In the past few months, Facebook has transformed from the platform we love to hate to the platform we still love to hate but unfortunately find useful.
And while millennials poke fun of their parents' social media naïveté (sorry, dad), the charge appears to be led, in part, by red-state parents and otherwise non-traditional protesters who now are posting constantly and organizing rapidly under the group Indivisible.
Members of the GOP might label this "tea party of the left" as "radical," "left-wing," "anarchist" or "paid protesters," but these members know who they are: librarians. Teachers. Veterans. Nurses. Your moms.
There's a stereotype about the modern protester that's proven hard to shake: the whiney, internet-savvy highly educated socialist coastal liberal who wants nothing more than to destroy capitalism and replace it with Lena Dunham.
The current face of the resistance to the Donald Trump administration and its policies, however, is more diverse (and largely female-led) than some GOP senators would have you believe.
"I've never protested anything before," Liz P., an Indivisible member in Alabama says.
Indivisible, the coalition of 5,802 anti-Trump grassroots groups that rapidly organized after the election, gave her a platform.
"I'm from Alabama. We never even talked about politics around here before, it's kind of a social survival thing."
Overwhelmed by Trump and the daily barrage of threats they feel he poses to the American democracy, these "violent paid protesters" got together on platforms millennials thought their parents didn't understand -- Facebook, Slack, and Twitter -- and did something about it.
They'd like people to know they're not quite the radical left-wing extremists Marco Rubio and others say they are. And they definitely aren't paid to protest.
They come from deep red states
Americans love nothing more than dividing themselves into a FiveThirtyEight map: red or blue, Clinton or Trump, facts or alternative facts.
Some of the loudest voices of the resistance aren't from blue states at all, but from places like West Virginia, which Trump won by a margin so large we'll just hyperlink it.
Sara Anderson lives in Morgantown, West Virginia, a blue speck in the heart of Trump country. Since she since started organizing after the election, first on Pantsuit Nation West Virginia and then on Indivisible, she's started to see members pop up from everywhere.
"We've had women from Pocahontas County, a beautiful, rural, Trump county, drive hours to Charleston to make it to a meeting. They connected on the Indivisible page. They're doing what they can to find each other."
Users sometimes take advantage of the Indivisible map to discover grassroots groups in their state. All the way over in Northwest Arkansas, a Muslim woman in a red state, whose name we've abbreviated to A.P., was thankful to connect to anti-Trump neighbors she didn't even know existed.
"I got involved shortly after inauguration when I heard of the Indivisible groups popping up all over the nation. I live in the South in a very red state so I doubted there was one near me," A.P. says. "As a Muslim American, I felt more lonely than ever. But ,lo and behold, thank goodness, there was one nearby."
A.P. admitted that she's nervous to share some of her story, as a Muslim woman living in a Trump-friendly state. But she's glad she doesn't have to experience this administration alone.
They could otherwise be confused for a Trump voter
It's no surprise that A.P. thought she wouldn't find allies in her state. If you read the post-election hot takes, Trump supporters, we came to understand, were white, married, working-class, highly religious, and liked to eat their steak well done.
The Women's March itself, the largest protest in U.S. history by some tallies, was led by women of color (after significant backlash). Many of the "paid protesters" showing up at these town halls, however, look like they'd fit in one of the typical Trump voter categories.
Kim Holmes from Huntsville, Alabama, checks off all of these boxes: She's a married, white heterosexual woman from a deep red state with three kids and a job in marketing. But she also has a gay son, who helped to make her aware of people whose life experiences were dramatically different from her own. She wants her children to be involved in politics so that "they will be comfortable with it as adults."
"I think I used an Obama Presidency as my safety net, so I didn't feel the need to be super active in the political sphere. But now the safety net for marginalized communities is gone and I suddenly feel the weight of my privilege as a white women in a heterosexual marriage with middle class means," Holmes says.
Holmes alone doesn't change the data of who voted this election, and which candidate they voted for. But she's actively looking to find "non-traditional" protesters -- even former Trump voters -- and get them involved in the cause.
They're addicted to Facebook, they're blowing up on Twitter, and they even like Slack
Kim and others like her stressed that they're dependent on Facebook for their organizing, as much they sometimes resist it. Kristin Moline, another Indivisible organizer and nurse and a veteran, joined Facebook in August to simply find a lost cat. She didn't plan on using it nearly as much as she does, or for this purpose. Now, Moline says, "she's fomenting the resistance from my cellphone," and had to buy a new computer to help her organize post-election.
Moline didn't think much of social media until she started organizing after Trump's election. When she learned that her congressperson was holding his town hall across the state (400 miles away from their district's largest population center), she drove 12 hours round trip and filmed her experience for Twitter, where it quickly blew up and made headlines.
"I only got on Facebook six months ago, I only started to use Twitter three weeks ago and my life is going off right now," Moline said, who now manages the Twitter account for her 3,000 member group. " have learned how to elevate our group's work and presence using Twitter."
Indivisible reports that the page has already received 17.23 million page views in just two months alone.
Nothing (besides everything they're fighting against) makes them madder than being called 'paid protesters'
Though their concerns were diverse, from protecting the Affordable Care Act to investigating Trump's potential ties to the Kremlin, nothing unified these women more than their resentment as being dismissed as "paid protesters."
"I'm a stay at home mom and I'm doing this out of my own time and effort," Leigh Altman, organizer of one of the Indivisible chapters in North Carolina, says. "Without exception, these are hardworking ordinary citizens. The paid protester thing is a testament to how desperate [the opposition] are. They'll come up with any face-saving lie to try and explain a spontaneous groundswell from the people that we've never seen before."
While there are some people who are paid to organize, not "protest for pay," all of these women strenuously asserted that they had little to gain financially by organizing.
Lorena Johnson, a citizen and formerly undocumented immigrant from Mexico, is truly embarrassed that her representatives allege that she's motivated by money. She'd like her senators to know she's here for a different reason.
"I'm here because I remember what it was like to be an undocumented immigrant. I knew how people feel. You are are always scared you will be caught [and] deported. You're hiding. I lived here for a year without documents and I remember what it's like to suffer ... So I'm speaking up because I have to tell this story. Now."
Note: Names in this piece are abbreviated to protect the subject's identity, per their requests.
Topics Activism Facebook Family & Parenting
