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.
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.
But the reality is that protest movements this time around are just different than during Trump’s first term. Last time, while groups like the Women’s March and others organized large-scale demonstrations in the early months of his first presidency, this time around opposition is being driven by decentralized groups and individuals focused on a smaller-scale approach.
The change from a top-down movement to a much more decentralized one is key to understanding what’s happening, says Dana Fisher, a professor of sociology at American University and author of American Resistance: From the Women’s March to the Blue Wave. “This is what we who study social movements call a moment of tactical innovation, where there are going to be all these innovative ideas about ways to break through and to get people to mobilize and work together in these very dark moments,” Fisher says.
People are still in the streets, as well. Data from the Crowd Counting Consortium, a joint project of the Harvard Kennedy School and the University of Connecticut, shows that in late January and February alone there were over twice as many street protests in the US than in February 2017. The numbers have kept growing.
The protests at Tesla dealerships, for example, began as a grassroots effort that has grown into a nationwide movement. There are also people working together online to combat the disinformation being pushed by Musk and DOGE, in addition to individuals like Jack and Fiona doing what they can. In isolation, these are small-scale protests; viewed as a whole, they show the level of anger that ordinary Americans feel at what has been happening in Washington over the past five months.
The number and scale of the protests has grown significantly, with millions of people turning out at more than a thousand separate protests in all 50 states on April 5. Last Saturday’s No Kings protest, which was organized by dozens of groups, drew over 5 million people to more than 2,100 events across the nation, according to the organizers, though notably not in Washington, DC, where Trump held his military parade to celebrate the US Army’s 250th anniversary.
Many of these calls for protest can be traced back to a single post on a subreddit called 50501, which stands for 50 protests, 50 states, 1 movement.
Sydney Wilson first learned about the online movement against Trump through this subreddit. Her journey into political activism began in late January while she was idly poking around on Reddit and came across a flyer for an event in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, at which citizens would be protesting against the Trump administration. Wilson was intrigued, but living 200 miles away, she wondered if there were any events closer to her home in Pittsburgh.
That’s when she found 50501. Though the subreddit had been created just a few days earlier, it was already amassing huge support. It began on January 25 with a single Reddit post calling for citizens to fight back against executive overreach. The idea took hold, and within 10 days, those who signed up had organized protests in 80 cities across the US. Two weeks later, on February 17, they held another set of protests, with thousands of people attending.
Wilson, who had attended political protests in the past but had never been involved in organizing them, joined the group’s Discord channel to help plan.
“Not even in my wildest dreams did I think that my first protest that I organized with another group of Pennsylvanians would have 200 people show up,” Wilson tells WIRED. “Then the next one, I think we had 300 or 400, so I’m optimistic right now. The trick will be to keep this energy going.”
Like Wilson, many of the 311,000 subscribers to the subreddit and the 17,000 members of the group’s Discord have no experience in organizing protests. Still, they felt they had to.
“Democracy needs to be defended, and it’s up to us as community members to stand up and do that work, because no one else will do it for us,” Wilson says.
The 50501 group also uses a wide variety of other online platforms to coordinate their efforts, including encrypted messaging apps like Signal and Matrix, which smaller subgroups use for sensitive conversations. Platforms like Mobilize.us allow participants to share information about upcoming protests, while state-level groups come up with ideas for signs and chants on shared Google Docs.
“Everybody’s kind of using different strategies to communicate, so it’s all over the place,” says TJ Demetriou, the public affairs officer for a 50501 subgroup for veterans. “If you’re involved in a couple different groups, it can be confusing.”
Discord is the primary platform for planning and assigning volunteer positions within local groups, but it also serves as a place for the community to vent. Following the group’s protests on March 4, many of the members gathered on the group’s Discord server to watch Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress.
The “general chat” channel was quickly filled with anger, not at what Trump was saying but at the response from the Democrats in the chamber, who had decided the best way to confront Trump was to wear pink blouses and hold up tiny signs that no one could see.
“I kid you not, they are holding signs instead of booing,” one member wrote incredulously. “Bunch of spineless fucks,” another added, after no other Democrat came to the defense of representative Al Green of Texas, who was removed from the chamber for heckling Trump.
“Well I’m glad YOU all are protesting because holy shit that was a weak showing from dems with their bitch=ass [sic] paddles and pink shirts and blue ties,” another member wrote.
Though the group has had a lot of successes, some infighting has unfortunately become a distraction.
In April, the person who posted the original 50501 post, known online as Evolved Fungi, locked down the subreddit entirely, claiming that some national groups were seeking to take control of the 50501 group for their own ends. According to a since-deleted post on Reddit, Fungi believed someone had sought to file trademark applications for the 50501 name. A member of the 50501 leadership group subsequently claimed in a Reddit post that there was an attempt to trademark the name and create a 501c4 entity, but that this was done by “a separate, independent group of three people wholly unconnected to the broader 50501 group.
Fungi, who was posting anonymously, says they were doxed and accused of what some felt was inappropriate behavior during a Zoom call with other members of the 50501 group. Some 50501 members circulated a petition calling for them to step down before they finally did so. Fungi declined to comment when contacted by WIRED.
Fungi’s departure didn’t slow the movement down. By late spring the organization was deeply involved in organizing the No Kings protests on June 14, ultimately helping bring people to protests across the US and bolstering the movement’s momentum even further.
The 50501 movement is not the only grassroots effort that began life online. The Tesla Takedown protests began with a single Bluesky post that exploded in large part thanks to social media posts, including protesters’ pictures and videos outside dealerships. These efforts were boosted when celebrities got involved, and Instagram reels went viral from people like Grammy-winning singer Sheryl Crow waving goodbye to her Tesla.
Other movements online, including tools for keeping tabs on the Trump administration, have also sprung up. One online tracker follows how many of Trump’s policy actions align with Project 2025’s goals. As of this writing, it shows that more than half of them have been completed or are in progress. Another tracker, Spotlight on DOGE, aims to fact-check claims made about the department’s savings. The organizer, who asked to remain anonymous, says they recruited more than a dozen professionals, including lawyers and doctors, across the US to help analyze DOGE’s actual savings.
But for all the work being done online to organize, educate, and plan, veteran activists who protested the first Trump presidency believe that success this time around will rely on turning that online support and activity into real-world demonstrations.
“I do think that there’s a lot of work to do to move people from where we are now to the kind of mass society-wide struggle that it will take to stop this regime,” Sam Goldman, host of the Refuse Fascism podcast, tells WIRED.
“What this is going to require is sacrifice,” he continues. “It is going to require what people did in the Arab Spring, which was, get in the streets, stay in the streets, bring more people into the streets, coming back again and again and again, and not stopping until their demands were met.”
But deciding what those demands are can be difficult, especially in a movement that is so decentralized, and often leaderless. As national groups and bigger names seek to leverage recently activated grassroots activism, conflicts and disagreements are inevitable. This happened among the leadership of the Women’s March, and it’s already happened within the 50501 subreddit.
Last week, as people took to the streets of Los Angeles to protest deportation raids by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, Trump called in the National Guard and Marines over the objections of California governor Gavin Newsom and LA mayor Karen Bass. Protests persisted anyway, as online supporters hit the streets.
