5 days ago
The Online Tools That Fueled ‘No Kings' and the Trump Resistance
Jack and Fiona wanted to do something, but they didn't know where to start. For months, the couple had watched as President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, then spearheading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), had turned the US into what they thought was 'a fascist hellscape.' But they live in a deeply red county in a deeply red state in the South, and were worried that speaking out publicly could mean putting them and their children in danger.
Jack, who requested WIRED use a pseudonym to safeguard his identity, has long been familiar with extremism in the US. He says he was brought to his first KKK meeting at the age of 7. 'I have seen the kind of behavior exhibited by MAGA, and know that it's exactly what I saw when I was younger,' he says. 'The strain it is putting on society is the same strain that it puts on every single one [of us] who was in that space.'
So Jack and Fiona turned to technology. Searching on platforms like Reddit and Bluesky, Fiona stumbled on Realtime Fascism, a website that uses AI to trawl the internet for news articles featuring keywords linked to fascism. The tool analyzes those stories to produce a score for the threat posed by fascism in the US at any given time. The rating they found when they opened the site in February? CRITICAL.
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The couple wanted more people to understand what was happening, so they built their own website called Stick It to Fascists. They bought a $100 thermal label printer, created a QR code linking to Realtime Fascism, and began making stickers.
What began with 500 stickers posted all over their small town 'in the heart of MAGA country' quickly grew—with the help of an appeal on Reddit—to a campaign that has so far seen the couple and their children send 750,000 stickers to more than 1,000 people in all 50 states.
Stick It to Fascists is one of countless grassroots efforts that have emerged since Trump took office a second time. Many of them are fueled by technology: printers, QR codes, Reddit, online platforms, encrypted messaging apps like Signal. Across the country, small local groups have used a wide variety of online tools to mobilize their resistance to Trump 2.0 while trying to protect themselves against backlash from the administration. As millions of Americans joined some 2,000 'No Kings' protests last Saturday, these tools were powering the movement.
Spinning up crowdsourced collaborative tools is relatively easy. Maintaining them is much more difficult, however, and without aligned goals or aims, many of them could eventually become digital wastelands. But that is not stopping people who see no other option.
WIRED spoke to more than a dozen people involved in organizing against the Trump administration who all believe that the Democratic Party has not presented a coherent opposition to Trump and DOGE's dismantling of the government. As a result, the organizers say, they had no choice but to get involved.
'We're doing this now, because in a couple of months, what we're doing may be illegal,' Fiona says. 'This administration is already doing everything within their power to limit free speech, and it's extremely important that dissenting voices not be silenced.'
In the early days of Trump's second term, there was concern that an opposition movement against Trump was nowhere to be found.
