Nine days until the march. They were all about the message now. A million little details to work out, but that was not the focus at MFOL headquarters. No one would remember if the buses got snarled getting folks there, or if some fine was levied for parking them wrong. If they failed to inspire young activists, they lost. If the march came off as too juvenile, too unfocused, too privileged, too white, or even too boring to keep millions tuned in to TV . . . loss. Every previous group of survivors had gotten a four-day window of relevance. The MFOL kids were the first to get a second shot, a shot they created, and they had to make the message sing.
They had mapped out message strategies for before, during, and after the march. During depended on the stage: the pacing, the visuals, the performers, and all the optics, because millions would be receiving their message through their eyes even more than their ears. The message was gun safety for all kids, so they all had better be visible. They had spent the spring meeting young urban activists, so they had a wide talent pool to draw from. Alex and D’Angelo from the Peace Warriors were no-brainers: passionate and articulate speakers—voices the world needed to hear. About half the performers and speakers would be people of color, representing hard-hit urban areas like Chicago, Brooklyn, and South Los Angeles.
Another major visual choice would be to exclusively feature kids at the podium. They wanted adults as allies—performers, for example—but their message would be delivered by kids. That was a powerful message itself. But they were wise enough to realize that kids were relatively new to this—and none of them had played a stage this big. They were not just handing them the mic cold. They had conducted a series of conference calls with speakers and organizers for DC and the sibling marches. “We want to make sure all of them have the same ideals that they’re pushing,” Jackie said. “Because people aren’t very clear about that, even though we’ve made the message pretty clear. People still are a little cloudy.” Repetition, repetition, repetition. They would keep scheduling conference calls until they heard everyone singing the same tune.
But even the world’s best orators could never hold a worldwide TV audience for two hours. They calibrated their own short attention spans: Who would they watch? They needed lively performers and big names. 42 West had opened doors; it was up to the kids to woo the talent.
Jackie’s top priority was recording personalized video for each performer they wanted—no frills, just straight to camera, expressing what it would mean to have them. They were casting a wide net, dreaming big and audacious, across hip-hop, pop, R&B, and country. Country was vital, Jackie said. Diversity didn’t always mean color—this time it also meant conservatives, who had been tough to reach. Diversity meant gun enthusiasts, making sure the performers also included a streak of white.
Big names were already on board, but they were reaching for more. Jackie had just completed appeals with four other girls to Drake, Chance the Rapper, Kendrick Lamar, and Jason Aldean. They coaxed Dwayne Wade to appear with them in one. Jackie was especially hopeful about Aldean, who had been performing in Las Vegas during the Route 91 concert shooting. He felt like a kindred spirit, and could reach red America. “He’s been involved in the issue, but he gets the different crowd,” she said.
Jackie wasn’t sure how the videos actually got to these people—not her problem. She just sent them to 42 West, she said, and whoosh, connected.
They reached out to a long list of performers, because many were previously committed. They didn’t hear from Aldean. But Demi Lovato said yes, and so did Miley Cyrus, Ariana Grande, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Ben Platt, and several more.
They had expected to be pulling their hair out that week, but the office was eerily quiet. Things felt so in hand that most of the MFOL team left town. The drama club was off to Tampa for a statewide one-act competition, and the news team had a national competition in Nashville. At first, the whole team wondered if they should cancel, but what they needed right now was a break. “It wasn’t a big deal,” Jackie said. “It’s kind of like a plateau week.” She was not in news or drama, so she stayed back, stressing over her speech. She had never even attended a political rally before Valentine’s Day. David, Emma, and Cameron also skipped the competitions. The teams could take a break, but not them.
Most of the details were delegated. Adults were employed to solve the vexing issues posed by all the in-kind generosity. Airlines and hotels had donated tickets and blocks of rooms, Lyft promised free rides, and so many kids were in need, but who was going to coordinate all that? Invitations were routed to Ryan Deitsch, who texted the information to Jeff Foster, the AP government teacher. Mr. Foster maintained a sign-up list, which ran about 750 students deep, and he built a detailed spreadsheet to capture all the details and match them up. Two other teachers were working different lists, and they corresponded with students to sort the details. Off-loading that clerical work was a no-brainer.
Jackie was drawn to logistics, and dove into the nitty-gritty, where it would make an impact. She decided they would sell blue hats and beanies at the march, but Douglas kids would be given maroon ones. “That was important,” she said. Activists she was meeting around the country were eager to network together at the march, but they all wanted to meet the kids who’d lived through it.
