If the pro-abortion agitators styling themselves “Jane’s Revenge” received critical support from an international network supporting leftist terrorism, why are Americans only learning this four years later?
The answer to this key question has a great deal to do with the left-wing groups that influenced the Biden administration, ensuring that the same institutions that aggressively monitored threats to abortion centers treated attacks on pregnancy centers as a low priority.
The State Department and Treasury Department last week imposed sanctions on Autistici/Inventati, also referred to as the A/I Collective, an Italy-based entity that repotedly provided key online services for Rose City Antifa in Portland, the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, and the pro-abortion agitators of “Jane’s Revenge.”
The State Department stated that Jane’s Revenge, which claimed responsibility for firebombing pregnancy centers after the leak of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization opinion, relied on A/I Collective tools and services “to publish official communiqués and claims of responsibility for violent and criminal acts to incite copycat attacks.”
While federal officials previously prosecuted individuals connected to some Jane’s Revenge attacks, the State Department’s designation publicly places the group within a broader international network and identifies a foreign platform that allegedly helped disseminate its message.
During the Biden years, the Justice Department seemed not to ask whether Jane’s Revenge belonged to a larger extremist ecosystem. Rather, it focused on protecting abortion facilities.
The A/I Collective
According to the State Department, the A/I Collective “builds and operates the digital infrastructure for violent Antifa cells and other far-left militants across the world.” The collective’s hackers and tech developers provide “encrypted chats and email, web hosting, secure video conferencing and streaming, anonymity shields, and a suite of other technological tools,” aiming to “support the operations of far-left terrorist networks.”
“The group has become a key node in a transnational campaign by violent and criminal far-left networks to destabilize the United States and its partners across Europe, the Western Hemisphere, and beyond,” the department notes.
For its part, the A/I Collective claimed it provides tools for “digital self-defense.”
"We will not back down," the group said. "Antifascism and anticapitalism are not terrorism. Protesting is not terrorism.”
Jane’s Revenge
Following the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion in the case overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, bands of pro-abortion agitators targeted scores of pro-life pregnancy centers and Catholic churches. The agitators fire-bombed pregnancy centers and spray-painted “Jane’s Revenge” on their doors.
The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division only leveled five charges against these pro-abortion vandals, while it prosecuted more than 50 pro-life protesters who attempted to attempted to dissuade women from having their aborted babies killed in the womb.
When asked about the discrepancy, Attorney General Merrick Garland meekly replied that the DOJ just couldn’t track down vandals who attacked under cover of darkness.
A Systemic Bias
Why did Garland think this would be an acceptable answer? America’s security establishment views terrorism differently based on ideology.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio hit on the broader problem well in his speech about the threat of leftist terrorism in July.
“We have think tanks and fellowships and journals and consultancies, with the unspoken understanding among them that only one kind of political violence was a true threat to the system,” Rubio said. “A bomb planted by a neo-Nazi group was a nefarious and murderous act of evil. It is. But a bomb planted by a Marxist revolutionary — well, that’s just merely a tragic excess of idealism.”
Rubio argued that “this extraordinary ideological prejudice” grew so bad that “people in positions of power have repeatedly dismissed acts of violence and even terrorism as legitimate forms of political expression so long as they served a left-wing cause.”
Rubio rightly mentioned the George Floyd riots in the summer of 2020, and Americans should well remember the arsons of Teslas last year.
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The Pro-Abortion Group Deputized by DOJ
The Justice Department didn’t just overlook attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers—it worked closely with abortion activist groups to target pro-lifers, according to a report from the Trump Justice Department’s Weaponization Working Group.
Garland resurrected the National Task Force on Violence Against Reproductive Health Care Providers, which he charged with investigating potential violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. The task force developed a close working relationship with the National Abortion Federation.
Sanjay Patel, the task force director, worked with NAF’s security team, and he described the team’s director, Michelle Davidson, as an “MVP” in bringing incidents to his “attention, often in real time, which usually result in an investigation/ prosecution.” Patel regularly communicated with NAF, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and the Feminist Majority Foundation.
By contrast, Patel and his task force mostly kept pro-life groups at arm’s length. According to the report, the Biden DOJ even refused to hand over evidence to pro-life defendants, evidence the office shared with pro-abortion activists.
According to the report, Patel “monitored” pro-life activists for years before charging them. The National Abortion Federation sent him “security reports” or “dossiers” on pro-life activists.
For instance, NAF sent the Justice Department a 135-page report on an Operation Save America convention in June 2021, complete with a conference schedule, lodging, and multipage dossiers on “anti-choice individuals,” many of whom Trump would pardon after the Biden DOJ brought FACE Act charges against them. The dossiers contained personal information, such as addresses, photographs of the pro-lifers with their spouses and minor children, names of associates and affiliated ministries, and even driver’s license numbers.
NAF reportedly provided surveillance of pro-life activists, tipped the DOJ off to their activities, and even provided roadmaps for charging documents.
Willful Blindness?
So, if the Trump administration is correct about the international terror network supporting Jane’s Revenge, why did the Biden administration fail to decipher it?
It remains unclear whether Biden officials had any inkling about the connections between Jane’s Revenge and the international leftist terror network. It is clear, however, that these questions received little attention due to a myopic focus on advancing abortion access after Dobbs.
Did the Biden administration’s ideological assumptions and its close relationships with leftist groups blind it to the patterns that were there all along?
This article derives from reporting and analysis on the Daily Signal.
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