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Alt-right protests against Googles allegedly anti-white-male diversity policies were already being planned before the white-supremacist violence in Charlottesville this last weekend. And organizers of the March on Google in (at last count) nine cities are trying to distinguish themselves from the motley gang of neo-Nazis, Kluxers, and open white supremacists who held the Unite the Right rally in Virginia. They issued a statement that closely tracks the evasive take on Charlottesville of you-know-who in the White House:

We, the organizers of the March on Google, join the President in condemning the actions in Charlottesville on August 12th. Despite many false rumors from those seeking to discredit us we are in no way associated with any group who organized there.

We condemn in the strongest possible terms any display of hatred and bigotry from any side. It has no place in America. No citizen should ever fear for their safety and security in our society.

But inevitably, given the timing, what looks and feels like a proliferation of far-right public events is going to attract attention, and probably counter-demonstrators. The march will be directed at Google facilities in Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., in addition to the companys headquarters, GooglePlex, in Mountain View, California.

The protests, of course, were spurred by the now-infamous memo on Googles hiring practices that made its author, Google engineer James Damore, a conservative hero, particularly after he was fired over it. As Madison Malone Kircher notes, Damore chose to show some solidarity with the alt-right.

Since confirming his firing, Damore has done very little press, but his first public interview, posted online Tuesday evening, is with alt-right YouTuber Stefan Molyneux.

Damore doesnt express any beyond-the-pale views in the interview, but Molyneux a mens-rights blogger and accused cult leader with, uh, unorthodox views on race is, well, a pointed choice for a first-interview host.

The alt-right not those prone to cavorting in sheets or goose-stepping, but the kind of people who view Breitbart News as their daily bread and mobilized for Trumps presidential candidacy has reciprocated this embrace avidly. And that has led to next weekends march, as the San Jose Mercury News reports:

We are going to raise awareness about Googles one-sided bias and campaign against dissenting opinions and voices, activist and protest march organizer Jack Posobiec, a self-identified member of the new right that seeks to distance itself from the white-power politics of the alt-right, told this news organization via Twitter.

Googles firing of James Damore is the flashpoint here, said the pro-Trump Posobiec, known for peddling conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate.

Posobiec was also special projects director for Citizens for Trump, a leading outside pro-Trump group during the 2016 presidential campaign. One problem for him in distinguishing the March on Google from Unite the Right is that he was accused by his own former employer, The Rebel, earlier this year of plagiarizing a video script from Jason Kessler, the white supremacist who organized Unite the Right. Oops.

Its likely next weekends protests will mark a point either of convergence or divergence for the alt-right and white-supremacist groups.

As J.M. Berger observes at Vox, the events in Charlottesville represent an existential challenge to the idea of the alt-right as a playful and essentially harmless online phenomenon:

Charlottesville put to rest the idea that the alt-right can be primarily defined as fun-loving transgressive hipsters or an elaborate practical joke (if anyone still really believed that). Even before the culminating act of terrorism, the rally in Charlottesville illustrated that the umbrella of the alt-right is an effective means to mobilize a highly visible mix of old-school white supremacists and neo-Nazis. Offline, at least, this isnt the new white nationalism; its the old white nationalism as the primary beneficiary of the activity generated by a looser collection of people online.

How the March on Google turns out could have significant implications for the alt-right and for their daddy Donald Trump. Charlottesville was a turning point.

As he dragged his feet on condemning racist violence this weekend, the president was thinking fondly of the nativist demagogue Joe Arpaio.

The 23-year-old would-be terrorist told an FBI informant that he wanted to start the next revolution.

Alabama GOP voters likely to vault the wheezing campaign of Trumps endorsee Luther Strange into a runoff with the grim celebrity theocrat Roy Moore.

In the White House on Monday, Trump said racism is evil and called out white supremacists by name.

Alt-right activists who would like to distinguish themselves from the white supremacists who rioted in Charlottesville will march against Google.

