Three Cheers for Human Friction

How many small actions (like Emily Feiner's civil disobedience at a Mike Lawler townhall) are “making a dent” in the MAGA onslaught. Plus, the state of the Democratic tech ecosystem.

Musk Withdraws!

Speaking at the Qatar Economic Forum yesterday, (f)Elon Musk declared that he would “do a lot less” political spending “in the future,” Politico reports. He added, “I think I’ve done enough.”

Can we just take a moment to recognize what a big deal this is for the Defiance? The richest man in the world, who had the audacity to try to buy the entire American political system, making ordinary billionaire buckrakers seem like pikers, is now in retreat. Sure, he left the door open to writing more mega-checks, saying, “If I see a reason to do political spending in the future, I will do it.” But, he added, “I don’t currently see a reason.”

Recall that Musk spent nearly $300 million in 2024 to support Trump and the GOP, and that in early 2025 he threatened to finance primary challenges against any Republican who broke ranks with Trump in Congress. Not so much anymore, apparently.

Yes, Musk extracted all kinds of value out of his investment in Trump, including regulatory relief and the disruption of agencies that were investigating or suing him, along with a hefty bump in his overall net worth. But I’m with the folks at #TeslaTakedown, who noted this news by posting, “Pressure works. Protest works.” And as Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic party noted, Wisconsin, where Musk spent $20+ million to try to buy a state Supreme Court seat and lost by 10 points, “was his Waterloo.”

Speaking of Pressure and Protest

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.

Emily Feiner being carried out of Lawler town hall, May 4, 2025 (photo by Seth Harrison)

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? Leave a comment.

Tech and Politics

Higher Ground Labs has just published another of its annual reports (be forewarned, this one is titled “2024 Political Technology Landscape Report” which you could confuse with their May 2024 “AI Edition Political Technology Landscape Report”). While I highly recommend you read the whole 63-page document if this is anywhere close to your field of work, here are my main takeaways:

First, kudos to HGL for, right from the start, admitting that for Democrats, this is a time of crisis. It’s not enough to just map the poli-tech ecosystem, which now includes about 150 companies. “We must also critical examine the programs we ran last cycle and identify where and why we failed to reach critical voters and move them to action,” Betsy Hoover, HGL’s cofounder and managing partner writes in the report’s introduction. She adds, “Voter behavior has changed rapidly, particularly in how people access and engage with information, yet our strategies have not kept pace.”

Hoover also makes a really interesting point: While Democrats believe they were able to reach out to 70% of registered voters in battleground states and more than half elsewhere, “actual engagement dropped significantly—especially among younger voters and key demographics that we had previously engaged more effectively.” There’s a logical conclusion that could resolve this conundrum, which is that the meta-machine Dems have learned to build using texts, calls, and door-to-door visits at massive scale is delivering declining, zero, or even negative returns. Hoover doesn’t say that, but when even hardcore Democratic voters keep saying they are sick of the bombardment of their inboxes, phones and porches, maybe it’s time to listen?

A second overarching conclusion—while (or perhaps as) the field as matured, it’s also gotten more routinized. “Campaigns frequently default to familiar tactics over newer approaches,” the authors write. The same with adoption of AI tools that could help save time and resources. Some of this is endemic to electoral campaigning, in that it’s safer to stick to methods you know, especially when budgets are tight or you don’t know how much money you’ll have to work with. But it’s another sign that the disruptive, game-changing days of the netroots are over, or at least, in hiatus.

HGL’s Political Tech Landscape map. That’s a lot of logos!

Third, the field desperately needs its own Consumer Reports. In every subsection of HGL’s landscape map, there are anywhere from six to twenty potential tools/vendors to choose from. How do users make good decisions? Charlotte Swasey, who writes the Medium Data newsletter (which is becoming a new fave for me) makes this point here in slightly saltier language. She also notes how much churn there is in the field, which is normal for startups but a challenge for anyone who would like to not buy a product and then discover it’s disappeared two years later.

