Organizers of a free speech protest planned at Google locations across the United States said late Tuesday that the marches were postponed because of threats from “left-wing terrorists.”
“The Peaceful March on Google has been postponed due to credible Alt Left terrorist threats for the safety of our citizen participants,” organizers wrote on a blog post on the protest’s website.
The postponement of Saturday’s rally comes on the heels of bloody clashes in Charlottesville in which a man who was reportedly a Nazi sympathizer allegedly crashed into a crowd of activists, killing one person and injuring 19. On Tuesday, President Trump used the term “alt-left” and said both sides were to blame for the violence.
The rally’s organizer, Jack Posobiec, is an alt-right activist and self-described “reality journalist” who used conspiracy theories to galvanize Trump supporters during the presidential campaign, including the infamous “Pizzagate” rumors of child trafficking. The alt-right, short for alternative right, is a small, far-right movement that seeks a whites-only state. Adherents of the alt-right are known for espousing racist, anti-Semitic and sexist points of view.
Posobiec gained national attention from the conspiracy theory that claimed Hillary Clinton and her campaign chief harbored a child sex ring in a pizza restaurant in Washington. The Internet-fueled falsehood led a gunman in December to fire an assault-style rifle as he searched the pizzeria, Comet Ping Pong.
In his blog post announcing the postponement, Posbiec blamed the mainstream media, and in particular CNN, for making “malicious and false statements that our peaceful march was being organized by Nazi sympathizers.”
He said that someone had threatened to use a vehicle to drive into the march.
The protests were triggered by Google’s firing of engineer James Damore, who wrote a 10-page internal memo criticizing the company’s diversity policies and advocating negative stereotypes about women.
The march appeared to be hastily scrubbed. Earlier Tuesday, the website announced that four cities had been added to the protest schedule.
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