For Joey Gibson, the 33-year-old organizer of the Aug. 26 “Free Speech Rally” planned for San Francisco’s Crissy Field, his event has nothing to do with the type of white supremacist hate that boiled over during a bloody march and rally last week in Charlottesville, Va.

“For those of you who believe we are seriously going to throw a white nationalist supremacist rally in San Francisco, it’s time for logic,” Gibson said in a video posted this week on his Facebook page. “We have a black speaker, two Hispanic speakers, we’ve got an Asian, a brown speaker right here (referring to himself) — we got a transsexual, and we aren’t talking about race.”

But for Gibson, an enthusiastic supporter of President Trump, talk has been far different from the actions at events that his Patriot Prayer group has held in his native Pacific Northwest.

On Sunday in Seattle, for example, police were forced to use pepper spray and stun grenades to keep counterprotesters separated from people attending a Gibson rally. And earlier rallies in Portland, Ore., and elsewhere in the area have sparked clashes between protesters on the right and the left, many of whom came spoiling for a fight.

All too often, the vicious street fighting surrounding the conservative free speech events is more tactic than accident, said Randy Blazak, a University of Oregon professor who has studied white hate groups for more than 20 years.

“The strategy is relatively clever,” he said. “They go into liberal country and get the organized left to attack them and then look like victims.”

It’s hard for opponents of the racists, anti-Semites and white nationalists calling themselves the “alt-right,” who often join the crowd of mainstream conservatives at events like Gibson’s rallies, to resist the challenge.

“You get some 18-year-old kid in a black mask who just wants to go bash some Nazis,” Blazak said. “In some sense it’s a noble impulse, but they’re feeding into the narrative of the ‘alt-right’ that there’s no free speech allowed for white men.”

Many of the right-wing protesters “are happy if some crazy-looking anarchist in a Chairman Mao T-shirt comes out and swings a baseball bat at them,” he said.

Gibson, who is from Vancouver, Wash., began putting together pro-Trump rallies in 2016 after he saw disputes taking place outside the candidate’s campaign rallies. It’s come with a cost, though. He’s had his tires slashed and just recently left his job at a real estate firm after opposition groups threatened to jam the company’s phone lines with requests that Gibson be fired.

Gibson, who identifies as Japanese American and calls himself a moderate libertarian, says he wants nothing to do with white supremacists. There are questions about how much control he has — or even wants to have — over who shows up at his rallies. For example, he’s already said that the Oath Keepers organization, a conservative group of ex-military and ex-law enforcement types with a reputation for violence, will provide security for the San Francisco event.

“He’s creating a space where white supremacists and racist groups can come out and do their own organizing,” said a man who identified himself only as David, a spokesman for the Rose City Antifa, a Portland group that has helped organize protests at Gibson’s rallies. “They feel comfortable in the space he’s created.”

The most horrifying example of that came in April, when 35-year-old Jeremy Christian showed up at a Portland “March for Free Speech” organized by Gibson. When Christian started making Nazi salutes and shouting racist screeds, Gibson reportedly told him to leave.

A month later, Christian allegedly killed two men with a knife and wounded a third on a Portland light-rail train as they tried to stop him from yelling racist threats at two teenage girls, one of whom was wearing a Muslim hijab. He is awaiting trial.

No one, including Gibson, knows who will show up at the San Francisco rally, and that worries politicians, who are trying desperately to get the National Park Service, which controls Crissy Field, to deny a permit for the rally.

Mayor Ed Lee, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, state Sen. Scott Wiener and Assemblymen David Chiu and Phil Ting are among those who have argued that the prospect of violence should be enough to keep the proposed rally out of the city.

The Patriot Prayer group “attracts white nationalists and other hate groups to its rallies,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, former mayor of San Francisco, said in a letter Wednesday to the Park Service. “I am alarmed at the prospect that Crissy Field will be used as a venue for Patriot Prayer’s incitement, hate and intimidation.”

But as Portland, UC Berkeley and the city of Berkeley found earlier this year when they tried to block extremist rallies, the free speech argument, even when it’s made by unpopular groups, is a powerful one.

In May, when Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler tried to stop such a rally from being held downtown just days after the double slaying on the light-rail train, he didn’t succeed.

“The government cannot revoke or deny a permit based on the viewpoint of the demonstrators. Period,” the ACLU of Oregon said in a May 29 tweet.

Those conservative rallies brought plenty of confrontations, however. A free speech rally by conservative activists in Berkeley last April erupted into a series of bloody street brawls. Police arrested 21 people and confiscated a variety of weapons. In February, a planned appearance by conservative writer and provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos at UC Berkeley was abruptly canceled when hundreds of protesters showed up, breaking windows and setting fires outside the student union, where he was scheduled to speak.

It’s a no-win situation for cities and law enforcement, said Blazak, who has worked as a police consultant on issues dealing with white supremacists and right-wing groups.

“It’s a tricky job,” he said. “Some say police are protecting the fascists, others that they are protecting free speech and some that they are protecting the city. It’s hard to come out smelling like a rose, since you’re going to upset one side or the other.”

The police aren’t likely to get cooperation from either side, Blazak added.

“The challenge is keeping people apart who really want to knock heads,” he said.