June 24, 2022 was a momentous day for both life and democracy.  The SCOTUS decision in Dobbs, hardly a cliffhanger by standards of the Roberts court, sent the issue of abortion back to the states where it belonged and put the endemic malevolence and selective outrage of the Democrat party on full display.  Before that anticipated decision, Democrats were already circling the wagons,  huddling into a troop of see-no-evil monkeys and averting the glare of political violence in plain sight.

Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, who have issued an ideological fatwa against MAGA voters using the January 6^th Commission, pushed the pause button long enough to promote insurrection against a branch of government. They did so despite understanding that inflammatory rants over the Dobbs decision could spur weak-minded individuals such as Nicholas Roske to action. The House Speaker could hardly restrain her arm and hand spasticity as she swatted off annoying questions about kidnap and assassination plots against conservative justices and the flurry of pregnancy center and church fire bombings. Pelosi realizes that the fuse is burning down to November and, with a series of high court setbacks over guns, abortion, voting rights, and freedom of speech and religion, the train is coming off the rails, along with much of the progressive agenda. 

Even more frustrating to both majority leaders is that the Dobbs ruling is not giving the Dems the expected bounce. Vile comments and disrespect of the party elite toward the Court and justices, rhetoric that has gaslit street actions in blue cities still rebuilding their communities after the peaceful protests of 2020, have exacted little reaction from the voters-at-large. Democrats have yet to understand that inciting violence as a gambit to achieve one’s political goals is a loss leader for a party that claims to champion the lower and middle class while offering them little more than rioting, crime, inflation, and scarcity of basic needs.

Republicans, by and large, take out their grievances at the ballot box, while Democrats rely upon intimidation and violence.  To make their point after Dobbs, Democrats have once again unleashed their paramilitary wing of shock troops, ending the truce brought about by the installation of the 46^th resident of the Oval Office and their dreams of upending fair elections, disarming the most well-armed populace in the free world, and breaking the back of the middle class before they awoke from the pandemic.

Leading the charge is a group of dilletante firebugs and graffiti artists called Jane’s Revenge, a nom de guerre commemorating Jane Roe, actually the alias of Norma McCorvey, the original plaintiff who in 1969 sought an abortion in pro-life Texas. McCorvey was also the inspiration for Chicago’s Jane Collective that aborted 11,000 babies in violation of the law in the early seventies.  Many Americans don’t know that twenty years after Roe v. Wade, McCorvey turned her back on her comrades in the movement and lived out her days as a staunch Catholic and pro-lifer.  

The reprobates of Jane’s Revenge are a pop-up group of pro-abortion extremists that hurl Molotov cocktails, smash windows, and spray paint the walls of pregnancy centers, religious institutions, and holy statues in the dead of night.  It is a geographically-dispersed alliance of mostly black bloc feminists in league with Antifa and egged on by the hacktivist group, Anonymous.

The group called for a Night of Rage -- a pro-abortion Kristallnacht -- on the day of the Dobbs decision, taking a page from the Days of Rage in Chicago in 1969.  A half-century apart, both events suffered the same fate at the hands of well-prepared law enforcement.  Except for the usual urban locales, Portland and Seattle, where antifascists rule, the event was a non-starter and garnered little public attention.  

At least forty suspected incidents of arson and vandalism are linked to Jane’s Revenge, sixteen of which have been attributed by online communiques of similar language and terms, suggesting at least some level of organizational sophistication and communication.  The group recognizes  that size matters to its survival, claiming the movement will be “unsustainable if it continues to rely on the same few hundred people.” 

Is a more violent terror campaign in store for Jane’s Revenge?  It seems probable, given a rising desperation that their incendiary antics against property will not bring back abortion as a phony federal right.  Neither has it intimidated the justices.  Beyond the fizzled Night of Rage, the muscled conservative majority on the Supreme Court has continued to issue several decisions devastating to the progressive agenda.

It is characteristic of protest movements that a lunatic fringe devolves into terrorism in furtherance of their cause.  For Jane’s Revenge, history offers a road map to insurgency.  In the sixties through the eighties, militant activism centered on the imperialism of America and its allies, coalescing around the hot button political issues du jour, such as the Vietnam War or corporate and military investments in Prime Minister P.W. Botha’s oppressive South Africa regime.  Groups like the Weather Underground, Black Liberation Army, FALN, and United Freedom Front recognized the ineffectiveness of curbside antics and the futility of face-to-face police confrontations.  Each group hardened into one or more small cells to carry out a subversive campaign of bombings, robberies, and assassinations.

Jane’s Revenge, Antifa, and co-eds protesting in colorful plumage are all in play for the summer of 2022.  Whatever is to be accomplished on the progressive agenda cannot be trusted to the November voters and must rely upon slim congressional majorities and swing-state judicial and legislative activism to keep the sluice open to election shenanigans.  As the midterms loom, the Left is also hoping that the drumbeat against Dobbs along with Trump-stopping subcommittees and investigations will divert Americans from the successive and intentional failures of the Biden administration’s domestic and international policies.

Workarounds for the Dobbs ruling are underway as the Biden administration searches for regulatory loopholes in the cabinet departments.  HHS commissioner Xavier Becerra is plotting to subsidize transportation to abortion-friendly states and send out abortion pills like mail-in ballots. Congressional power brokers and blue-state governors are pushing Joe Biden to open abortion clinics on federal lands, such as national parks, in pro-life red states.  All of this is in violation of the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal spending on abortions.

Other progressive have suggested a public emergency declaration, sidelining the legislative and judicial branches and ruling by executive fiat similar in policy and practice to the way the federal departments imposed COVID shutdown and vaccination mandates. Joe Biden is favoring a more heavy-handed approach, prompting Congress to set aside the filibuster rule and codify abortion rights into law.

We now know that it takes a political tempest to force Attorney General Merrick Garland to do his job in a manner beyond that of a figurehead who parrots the talking points of his political masters.  In a series of letters signed by a plurality of congressional Republicans, Garland was put on notice to either investigate Jane’s Revenge or resign in shame for nonfeasance of duty.  The following day brought word that the FBI had finally stepped up to open a domestic terror investigation, leaving one to wonder that if the House and Senate minority had not turned down the screws on the DoJ, would crickets still be the only chorus coming from the J. Edgar Hoover Building? 

In the months ahead, Jane’s Revenge will serve as combative tip of the progressive spear.  In support, the Left is constructing a veneer, branding pregnancy centers as fake clinics, greenlighting fire bombings by silence, and concocting alibis to downplay the violence.  Ethical terrorism is put forth as one pretext; namely, hissy fits against property that does not take lives but advances preferred narratives,  goals, and agendas.

Image: Lorie Shaull