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