Sharon McMahon is doing the next needed thing

As I pulled out my copy of "The Small and the Mighty" to read on a flight, the mom across the aisle from me picked up the same book and waved it at me with a smile. "I'm a huge Governerd," she said.

"Governerds" are what Sharon McMahon's loyal 1.1 million Instagram followers call themselves. Using the handle McMahon, a former teacher, has been sharing information about democracy, politics and history and how they impact American citizens, for four years, earning herself the moniker " America's government teacher. "

Not a day goes by that I don't encounter McMahon's content on my Instagram feed. Sometimes it's a video of her explaining a political concept while she applies her makeup. Sometimes it's a quote from a historical figure. Sometimes it's a quote from McMahon herself addressing current political events or explaining an election process.

Her insights are shared by people who have spent years following politics and also people who are just now getting involved. "I don't feel manipulated by her, and she doesn't make me feel stupid," Instagram follower Nicole Kunze told me.

"She meets people where they're at," Jen Robinson said, adding, "You don't feel judged for not knowing something or for believing differently than others."

According to McMahon, 90% of her followers are female, many of whom are paying attention to politics and governance for the first time.

"So many history books are about tanks and battles," McMahon told me on Oct. 23 as we sat in the lobby of the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City. "It's the men in the bold face; it's the men who are elevated to positions of high status." She said she believes there's recently been a new awakening among women in their 30s, 40s and 50s who have realized politics is interesting and knowledge about politics is useful.

Many of those women attended McMahon's book event later that night at Utah Valley University's UCCU Center, which seats more than 8,000. When I walked in, the arena was packed with millennial and Gen X women yelling, "Whoop, there it is" as a DJ in an orange suit coat spun hits from the past few decades and strobe lights rotated around the crowd until the 6-foot-tall McMahon made her way on stage to uproarious applause.

She spent the 90 minutes alternating between standup-adjacent stories of her interactions with the political and media elite — like a conversation she had at an event with former President George W. Bush, wherein he attempted to toss nuts in his mouth and missed most of the time — and highlighting the relatively unknown Americans featured in her new book "The Small and The Mighty." It was much bigger and much louder than any book-tour stop I've ever been to. So big, in fact, that the first venue at UVU — the Noorda Center for the Performing Arts concert hall — sold out in a single day and the UCCU Center was booked to accommodate an extra 2,000 Governerds.

Salt Lake City and the surrounding areas is one of the top four cities where McMahon's followers are concentrated, alongside New York, Los Angeles and Minneapolis. I asked McMahon why so many women in Utah gravitate to her content. "I think some of it has to do with my approach to talking about government," she said. "It's very common sense. It's not excessively inflammatory. It's not hurling insults at people. It's not making fun of people's appearance or the way that they talk." She said she believes this approach aligns with the cultural values of Utahns and Latter-day Saints.

McMahon often hears from followers who tell her that they used to be consumed with anxiety about the world, but being able to understand how things work and how they might personally make a difference has allowed them to feel control over their thoughts and emotions and endeavor to make a difference, regardless of how small the action might seem.

"History books are full of boldface names — people who did incredible things," McMahon said. "Those people are great, and we should study them. But there are literally tens of thousands of people who changed the course of history whose names are never highlighted." This is why, she explained, she decided to write "The Small and the Mighty."

McMahon spent three years researching everyday Americans who made a significant impact on their communities by doing "the next needed thing." They include a suffragette who died fighting for women's right to vote, a Hawaii-born Japanese Pearl Harbor survivor who went on to become a senator, a woman born to enslaved parents who eventually became a pioneer in education, and many others relatively unknown to history who influenced America for the better.

Each individual in the book influenced their communities by doing the next needed thing, which has been the message she has shared with the Governerds since she launched the SharonSaysSo account.

McMahon, who is 47, taught high school government and law in Washington, D.C., for 10 years before her family moved to Minnesota and she launched a few projects, including a hand-dyed yarn business and photography services. Then, in late summer of 2020, her husband had a kidney transplant after being diagnosed with stage 5 kidney failure.

While her family took extra quarantine precautions to avoid the COVID-19 pandemic and while her four children, ages 8-18, attended online school, McMahon began sharing videos about civics and government on Instagram that were fact-based and nonpartisan, using the skills she had honed while teaching. "I started seeing so many people on the internet who were just confidently wrong, saying things that are obviously false, but in an authoritative voice," she explained. "So I just took many of the skills I had learned from many years in the classroom and started applying them." Her first video was on the Electoral College.