After Tallahassee, Jackie described the experience as a dry run for DC, a small-scale proving ground to master the details. By early March, all that felt like the weeds. A few weeks later, I posed the same question of her biggest Tallahassee takeaway, and got a completely different answer. “I learned that even if I cry in front of a senator, they won’t change their mind,” she said.
“Did that happen?”
“Yeah, it happened. I cried twice in Tallahassee. Hearing them say that they’re not changing their opinion even though we were there. And then the same thing happened in DC. I talked to Congressman Steve Scalise—he was shot during the baseball game—and hearing him say that guns aren’t the problem, I started crying. I talked to Tim Scott of South Carolina—he is from Charleston; his church was the church! And to hear him say guns aren’t the problem—I was crying, there were tears running down my face as I was saying this, and his eyes actually did swell up. I was like, ‘We have a commonality between our hometowns. I don’t understand why you can’t see the one problem.’ He’s like, ‘Mental health is the issue, blah blah blah.’ I just can’t fathom how people don’t understand. They try to find a scapegoat and they think the scapegoat’s the answer. Wake up!”
But that was February. Jackie would never be that naive again.
Jackie had shaken off the political naivete, but she still cried. “I’m honestly like, I’m a very sensitive person,” she said. “Like if someone’s going to be crying in the office, it’s me.”
The office. They were trying to keep a lid on its existence but the kids had started referring to “the office” instead of to “Cam’s.” They told me no press was allowed, but I asked Jackie again during an interview on March 15, at a Starbucks near the school.
“I’ll ask,” she said, and texted as she continued. “I’m asking them, but I don’t really know. It’s kind of Cameron’s call.”
I wasn’t sure who “them” was—obviously a group thread, but who exactly? The entire group, I would soon learn. A massive thread that had expanded to nearly thirty people, hundreds of messages a day, running day and night. It was their primary form of communication, and they were keeping that quiet too. They were functioning as a democracy, everyone equal in theory, but some exerting a bit more weight. They often said they would have to check before sharing something, and when they named a particular person, it was usually Cameron.
Thirty minutes later, Jackie said I could come to the office. “David said not too long though. We can head over now if you want.” David this time. It had been settled by group consensus, but David drew the boundaries in.
We drove to a nondescript strip mall on Sample Road, a busy commercial strip in Coral Springs, the next town over, six minutes from the school. It housed a wide assortment of small businesses behind putty-colored stucco walls with green metal awnings: a Weight Control Center, the Neck and Back Institute, and the No Hard Feelings Tattoo Gallery. We parked and I followed Jackie to an office tucked in the back, on the lower level, beside an office supply store and a martial arts studio. The blinds were closed, and the plate glass door was papered over on the inside. “It literally says ‘Nurse Practitioner’ on the window,” she pointed out. “So no one really knows where it is.” Death threats had continued, and some of the team was still jumpy.
She rapped five times loudly on the door.
“Who’s there?”
“Jackie.”
“Prove it.”
We laughed, someone laughed inside, swung the door open, and Jackie nodded at me with a smirk as she walked in. “I’m with him.”
Each time I arrived, it took a wisecrack or two to gain entry, followed by a flurry of silliness inside—mixed with a lot of hard work. The check-in station was empty, like most of the office. It was a tight space, even with most of the team gone. The main room was in the middle of the unit, presumably the nurse’s exam room. Everyone was in there: eight people huddled around the oblong boardroom table that barely fit inside. More than twenty kids squeezed in for group meetings, leaning against the walls or sitting cross-legged on the floor.
The first thing I noticed was I’d never seen some of these people: in person, on TV, or on social media. It was hard to miss the guy in chunky black Rachel Maddow glasses, with flaming red hair radiating in all directions, like an Irish Albert Einstein. I caught them in the middle of a creative session, brainstorming ideas for some complicated Web content, and everyone seemed to be deferring to this guy, all the questions flying his way. But I had promised to be quick about this, so I moved on, and Jackie gave me a tour.
There was less space and less furniture than in Cameron’s living room. “It feels cramped,” someone I didn’t recognize said. It was tight, but it was theirs. No parents, nobody’s house, no community gatehouse.
I counted fewer than ten office chairs, which they wheeled from room to room for makeshift chats, and a cozy beanbag chair in what they called the writer’s room. The space sported a toaster, a microwave with red Solo cups stacked on top, a full-size fridge stocked top to bottom with soft drinks, especially Living Juice bottles, and a minifridge, completely empty. There was a chest-high commercial photocopier with the box for a cheap all-in-one printer stacked on top: an HP Officejet Pro 8710.
