The activists behind Ruth Sent Us set up a webpage that lists the conservative Supreme Court justices’ home addresses.
Organizers of the pro-abortion groups who doxed six conservative Supreme Court justices this week ahead of planned marches in front of their homes appear to be mostly street-level activists who trade in leftwing conspiracy theories and fund their work in part through PayPal donations, according to a review of their social media posts and online activity.
The organizers of the groups, including Ruth Sent Us, Vigil for Democracy, and Strike for Choice, appear to have modest online followings. It’s not clear if they have financial backing from any deep-pocketed progressive groups. But it is clear this is not the first time these groups have organized protests in front of the justices’ homes.
Organizers claim the protests planned for Wednesday will be peaceful, but critics say the point is to threaten and intimidate the justices in the wake of Politico’s report on the leak of a draft Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. There also is concern that publishing the justices’ addresses could invite rogue individuals to their homes.
The various websites associated with the doxing appear to be part of a network of small-time leftwing protest groups. National Review reporters reviewed the sites and the organizers’ social media accounts to get a better understanding of who is behind the planned protests.
Ruth Sent Us
Online records indicate the RuthSent.us website, which announced the “Walk-by Wednesday” protests at the homes of “six extremist justices” and published a Google map with their addresses, was created in November 2020 after the sudden death of progressive Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. It’s a simple website, more like an online billboard. When it was first published, a banner at the top of the site said, “To Stop a Corrupt and Illegitimate Government,” followed by “We will #StopTrumpsCoup!” according to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The banner was later changed to “The Supreme Court is Corrupt and Illegitimate,” and “It was even before Amy Coney Barrett was forced onto it!”
The RuthSent.us website was registered on Nov. 2, 2020 to a Sam Spiegel, whose Facebook page identifies him as a director of digital marketing for another leftwing political group, unseat.com, a group that campaigned to “Protect Democracy” and called on Silicon Valley executives to “#StarveTheGOP.” That website is no longer live, and the group’s phone number went directly to voicemail.
According to Spiegel’s Twitter feed, he’s also connected with another leftwing group, Vigil for Democracy, whose website declares that “America is a theocracy” with a “6-3 religious fundamentalist majority on our Supreme Court.” The Vigil for Democracy website urges people to “rise up in mass protests,” and provides links to protest posters activists can download.
Attempts to locate a phone number for Spiegel were unsuccessful, and he did not respond to a direct message on Twitter from a reporter.
Spiegel’s social media pages are filled with typical progressive messaging and retweets, along with some leftwing conspiracies. For example, last June he tweeted that Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “is in cahoots” with former president Donald Trump and former attorney general Bill Barr to “ensure they’re never investigated or prosecuted.”
Pelosi is in cahoots with Bill Barr and Donald Trump. She will ensure they’re never investigated or prosecuted.
Sarah Kendzior is right.
— Sam Spiegel, Ph.D. 🪧 (@UNSEATpac) June 2, 2021
In a 2019 Facebook post, Spiegel said that the members of Opus Dei and the Council for National Policy “include EVERYONE still faithful to Trump. These people will sacrifice themselves to the cause of installing a white Christian theocracy for the next 1000 years. They must destroy democracy first, and they have no qualms about doing it.”
Strike for Choice
The Ruth Sent Us website map includes the addresses of justices Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. The group’s TikTok account seems to indicate that some marchers will silently walk by the homes of the justices wearing costumes depicted in Margaret Atwood’s novel, the Handmaid’s Tale, an increasingly common tactic used by abortion proponents who claim that a Roe reversal represents the first step toward the creation of a dystopian, patriarchal theocracy.
It also suggests that stipends are available for muralists, chalk artists, and graphic designers, because “large-scale art will be included in the protests against the Supreme Court.”
A link on the bottom of the Ruth Sent Us page, reading “Commit to rise up with us!” takes people to a sign-up page for another pro-abortion group, Strike for Choice, where people can sign up to participate as paid or unpaid strikers, donate to a striker, to volunteer to help organize a strike or to amplify their messages on social media.
On its website, strikeforchoice.org, the group claims to have chapters in ten states and in Washington D.C. It also claims to be “endorsed by” a variety of other leftwing groups, including the Wall of Moms, the Black Lives Matter Wall of Many, the Raging Grannies, and Code Pink.
Strike For Choice organizes weekly direct action strikes at Whole Foods, the Texas-based grocery company that “has not bothered to speak up against” Texas’s anti-abortion law, and AT&T, “the largest donor to Texas legislators who wrote and passed” the Texas Heartbeat Act, according to the Strike For Choice website. A video on the website shows protesters dressed in red Handmaid’s Tale robes, walking through a Whole Foods and carrying signs.
