Good: A little less of this coming this weekend

The “March on Google” planned by far-right provocateurs for this weekend has been canceled, supposedly because of threats of violence from the “alt-left.” Google was targeted for protest for having fired James Damore over his memo opposing diverse hiring and pushing pseudoscience nonsense about women’s inferiority, and protests were supposedly planned in nine cities before being canceled. The claim of “Alt Left terrorist threats” is, of course, an attempt to expand on the false equivalency between neo-Nazis and anti-racists that Donald Trump so helpfully set up on Tuesday. And here’s how believable that claim is.

The rally’s organizer, Jack 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.

Posobiec was also responsible for a sign saying “Rape Melania” being held up at an anti-Trump rally, trying to make it look like that sentiment was coming from anti-Trump protesters. If that history isn’t enough to convince you that his claims about what the left is doing to threaten his march might just be a total load of bull, consider that prominent white supremacist leaders were vocally not on board with Posobiec’s plans:

“The rallies this weekend are being created by the alt-light so they are going to suck,” alt-right leader Richard Spencer said in an interview Tuesday afternoon. Alt-light is a term used by some alt-right figures to disparage more conciliatory elements of the movement.

Indeed, Posobiec seems less like a committed white supremacist than like a far-right troll who’ll try to jump on anything he can to get attention. Racism may be a favored tool, but it’s not his overriding passion as it is for Spencer. Planning to protest Google got him attention, and now Donald Trump has handed him the way to get attention for canceling the protests before they have a chance to publicly flop.