“Somebody turn on the AC!” someone yelled. “It’s brutally hot in here.”
Background giggling was nearly constant.
The bathroom was spotless, which shocked me, and I commented on it.
“We treat it like a public bathroom,” Jackie said. No public bathroom I’d ever seen was that clean.
They had made the place their own. There was a globe, an electric piano, and a faceless cloth doll near the toaster in a black and gray jumpsuit, with a clump of bright blue yarn for hair. Jackie reached for it. “This is the Dammit Doll. Slam it!” She battered the table in a burst of rage, as in a moment of possession, and then she was sweet, young Jackie again. It had made such a racket, Pippy rushed back to make sure we were OK.
“I slammed the Dammit Doll,” Jackie said.
Pippy looked a little worried. I had never seen Jackie’s menacing side, raging through her body for just a moment. Pippy apparently had.
I asked how often she whacked the doll.
Frequently.
“Are you still jumpy?”
“Uh-huh.”
What were her triggers?
“When I pass a police car, I duck in the car,” she said.
“Really?”
“I get scared.”
There was a massive photo of Cameron’s brother Holden in the hallway, nearly floor-to-ceiling, just his head with a huge grin. On a front wall they’d made a photo montage from some of the favorite cards they had received. A big close-up of Emma had been accessorized with a curly mustache. A huge US wall map was tacked with green pushpins, one for each sibling march, but just the early sign-ons, because they had come so fast and so furious, it was simpler to track them on their website. The map dominated an entire wall, with a piece of paper taped on either side. Each was creased twice, where it had been folded inside a business envelope. The notes were written with a thick Sharpie, in the same hand. The one on the left was addressed to Alfonso, who had shown it off eagerly on his phone earlier in the week:
DEAR ALFONSO—
SAW YOU ON CNN!
PLEASE DO SOMETHING ABOUT YOUR ACNE
—IT’S REPULSIVE!
YOU SHOULD NOT BE ON TELEVISION
Alfonso did have a harsh case of acne. And he was a very attractive young man. Delaney Tarr had no acne problem, and was outright beautiful, so her note was simpler:
DELANY—
SAW YOU ON CNN
SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU STUPID
FUCKING CUNT!
☺
They had been getting mean tweets daily, but this guy had taken the time to stamp and mail these to the school—with his return address. Alfonso said they didn’t post the address, because why be mean? But there was no name on the notes, so it was safe to post. He and Delaney had each photographed and tweeted theirs and then donated them to the wall for the whole team to enjoy.
The prized possession in the office was a gold-colored bust of Robert F. Kennedy. The boys had raved about it during our group interview a few days earlier.
“Robert—such a great guy,” Alfonso said.
“Was he?” I asked. “Cool? I never know.”
“I’m fawning over him in my head.” Alfonso said. The RFK Foundation had about four busts of his head, so they gave the group one, he said.
“Joe Kennedy the Third gave us a statue of Robert Kennedy,” Ryan Deitsch said. “Looks like a macaroni art—”
Alfonso repeated the line to not quite finish his sentence, and they bounced back and forth: “It looked like macaroni art, but we were very—”
“Appreciative.”
“Joe Kennedy escaped a snowstorm to give us the head of his grandfather,” Alfonso continued.
“That’s actually true.”
“He brought it to a Democratic dinner we were also invited to. He had a duffel bag with him. Everyone was just like—”
They all made horror-movie faces, including Daniel, who sat back, gleefully watching the older boys riff. “But it’s amazing,” Ryan said. “He was the keynote speaker and he controlled that room. Kennedy charisma.”
They gushed about Joe for a while, but lamented that he slipped into politician bullshit at one point. “But you know, he gave us some pretty good answers,” Alfonso said.
They were still getting used to the office—to any office, for many of them—and there were lots of functional items. A handwritten key roster, with seven color-coded keys, six of them signed out. A big whiteboard mostly dedicated to instructions on operating the printer. A corkboard with a before you leave list printed in large type:
Thanks!
Another version, taped to the front door, had a handwritten addition squeezed in:
A blue Post-it was stuck to the front door, with an arrow pointing to the latch that read this shocks you every time.