Blending neo-Confederate and Nazi ideology, our white nationalist movement is part of a frightening international phenomenon.

More than words are needed to absolve the GOP and Donald Trump of collaborating with racists. But very direct words are essential as well.

A far stronger response than the president has mustered.

Kenneth Frazier, who runs Merck, said leaders must reject expressions of hatred, bigotry and group supremacy.

And helped its key player escape to the United States.

A former teacher said he expressed white-supremacist views throughout high school, and he was kicked out of the Army after four months.

We still dont know if Trump plans to sabotage Obamacare, which is whats driving up 2018 premiums.

Republicans need to do a lot more than say the right words about Nazis to atone for their role in the revival of the racist right.

Many sides are to blame for the haphazard defense of the presidents response to Charlottesville, but none more so than Trump himself.

The wounds are raw in the city.

It calls the media enemies of the president.

Thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer had a very strong sense of right and wrong and was dedicated to ending injustice, according to her mother.

By professing neutrality between those who support and oppose racial equality, Trump is joining the generations of pols who whitewashed Jim Crow.

Republicans are continuing to call out the president, this time over white-nationalist violence.

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Don't Look Now, But Alt-Right Demonstrations Are Scheduled for Nine Cities Next Weekend - New York Magazine

Its almost impossible to get Donald Trump to criticize one of his supporters. Last March, when former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke supported his campaign, Trump initially declined to disavow him and at one point blamed a bad earpiece for his failure to do so. A couple weeks later, when a Trump supporter punched an African-American man at a stadium rally, Trump said the man obviously loves the country and suggested he might pay his legal bills.

And, of course, after Saturdays alt-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that left one woman dead, Trump blamed many sides and refused to single out white supremacists and neo-Nazis, even as a growing chorus of Republican elected officials called on him to do so.

One reason for Trumps mystifying refusal to criticize the alt-right racism in Charlottesville is that he came under similar pressure during the campaign, didnt buckle, and still won the election.

Last August, Trump hired Steve Bannon to take over his presidential campaign. Bannon was executive chairman of Breitbart News, the hard-right populist website that he had described a month earlier as the platform for the alt-right. Seeking to highlight Trumps unsavory connection to racists and anti-Semites, Hillary Clinton gave an August 25th speech in Reno, Nevada, explicitly warning about the danger of embracing white supremacy. Trump, Clinton declared, is reinforcing harmful stereotypes and offering a dog whistle to his most hateful supporters. Its a disturbing preview of what kind of president hed beThese are racebaiting ideas, antiMuslim and antiimmigrant ideas, antiwoman--all key tenets making up an emerging racist ideology known as the altright. She added: A fringe element has effectively taken over the Republican Party.

Most Americans had never heard the term alt-right until Clinton highlighted it inher speech. The term was just beginning to enter the political lexicon, a Clinton adviser told me, in an interview for my book Devils Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and the Storming of the Presidency. We thought it would be catnip that would fuel peoples curiosity [about the altright] and what Bannons place was in that world. Trumps campaign was built on stoking xenophobic impulses, so you could take a process story on Bannons hire and turn it into a bigger critique of how Trump was uniquely unacceptable.

In one sense, Clintons speech had the desired effect: it sparked a nationwide debate about alt-right racism. But it didnt prompt Trump to fire Bannon or distance himself in any way from his alt-right supporters. And as a political attack, it plainly failed. A month later, Trumps poll numbers had improved.As Bannon told me in Devils Bargain, We polled the race stuff and it doesnt matter. It doesnt move anyone who isnt already in her camp.

Its not clear why Trump has so far refused to call out the neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville whose rally produced deadly violence. He has come under withering criticism not only from Republican senators like Orrin Hatch and Cory Gardner, but also from conservative media outlets like Fox News andthe New York Post.

