Be a Protagonist: Boycott by Dean Gloster

        I love our U.S. anthem: It’s appropriately hard to sing, and it ends in a question. At every public event, it asks us:

            Oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave/
            Over the land of the free/
            And the home of the brave?  

           We planted that flag on the moon to keep it waving over us for the next several thousand years, so the real question is: Are we still brave enough in these times to stay free?

            This month’s theme is either “finding your voice” or “world events” but I’m going to write about both—because, dear reader, events in the U.S. now compel us to make our voices heard. If, as it appears, we are under a new, immensely corrupt regime committed to assaulting our freedoms, are we brave enough to resist?

            A few data points from the last three days:

            Yesterday a federal Judge suspended, as requested, the SEC’s prosecution of Chinese crypto bro Justin Sun. Why did the SEC back off? After the election Justin Sun paid $75 million to a Trump family crypto operation, World Liberty Financial, which mostly went into Trump’s pocket, and then praised Trump. This matches last week’s SEC dismissal of a lawsuit against crypto platform Coinbase, after its CEO donated $75 million to a Trump super-PAC, gave $1 million for Trump’s inauguration, and promoted a Trump meme coin. As long as you’re selling something as ridiculous as a meme coin, why not just sell our justice system?

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/sec-fraud-prosecution-chinese-crypto-entrepreneur-justin-sun-donald-trump-world-liberty-financial-tokens/

            In the last two days, the Washington Post reportedly lost an additional 75,000 digital subscribers because its owner, Jeff Bezos (Amazon/Whole Foods), announced that the only opinions published by the paper from now on will be those matching his “free markets and personal liberties” views.

https://thehill.com/homenews/media/5169346-washington-post-loses-75k-subscriber-jeff-bezos-opinion-pivot/

            The Post’s publisher chirped that this new move was not about “siding with any political party,” but that was immediately contradicted by the next opinion piece in the WaPo, a laughable, Trump-toe-tonguing, North Korean-style-praise-of-Great-Leader puff piece extoling Trump’s extorting half of Ukraine’s mineral wealth as a master stroke effectively ending the war. (Reality check: It is not.)

 

            Meanwhile, thousands of more federal employees are being let go. Today, it’s the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) which tracks hurricanes, and which drew Trump’s ire in his last administration after its chief scientist correctly pointed out that Great Leader misspoke when he said hurricane Dorian was going to hit Alabama, causing him to double down and show an altered map with a hand-drawn sharpie line incorrectly suggesting the hurricane would continue toward Alabama. (Sharpie gate.)

 

I’m writing this on February 28^th, the day of a national buy-nothing boycott.

 

            I’m not buying anything today, and I’m picketing my local Tesla dealership tomorrow as part of an organized protest. 

            That doesn’t sound like much, but some of today’s chief enablers of the MAGA regime own big chunks of publicly-traded companies. When we boycott those companies, which trade at enormously high multiples of their earnings, every lost dollar earned results in many, many dollars of lost stock value.

            Elon Musk paid over a quarter of a billion dollars to elect Trump. Since throwing his Nazi salute on stage at Trump’s inaugural rally, however, Musk has lost an additional $50 billion, as the value in his publicly-traded Tesla stock has declined.

 

            If we don’t buy Teslas—and tell our friends not to buy Teslas—then the company will no longer be priced as a growth stock. If the price to earnings ratio shrinks to match the multiple of other car companies, Tesla’s value will become only 5% of what it trades at today. Because Musk borrowed against his Tesla stock to buy Twitter, he’ll also have those loans called. Good times. 

            We are book people. But two of the three bookstores near my house closed in the last two months. Don’t buy from Amazon. Buy from Bookshop.org and designate your local bookstore as the beneficiary. (Today would be a great day to join Bookshop.org)

            Today’s boycott is just an initial step. But there are more boycotts planned: 

            And each time you take action, and get your friends to take action, it trains you to resist. To do something. To be a protagonist. In France, where they have a tradition of beheading insensitive broligarchs and resisting Nazis, they regularly paralyze commerce with nationwide general strikes. Here in the U.S., without those traditions, we’ll have to work up to effective group action like a national strike.

            The bad news is that things will get much worse before they get better. (Trust me. I've dealt with narcissistic sociopaths. You have no idea.) 

            The good news is that those of us who read books can hear this as a call to action.

            Be a protagonist. Do something in response.

Dean Gloster is a former stand-up comedian and a former law clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court. His debut YA novel DESSERT FIRST is out from Merit Press/Simon Pulse. His YA short stories “Death’s Adopted Daughter” and "Proof of the Existence of Dog" are in the anthologies Spoon Knife 6: Rest Stop and Spoon Knife 7: Transitions from Autonomous Press. He is at work on two more YA novels, and the one he's wrapping up now deals with opposing evil. (Which we should all do.) He makes periodic anti-authoritarian posts on Bluesky, where he is @deangloster.bsky.social