The Strike For Choice donate button links to a page on opencollective.com, where people can make donation’s to the group or support a striker. According to the page, Strike For Choice has an estimated annual budget of $747.12.
Strike For Choice’s administrators are listed as Snowden Bishop and Justin Russell.
According to her LinkedIn page, Bishop is a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based radio show host and the editor-in-chief of a pro-cannabis website. She is a former DJ, television reporter and news anchor for NBC affiliates, and she considers herself a “thought leader in several fields,” according to her LinkedIn bio.
Bishop did not return a message left on her work phone by a reporter on Thursday.
Russell is an activist based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He and Bishop appear to head up another website, justresisting.com, created in July 2020. Russell also claims to have help found the Vigil for Democracy group. He accepts donations through PayPal.
He did not respond to a message sent Thursday afternoon via Twitter.
Russell has 7,224 Twitter followers and a history of engaging in leftwing conspiracies.
I made a tweet yesterday about this condo collapse looking like a controlled demolition.
I was wrong. That's fine.
I mentioned that we should look at Rudy Giuliani's involvement in that demolition.
I was really wrong. That's OK.
I am not wrong about reexamining our past
— Justin Russell (@JustResisting) June 26, 2021
In June 2021, he suggested the Surfside condo collapse could have been a controlled demolition, and suggested that Rudy Giuliani could be involved. He later walked that back. “I was really wrong. That’s OK,” he wrote. He then continued posting conspiracies in a long Twitter thread, including writing that Hillary Clinton was right about the “#VastRightWingConspiracy,” that “we need to seriously investigate Rudi Giuliani’s involvement in 9/11,” and that the 2000, 2004, and 2016 elections were stolen. “I DO NOT believe George W. Bush won the 2004 election,” Russell wrote.
In a YouTube video posted on Jan. 5, 2021 and linked to the Just Resisting page, a man who claims to be Russell is protesting outside the San Francisco Federal Building, seemingly alone.
During the 20-minute video, he calls on Pelosi to impeach Trump, declares that “immigrants are dying in concentration camps on the U.S. border” and that “black people are being killed across the country by white supremacists and law enforcement,” and he urges people to “engage in large, sustained mass protests across this country.”
“What are you doing? I flew out to San Francisco to stop this, to do something,” Russell tells his audience, staring into the camera. “You guys have to do something. You cannot sit on Facebook and send pictures of your kids and your families and pretend everything is all right. Things are not all right.”
The video has 21 views and one “like.”
Planning Supreme Court Protests
Next week’s protests will not be the first time Ruth Sent Us and its affiliates have organized in front of Supreme Court justices’ homes. Messages on the group’s private Facebook page and on its public Twitter account indicate that they organized protests in front of Thomas’s and Roberts’s homes in March. They’re also planning a candlelight vigil and march to Kavanaugh’s and Roberts’s homes on Saturday, according to a Facebook post.
Three of the administrators of the Ruth Sent Us private Facebook group are listed anonymously as “Ruth Sent Us,” “Wall of Many,” and “Vigil for Democracy.” But another administrator is Vara Ramakrishnan, an activist from Los Altos Hills, Calif., a tony suburb of San Jose.
Ramakrishnan describes herself on her Facebook page as a “Privileged Non-Black activist for Black Lives Matter. Defender of Democracy. Fierce American mom.” She has 211 Facebook followers. On her Facebook page, she has called defunding the police “a fantastic demand” and “not a slogan,” has called for abolishing the Senate filibuster, and said that “Critical Race Theory” is how racist whites “say the n-word without saying the n-word.”
When reached on the phone by a National Review reporter on Thursday to discuss her involvement with the Ruth Sent Us protest, Ramakrishnan hung up. She did not respond to a follow-up text message asking about the dangers of publishing the justices’ home addresses.
Ramakrishnan made headlines in her local weekly paper in July 2020, when she and her daughter organized a group of about a dozen activists to paint the word “Desegregate” in yellow at the entrance of a residents-only park in the Palo Alto. According to the Palo Alto Weekly, the protesters – teenagers and activists with the Raging Grannies organization – painted their message in the moonlight over four hours on a Sunday, only to awake to find a city employee erasing their work with a power hose by 7 a.m.
“We wanted to look over the work in the daytime and touch it up,” Ramakrishnan told the paper. “We never got a chance to do that.”