On Sunday, Vice President Mike Pence offered an explicit condemnation of the Charlottesville instigators during a visit to Colombia. "We have no tolerance for hate and violence from white supremacists, neo-Nazis or the KKK, Pence said at a news conference with Colombia's president, Juan Manuel Santos. These dangerous fringe groups have no place in American public life and in the American debate, and we condemn them in the strongest possible terms," he said.

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Having survived Clintons attack over alt-right racism, Trump may simply feel impervious to the pressure to speak out more forcefully about Charlottesville. But the differences between the two episodes are significant. Last year, Trump was being attacked by a Democratic political opponent; the basis of the attack was a website most people dont read; and the specter of alt-right violence that Clinton invoked in her speech was theoretical.

Charlottesville was different in every respect: The bloodshed and deadly assault were vividly on display for all to see. Those responsible for it were not Democrats, but Trump supporters (some marchers shouted Heil Trump!). And this time, the calls for Trump to show moral courage and condemn the Nazis and white supremacists are coming from his fellow-Republicans.

Trump may find himself forced to say something more specific or he may continue to refuse, as he did in the campaign. But its hard to imagine his poll numbers improving in the wake of the tragedy, as they did last August. The difference between the two episodes couldnt be more stark or more obvious to everyone except Trump.

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Why Trump Refuses to Call Out Alt-Right Violence - Bloomberg

AnthonyScaramucci, the former hedge fund manager who very briefly served as the White House communications director, is continuing his feud against President Donald Trumps top adviser Steve Bannon. The man known as The Mooch is essentially blaming the ex-Breitbart News CEO for the controversy thats surrounded the president for his weekend-long refusalto denounce white nationalists after one was accused of murdering a woman with his car over the weekend.

In a Sunday interview with ABC News, Scaramucci essentially called Bannon a member of the white supremacistalt-right movement. He also accused Bannon of tolerating racists, an offense which Scaramucci deemed inexcusable.

There are elements of the alt-right I mean people are not going to like me saying this there are elements of the alt-right that I think have actually been quite beneficial, Scaramucci said in an effort to damn Bannon with faint praise as he called the former Breitbart News chief a great speech writer.

Later on in the interview, Scaramucci slightly backed off on his accusation.

Ive never sat down with Steve Bannon and said, Hey are you a white nationalist or a white supremacist? But I think the toleration of it by Steve Bannon is inexcusable, he said.

Scaramucci argued that Trump should have been more vocal in condemning racism in light of the neo-fascist rally in Charlottesville, Va., which resulted inthree deaths.

He needed to be way tougher with the white supremacists thing. Anybody that has experienced any level ofracism, any level of prejudice, knows that this is disgusting. Its un-American and it cannot be tolerated, he said.

Scaramucci was fired last month afteronly 10days on the jobafter New Yorker writer Ryan Lizza reported on an on-the-record conversation that the two had in which Scaramucci used vulgarities to criticize Bannon and other Trump figures.

In his ABC interview, the former communications director also accused Bannon of leaking confidential information to reporters.

Thepresident has a very good idea of who the leakers are inside the White House. The president has a very good idea of the people who are undermining his agenda that are serving their own interests, hesaid.

Scaramucci, who supported Democrats before flipping to Trump shortly before the 2016 election, also urged the president to move toward the center with his policies.

Hes got to move more into the mainstream. Hes got to be more into where the moderates are and the independents that love the president, so if he does that hell have a very successful legislative agenda, the former communications director said, calling the nationalist-oriented Trump wing of the party a snag on the president.

Bannons former employees at Breitbart News responded sharply to Scaramuccis criticism running an article headlined Anthony blows whatever was left of his credibility with Trumps base. In the piece, written by political editor Matthew Boyle, the site accused Scaramucci of being a turncoat.

The tune he is singing now is in almost every way exactly the opposite of what he was saying just a few weeks ago, during the beginning of his brief tenure as White House communication director, Boyle wrote.

