The act or process of becoming an individual. I'm 24 and living in beautiful Los Angeles, California. I aim to have a life full of adventures and a little bit of magic ^_^
Social media platforms, collaborative online tools, and encrypted messaging are all helping to power a massive, decentralized resistance to
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.
Scientists in weather and climate are live streaming for 100 hours to make their case to the American public.
They are live streaming, but engagement is necessary for it to work. SHARE THIS WITH PEOPLE, RECORD THE STREAM, POST CLIPS OF IT THAT ARE FUNNY, if you can tune in, PLEASE DO!
This is something that has to be heard by as many people as possible. Put it on in the background! See if you can get other people to watch it! Do whatever you can do support those who are trying to be supported! Anything and everything helps!
using "what were YOU doing at the devils sacrament" to mean "yeah i made an embarrassing reference but you understood it which is also embarrassing" is very funny to me
my favorite part is that absolutely nobody says this except here. so if you use it in public, it's a dead giveaway that you spent the last ten years on tumblr. but then again, they recognized it, which means they were at the devil's sacrament
I tested this theory in the wild the other day at work. I was on a call with my department lead and a few other folks and I replied to an email the DL had sent me, thinking that, because he was on this call, he wouldn't notice when I sent it and would not catch me multitasking.
However, he replied to said email within five minutes, asking a question that required an answer. So I answered and was like "Also, I was going to apologize for answering emails during this call, but I see we're both here at the Devil's Sacrament, so I don't think an apology is necessary."
I watched him read that on screen and try not to laugh. And then at the end of the call as everyone started saying goodbye, he goes, "Hey, MJ, I meant to tell you. I like your shoelaces."
And I looked straight into my camera, stone cold serious, and said, "Thanks. I stole them from the president."
And the rest of the team was like, "What...the fuck...?" before he abruptly ended the call for everyone.
So now my DL and I know this about each other. He could be any one of us.
“Only seventeen” implies that seventeen is an unusually precocious age at which to assume the title of Dancing Queen, which opens up the possibility of anyone above that age being eligible and possibly even more likely to qualify.
China has existed for 5000 years and it will still exist in 5000 years' time when the United States of America will be forgotten dust, let's be honest.
In a footnote to a May 10, 2005, memorandum from the Office of Legal Council, the Bush attorney general’s office argued that restricting the caloric intake of terrorist suspects to 1000 calories a day was medically safe because people in the United States were dieting along those lines voluntarily.
“While detainees subject to dietary manipulation are obviously situated differently from individuals who voluntarily engage in commercial weight-loss programs, we note that widely available commercial weight-loss programs in the United States employ diets of 1000 kcal/day for sustain periods of weeks or longer without requiring medical supervision,” read the footnote. “While we do not equate commercial weight loss programs and this interrogation technique, the fact that these calorie levels are used in the weight-loss programs, in our view, is instructive in evaluating the medical safety of the interrogation technique.”
Another another friendly reminder that the Minnesota Starvation Experiment subjected adult men who were VOLUNTEERS to 1,560 calorie diets and the psychological effects were so profound that one volunteer cut three of his own fingers off and could not remember why.
These men were volunteers who knew exactly what they would be going through and when it would end, and who believed they were doing it for a good and moral reason (the research was used to help rehabilitate victims of starvation and famine at the end of WWII).
And these are the things we are expected to engage in FOREVER to stay at a “healthy” weight.
Reading about the Minnesota Starvation experiment was my wake-up call. It was what kicked me out of my eating disorder. The guy missing three fingers, whatever his name was, he was the last straw for me.
Scared me so fucking bad I stopped restricting my food that day, and never went back to it.
Anorexia has ~16% mortality rate, slightly higher than acted upon suicidal ideation. It’s more lethal than actively trying to kill oneself and this is why.
Does anyone else remember when Elon was like "if anyone knows how to end world hunger for 6 billion USD, I'll fund it" and UNICEF was like "we're going to spend a month to make a plan to end world hunger for 6 billion USD and Elon is going to fund it" and Elon was like "actually, nah" and then bought Twitter instead?
