Two weeks ago, Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) held a congressional town hall meeting in Somers, a small suburban town in northern Westchester County. Even though his team imposed a set of ridiculous requirements on attendees—that they had to prove they were residents of the district, that they couldn’t bring pens or umbrellas, that recording was strictly forbidden, that shouting or standing was prohibited, and that questioners were limited to 30 seconds, defiant opponents of Trump and MAGA dominated the event.
Even worse for Lawler, a 64-year-old constituent named Emily Feiner, a social worker, made national news for asking him a simple question: Given all the unconstitutional acts of the Trump administration, did Lawler have a red line and what was it? When the congressman started to dodge the question, Feiner, along with many in the audience, started shouting “Answer the question, answer the question!” When he then went on to the next question and claimed that tariffs only increased prices on imported goods, she exclaimed, “He doesn’t even understand basic economics!” At which point a Lawler staffer, Erin Crowley, called the private security firm hired for the event to eject Feiner. She refused to leave, and state troopers then approached her and demanded that she leave the hall. When she continued to refuse, they carried her out while the crowd chanted, “Let her stay.” The rest is history.
It turns out that Feiner is a subscriber to this Substack (small world!) and after reading last week’s edition exploring how the Defiance might develop more tactics to expand the pushback on Trump, she wrote me: “I have heard from SO many people thanking me for doing SOMETHING when I got carried out of Lawler’s Town Hall. Things like this are happening everyday, but they don’t get the play in the media. Someone should be looking for these stories and amplifying them, and everyone should know to have their cameras ready to document these everyday acts of defiance. We should use social media to teach civil disobedience.”
So I wrote back suggesting we talk, which we did this past Monday. We started out discussing what it was like to suddenly become Internet famous. Feiner didn’t hesitate with her answer. “Going viral is just awful. People say ‘thank you’ and ‘you’re my hero’ and stuff, and that feels nice. But nothing I did felt heroic to me, though I do understand why people say that.”
She added that the experience was pretty surreal. “The other thing about going viral is, truly, that you lose your identity. Everybody just projects onto you what they want you to be. So I am not a mainstream Democrat. I am not what my kids would call a lib or neoliberal. So many of the Democrats who loved that I spoke up, particularly on Bluesky, went after me. This was really interesting to me, because one of my first concerns was, ‘Oh, my God, they’re going to trash me and they’re going to come to my house and do terrible things.’”
In fact, she said, other than one nasty private message on Facebook, she hadn’t experienced a deluge of rightwing attacks. Instead, it was what she jokingly referred to as “Blue MAGA” that got riled up at her in ways that she found quite hurtful and insensitive. “The people on Bluesky, they were just so pissed because they found an old post of mine, where somebody was talking about the reasons why Kamala Harris lost, and I brought up Israel and Gaza and her unwillingness to allow a Democratic Palestinian elected official to speak at the convention, and her unwillingness to even make a noise about Palestinian humanity and liberation. And I think I said that [instead of voting for Harris] I had written in Hind Rajab [a six-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israel in Gaza], and people went nuts.”
Feiner told me that her Bluesky critics said things like “‘I thought you were a hero, but you’re responsible for Trump and you don’t care about homosexuals and trans people and black people, you’re a racist.’ And that this was an egotistical vote which was really interesting. I made the point that I lived in New York [where Harris won by a million votes] and they said, ‘No, that doesn’t matter. A vote for anyone but Kamala Harris was a vote for Donald Trump.’”
Since becoming semi-famous, Feiner has seen her Bluesky follower count jump from something like 653 to more than 20,000. But she said there were other dark sides to becoming well-known. On Facebook, she told me, she has gotten hundreds of friend requests. She worries about letting strangers onto her personal page, but also notices that the experience is changing her too. “it’s not just about me and the ways people project onto me, but I’ve become really aware of the ways I project onto other people.” Because she is outspoken about Gaza, she says, “I’ve lost a lot of friends since October 7 who disagree with me about Israel,” and she doesn’t want to accept requests from people enamored of her Lawler protest who will then just get angry at her. “I don’t need any more of that, you know? I’ve been doing that for something like 18 months now.”
I asked her why she thought so many national Democratic figures, people with huge followings like Robert Reich, were lionizing her online. We agreed that it was a sign of how hungry people are for leadership and catharsis. “Somebody finally did something,” she said. “That’s what people are feeling, and also that it’s this average person who’s not a celebrity. You know Bruce Springsteen—his rant over in Europe was great, but he’s Bruce Springsteen. I think people saw that an average person can make a dent. Because clearly our elected officials aren’t making a dent.”
But Feiner did make a dent—rumor even has it that House Speaker Mike Johnson admonished Lawler for continuing to hold townhall meetings in the event’s aftermath. It’s worth noting that Feiner’s protest and rise to fame was completely spontaneous. All she did at the Lawler event was ask a difficult question of him. People believe part of a representative’s job is to answer those questions, not suppress them.
Feiner commented, “It really was unplanned but it unfolded perfectly.” She noted that afterwards, “A lot of people have said, this is a textbook example of how you do civil disobedience. Because I remained calm, right? I didn’t fight with them verbally or anything. I went limp. I threw up the peace signs, all of that was textbook. But I have never been trained in civil disobedience, at least not that I can remember. Certainly I’ve been active in politics a long time, so maybe, maybe back in the days of, Nicaragua protests, maybe. But I don’t remember getting trained. I think it’s just in who I am.”
Feiner was also lucky that her friend, Jennifer Cabrera, a local organizer who is the co-chair of the Westchester-Putnam county branch of the Working Families Party, chose to pull out her cell phone and start recording the state police as they demanded she leave the hall and then carried her out. (Cabrera was carried out as well.) And she also was lucky to have another friend attending the event who was a civil rights lawyer. That’s because after she was removed from the town hall, the cops told her she was trespassing on a private event. But she was still refusing to leave, thinking that she needed to get arrested for her protest to have an impact. Her lawyer friend came out and told her, “‘You did what you needed to do, now leave,’” she told me. “And he was absolutely right. I had no idea at that point that this thing would explode in the way it did. But he said, ‘you’re good.’ I said, OK, and I was really glad that I didn’t get arrested and we got to go out to dinner instead!” She laughed at the memory.
That said, Feiner told me she would love to work with groups doing civil disobedience training. “I was wondering if there was a way to leverage the Internet to make it so that everybody sort of knew this stuff in the back of their head. You know, like maybe taking somebody who has the ability to take the video and break it down and say, okay, these are the principles of civil disobedience, and this is how, this is how they were enacted in this situation.”
I don’t know of any public-facing programs training people in the skills of nonviolent civil disobedience right now—the closest I’ve found is Rise4Freedom.org and its current round of trainings is almost done–but perhaps a reader wants to point to one?
Micah L. Sifry, writer and organizer.
This piece was originally published in the Connector on May 21st, 2025.
Pressure and Protest