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Anthony Scaramucci lashes out at Steve Bannon, calls him alt-right - Salon

You can choose to ignore it, you can choose to enlist support from groups normally targeted by the alt-right, or you can simply choose to hold a "joyful" peaceful protest.

Whatever you do, you should deny the speaker a "spectacle" or "heated confrontations."

The guide came out just a few days before the clashes and confrontations sparked by the weekend's planned "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, home of the University of Virginia. Lecia Brooks, SPLC director of outreach, said she thinks the guide could have been helpful in that situation, because it could have helped single out the violent groups that went to Charlottesville for the rally.

The SPLC is an Alabama-based nonprofit organization that monitors hate crimes and hate speech across the country. It released the guide because it believes students are not adequately prepared to deal with the influx of alt-right speakers that have started to flood college campuses throughout the country.

The term alt-right has become intertwined with the term white nationalism, which originated as a euphemism for white supremacy, the belief that white people are superior to all other races and should therefore dominate society, according to Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism.

Though people who hold these beliefs may go by names like alt-right, identarians or race realists, this is simply a rebranding: "a new name for this old hatred," Segal said.

Reflecting what observers say is a glaring nationwide trend, many college campuses have seen increasing tensions -- in some cases outright confrontations -- surrounding controversial speakers and programs in recent months.

The SPLC guide is "meant to educate the students in advance," said the SPLC's Brooks. She said college administrators and leaders of college groups were ill-equiped to deal with these speakers.

"What often happens is [these speakers] will present themselves as conservative thinkers," Brooks said. "They don't really identify themselves as white nationalists."

The guide is being distributed by the SPLC's on-campus program. It is being sent to over 2,000 schools across the country, including historically black colleges and universities.

On the receiving end are student unions, student groups and college administrators.

Aside from identifying and explaining the main actors behind the alt-right movement, it also offers tips on how to address the situation before the speakers come to campus.

It encourages students to speak to their classmates, make a YouTube video or print out a pamphlet. Other ideas include passing out buttons and making T-shirts.

The guide also suggests enlisting college leadership, faculty and others for help.

Brooks said white nationalism began to grip college campuses throughout America around 2012, with the first "White Students Union."

The union was founded by Matthew Heimbach at Towson University in Maryland. Since then, various other alt-right speakers, such as Yiannopoulos and Spencer, have had successful campus tours. College is a formative time and these speakers normally thrive in that atmosphere, according to Brooks.

For Brooks and the SPLC, the guide isn't about radical new ideas to combat the alt-right and white nationalism, it is more of a way to introduce Yiannopoulos and Spencer to the average college audience and explain that behind the "conservative" speaker is really a white nationalist mentality.

"Students often don't know who they are," Brooks said, and college administrators find themselves in a tough situation trying to protect free speech and also curb hate speech.

The guide's most crucial piece of advice is to not engage directly with the speaker or resort to violence.

"There are many other ways to challenge the beliefs of this movement." it reads.

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SPLC issues college student's guide to dealing with the alt-right - CNN

On Saturday, at a Charlottesville rally populated by alt-right activists and white supremacists, a car plowed into a crowd of counter-protestors, injuring 19 and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer . The man arrested in connection with the murder, James Alex Fields, Jr., had previously posted white nationalist symbols, alt-right memes, and even a photo of Hitler as a baby to his Facebook page. Now, alt-right message boards and leading figures are attempting to disown not just Fields, but Saturdays violent gathering as a whole, in part by going into full damage control mode.

For months going on years, online forums like Reddit and 4chan have fostered a growing contingent of disenfranchised, young, (mostly) white men who have railed against calls for diversity and inclusion. In the process, they have demonized minorities and progressive values. In practical terms, this has meant flirting withif not directly embracingwhite supremacy as the solution to their problems. The alt-right cant disavow the events of the Unite the Right rally, because that rally was a product of an environment theyve spent years making.

