joe Biden’s presidency" as a 'mixture' of true and false.

Snopes claims that while the former president "did not explicitly tell people to 'storm' or 'breach' or 'break into' the Capitol", it is "a subjective call" whether him saying "you have to show strength" and "demand that Congress do the right thing" was "meant to condone violence and crimes among right-wing extremists without explicitly encouraging it".

In the transcript of Trump's speech, which Snopes included in their article, he explicitly states that the goal is for everyone to be "marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make [their] voices heard".

Both Waters in 1992 and Trump in 2021 called for peaceful demonstration, but only the former called the ensuing violence 'understandable'. Nonetheless, Snopes made it clear that when Democrats declare that violence is ok, that is not incitement, but when Republicans make claims that are 'subjectively' encouraging violence, it is.