So, we have news: we’re starting a monthly newsletter.
Beginning today, we’ll send these newsletters near the start of each month, and each newsletter will go a little deeper than our normal emails, providing an additional level of insight into our strategy and our work.
To kick us off, we’re digging into an old strategy that has gained renewed prominence lately: the boycott.
Ever since the Irish Land League organized community members in County Mayo to band together and refuse to serve, work for, trade with, or even deliver mail to the tyrannical English land agent, Captain Charles Boycott, the boycott has become a staple in the activist’s toolkit. And nearly 160 years after Captain Boycott was shunned, it’s a tool that’s still used with remarkable effectiveness.
After Target dropped its DEI targets in February, Black faith leaders called for a boycott of the company. In the months that followed, the company’s sales and stock price tanked. By August, Forbes was announcing that the boycott had cost the Target CEO his job and the company’s investors $12 billion.
After Elon Musk started his attempts to destroy the US government earlier this year, including bragging about putting USAID into the woodchipper, an act that may have killed half-a-million people so far, thousands committed to boycotting Tesla as part of the #TeslaTakedown movement.
In the midst of the boycott, Tesla sales collapsed, the stock price cratered, and before long Musk was out of the government.
More recently, after Disney suspended Jimmy Kimmel, a boycott of Disney grew so rapidly that it forced the company into reinstating the comedian.
And, of course, with the Communication Workers of America and Tesla Takedown, we’ve launched the T-Mobile Boycott.
In the fight to save democracy, T-Mobile has chosen the wrong side: it’s hosting Trump Mobile on its network, despite the conflicts of interest being so great they may amount to corruption. T-Mobile is also partnering with Elon Musk’s Starlink, and it lobbied in favor of Trump’s deadly budget bill, which will strip healthcare from millions of Americans.
In response, alongside our friends at CWA and Tesla Takedown, we’ve set a goal of 10,000 T-Mobile customers canceling their contracts between November 14-16. In the process, we hope to make it clear not just to T-Mobile but all of corporate America: there are costs to siding with this authoritarian government.
If you’re a T-Mobile customer, you can take the pledge to hang up on T-Mobile here.
Even if you’re not a customer, we encourage you to take the pledge to boycott T-Mobile. The boycott is happening right before the holiday season, when a lot of people switch carriers – tens of thousands of people pledging to never switch to T-Mobile at this time of year is an important part of the campaign.
But I also want to be honest with you, I don’t know if this campaign will work. I recently canceled my contract with T-Mobile and switched to Visible (saving more than $60 on my monthly cell phone bill in the process).
Yet, as economically advantageous as it was, it took me about forty-five minutes to switch from T-Mobile, including a call to the company to get a “port out pin”. In the grand scheme of things, forty-five minutes isn’t an eternity, but it’s also not nothing. It took me less than four minutes to cancel my Disney+ subscription earlier this month.
I have no idea if we can get 10,000 people to do something that might take them nearly forty-five minutes, even if we can convince them it is a small but important act in the fight to save democracy.
But I do know this, in his powerful book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the 20th Century, Timothy Snyder’s first lesson was, “Do not obey in advance.”
And not only is T-Mobile obeying in advance, it’s actively courting the Administration, even as the horrors pile up: the attacks on free speech, the naked threats against political opponents, the vanishing of countless human beings into a gulag in El Salvador.
If a company like T-Mobile believes that there are no economic consequences to siding with authoritarianism, they are much more likely to do it. This is a tragedy of the system we have built: if a corporation thinks that buttering up to a guy trying to end democracy is in its short-term interests, it’ll do it.
But as the recent campaigns against Target, Tesla and Disney have shown, boycotts are an effective way to hold the powerful to account, just as was the case in Ireland in the 1870s,
So, in this time of grave peril for this country and the entire world, let us use our money to build the world we want to see.
From Target to Tesla to T-Mobile, let us boycott the collaborators.
In Solidarity
– Alec Connon, Stop the Money Pipeline coalition director