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