"There's no question that the conditions by which people feel emboldened, the condition under which people's attitudes are supported and elevated on these types of forums, certainly create the conditions that makes this type of violence possible," says Charlton McIlwain, an associate professor at New York University who focuses on race and digital media.

Fields appears specifically connected to Vanguard America, a group that the Anti-Defamation League defines as "a white supremacist group that opposes multiculturalism and believes that America is an exclusively white nation." You might have seen one of several videos floating around of Vanguard America members, who all donned white polos and khakis in Charlottesville Saturday, chanting "blood and soil" as they marched through the streets. The phrase refers to a defining Nazi ideology that emphasized the idea that German blood belonged on German soil. In Vanguard America's case, it represents the notion that the blood of white people somehow has a "special bond" to American soil.

Vanguard America issued the following statement late Saturday evening: "The driver of the vehicle that hit counter protestors today was, in no way, a member of Vanguard America. All our members had been safely evacuated by the time of the incident. The shields seen do not denote membership, nor does the white shirt. The shields were freely handed out to anyone in attendance. All our members are safe an [sic] accounted for, with no arrests or charges."

Regardless of whether Fields was an official member, he was clearly involved enough to know about the meeting place, the chants, and the dress code. The group also made no attempt to denounce Fields, nor did it express remorse for the lives that were lost. Currently, Vanguard America's pinned tweet reads , "Stand up, White man. This is your fight. Become a man of action, become a part of the Vanguard. #VanguardAmerica."

But even beyond the actions of Fields, or any specific white supremacist group, the rhetoric of alt-right groups online both promoted the Charlottesville rally and, by extension, the confrontations that arose. On Sunday, the alt-right Reddit group r/The_Donald attempted to distance itself from the previous days events. One post in particular declared that those who weren't present at the rally could in no way be complicit in what happened there.

But the entire week prior to the event, that same subreddit promoted the rally with a thread stuck to the top of the page.

The front page of r/The_Donald as of August 5, 2017, via archive.is.

The original post itself was deleted at some point Saturday, but archived versions of it survive on both Internet Archive and Archive.is .

Archive version of Unite the Right promotion on r/The_Donald via archive.is.

In the post, user John3Sobieski notes that while "many of the people who will be there are National Socialist and Ethnostate sort of groups," he does not "endorse them." However, he then goes on to say, "In this case, the pursuit of preserving without shame white culture, our goals happen to align. Ill be there regardless of the questionable company because saving history is more important than our differences."

Archived version of Unite the Right promotion on r/The_Donald via archive.is.

Another (now deleted) post from Reddit user WeLoveTrump2016 asserts that attending the rally and standing up to "radical leftist terrorism" is a moral imperative: "It is one thing to say you believe in Free Speech. It is another to stand up for the first amendment in the face of thousands of violent Marxists. If the leftists can shut down this event, then they will shut down ours too through the same intimidation and literal terrorism. This rally is a matter of Civil Rights and preserving American History and Heritage. ... We cannot allow BLM and Antifa terrorists to succeed in demolishing our rights to speak and peacefully assemble." (' Antifa ' is technically a group that opposes fascism, though the alt-right uses the term as a pejorative to describe any organized left-wing group.)

Simply deleting these threads doesn't remove the r/The_Donald's association with what happened. It also doesn't erase the cumulative posts that target minorities and advocate for white supremacy.

"It's something that we saw over and over again happening throughout Donald Trump's campaign," says McIlwain. "Not calling out racism and white supremacy, not actively trying to voice concerns about itmuch less ramping it up by contributing in terms of language or making room for overt and explicit displays of racismall of those figure into the picture that contributes to what we saw Saturday. All of that contributes to an environment that makes those types of actions possible, that makes them kind of likely."

The argument, too, that r/The_Donald only supported some ideologies and not others, that its version of white nationalism differed from that version, is disingenuous at best, and useless in practice.

