Alt Right Google Protest Marches Cancelled Because of “Alt Left Terrorist Threats”
Rallies scheduled to take place at nine Google campuses this weekend, including the company’s Mountain View headquarters, in response to the firing of James Damore over a 10-page anti-diversity memo and claims that the company is "using its power to silence dissent and manipulate election results," have been cancelled.
It's not clear when the rallies will be rescheduled. The group hopes to still march in "a few weeks time," according to the announcement on their site.
The March on group put out a code of conduct and a statement condemning violence and hatred and distancing themselves from the “alt-right” following the events in Charlottesville, though several organizers are aligned with the white nationalist movement.
Event organizer Jack Posobiec, a far-right media figure who pushed "Pizzagate" and Seth Rich conspiracy theories and was retweeted by the president calling out violence in Chicago following the events in Charlottesville over the weekend, put out an announcement on the group's site Wednesday morning claiming "Alt Left terrorist threats" led them to postpone the protests due to safety concerns.
Meanwhile: 39 shootings in Chicago this weekend, 9 deaths. No national media outrage. Why is that? https://t.co/9Crutnnrp8
— Jack Posobiec
(@JackPosobiec) August 14, 2017
Prosobiec said in the post that the group reported the threats it received to the relevant authorities.
This announcement comes on the heels of remarks by President Donald Trump Tuesday evening repeating his assertion that there was "blame on both sides" of the violence that unfolded at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville leaving three dead and dozens injured.
Experts on extremist groups say there is no such thing as the "alt-left." It's a term made up to create a false equivalence between far right groups and "anything vaguely left-seeming that they didn't like," Mark Pitcavage, an analyst at the Anti-Defamation League, told the New York Times.
“There is no such movement as the alt-left," George Hawley, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama told CNN. "Obviously, there are left-wing extremists but there is no congruence between the far-left and the alt-right.”
While "alt-right" was coined by white supremacist Richard Spencer and adopted as a moniker by many on the far-right, Hawley says the term "alt-left" has been most aggressively pushed by Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity rather than any group or ideology.
Although the demonstrations have been postponed, Silicon Valley is still in the grips of a culture war that conservatives are bringing against the tech enclave. Pushback against efforts to diversify the predominantly white, male sector and claims that of discrimination against conservative viewpoints as social media platforms face pressure to rid their sites of hate groups are likely to continue.
See original article on Fortune.com
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