A prominent business thinker is urging Americans to take their protest wallets online, and then close them.
New York University Stern School of Business professor Scott Galloway says people upset over President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown should not only march in the streets, but also hit Silicon Valley where it hurts most, subscription revenue.
Speaking Tuesday on MSNBC’s The 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle, the host of The Prof G Pod unveiled a campaign called Resist and Unsubscribe, a coordinated month-long boycott targeting companies he believes bolster the administration’s power.
He argues the most effective pressure point is not Washington. It is Wall Street.
“Hiding in plain sight”
According to Galloway, Americans already possess leverage capable of rattling the White House. It simply requires canceling services many use daily.
He urged people to cancel recurring subscriptions such as streaming platforms, ride-share memberships and AI services offered by companies like Amazon, Apple and Google.
A small cluster of subscription-driven giants, he explained, now dominates market indexes. Therefore, weakening their valuation could ripple into political influence.
“If you really want to hurt or send a message to the president, he listens to markets,” he said. “So how do you do that? Have to go after the soft tissue.”
The math behind the boycott
To illustrate the strategy, Galloway even leaned on artificial intelligence itself.
Using ChatGPT as an example, he described how individual cancellations scale into investor impact.
“Say you have Anthropic and ChatGPT, and you decide to cancel ChatGPT: $20 a month, $240 [a year],” he explained. “OpenAI is raising money at an $800 billion market cap, $20 billion revenues — that’s 40 times revenues. So your $240 less of subscription revenues translates to approximately $10,000 in market capitalization.”
In other words, he argues, small consumer decisions multiply dramatically once they collide with high valuations.
“The easiest way to send a strong signal to the markets and to the president is to go after the most fully valued companies whose CEOs have his ear and have enabled him.”
Not a replacement for protest
Galloway praised street demonstrations against immigration enforcement but said economic participation amplifies them rather than replaces them.
“I think it’s just healthy to do something like this with other people,” he said. “I think it’s an additive or a cumulative effect, not an either/or.”
He also pointed to growing unease over federal enforcement tactics, warning Americans they “can do with fewer recurring revenue subscription programs” as long as there is a “secret police with masks on” operating domestically.
A consumer-driven political weapon
Ultimately, Galloway framed the boycott as civic participation rather than partisanship.
“Political parties don’t foment change — people do,” Galloway said.
Whether Americans follow through remains uncertain. Still, the proposal reflects a broader shift in modern politics, where economic behavior increasingly doubles as political expression, and the battlefield extends from polling booths to monthly billing statements.