Some bullhorns were stacked up, still in the boxes. Someone had donated them after seeing the kids hop up on cars. Very nice intentions, a little too late, but maybe they would need them again.
I circled back to the main room to say goodbye, and meet the redhead—who still seemed to be directing. He introduced himself as Matthew Deitsch.
“Oh, Ryan’s brother?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve even got the same red hair.”
“Nah, his is much more red than mine.”
That didn’t seem possible.
I asked if I could interview him before I left town, and he said, “How about now?” I explained my promise to leave quickly, and he waved that off. He had a brutal schedule and right here would be most efficient. And he could clear me to stay.
We headed toward the writer’s room. The guy who had called the space cramped looked up from his laptop and called after Matt, “Do you have explosion on here?”
“No, but you could download a green-screen explosion pretty fast.”
“Should it be an anime explosion?”
Matt didn’t hear. He was already wheeling a chair into the writer’s room. He motioned me toward it and flopped into a beanbag chair. When I asked if it was OK to record, he leaned forward and yelled toward the main room, “Guys! We’re going to be recording, so just don’t yell any racial slurs!” He watched for my reaction, and only then grinned.
Reporters were still wondering whether the kids could really pull this march off so quickly. I peppered Matt with logistical questions and he shrugged. No idea, why would he? “Just not where my focus is,” he said. “I’ve had a month to be an expert in gun policy and write our five main points and platform.” Matt turned out to be the recent grad who had led the research, selecting articles to route to the group. He enjoyed going bookworm. He loved deep dives to learn, and share, and debate. Nothing more gratifying than hearing your conclusions challenged and improving them.
Matt was obviously a force in this movement behind the scenes. But publicly, he and the other alumni were keeping a very low profile. He introduced himself as the MFOL community outreach director, which was true, but not the half of it. Later, they would name him chief strategist, the role he had been gravitating toward from the start. Matt was twenty, oldest of the group, and many of them had been looking up to him for years.
Matt saw MFOL changing the gun debate by adopting a new strategy. “The messaging of both political parties is awful. I think most people in this country have a distaste for politicians because most politicians are scared of actually making the right choice. The right thing to do would be to pass universal background checks; the right thing to do would be to lift the ban on CDC research; the right thing to do would require some form of tracking the guns that are being trafficked in this country. I think it’s really important that we’re all artists, we’re all communicators, because we’re able to communicate this hurt with the nation. We just really know how to be serious and focused and also entertaining.”
Matt had graduated two years earlier but flew back from film school in California immediately when it happened, to be with Ryan, and his freshman sister, Samantha, and all his theater friends. He ended up at Cameron’s house very quickly. Just mentioning Samantha made him emotional. She was celebrating her birthday on Valentine’s Day, but mourned two friends instead.
Matt had moved back in with his family, but hardly saw Sam, because he was at the office so late, like an absentee dad. So he had signed her out of school for an alleged doctor’s appointment that morning, and taken her instead for comfort food and family time at Chick-fil-A. Their mom and aunt and grandma were all there, and David’s family, whom they met for the first time. Kevin Hogg was quiet but sweet, with a wry sense of humor—not at all what you would picture for an FBI agent, or a navy pilot, for that matter. Rebecca was a hoot. That big group—everyone had gone through it in different ways. Most of them had been miles from the school, but they were all hurting. Cutting up with them was as comforting as the crispy fried chicken. Therapists could get annoying, forcing you back to the tragedy with their probing questions, but it came up naturally with that crowd, and everybody spilled. The empty desks seemed to haunt everyone. “[Samantha] was like, ‘We don’t know what to do with those desks,’” Matt said. “‘Other periods, people probably sit there and they have no idea this desk is the one we all look at in our class.’”
And the bathrooms. So many kids were afraid to use the bathrooms. They kept triggering Samantha. “She says, ‘Now when I go to the bathroom I think if I take a little longer to wash my hands maybe I’ll survive if it happens again,’” Matt said. “Or, ‘If I take the long way from lunch instead of the short way from lunch, will that make me stay alive or will I die because of those choices?’”
Then he shrugged it off and got silly again. Matt cracks himself up constantly—along with most everyone in his vicinity—but he got particularly giggly describing how he first met Cameron. Matt was a senior in drama club when Cameron first showed up as a freshman. It was the first meeting of the Improv Club, started by Matt’s brother Ryan Deitsch, then a sophomore. “He did not know what he was going to do with the club,” Matt said. “Should we do improv games or blah blah blah? And the TV teacher was the sponsor, and he said, ‘You can run with it. You can do whatever.’ He was literally improv-ing the entire experience.”
