White supremacists canceled a planned rally in San Francisco
America has been having a tough time lately. Day after day, the news cycle has been filled with just awful headlines, telling tales of tragic events. But today, we have a tiny bit of good news. In a press release given exclusively to Breitbart, white supremacist organizers announced that they’d canceled a rally in San Francisco.
It’s being reported that the leaders of a right-wing group, Patriot Prayer, who had planned a Saturday rally at Crissy Field in San Francisco for Saturday, called off the event on Friday over fears of a “huge riot,” despite the fact that local and federal officials were in the final stages of putting together security measures designed to head off the kind of violence seen this month in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Joey Gibson of Patriot Prayer said the group will instead hold a “press conference” at 2 p.m. Saturday at Alamo Square Park, though that, too, was canceled.
Joey Gibson, organizer of SF's #PatriotPrayerRally, says he plans to "pop up at random spots in the city" today pic.twitter.com/YLvXt3vfrD
— Casey Tolan (@caseytolan) August 26, 2017
“It doesn’t look safe, a lot of lives are going to be in danger,” Gibson said in a Facebook video. “In our opinion, it seems it would have been a huge riot.”
He also blames local politicians and the media for drumming up fears by “saying that we are white supremacists.” But what else do you call a group built on the racist belief that white people are superior to people of other races and should therefore reign dominant over people of color?
Luckily, instead of the white supremacist rally, hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets of San Francisco today to denounce racism and bigotry, sharing the message that love trumps hate.
San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee said, however, that despite what the white supremacist organizers had said about their event, they hadn’t canceled it in writing, so the city was proceeding as though it was still happening.
"We don’t trust this group. I never have from the beginning," Lee said, as he urged people not to show up at the news conference the group planned to hold instead of the rally.
Mayor Lee’s approach seems like the way to go — it’s better to be safe than sorry as the country remains on edge after a large group of white supremacists, carrying firearms and torches, gathered in Charlottesville earlier this month to protest the removal of a confederate statue in Emancipation Park.
In the end, though, we’re glad to see that counter-protestors won the day.
