There won’t be a protest in front of Google’s D.C. offices this weekend after all, though the organizers who scuttled the demonstration “hope to hold our peaceful march in a few weeks’ time.”
The March on Google in the District was initially scheduled for this Saturday from 1-3 p.m. at 25 Massachusetts Ave NW, along with rallies in 10 other cities and a “Google Meme Contest.”
Lead organizer Jack Posobiec, a former Navy intelligence officer who spread falsehoods about Pizzagate and the murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich and was retweeted earlier this week by the president, is postponing the events, claiming that there are “credible Alt Left terrorist threats for the safety of our citizen participants … credible threats from known Alt Left terrorist groups have been reported to and relevant authorities have been notified.”
The Metropolitan Police Department says that it has not received any reports of threats. “Our mission is to ensure anyone wishing to peacefully exercise their First Amendment rights within the District of Columbia has a safe environment to do so and ensure public safety,” says MPD spokesperson Aquita Brown.
On August 9, Posobiec along with a “coaltion [sic] of free speech activists around the United States” announced the March on Google to protest the company for terminating the employment of James Damore, who wrote and circulated a memo that said biology rendered women less suitable for engineering work, among other anti-diversity arguments.
Recode noted that the RSVP numbers for the rallies’ Facebook events were low, in some cases lower than counter-protests scheduled.
After the deaths during a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va. over the weekend, one at the hands of a self-proclaimed Nazi, the March on Google claimed it was a First Amendment rally rather than an alt-right gathering. “The March on Google condemns and disavows violence, hatred, and bigotry and all groups that espouse it such as White Nationalists, KKK, Antifa, and NeoNazis … Is this an ‘Alt-Right’ event? The answer is no.”
But it was hard to for Posobiec to escape his roots as a prominent voice for far-right conspiracy theories. Even in his note about the rally’s postponement, he uses the term “alt-left,” just as the president did at a press conference earlier this week.
Rachel Kurzius