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MOUNTAIN VIEW — No matter that a far-right rally for Saturday was postponed — the counter-protest gathered its own momentum from the violence in Charlottesville and President Donald Trump’s response to it, drawing more than 500 people to downtown Mountain View on Saturday afternoon.

Among those in the crowd at the Civic Center plaza for the 1 p.m. event was Mandy McDonough, 46, of San Jose, who said her father had marched for civil rights in 1965 with Martin Luther King Jr.in Selma, Alabama.

“My dad died eight years ago yesterday,” said McDonough, a sales representative. “I think of him looking down on me and showing him that I’m carrying on his work. We need it now as much as then.”

The event was planned in reaction to a “March on Google” over the technology giant’s Aug. 7 firing of software engineer James Damore, who had written an internal memo arguing that there may be a biological basis for the scarcity of women in tech. But that march, which had targeted Google offices in Mountain View and eight other U.S. cities over perceived stifling of free expression and conservative views, was postponed by the organizer on the basis of purported leftist threats.

Mountain View’s vice-mayor, Lenny Siegel, who organized the counter-protest at the Civic Center in a non-official role, said the right-wing rally was only half the reason for the counter-event. The other target was Trump, who said after a woman was killed Aug. 12 — allegedly by a white supremacist during a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia — that there were “very fine people” on both sides.

“The other people who are around the country need to know that his attitude to the extreme right is unacceptable,” Siegel said. “It’s the intolerance that he was basically endorsing.”

The White House did not respond Saturday to a request for comment.

Also in attendance were 11 local members of the activist group “Raging Grannies.” They belted out a protest song they wrote for the event.

“At Google there might be a protest,” they sang, “defending the speech of Damore. As feminists we hate this bias. Misogyny: We say ‘no more.'”

A number of speakers took to the open microphone to address the counter-protesters.

“We’ve heard white men who participated in a violent, armed white supremacist and Nazi rally saying that they don’t have hate in their hearts, that they just wanted to have some fun and play hate group with their friends,” Kathryn Jepsen, 35, told the audience. “But when the impact of your actions is the spread of a deadly strain of prejudice, when the impact is someone’s death, it doesn’t matter what your intent was.”

Jepsen, who works at a local laboratory, led the crowd in a chant of, “Love, not hate, makes America great.”

The first thing that Mountain View’s mayor said at the microphone referenced the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, in which members of the “alt-right” shouted “Jews will not replace us,” carried torches and performed straight-armed Nazi salutes.

“My name is Ken Rosenberg,” the mayor said. “Please note the last name.”

Then Rosenberg took aim at the aborted March on Google.

“Like cowards they chose not to show up at Google,” Rosenberg said. “As a Jew, I was going to be there to look them in the face and say, ‘Not in my town.'”

The reason for the March on Google’s postponement — whether because few would have shown up or because of “alt-left terrorist threats,” as organizer Jack Posobiec said — could not be confirmed.

Posobiec did not immediately respond to the question about whether the march had been rescheduled. He has said the march was not an “alt-right” event and disavowed violence, neo-Nazism and white supremacy.

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