Parkland

by Dave Cullen

  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?

  4

  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, an
d 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.

  5

  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 joking
ly 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.”