Time to make TACO wobble
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The day after federal agents shot Alex Pretti at a protest in Minneapolis, Scott Galloway got on an emergency podcast and said something that stuck with me.
“If you want to understand real power and the difference between being right and being effective, stop watching protests and start watching GDP.”
He wasn’t dismissing the protests. He was doing the math. Marches don’t move Trump. Outrage doesn’t move Trump. Court orders don’t move Trump. But when tariffs threatened a market collapse, Trump called it “wobbled” and reversed course within 24 hours.
“Trump does not respond to outrage,” Galloway said. “He responds to markets. And that’s not cynicism. It’s mechanics.”
Then he laid out the logic: the US economy is 70% consumer spending. A coordinated withdrawal from spending, even a small one, would be immediately noticeable. Hit the tech companies that drive 40% of the S&P. Cancel the subscriptions. Make the line go down. Watch how fast the rhetoric changes when CNBC starts asking questions.
“The most radical act in capitalism isn’t protest,” he said. “It’s nonparticipation.”
That was Sunday. By the following week, he’d built it. A website called “Resist and Unsubscribe” has specific targets, specific instructions, andlinks to cancellation pages. Ground zero: the big tech companies whose CEOs have been prostrating themselves at the White House. The blast zone: companies directly contracting with ICE.
He went from insight to action in days. Gangster!
What We’re Responding To
Let me be specific about what happened.
Federal agents in masks. Masks. Like they’re ashamed of their own faces. They shot a man at a protest in Minneapolis. A nurse. A father. No criminal record. Licensed to carry. Didn’t even touch his weapon. Dead anyway.
He was standing on a public street exercising his constitutional right to Voice.
They shot him for it.
Then the Secretary of Homeland Security got on television and called him a domestic terrorist. Said he was “brandishing” a weapon he never drew. Said he was there to “massacre” federal agents.
And they’re not stopping. Ohio is next. The Haitians. Same playbook. Same masks. Same lies loaded and ready for whoever they shoot next.
This is what happens when an administration learns it can ignore the courts, Congress, and the Constitution and face no consequences.
Galloway looked at this and asked a simple question: What actually moves these people?
Why the Market Is Trump’s Weakness
This isn’t about ideology. It’s about survival math.
Trump knows a bad economy means midterm losses. Midterm losses mean he loses his congressional shield. Without that shield, the lawsuits start landing. The investigations get teeth. The immunity arguments get harder.
His survival depends on keeping Republicans in line. Republicans stay in line when their donors are happy. Donors are happy when their portfolios are up.
Make the line go down, and that whole chain starts to rattle.
That’s his tell. When tariffs threatened a market collapse, he called it “wobbled” and reversed course within 24 hours. When the bond market got nervous about his Greenland rhetoric, suddenly annexing a NATO ally wasn’t so urgent. He’ll bluster about anything until the S&P dips. Then he folds.
Galloway’s “Resist and Unsubscribe” isn’t just a boycott. It’s a pressure campaign aimed at the one thing Trump actually monitors. Not polls. Not pundits. Not protests. The market.
The Complicit Assholes in the Middle
Let’s be clear about the CEOs. They’re not innocent bystanders caught in crossfire. They chose this.
Tim Cook showed up to a White House premiere in a tuxedo, hours after federal agents shot Alex Pretti at a protest that morning. His response, days later? A memo about “de-escalation” so bland it could have been written by a chatbot trained on HR documents. He made sure to mention he’d had “a good conversation with the president.” Wouldn’t want to forget to genuflect.
Amazon paid $40 million for a Melania documentary that made no financial sense unless you count it as what it obviously was: a tribute to power. Protection money with a press release.
Zuckerberg gutted his content moderation team, abandoned fact-checking, and explained that, actually, masculine energy is what Meta needs right now. Then he sat courtside at the inauguration like a nervous courtier hoping to be noticed while the administration he’s courting sends masked agents into American homes.
These men watched what was happening, the raids, the masks, the lies about dead men, and decided that access to power was worth more than basic human dignity.
They deserve what’s coming. But they’re not the point.
They’re the transmission mechanism. Hurt their stock price, they make phone calls. They beg for meetings. They ask what it would take to make this stop. And that pressure travels upward to the one person who actually cares about the market.
The boycott hits the CEOs because hitting the CEOs hits Trump.
How This Actually Works
Galloway laid it out simply. Cancel the subscriptions. Drop Prime. Cut the streaming services. Unsubscribe from the platforms whose leaders decided the ring was worth kissing.
These companies run on growth. Wall Street doesn’t reward “flat.” A slowdown in subscriptions, a dip in engagement, a quarter where the numbers disappoint, that’s when analysts start asking questions. Stock prices wobble. CEOs sweat.
And here’s the thing about these particular companies: they’re valued on expectations of future growth, not current earnings. A 5% slowdown doesn’t cost them 5%. When it craters their multiple. The market punishes disappointment exponentially.
Hit them in February. Hit them in March. Make it sustained, not symbolic. This doesn’t work if a small group stops spending for a day. It works when a critical mass scales back for weeks and months.
The goal isn’t to bankrupt Amazon. The goal is to make the line go down enough that the pressure reaches Trump.
The Part Galloway Didn’t Say
Here’s where I come in.
I want this to work. I want it to work so badly, I’m writing this article to make it stronger. But I’ve been around long enough to know what happens when protest movements gain traction.
They get shut down.
Not through debate. Through the financial system.
Operation Choke Point. WikiLeaks. GoFundMe freezing fundraisers. PayPal is seizing balances. Banks are closing accounts because someone made a phone call.
A protest movement that can be frozen isn’t a movement. It’s a request.
What happens when “Resist and Unsubscribe” works too well? When does someone in power decide that coordinated economic action looks like “economic terrorism”? When the payment processors get nervous calls suggesting that maybe, possibly, accounts associated with this movement warrant “enhanced review”?
We’ve seen this script. We know how it ends.
The Insurance Policy
Bitcoin isn’t a replacement for Galloway’s boycott. It’s the insurance policy that keeps it running when they try to shut it down.
Money that can’t be frozen. Transactions that can’t be blocked. Funding that can’t be cut off with a phone call.
The people in Minneapolis organizing to observe ICE raids, the lawyers showing up at 3 AM, the networks sharing information about where the masked men are headed next. These people need resources. They need to move money without asking permission from institutions that might get a call from someone who doesn’t like what they’re doing.
I’m not saying abandon your bank account tomorrow. I’m saying: have an exit route. Know where the door is. Understand that the same financial system you’re using to boycott these companies can be turned against you the moment you become inconvenient.
Bitcoin is the door that doesn’t lock from the outside.
Step one: Do what Galloway says. Unsubscribe. Cancel. Withdraw. Make the line go down. Hit Trump where he actually feels it.
Step two: Secure your position. Some cash in bitcoin. A wallet that isn’t controlled by a company that might get a phone call. An exit route that stays open even if they try to close it.
Step three: Sustain it. Not a day. Not a week. Months. Until the midterms start looking scary enough that the phone calls from donors get loud enough to make something change.
The CEOs are complicit assholes who deserve every lost subscriber. But they’re also the lever. Pull hard enough, and the pressure reaches Trump.
He’s shown us his weakness. He told us himself when he said the market “wobbled.”
Time to make it wobble again.
Brian Connelly is a technology consultant, Bitcoin educator, and author of “How to Keep Your Bitcoin Alive and Well,” and “The Smell the Smoke,” He’s not on Facebook, and as of this week, neither is his Prime membership.