Her videos quickly became popular among the 12,000 or so followers she had gained from years of running various small businesses, and her followers started sending the videos to local news stations. She soon began receiving interview requests from media outlets all over the country that were looking for someone to clearly explain what to expect before and after the 2020 presidential election.

But it was during the contentious aftermath of the election that her following began to multiply. This happened, McMahon believes, because she was one of the few commentators simply providing facts and explaining political processes without bias. "I wasn't telling people who they should vote for and which candidate should win the election," she said. She also explained things in terms simple enough that even someone completely new to politics would understand.

She compared it to attending a physics lecture while knowing nothing about physics. "Do you leave feeling smarter most of the time? No, it goes right over your head, right? And you actually, many times, leave feeling dumber." That's the problem many people encounter when trying to understand politics. "They don't have a good background in government, they don't know what a lot of these things mean, nor do they have the time in their lives to (do) research."

McMahon often encourages her followers to submit questions that she answers in depth. "There wasn't really a place where people could go to ask a specific question," she explained. "Other outlets just don't have the capacity or desire to accommodate that."

When I asked people on social media about McMahon, some told me they found her too conservative for their liking, while others said she was too liberal. This news did not surprise McMahon. "There are a lot of people who really hate that I am not on the internet every day telling everybody what a tragedy Donald Trump is. And then there's a lot of people who are like, 'It's so obvious that you hate Donald Trump.'"

"It's always funny to me how people generally see what they want to see. They are allowing their brains to sort of fill in the blank to support their already held beliefs about something."

But politics isn't a zero-sum game, she told me. "The competition of ideas actually benefits us, and it benefits all of us. The best ideas should rise to the top." Who comes up with the best ideas shouldn't matter, she said. "If you can't see that somebody who disagrees with you might have something to teach you, there's a true lack of intellectual humility. Anybody who thinks they have a lock on all the good ideas, is either not being honest, or they're so blinded by their own party allegiance that they can't possibly see past it."

Being perceived as too liberal for some and too conservative for others has not changed her approach. "It's just the nature of the work," she said. "The larger your platform, and the more visible you become, the more (criticism) you're going to get. It's unavoidable. So the options are, keep doing what I'm doing, or bend to the whims of random internet strangers."

Doing what she's always done has worked well for McMahon as her audience has continued to grow to 1.1 million. By 2021, she was running SharonSaysSo full time. She launched a podcast, " Here's Where It Gets Interesting ," which has 1.2 million listeners a month, a Substack titled " The Preamble " with 225,000 subscribers, and published her book, which has sold more than 100,000 copies and hit No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list.

She's also raised more than $10 million dollars for charity. Most recently, McMahon and the Governerds raised more than $600,000 for Convoy of Hope to benefit those impacted by hurricanes Helene and Milton. They've previously raised money for World Central Kitchen , Undue Medical Debt and classroom grants.

"Nobody can do everything," McMahon told me. "But everyone can do something. That's the message that I try to encourage people with — don't get overwhelmed with the number of things that you could be doing. Just do the next needed thing."

"You see this in some of the characters of the book," McMahon said. "They can't possibly hope to address every societal ill. They can't possibly hope to fix segregation in Richmond, Virginia, in the year 1870 — you know they can't possibly hope to address income inequality, and ... all multinational conflicts, but that doesn't mean they can do nothing."

For McMahon, that next needed thing has been sharing hopeful, unbiased information to educate her followers and help them avoid outrage. "That invitation to outrage is actually a tremendously emotionally motivating thing in the human mind," she explained. "We love to be right. And when we turn on the news and we're told that, in fact, we were right, and all these other people agree, you feel like you're part of the group that knows the truth. I look at the world very differently and communicate very differently from that. So it's not an Invitation to outrage. It's an invitation to community, which is something that doesn't really sell on the nightly news."

The Governerds, however, are accepting McMahon's invitation to community by the millions. "I've learned so much from her about listening to others I disagree with politically, in order to understand where they're coming from," Instagram follower Pam Staheli told me. "It's all about finding the humanity."

During the book event at the UCCU Center, the crowd that delighted at every word McMahon said was perhaps most enraptured when she spoke of Septima Clark, an educator born to enslaved parents who fought for civil rights despite seemingly insurmountable opposition in North Carolina during the time of Jim Crow laws.

McMahon quoted Clark, who said, "I can even work with my enemies because I know from experience that they might have a change of heart any minute." She was met with perhaps the loudest applause I've ever heard.