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The Online Tools That Fueled 'No Kings' and the Trump Resistance -Wired
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.
Right now, everyone seems ready to throw down. More than ever, it’s important to pick your battles—and know how to win.
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.
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.
Right now, everyone seems ready to throw down. More than ever, it’s important to pick your battles—and know how to win.
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.
https://archive.is/x6eoc#selection-1607.0-1607.273