Fourth, while the report emphasizes the importance of developing more “organic” rather than paid relationships with media makers and influencers as well as voters, and gives the Right lots of credit for being ahead on that curve (Trump spent far less than Harris on paid advertising, for example), it’s also hard not to wonder if the Democratic ecosystem fell behind on this shift precisely because of how good it got at the data part of “data-driven” campaigning.

“On the NGP VAN platform alone, over 1.9 billion total contact attempts were made, 270 million total doors were knocked, and 12 million total event signups were generated,” the report notes. There’s a lot of detail in the report showing how Democratic campaigns and institutions are getting even better at integrating data and analytics into their work, and I suppose many practitioners think they should invest in maintaining those capacities.

That said, HGL also reports that “there’s growing recognition that traditional targeting strategies may be reaching diminishing returns,” with voters contacted multiple times over several election cycles becoming less responsive, also known as “targeting immunity.” What a gentle way of saying, maybe Democrats need to suck less?

I’ve written a couple of times in the past about the way the DNC in particular failed to understand the potential of relational organizing, and deep in the report there’s more evidence for this. While the Progressive Turnout Project ran a paid relational program that tapped 41,000 participants to reach 1.2 million friends and generated a measurable 2.2% lift in turnout, producing more than 47,500 net Democratic votes, the report also reveals that the DNC’s relational program, which had roughly twice as many volunteer participants (80,000) only mapped 200,000 relationships. In other words, they didn’t make smart use of the tactic at all.

Oh, and HGL notes that in 2024, Americans received more than 25 billion political text messages, a 50% increase compared to 2022. WTF! That’s something like 75 text messages each for every person in America.

Finally, if I had to highlight just one sentence from the report’s conclusion, it would be this: “We need to build communities, not just target them.” Amen.

—Related: Monday, Pod Save America focused on the problem of Democratic donor fatigue and scam PACs. The whole episode is worth a listen, but what caught my ear was the segment Tommy Vietor did with ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones. In it, she largely pooh-poohed the problem of scam PACs, even suggesting that many donors like to get those asks. When Vietor tried to interject and say that no one likes the shrill or false claims about 5X matches and the like, she said, “let me tell you why I know this is true. At least five percent of the time, people are saying yes. Right? So if everyone hated it, we would stop doing this.” Leaving aside that a 5% conversion rate on spammy fundraising asks is extremely unlikely, this means ActBlue’s CEO thinks a 95% rejection rate is healthy. She also said that if an outfit claimed that there was a big match on a donor’s contribution when that was not true, this wasn’t necessarily scammy behavior if the resulting donations actually ending up helping campaigns.

The HGL report doesn’t mince words about the spam PAC problem, noting that according to FEC filings, “8 of the top 20 ActBlue recipients in July 2024 were scam PACs. Collectively, the top nine scam PACs raised over $31 million of the $250 million total brought in by candidates, committees, and victory funds that month.” Indeed, thanks to public pressure, including from the Harris campaign, ActBlue removed six of those eight PACs from its platform. But the problem remains severe. Wallace-Jones’ remarks on Pod Save America suggest that she’s not inclined to handle it more aggressively. Not good.

—Also related: Democratic data firm Catalist published its big “What Happened” report earlier this week, which is based on actual voter data rather than questionable exit polls. It confirms what we already know, that Harris-Walz 2024 underperformed the Biden-Harris 2020 ticket with young voters, men, voters of color, less frequent voters and urban voters. Some of these voters went to Trump; some just stayed on their couches. There’s a ton to digest in this report and people are just starting to offer their takes. If you want a quick read: Kyle Tharp offers some key takeaways, including an intriguing tidbit about how underfunding of voter registration programs might have played a role.

—Also related: Teddy Schleifer reports (gift link) for The New York Times on how big Democratic donors and political entrepreneurs are swarming to catch up with Republicans in the world of online media influence. Wierdly, the “find the next Joe Rogan” crowd doesn’t seem to be looking much at existing liberal/progressive media, whether that’s the Meisalas brothers (whose daily podcast surpassed Rogan recently) or the plethora of smart commentators doing great work but in need of production support.

End Times

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