Ryan held the intro meeting in the TV production room, and all the kids who came were from drama club. Matt was kind of the elder statesman: president of TV production, vice president of the senior class, and founder and editor of the school’s anonymous satire blog, The Cold Beak. Cameron was some scrawny freshman he’d never seen or heard of. “So we’re in a skit and we’re improv-ing and for some reason it’s a date scene or something, and me and Cameron are on a date and the whole time—I had no idea who this kid is, this little shit—and he just keeps trying to kiss me!” Ballsy move for a straight freshman guy. Matt had thought he was the adventurous one. And this little upstart was playing in a different league. Matt loved it. He recruited Cam to write for The Cold Beak. “We’ve been friends ever since,” Matt said.
Nine days until the march, Matt was looking way past it. He was not here to put on a show—though a powerful show of force would etch itself into the minds of every candidate, which was the horizon Matt had his eyes on: the midterms, midterms, midterms. And he was also looking beyond them. He knew they weren’t going to win South Carolina or Texas or Tennessee. Not this year, or probably this decade. But Matt’s children might have very different ideas about whom to elect there. Most of the MFOL kids would likely have kids of their own, and Matt hoped their children would thank them.
Their short-term strategy for earning that thanks was fueling this movement with some victories in the midterms. The long-term strategy was taking this issue out of the red-blue brawl.
Matt also understood already that the main impact his small band could have on the midterms was leveraging the thousands of young activists in the hundreds of new groups mushrooming across the country.
All the media could see right now was Washington, but Matt saw the future in those sibling marches. Each one was a trial by fire for a young group of activists. Most were neophytes beginning with nothing, trying to build an organization and stage an event in five weeks or much less. (Groups were still signing up.) What a surge of confidence when they pulled it off. MFOL had hoped to inspire dozens of these sibling marches. The count was over eight hundred, in every state and around the world. (The final domestic count would be 762.) “We just got our first African march, in one of the East African islands, starts with an ‘M,’” Matt said.
“Mauritius?” I asked.
“Mauritius, yeah. Africa was the last one, because we had scientists in Antarctica saying they were going to officially put one together. So we’re on every continent.”
Matt was about to conduct another mandatory conference call with the 800-plus organizers. That was far too many to speak, so most were in listen-only mode. “We have to create a unified front,” he said. “The people in power would like nothing more than for us to be diverted. And we cannot be diverted.”
Matt corrected me when I called them the sister marches. “Sibling marches. Sister marches were the Women’s March thing. We’re not trying to completely rip off their branding.” They were actually navigating their own branding issue. MFOL had been quietly inching away from the Never Again label, and Matt explained why. “We can’t actually use that, because it’s owned by the Anti-Defamation League. But we did get permission to use it through the march. We can use it for messaging, but we can’t use it for our name.” They chartered as March for Our Lives, and slowly worked it into their messaging. That was temporary, they confided. The march was a one-day event, so once it was over, they would permanently rebrand as Fight for Our Lives.
That never happened. They would tease the name on march day, by sprinkling it throughout their speeches. But they were already reconsidering by then. Three names in two months was too many. And “march” had many connotations, so they kept it.
Two big movements had been percolating for years: the struggle to address urban gun violence, and the struggle to address mass shooters. MFOL’s vision was to merge them. Matt thought that seemed obvious, but the media seemed oblivious to it. The whole team was talking about it relentlessly, in posts and in person—Berkeley, Baltimore, Chicago, Liberty City—but the media was obsessed with suburban white kids. That was Matt’s biggest frustration with the entire experience thus far.
As he spoke about the messaging, he mentioned the writer’s room again. I stopped him this time. “Writer’s room?”
He chuckled. Did I think all this material was writing itself?
MFOL had broken all the rules of sustaining the national spotlight. For now. The media was notorious for having attention deficit disorder. It would go gaga for the march and then forget these kids the next day. What was their strategy for life after media?
