Lefty Protest Group Rocks the Right with Unruly Tactics

By Michael Lovito, July 20, 2022

On July 6, a group of protestors gathered outside of Morton’s Steakhouse in downtown Washington to protest Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanagh, who was dining inside, and the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade. Two days later, the Morton’s PR team released a statement calling the demonstration “an act of selfishness and void of decency,” perhaps expecting to shame the “unruly protestors” who “unduly harassed” the restaurant’s guest. It didn’t work.

“DC Service Industry Workers…If you see Kavanaugh, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Coney Barrett or Roberts DM us with the details!,” @ShutDown_DC tweeted. “We’ll Venmo you $50 for a confirmed sighting and $200 if they’re still there 30 mins after your message.”

Unruly, uncivil, unfair – whatever you want to call it, ShutDownDC doesn’t care. Over the past two and a half years, the Washington-based direct action group has taken the fight for abortion rights, climate legislation, and a host of other progressive priorities to DC’s streets, disrupting traffic and, occasionally, steak dinners to grab both headlines and the ears of politicians. To conservatives like Tucker Carlson, who encouraged his viewers to flood their Twitter account with phony tips, they’re menaces. But to the hundreds of Americans who turn out to their demonstrations, they’re the vanguard in the fight for, in the words of organizer Hope Neyer, “the world we want to live in and the world that we deserve.”

Tucker Carlson’s Name-Drop Results in a Flood of Donations

ShutDownDC was founded in 2019 by a group of labor organizers, climate activists, and other demonstrators as a sort of adult auxiliary to the student climate strikes inspired by Greta Thunberg. Their first attempt to “shut down” the nation’s capital involved blocking traffic with their own bodies to “send the message that business as usual cannot be allowed to continue in the face of the climate crisis.” The group has been working to bring awareness to progressive causes and get in the face of stubborn politicians ever since, organizing demonstrations addressing the unequal distribution of Covid-19 vaccines, criminal justice reform, the filibuster, and Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

While ShutDownDC’s demonstrations have attracted up to 500 participants in the past, Hope Neyer, a 21-year-old rising senior studying public health at American University who volunteers on the group’s communications team, estimates that the average turnout for one of the group’s protests is between 75 and 100. In terms of structure, ShutDownDC is “decentralized and non-hierarchical,” with decision making guided by 12 core organizers who also lead working groups within the organization that focus on communications, training, and strategy and tactics. All of ShutDownDC’s organizers are volunteers with day jobs and the group is funded entirely by donations, which surged after they were namechecked by Carlson.

“The benefit of being name dropped on Tucker is that a lot of people sympathetic to our cause were also made aware of us, and we’ve been able to fundraise pretty successfully off of this,” Neyer said. “I can’t share specific figures, but I can tell you that we raised, by an order of 10, more money in the month since Tucker Carlson referenced us than we have in any month since the 2020 elections.”

Contrary to Carlson’s attempts to paint ShutDownDC as a cadre of shadowy antifa supersoldiers, Ann Swearingen, a 54 year-old climate change activist who first got involved with the organization in the lead up to the 2020 election, says the organization is welcoming and open about its goals and tactics.

“We’re not gatekeeper-y,” Swearingen said, “We operate with kind of a transparency model, like ‘this is us, this is what we do.’ I think it’s a good culture.”

An Unwelcome House Call at Mitch McConnell’s Home

Kavanaugh isn’t the first public figure who’s been singled out by ShutDownDC – in November, the group organized a “people’s filibuster” in which demonstrators spoke and played music for 26 straight hours outside of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s home to protest the Senate rule that effectively requires a 60-vote majority for most legislation to pass the chamber. But this is the first time ShutDownDC has offered a “bounty” for the location of one of their targets, a decision that was unwittingly inspired by the very people who tried to shame them for the first Kavanaugh protest.

 “With the combination of the Morton’s PR guy making us look way cooler than we actually are and the ensuing media storm, we decided it might be a good time to put that out there,” Neyer said. “People sent us a lot of nasty DMs, but it blew over generally. I’ll be excited to see if this process allows us to actually come into contact with the justices that voted against abortion access.”

While the Morton’s incident and the bounty tweet has left ShutDownDC’s organizers sifting through a mountain of phony tips (Neyer estimates that their Twitter account received about 700 DMs since the Tucker Carlson segment), it’s also brought them a newfound notoriety. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez retweeted a Politico report about the protest and sarcastically suggested that demonstrators should have let Kavanaugh “eat cake,” while Fox News White House Correspondent Peter Doocy asked White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre if Supreme Court justices should expect a “right to privacy.” Even Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg addressed the protest during an appearance on Fox News.

“I can’t even tell you the number of spaces, venues, and scenarios where I’ve been protested,” Buttigieg said. “The bottom line is this: any public figure should always, always be free from violence, intimidation, and harassment, but should never be free from criticism or people exercising their first amendment rights.”

Despite their current association with abortion rights, ShutDownDC maintains a broad mandate. Later this month, they plan on collaborating with climate activist group Now or Never to disrupt the congressional baseball game and expect to take part in demonstrations regarding immigration policy and the midterm elections later this year. It’s unlikely that any of these protests will be as notable, or, depending on your perspective, notorious, as the one that took place outside of Morton’s earlier this month. But where some people see a breach of privacy, Neyer sees a message successfully delivered.

“The people you claim to represent, the people whose lives you are controlling when you make these choices, are listening,” she said of the office holders targeted by ShutDownDC. “And if you don’t actually represent them, it is well within their rights to confront you and share why it matters that you made that decision.”  

Michael Lovito is a Brooklyn-based reporter and critic whose work has appeared in Salon, Brooklyn Magazine, Pavement Pieces, and The District. He also serves as editor-in-chief of the politics and pop culture website The Postrider.  @MLovito

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