After Dobbs, Angry Pro-Choice Protesters Struggle to Stay Focused

Washington, D.C. — If the scene outside of the Supreme Court on Friday morning was full of joy and promise, and defined by its hugs, smiles, and bubbles, the one outside of the Court that night was its opposite.

Chants — some related to the ostensible purpose of the protest, others not — rippled through the angry crowd.

One frequent refrain, “we protect us!”, reflected activists’ disillusionment with the political system, as well as their frustration with the Biden administration.

While Biden delivered remarks in opposition to the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on Friday afternoon, and various cabinet members expressed their intention to flout the ruling, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre responded to a question on the decision by admitting that she didn’t “have anything to read out to you specifically on a strategy — a strategic strategy — around the decision that was made by the Court yesterday.”

“Where the f*** is she?” asked one speaker about Vice President Kamala Harris.

Most of the derision, however, was reserved for the protesters’ more direct opponents on the issue, and if any one man was the focus of that anger, it was Justice Clarence Thomas. Numerous signs targeted the only African-American member of the Court to have heard oral arguments in Dobbs, with some calling for his removal from the bench, and others blaming him for his wife, activist Ginni Thomas’s misbegotten belief that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from Donald Trump. No other justice earned his or her own legion of derogatory signage.

And yet, the rally was much too disjointed to stay focused on any one figure, or even any one issue.

One speaker stated matter-of-factly that “this state, the United States, this is the result of colonial violence. It will continue under imperialism.” The police presence around the protest, heavy enough to leave Capitol police buses lined up from the eastern side of the Capitol Building to First Street, was repeatedly berated. “This is a f******* police state,” asserted one advocate from the podium.

Other orators called Dobbs itself “a distraction” and argued that the decision “is bigger than whatever government s*** you got going on,” before urging the crowd to pull out their phones and follow her group on Instagram.

Still others asked that you “make some motherf****** noise” if you’d had an abortion. The only tangible advice or “assistance” offered was a phone number that activists said could help provide abortion pills to women who might now find in-person abortion services impossible to obtain.

Despite the rhetoric of the rally’s leaders, the crowd was not an energetic one, and was admonished more than once for their lackluster echoes. Indeed, the only figure to inspire any heights of emotion during the rally was a pro-life representative — there were only a few outside of the Court on Friday evening — who showed up with speakers that he used to play music at a considerable distance from the pro-choice stage.

The boisterous pro-lifer solicited song requests from, and tried to develop a good-natured relationship with the bulk of the crowd, suggesting that they go lobby for abortion rights in their own jurisdictions. There were not many takers for this approach, however, and the pop-up DJ, who identified himself to National Review as “Captain Matthew,” found himself under duress from a barrage of middle fingers, expletives, and physical attempts to interfere with his movement and his equipment’s functioning.

One young lady stood an inch away from him, blowing a whistle and using a siren attached to a bullhorn she carried to drown him out.

When a fellow pro-lifer had the temerity to fist-bump Captain Matthew, he became a fellow target of the rest of the crowd, even earning a breath full of cigarette smoke to his face.

Eventually, Matthew determined that the abuse had rendered his mission unproductive, picked up his equipment, and left the scene. In an interview with National Review, he described that mission as “bring[ing] peace.”

“I didn’t expect it to go this way,” he admitted. “I was playing classical music again, which I prefer to do. I just prefer playing Beethoven and stuff, and that, I’ve seen at other rallies, that calms people down, but that pissed them off. Everything I tried, Bob Marley pissed them off.”

“I value life, you see a little baby like that, how can you not? Life is sacred, it begins it begins at conception. The Supreme Court did the right thing, take it down to the states where it should be,” continued the beret-clad activist, who said he helped deliver each of his six children. “I told all these people here, ‘go back to your states, learn how to run for office, speak well, get educated, and you can impact the laws with what you want.'”

“I said, ‘I don’t agree with you. But God bless y’all, this is how we participate in our system,'” he added. “I came to bring peace, peace was my objective.”

He had come to the wrong place at the wrong time.