You mean old media, Matt said. “We’ve already established our platform. We’re on social media, we have these speaking engagements. I taught Emma how to use Twitter. She still gets things wrong. She’s using the wrong terminology and she gets more impressions per hour than the president now.” The network cameras had helped them amass their following, but their own cameras had greater pull now, he said. Ten million would watch the kids on 60 Minutes that Sunday, but the group believed they beat that online every week. Emma was up to 1.2 million Twitter followers. David, Cameron, and Sarah Chadwick had another 1.1 million collectively, and the count was expanding fast. With the multiplier of retweets, a single hot meme could draw millions of impressions. Twitter had been their biggest platform, but they were pumping out clever, shareable content that could be customized to Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat, and they were prepping a YouTube launch. “That’s where our generation lives,” Dylan Baierlein said the next day. Dylan had been the kid asking about the anime explosion. Dylan was MFOL’s secret weapon online.
“What a lot of my generation does is basically come home from school, eat a snack, and watch whatever’s in their subscription box from YouTube,” David said. “That’s how they get a lot of their information and build this into their daily routine.”
A powerful platform requires two big elements: attract an audience, and satisfy them. Attracting was complete. Sustaining massive numbers meant great content. This group was born to meme. Every teen in America is now a content creator, churning out posts on Instagram and Snapchat—without a second thought, they would tell you, but actually employing tremendous thought. They have grown so skilled at it that it can seem effortless. The Columbine kids could have never done something like this. Several Columbine survivors went to Hollywood, and at least two of them created stellar films. But that was a decade or more down the road. The Parkland generation was prepared on day one. Some more than others. Most kids can amuse their friends online, but only a few are truly gifted. For most of the MFOL kids, content creation was a way of life.
“We’re the communicators,” David said. And they were communicating on two wavelengths—emotional and intellectual—which was the key to their appeal. “They’re actors, they know like how to communicate human emotion,” David said. “I’m news director, and I’m educated in this area from speech and debate.” He excelled on the rational side.
MFOL had a deep bench. Cameron could also pull the heartstrings, Sarah Chadwick, Delaney Tarr, and later Matt on the head—but the power of Emma González was her gift to pierce both organs simultaneously.
Everyone was worried about the cult of personality around Emma, though, especially Emma. And they rolled their eyes at the central tenets of the cult. “We have this celebrity culture that would love to say Emma is this trailblazing feminist hero,” Matt said. “I’ve known her for a long time, and I’d say she’s one of the more down-to-earth people I know. She does have this way of evoking emotion from just being an artist and being in spoken word.” We discussed the power of her authenticity, and he asked, “Why is that rare?”
Reason and emotion were crucial. So was a third element: humor.
From first sight of him, I had a sense Dylan Baierlein played a big part in that. On my way out, I asked about that anime explosion. What was that about? He gleefully showed off the GIF he had found, and the meme he had assembled while I was talking to Matt. He stopped midsentence, with a concerned look. “Do you know what a meme is?”
I did.
OK. He plunged ahead—couldn’t wait to show me what he was working on next.
I didn’t want to risk the wrath of David, so we agreed to meet there the next afternoon. He had class in the morning, then several MFOL meetings, but he could squeeze me in for an hour. It was late, and I picked up Indian takeout across the street.
I texted Dylan for the address the next morning, and he said he couldn’t give it out. He knew I had just been there, but still. Thank God for the Indian food. Google Maps got me back that way.
Dylan was friendly and self-effacing. He had graduated Douglas the year prior, and described himself as “a five-foot-six scrawny white boy.” He wore Ray-Ban prescription glasses, dyed his blond hair with Revlon brown-black, and spiked it with Axe Messy Look Flexible Paste. He was still squeezing in psychology classes at Florida Atlantic University, but treating MFOL as his full-time job, cranking out memes. Dylan called himself the memes man periodically over the next several months, and snickered every time.
Dylan didn’t have a title, but he was the backbone of the content creation team. It came naturally. “I started memein’ when I came out the womb,” he said. At eighteen, Dylan had written short films, plays, monologues, comedy sketches, news packages, and was at work on a musical when the shooting put a stop to all that. He had collaborated with the other MFOL kids on most of it. Everything Dylan was doing now was collaborative. Even with most of the team gone, the conference room buzzed with an SNL writers’ room vibe.
One of Dylan’s favorite pre-Valentine’s projects had been The Cold Beak, an anonymous, satirical version of MSD’s school paper, The Eagle Eye. Matt Deitsch created and edited it, and Cameron, who was then a freshman, was his chief writing partner. Dylan, Ryan Deitsch, and Alex Wind were regular contributors. It started on Instagram but migrated across platforms, and Matt estimated it peaked at around three thousand readers a day. The school administration was not amused. “We actually had encrypted email and hidden identities, because we were threatened to be kicked out of our clubs if they found out who was writing it,” Matt said. “I was the vice president of the honor society for journalism and they had me read a memo saying that anyone who was in The Cold Beak would get kicked out of the honor society. And it was me reading the memo, and I was like, I’m the founder of it.” It started getting scary, but all the more fun. Best parody of the whole endeavor, and they could never use it.
