The Coercive Power of Withdrawal

As many readers know, in those posts on my blog which deal with strategic nonviolent resistance, I have cautioned against relying solely on protest rallies and marches as a tactic of resistance.  I have also emphasized that tactics of noncooperation - especially economic noncooperation - are far more powerful, as these tactics can impose far more painful costs on an oppressor than mere mass protest.

So we come to the tactics which have been deployed against American businesses which have supported the fascist, racist, supremacist regime of Trump and the Rethuglican party.  I don't have time to go into an exhaustive analysis today, but I can definitely tell you that boycotts have definitely hurt the Target chain of big box stores.  Target was targeted (no pun intended) by boycotts because in 2025 it rolled back its employee diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in order to please Donald Trump. As a result, by September 2025, Target stock had lost 33 percent of the value it held at the beginning of 2025.  This drop in stock value erased over $20 billion in shareholder value.  By October 2025, Target had eliminated 1,800 corporate jobs.  And Spotify is starting to lose stock value.  Boycotts do indeed bite.

Boycotts should be part of a larger strategy of decoupling from existing oppressive systems in order to create smaller, local alternative institutions and arrangements that are more equitable.  So instead of hoping merely to "apply pressure" in order to try to "change" Spotify, why not go for broke and create arrangements which don't require the use of any streaming music service?  Does anyone remember CD's and CD players?  If you haven't thrown your old CD player away, you can always fish it out of the attic or garage, dust it off and fix it up, and enjoy great high fidelity music without ever again subscribing to Spotify.  In doing so, you will help small indie artists in the process.

And as far as boycotts and creating alternative institutions and arrangements, here's something the international community can do to help those of us in the U.S. who still remain decent people and not fascist monsters.  You in the international community can help us by ending your buying of U.S. debt.  You can also help us by getting rid of the U.S. Treasury bills that you already have.  Think about this: the U.S. is already over $38 trillion in debt.  The interest on the U.S. debt has begun to exceed $1 trillion per year.  Whatever debt you buy, I think it's safe to say that a point will come when the interest on the U.S. national debt exceeds the annual tax receipts of the U.S., and then you may never see your money again.  And by continuing to buy U.S. debt, you will be financing a huge buildup of the U.S. military (for Trump wants to boost war spending to $1.5 trillion in FY 2027).  That money will be used to build the capability to bully and threaten the entire world with violence so that the fascist, supremacist element in the U.S. can get its way. Please, for the sake of all of us, decouple from the U.S.  The sovereignty you save may be your own.

A Minor Symptom of American Breakdown

Car crash in 2018. By Charles Edward Miller from Chicago, United States - Car Crash 7-1-18 2246, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=71153146

一个汉语文功课的问："Comment [in Chinese] on how you drive, and how you drive on the highway...Comment on how people drive in your city..."

我的回答：“我开车开得不错。我开车开得有一点慢。因为我不喜欢超速罚单，所以我开车开得有一点慢。我遵守限速规定和交通法规。很多司机不遵守交通规则，他们开车开得特别快，所以我的城市（和美国）有很多交通事故和死亡事件。我觉得很多美国的司机都想死或者他们觉得他们是超人 （"Superman"）。我从前坐公共汽车和轻轨，可是我现在只开我的电动汽车。”

Aaand, the rest of the world is starting to notice! See this: "美国：法律视各州而定，一般为：东海岸普遍为非城区65mph（105km/h）城区50-55mph（80-89km/h）；中西部普遍乡村70mph（113km/h）城镇65mph（105km/h）市区50-55mph（80km/h-89km/h）部分市区（芝加哥为例）45mph（72km/h）；西部（怀俄明州等）非城镇80mph（129km/h)城镇山区65-75mph（105-120km/h）；西南部（德州亚利桑那等）非城区75-80mph（120-129km/h）；西海岸：非城区70mph（113km/h）；近郊：55-65mph（89-105km/h）；夏威夷州：60mph（97km/h）。现实是，美国普遍存在超速现象。。。" (https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/%E9%AB%98%E9%80%9F%E5%85%AC%E8%B7%AF, retrieved 13 January 2026)  还有看 "The Uniquely American Epidemic of Traffic Deaths," Deutsch, 2023.

