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Chapter 1: Why are ICE operations in Minneapolis significant?
Why have the ICE operations in Minneapolis struck a nerve unlike anything else in the Trump era?
It's really important to understand that this is a radical administration. It is not a conservative administration.
I'm Preet Bharara. In this week, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum joins me to unpack what's happening in Minneapolis and why she argues this moment reflects a radical governing project, not traditional conservatism.
Chapter 2: What defines the current political administration's approach?
The episode is out now. Search and follow Stay Tuned with Preet wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Scott Galloway, and this is No Mercy, No Malice. Political parties don't build movements, people do. We build resist and unsubscribe to serve as infrastructure for America's pro-democracy movement. Resistance infrastructure, as read by George Hahn.
I've struggled my whole life to discern the difference between being right versus effective. Over the past decade, the U.S. has been on a slow burn to fascism. The best description I've seen of America's current political landscape came from David Frum. If progressives won't enforce the border, fascists will. we are squarely in the fascist part of the program.
Now that it's happened, to borrow from Sinclair Lewis, being right isn't enough. We need to be effective. The question isn't what to say or who to vote for, but what to build. A. Resistance Infrastructure Congress has the power to rein in ICE, restore the rule of law, and unwind authoritarianism in America.
But to paraphrase a quote popular with self-help gurus and motivational speakers, Congress isn't coming to save you. Last year's government shutdown over health care didn't result in a solution, but the assignment of blame. Democrats leveraged the recent partial government shutdown to negotiate for guardrails on America's Gestapo. Good.
But banning federal agents from wearing masks and ordering independent investigations into the murders of American citizens are empty wins if the Trump administration is responsible for enforcing those policies. In addition, without true structural change, de-gerrymandering, reversing Citizens United, installing term limits, we'll continue to endure a bipolar America.
Democrats, playing by a rulebook that's been incinerated, come across as neutered and voiceless. Meanwhile, Republicans are Jekyll and Hyde. In private, they say Trump is a threat to American democracy. In public, they're sycophants, praising the president no matter what he says or does. The result?
Congress is America's answer to the Russian Duma, i.e., nominally important but functionally irrelevant. When I interviewed historian Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, on my podcast at the end of January, he said the current state of American politics is best understood as a system of competitive authoritarianism.
A democratically elected leader erodes checks and balances, attacks institutions, and weaponizes the justice system against his opponents. There will still be elections, but you don't wait for the opposition party, Snyder said. Instead, the people have to push out ahead of the opposition party.
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Chapter 3: How can individuals contribute to resistance infrastructure?
You have to set the moral terms, take risks, and build a coalition of which the opposition party is a part, but isn't necessarily leading. Pro-democracy movements aren't created by political parties. They're created by people. political parties are elected and returned to office for promising and then delivering tangible results to their constituents.
Good jobs, better schools, clean drinking water, etc. Political movements are graded on a similar curve, but the connection between action and outcome is rarely a straight line. The 1955 Montgomery bus boycott began as a one-day protest. Despite a 90% participation rate, the single-day action achieved no tangible results.
But after 13 months and a favorable Supreme Court ruling, the boycott successfully forced the integration of Montgomery's bus system. During that long campaign, however, it would have been easy for onlookers to be cynical.
Over the past decade, I've been a protest cynic, believing most actions viewed through the narrow lens of the moment are performative measures that generate selfies and make participants feel good about being right without having any actual impact. But Timothy Snyder says my thesis is incorrect.
The main reason you protest is to tell the rest of the people who are watching you that what's going on isn't normal, Snyder told me. The second reason you protest is that it's the gateway to doing other things. In other words, what looks like sound and fury signifying nothing is in fact an incubator for building infrastructure and organizing further actions. Case in point.
After the first day of the Montgomery bus boycott, activists, led by a young preacher named Martin Luther King Jr., organized a carpooling network with more than 200 cars and 100 pickup locations. That infrastructure sustained their movement, allowing them to register an estimated $3,000 hit per day to the city's bus service until their demands were met.
That's $35,000 per day adjusted for inflation. When we launched Resist and Unsubscribe last week, we contributed some infrastructure to a political movement. Our goal is to demonstrate to consumers that they wield enormous power, as their spending accounts for more than two-thirds of the U.S. economy.
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Chapter 4: What historical examples illustrate effective protest movements?
Your wallet is a weapon. And in a capitalist society, the most radical act is withholding your money. Deployed broadly across the economy, however, a consumer boycott is a blunt instrument that maximizes damage while diluting influence. We prefer surgical strikes to carpet bombing.
America's economy has become one giant bet on AI, with seven tech companies representing more than a third of the S&P 500. The concentration of economic power in so few hands renders those businesses uniquely vulnerable to a boycott, as consumers can focus on a short target list.
Big tech's vulnerability is further multiplied by the subscription model, as valuations for subscription companies are typically 8x to 20x revenue. One example. In 2022, Netflix reported losing just 200,000 subscribers in a single quarter, and that wiped out $50 billion in market cap overnight.
Netflix attributed the churn to increased competition and the lifting of pandemic restrictions that had kept people in front of their TVs. Free gift with purchase? Consumers maximize political impact while minimizing household expenses. In America, four out of five adults spend nearly $200 per year on unused subscriptions. I had three HBO Max subscriptions. Somehow.
Some of you have asked why we are targeting Amazon, my 2026 stock pick. Others want to know why we didn't target Disney. A, I'd rather be effective than right. The companies at ground zero of resist and unsubscribe have an outsized influence over the national economy and our president. The stocks in the blast zone belong to consumer-facing companies we've identified as active enablers of ICE.
Collectively, ground zero and blast zone businesses don't represent the totality of complicity, but rather the jugular of American authoritarianism. For a recent example of what happens when consumers deploy their spending power against the jugular of authoritarianism, see Disney's suspension and reinstatement of Jimmy Kimmel.
In the end, it took fewer than 1% of the mouse's total streaming subscribers to accomplish what CEO Bob Iger couldn't, stand up to an authoritarian.
Note, according to Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist and professor at Harvard who analyzed 323 nonviolent and violent mobilizations between 1900 and 2006, when at least 3.5% of a country's population actively engages in a peaceful protest movement, it has always resulted in political change.
My go-to framework for understanding the rise of fascism in America today is the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s. The most chilling parallel between then and now is the relationship between business elites and authoritarians.
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