Scott Galloway on How Small Businesses and Consumers Can Take the ‘Most Radical Act in a Capitalist Society’

The NYU professor is currently orchestrating a ‘resist and unsubscribe’ boycott of tech platforms and ICE-aligned corporations. Small businesses should pay attention.

BY BRIAN CONTRERAS, STAFF WRITER @_B_CONTRERAS_

Scott Galloway. Photo-illustration: Inc.; Photos: Courtesy Subject; Getty Images

For Scott Galloway, the final straw wasn’t when federal agents gunned down Alex Pretti in the streets of Minneapolis, but what happened soon after: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accused the dead man of being a domestic terrorist.

“This is an ICU nurse looking after our veterans, and I felt like she literally showed up and peed on his grave,” says Galloway, an NYU Stern School of Business marketing professor who’s emerged as an outspoken commentator on politics, business and culture. “I thought it was just so depraved. I’ve been good at being able to disassociate from politics that I didn’t like most of my life, [but] I found myself really anxious and upset about this.”

What to do about it, though? Galloway turned to a mantra he’s borrowed from journalist Dan Harris—“action absorbs anxiety”–and, drawing on his knowledge about market forces, put together a boycott movement aimed at exerting economic pressure on the Trump administration.

That effort, called “Resist and Unsubscribe,” asks ordinary Americans to boycott consumer businesses that directly support ICE efforts and unsubscribe from tech platforms that hold sway over the White House. Galloway say the movement’s website is currently seeing between 60,000 and 100,000 unique visits a day, with the landing page claiming responsibility for having lost the targeted businesses almost $250 million in market cap.

It’s not yet clear what impact, if any, the movement could have on federal policy. An “economic blackout” that took place a year ago this Saturday, organized by a grassroots group called the People’s Union USA, did not ultimately leave much of a mark despite enjoying substantial social media pick-up.

Yet with Amazon subject to the boycott—not to mention other big corporations such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Uber and OpenAI—it’s not hard to see how small businesses could be affected, especially if the number of participants keeps growing. (Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.)

“The president only walks back or checks back on policy when one thing happens,” Galloway tells Inc. “It’s not protests, it’s not shaming, it’s not co-equal branches of government. I’m not even sure it’s going to be the Supreme Court. It’s when the bond or the stock market declines; that’s when he backed away from ridiculous discussions of annexing Greenland, or sclerotic tariff policy.”

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