Matt said The Cold Beak really taught a lot of them how to reach an audience. And how to collaborate. “A lot of what people liked about us was we never spoke down to our audience,” he said. “We never made fun of their intelligence. And that’s the same with what we’re doing now.” They were gobsmacked by much of the NRA’s message machine, and satire was still their instinctive response.
Dylan took over as Beak editor the next year, but the heat was getting fierce. The administration was going hard-core trying to identify them, and they had mined the parody vein pretty well already. The Beak also taught them that even great material was finite. More fun to reinvent anyway. They shut it down.
MFOL’s mission now was to keep their audience captivated. Constant reinvention on the content side was key. “We will soon be starting to create YouTube content,” Dylan said. “We’re working on the logistics. I’m writing scripts and whatnot already.” They were planning short videos, two to five minutes max—what kids would actually watch and enjoy. He had a range of topics in mind, political and educational, like the history of gun violence, and how to register to vote. Always, always lighthearted, though. “We don’t want to lose sight of our actual selves and our youth.” People were always clamoring for peeks backstage, so he was constantly filming, creating, meeting, everything. He would definitely have his camera rolling backstage at the march.
At first blush, they felt like a group that would really push the boundaries on outrageous posts. Quite the opposite—that was my biggest surprise. They were brash and bold in the brainstorming phase, cautious in the editing room. They had to be. One big error could set them back. They were in this for the long haul.
Every member had veto power, and they wielded it liberally. Veto power? They were reviewing each other’s tweets? Not every tweet, Dylan said, but the big stuff: their popular memes, the ones getting hundreds of thousands of retweets, everything coming out of the writer’s room. For such a playful group, they were very stern about the rules. Dylan had made four memes that could have been viral but released only two, because the other two were harshly satirical. “And the media yells at us when we’re laughing.”
“Everything we do, everything we put out there, is vetted through all of us,” he said. “Somebody has an idea for a tweet, they type it out, they send it to everybody else and we say, ‘That’s good!’ or ‘Change this thing.’”
There was a lot of spitballing. “Somebody will say something, and if even one person on the other side of the room says, ‘I like that!’ Boom!” Dylan said. Connection. “If you were watching that, you’d think, ‘OK, they liked that, but nobody jumped on that idea.’ No, those two people have now had a silent agreement where they are going to work together on that, and make it real. And then it happens.” Most of them had been collaborating that way for years, so the unspoken language was already set. The new kids brought fresh talent. David was wonkish and acerbic, so when they needed a pit bull, they had their man. Sarah Chadwick was great that way, too. “Emma is wonderful at writing emotional speeches and getting the crowd on her side and cheered and pumped,” Dylan said. Some of them were talented conceptually, others from TV and film production could turn ideas into quality video fast. And someone on the team always had access to the equipment they needed, and the apps. “Everyone has a different niche and the entire movement needs all of them,” Dylan said. “So we’re all working in tandem to make sure that the tones that are needed are used.”
Their basic rules were simple: no profanity, no violence—actual, symbolic, or implied—and no ad hominem attacks. MLK’s six principles had been helpful. Personal digs are cheap, dirty, and counterproductive. Chiding politicians was the trickiest to navigate: they wanted to call out bad behavior quick and hard, but without getting personal or too derisive, especially with Republicans. They were battling adversaries, not enemies. Matt Deitsch stressed that point repeatedly that week. He took ahold of his dog tags at one point to demonstrate how dear the ideas were—he kept them literally dangling over his heart. He was wearing number 6 that day, but number 3 kept coming up in our conversations: “Nonviolence seeks to defeat injustice, not people.”
They pulled the plug on one meme showing a prominent politician flailing in a defense of gun laws on national TV. Then they edited a short montage of his awkward moments, and overlaid the theme music from Curb Your Enthusiasm. Very funny, but too mean. He let me watch the video after I agreed not to divulge the politician—that would just be a passive-aggressive way of still ridiculing him. It was very funny, but surprisingly mild. I’d seen much worse on the Web that afternoon. Yeah, he said: that’s a low bar.