I think that was one of the worst things I'll ever see in my life.
I still think that should be the thing for which he's the most famous. It should be brought up every time he's mentioned. In any news article, any interview, any history book. "Elon Musk, who was offered a chance to end world hunger and turned it down." Put it on his fucking gravestone.
Slowing down/blocking as much as possible is key right now, because part of what Trump-Musk and the GOP are doing is moving fast and breaking stuff and hoping that a) momentum will continue to carry them forward and b) people won't react in time to prevent them from being entrenched.
Injunctions, lawsuits, restraining orders, filibusters, protests - these all take time, energy, and resources to focus on and respond to, and that means they can't press ahead as much as they'd like. It means more time to have people realize the consequences and how horrible this is, and more time and opportunity to continue shifting public opinion.
And, because of the overconfidence and inexperience (among other things) of those forces now in power, they're not great at responding and handling these things. The sloppiness and laziness is what helped hobble a lot of things in the first administration, and it's not gone away, for better or worse.
I can't emphasize enough that when a Senator or Congressman sends a letter to a Federal agency demanding answers, the Federal agency has to give them answers.
All federal agencies have an Office of Legislative Affairs specifically to deal with congressional requests, or "Congressionals."
If a member of Congress says "under what law are you doing this??" and you don't have a good answer, you change what you're doing.
The Treasury Department restricted Musk's access to payment systems because of a Congressional letter.
If you want something to ask of your congressman or senator - ask them to write a letter to the agency of your pick demanding answers about the issue of your choice!!
Fun Fact about me: I eat like a toddler. Despite the fact that I know A Lot about nutrition, and I recognize that I literally feel significantly better when there's lots of fruits and veggies in my diet, I will not actually eat these things Just Because They're Good™ For Me.
It literally has to taste good or I will mush it around with my fork and reject it. So I add cheese and roasted nuts and balsamic glaze and oil (and spices of course, but those are insufficient by themselves) to my veggies almost every time. It's the only way I'll actually eat them.
Prioritize taste. Nutrients are so important, but force feeding yourself gruel is miserable and not a long term solution. Make the nutrients Tasty.
Enjoying your food is not a vice. Refusing to eat foods you don't enjoy is actually extremely normal and rational behavior.
So many people in the tags have mentioned this study that demonstrated enjoyment of your food literally increases your nutrient absorption from that food. And conversely disliking your food impairs your nutrient absorption.
And this is very true and a very important point, and I wanna dig into that a little more, because enjoying your food triggers the relaxation mechanism in your brain.
This is actually why it improves digestion. Because your brain gets the signal that you're safe and happy and it can focus on the complex work of digestion. It can't do that when you're stressed because it shifts its priorities to watching out for possible dangers.
So when you're force feeding yourself nutrient paste in the name of Health™ you are literally putting your body into a stress state. You are impairing your digestion and could be losing significant amounts of the nutrients in that food.
There are zero benefits to eating foods you hate UNLESS you can prepare them in a way that you enjoy. Our enjoyment of our food is an evolutionary mechanism that is imperative to our ability to effectively digest that food.
Your taste also depends on textures and food colours you like. Right now I’m using vegetable seasoning salt, flavour infused olive oil, rosemary and roast chicken or beef seasoning. Roast your veggies in these and they’ll almost taste like meat.
My coworker also once suggested soaking some vegetables like broccoli in lemon juice for a bit before cooking to get some of that earthy taste out.
You can also hide your veggies in soups and dips. Chop it up small or straight up blend them in if you don’t like to see them. Blend nuts into it too.
You can not only eat veggies but drink it too. Carrot, spinach, ginger and apple go well together. Add sugar to it to enhance flavour. Some companies sell some delicious ones.
My family also occasionally makes carrot juice by blending carrots, ginger, evaporated milk, condensed milk, rum, cinnamon, vanilla, nutmeg and sugar (we personally put Ensure in it but you don’t have to) and that our holiday drink.
You don’t have to eat every veggie out there. Start with a favourite you know you’ll turn to everytime you need it.
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