Until recently, Seattle’s Holly Figueroa O’Reilly was best known as a self-proclaimed “Grammy-losing songwriter” and the founder of the women-in-music organization Indiegrrl. But since O’Reilly took on Donald Trump under her snarky Twitter handle @AynRandPaulRyan, she has found a different sort of voice, even serving as a national organizer for last weekend’s March for Truth rallies. And O’Reilly refuses to have that voice silenced, launching a free-speech crusade — alongside lawyers Jameel Jaffer, Katie Fallow, and Alex Abdo, from the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University — after Trump blocked her on Twitter last month.

Here's the letter we sent to the president today.https://t.co/U8WK7U3sVU pic.twitter.com/sc7PVjpLHe — Holly O'Reilly (@AynRandPaulRyan) June 6, 2017





According to report by Time, O’Reilly’s attorneys argue that the president’s Twitter account is a “designated public form” and that his blocking followers “suppresses speech in a number of ways.” They sent a letter Tuesday to the White House requesting that Trump unblock O’Reilly and reportedly hundreds of other Twitter users, and they may file a lawsuit if Trump does not comply. (The White House did not respond to Yahoo Music’s request for comment.) This campaign went viral the following day, when O’Reilly’s passionate essay, “President Trump Is Violating My Constitutional Rights by Blocking Me on Twitter,” ran in the Washington Post. “Press secretary Sean Spicer said just yesterday that Trump’s tweets are considered ‘official statements by the president of the United States.’ When Trump blocks people for disagreeing with him, he isn’t just deciding not to hear our voices; he’s cutting us off from receiving these official statements,” O’Reilly wrote.

Hey! I wrote a little something for the .@washingtonpost about Trump blocking me on Twitter.https://t.co/yexLFmras0#WedesdayWisdom — Holly O'Reilly (@AynRandPaulRyan) June 7, 2017





O’Reilly may be politically active and aware, but the retired troubadour and mother of five (including one child with special needs) interestingly tells Yahoo Music, “I grew up Republican. Bill Clinton was my first election when I voted Democrat. I’m pretty moderate.” She adds with a chuckle, “I’m actually really moderate for living in Seattle!” In fact, in her Twitter bio, O’Reilly describes herself a “foul-mouthed moderate” — right next to the hashtags #MarchForTruth, #RESIST, and a brand-new one, #BlockedByTrump.

However, O’Reilly believes it’s important that all citizens, regardless of their political affiliations or beliefs, are able to freely access the president’s tweets. In this exclusive interview with Yahoo Music, she discusses why Trump has set a dangerous precedent with his social media discrimination, how other musicians and artists are leading the resistance, and if she’d ever run for office herself.

Yahoo Music: So how did your “Twitter war” with Trump start?

Holly Figueroa O’Reilly: After the election, a lot of us were devastated and really upset, because we thought it was not going to go that way. So right afterwards, I started reply to his tweets — not all of them, but the ones that were especially dumb. I would just tweet dumb things myself underneath, at first, like, “Shut the f*** up. Stop talking. You’re not smart, you’re not helping yourself. Just stop tweeting, you’re bad at it!” At first he was just tweeting stuff like, “Ha ha, I won,” that kind of thing, but then his tweets became more problematic, so then I would reply [more seriously], with factual information and links to things that said exactly the opposite of what he was tweeting. And it kind of went from there.

And what was your tweet that broke the president’s back, so to speak? What made him block you?

The one that was the clincher was when Trump was overseas and met with the pope, and the pope was obviously not enthralled with his presence and was giving him a dirty look. I joked about that. That was literally it. That was the one that threw him over the edge. Right after that, I was blocked.

How did you realize you’d been blocked?

I tweeted that in the morning, and I went about my day. Usually my phone would go off any time Trump tweeted, because I had notifications set up, so I thought, “He’s being especially quiet today!” When I got back to my computer later, I found out that a bunch of other people had been blocked, people who usually rose to the top of his comments. I realized maybe I’d been blocked too — and lo and behold, I had.