"It shouldnt be a surprise that a lot of the nuance that some of these organizations were trying to think through and communicate would be lost, and that people would devolve to a lowest-common-denominator kind of thinking, which is an America for white Americans versus all others," says Safiya Umoja Noble, assistant professor at USCs Annenberg School of Communication and the author of The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class, and Culture Online .

Over on 4chans politics board , which has often acted as a sort of catch-all for opinions and ideas that are too unsavory even for Reddit, explicit discussions about preserving the white race are a daily occurrence, as are the racial slurs and pejoratives that follow.re

As recently as June 29, one 4chan user recommended that another join Vanguard Americathough the user warned the organization isn't really into street combat. Another user offered, If you want to stomp some Antifa, you are going to have to meet people IRL in an antifa-infested area. These sorts of comments are rarely (if ever) condemned, and more often than not encouraged.

But in the wake of Charlottesville, the focus shifted to deflection. Both 4Chan and Reddit also embraced the notion that Charlottesville was a "false flag," a staged effort by shadowy forces to effectively frame the alt-right for violence. And in a thread titled " DMG CONTROL alt right," users explicitly sought ways "to stand up and show that the MSM [or mainstream media] narrative is false. It's the only way of getting normies back onto our side."

One option: Fake empathy. "Screaming 'false flag' RN is stupid and no one actually believes it," wrote another 4chan. "It's a reach. We're better off having people commemorate her death, acting apologetic just for the PR." Meanwhile, the site shows few (if any) sentiments of sincere remorse, with little demonstrated desire to distance itself from white nationalism even after Saturday's events.

Screenshot of a 4chan thread discussing damage control via archive.is.

In that same damage-control thread, one user laid the alt-right connection to white nationalism out in relatively explicit terms: "The Alt-Right is an attempt to rebrand WN. Using ironic memes and terms that don't mean anything to our enemies but normies find funny and actually lead people to develop a race-based political consciousness is what it is all about. If you are arguing that we should always be pragmatic and open minded and we should bully larpers [live action roll-players] into fucking off then nobody in the modern movement really disagrees with you."

On Sunday, Reddit threads titled things like "Painting Trump supporters and the right as violent white supremacists IS AN ORGANIZED, DELIBERATE SMEAR CAMPAIGN by leftist smear groups such as Media Matters. The fake MSM are all a part of the campaign" and "REMINDER: Antifa are literally showing up at Trump rallies disguised as 'Trump supporters' giving Nazi salutes" have been garnering significant support. The latter currently has over 7,000 upvotes.

In a video posted Saturday entitled , "EXCLUSIVE: Virginia Riots Staged To Bring In Martial Law, Ban Conservative Gatherings," Alex Jones, the man Donald Trump praised as having an "amazing reputation," explains, "It's in the Wikileaks that they want to cause a race war, the Democrats, because they're losing. The Republican leadership is just as bad; they're a part of it." According to Jones, globalist elites staged the violence in Charlottesville in order to trigger a national emergency that will eventually allow them to enact martial law and stop any sort of demonstration from ever happening again. All of which is to say, according to Jones, none of this is the alt-right's fault. In fact, they were set up.

4chan, too, has grasped on to the idea that the deaths at Saturday's rallies might have been planned by the left or, in some instances, the CIA. One user wrote that it "appears to be the perfect set-up to win sympathy for the violent left, while demonizing the right."

But try as the alt-right might, it can't dissociate itself from the death of Heather Heyer, nor any other violence that might follow. The rhetoric it has wielded, and the ideas it has espoused, all contributed to Saturday's tragedy.

"Its a false distinction to say what happens on the internet isnt happening in the real world," said Noble. "People are acting on their beliefs always, in various different moments of their lives. Of course we should continue to expect to see people like Dylan Roof, and people like Milo Yannapolis, Richard Spencer, Steve Bannon, we should expect to see people who have used these internet and online spaces to think and ideate, we should expect to continue to see people doing and acting in the world upon those ideas."

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The Alt-Right Can't Disown Charlottesville - WIRED