An interesting way to be educated about civics, from middle school into adulthood

Sharon McMahon Did Not Plan to Be America's Government Teacher

I think I might join Instagram!

"In September 2020, Sharon McMahon, a public-school teacher turned yarn entrepreneur and portrait photographer from Duluth, Minn., was nursing her husband through a recent kidney transplant, looking after her four school-age children, watching the election campaign with mounting dismay and, as she puts it, “just riding out COVID like everybody else was.” Weary of people bloviating online about stuff they didn’t understand, she posted a short video explaining the Electoral College using an enamel bucket, a wooden box, a mug, a fake branch, and her mildly zany personality. “Let me know,” she said, “if you want me to make more videos like this.”

People did. Four years later, McMahon, 47, who now bills herself as America’s Government Teacher, has parlayed her ability to convey basic civics lessons in a nonpartisan manner into a mini-media empire with a podcast Here’s Where It Gets Interesting, an Instagram account SharonSaysSo with 1.1 million followers, a book club with a waiting list to join, a newsletter The Preamble, and a new book The Small and Mighty, which is a series of vignettes of non-famous people who affected history. She interviewed both Kamala Harris (in March, before she became the nominee) and Tim Walz (in August, after he became Harris’ VP pick). When people complained that she hadn’t interviewed Republican nominees, her loyal fans, who call themselves the Governerds, chimed in that she had requested interviews but hadn’t heard back—and many of them tagged vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance in their replies.


McMahon’s content offers no inside information or breaking news. She says nothing any mildly motivated voter couldn’t find on Wikipedia, or in a government textbook. But there’s something reassuring and refreshing about her midwestern earnestness, her crisp grasp of the subject matter, and the fact that it’s not easy to tell who she’d vote for. “I decided, rather than arguing with people who were confidently wrong on the internet, that I would just start making some very short explainer nonpartisan videos,” she says. “Not telling you who to vote for, not telling you why this candidate was better than that candidate, but helping you obtain the information you needed to be able to make an educated decision for yourself.” One popular recent post compared the economic plans from the Trump and Harris teams; another is a blow-by-blow dismantling of the saying that “the U.S. is a republic, not a democracy.”