Even rejected memes could be useful: giggling at them on the group thread was great for morale. “These guys are some of my closest friends and they’re going through a lot,” Dylan said. “That’s why I came here. Of course the movement is incredibly important to me, and the change in the nation is the overarching goal. But personally, I just want to make sure my friends are all right. Make sure my friends are smiling.”
Dylan picked out two of their most successful memes, and walked me through how they developed, from conception to viral explosion. Their biggest to that point, their hourglass parody of the NRA, started as a joke. “We saw the hourglass video that Dana Loesch made, and we thought it was hilarious,” Dylan said. “The next day, we were joking about it”—meaning by group text, of course. “It was just me jokingly being like, ‘So we’re writing like a spoof of it, right?’ And everybody was like, ‘Yeah that’s hilarious.’ And I was like, ‘OK, I’m writing it!’ And then Emma González was like, ‘No, that’s a bad idea.’”
All night he kept thinking, I’ve got to write that parody! That would make such a great parody! So he wrote it anyway. He thought the script might win her over. Worst case, he’d make them laugh.
“And then Emma read the script and was like, ‘Wait, I love it! We’re going to make it!’” he said. “So jokes happen, people realize that within that joke there is an actual great idea, and then it comes to fruition. We say what comes to mind, and some things are shot down and some things are picked up. And when it happens, it’s just lightning fast.”
The hourglass meme was really fast. Dylan recruited Ryan to film it and Sarah Chadwick as the talent, because it fit her fiery personality. She also had a big Twitter following, nearly 300,000, who relished her caustic tweets. Ryan was a TV production student, so he had great cameras, a boom mic, lights, and reflectors. They collected all the equipment from his house and filmed the clip in the office. Emma manned the boom. They edited it on Ryan’s laptop and Sarah tweeted it. From script approval to posting took only a couple of hours. The clip quickly racked up 1.2 million views.
Their “Enough Is Enough” meme came together even more easily. Just that week, the NRA tweeted a close-up picture of a gleaming AR-15 with the text “I’ll control my own guns, thank you.” It was the one-month anniversary of the shooting, and the kids were livid. “Why do you think that’s a good idea?” Dylan said. “We have to do a rebuttal. Something, anything. So I said to the group chat, ‘Can you guys send me emotional, powerful pictures?’” He got a boatload of images, and picked one showing a protester holding up a sign reading enough is enough. Dylan sent that back to the group and said he was working on a parody of the gun tweet. “Nobody said, ‘No, that’s a bad idea,’” he said. “Nobody necessarily said, ‘That’s a great idea!’ but if you don’t get a no, you take it as a yes.”
Dylan described the rest of his process as “so not professionally done.” He uploaded the picture to Snapchat on his phone and typed in his reply caption: “We’ll control our own lives, thank you.” He saved the Snapchat, dumped it into the Photoshop Express app on his phone, and then added the March for Our Lives logo. That failed to save, since it’s a premium option and he was using the free version of Photoshop Express. So he took a screenshot, cropped his phone’s border clutter, and discovered that the image now looked too blurry. So he uploaded that one into Instagram, sharpened it, took a screenshot of that, cropped it again, and texted the improved shot to the group chat. They loved it.
“Who wants to post it?” he asked.
Sarah and Cameron. Sarah drew 722 retweets and 4,878 likes. Cameron got 1,238 retweets and 6,565 likes.
From first spotting the offensive tweet to posting the rebuttal and multiple team members tweeting it took about an hour, Dylan said. Quick and dirty, and it looked fine. They needed to stay nimble to match the NRA beat for beat, without getting diverted from their own message. And without forgetting to have fun.
“It’s funny,” Dylan said. “If you came to one of our meetings and watched us and listened to us, you would think, ‘Nothing is getting done!’ But amidst this chaos and nonsense, somehow we are getting it done in our own way. I don’t know why it works, I don’t know how it works—but it does. And it’s incredible.”
The MFOL office had a brief life. The group had let a few other media outlets in, and that didn’t work out well. Time ran a cover story that omitted the location but included several revealing clues. And a TV crew used an outside shot that David believes was the final straw. “I saw them taking the shot and I told them not to use it and to delete it and they were like, ‘OK, we will,’” he said. “The one shot they used was that. Within twelve hours of the documentary airing, the Nazis, because I won’t call them the alt-Right, basically found where our office is, based off a door handle, had a hundred pizzas sent in my name, had death threats sent there. We all had to leave.”
They worked from their homes again for quite a while, without a good meeting spot. Months later, they got a new office. No press this time.