Repost - Touching The Oppressor's Wound

I'd like to point my readers to a post which I wrote back in 2017.  The title of that post is "Touching the Oppressor's Wound."  That post lays out the theoretical basis for weakening the power of the oppressor by showing his agents how their oppression is hurting not just the oppressed, but the oppressor's agents as well.  That may sound like a crazy and impractical approach to dealing with an oppressor, but allow me to give a simplified summary of the points I wanted to make in my original post.  That summary is as follows:

• First, we know that when a tyrant or dictator recruits men to serve as his armed henchmen, he tends to select such recruits from the most violent, deviant, and psychopathic members of society.  This must be so, because the tyrant will want to use these men as agents of terror both against his own citizens and against the peoples of foreign nations whom the tyrant wants to conquer.  
• Second, in order to make these recruits even more effective as instruments of terror and violence, the tyrant will subject these recruits to the kind of training that greatly amplifies their viciousness and violent tendencies.  In other words, their training will amplify their tendency to act like monsters.
• Third, this violent viciousness will become such a pervasive part of the character and personality of these people that it will essentially be "on" at all times, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  This means that they will be very hard people to live with!  Indeed, there are multiple studies which show highly elevated levels of domestic violence among U.S. military and law enforcement personnel.
• Fourth, this tendency to violence and cruelty will actually turn out to be a weakness of their families and intimate partner relationships, as it can become a motivator for their spouses and children to seek some way of escape from relationships with these people.  
• Fifth, and most important: Therefore, a viable tool of resistance against a tyrant and his agents of oppression can be for trained volunteers and mental health professionals to offer counseling, help, and especially outreach to the spouses and children of these men.  For in offering such counseling and help, the volunteers and mental health professionals will be communicating to the spouses and children that their situation is not normal or acceptable, and that the men perpetrating this domestic violence are not normal or acceptable.  This will weaken the ability of the tyrant to continue to use these men as a pillar of support of his oppressive regime.
• The weakening starts with the volunteer, friend, or mental health professional getting the victim of domestic violence to admit that she is in a destructive relationship and that she (and any children she has) are in danger of serious harm.
• The volunteer, friend, or mental health professional must then bring the victim to see that her spouse's monstrous behavior is a direct consequence of his choice to do the violent dirty work of the oppressor.  The victim must be brought to see that her spouse has been turned into a monster precisely because being a monster is part of the requirements of his job.
• The victim must then be shown that there are righteous, legitimate ways of escaping from her monstrous situation, and she must be gently led to choose between staying in a harmful (and potentially fatal) situation versus walking away into a more healthy life.

I suggest that in the United States at this time, there's no shortage of potential victims who could be helped by this kind of intervention.  For we have a military that has come unhinged from any moral restraints, a military which allowed itself to be deployed against its own citizens in 2025, and which is now busily killing people in other countries in order to take over those countries for Trump.  (First, Venezuela, then Cuba, then Denmark and Greenland, then...?) And we have domestic bullies like the ICE agents who have been shooting unarmed U.S. citizens lately.  (I'm a man and not a woman - yet I cringe at the thought of what it must be like to be the spouse of Jonathan Ross! Or one of his kids.  It truly must be a living hell...)  The kind of domestic violence interventions I am suggesting might be a pivotal tool in showing the men of ICE and of the U.S. military what monsters they have become by showing their spouses and children how impossible it is to live with these men any longer.

P.S. Those who read the original post will encounter comments from a few rather wacky and unhinged commenters.  These commenters spouted a bunch of right-wing talking points in their comments.  I believe two of the comments are from the same person even though one of them was posted anonymously.  Feel free to take the comments with a grain (or more) of salt.

Of Monkeys, Gourds, and Peanuts

I've been pleased to learn over the last few weeks that Donald Trump is losing the support of his base, as reported in such articles as "Three Polls That Show Donald Trump Is Losing His Base" (Newsweek, December 2025), "Trump's Support is Collapsing. But why?" (Vox, December 2025), and "How divides emerged at the heart of Trump’s Maga world" (BBC, December 2025). It is interesting to see that among the reasons for the collapse of Trump's support among white American males is the fact that MAGA Trump-ism has begun to seriously hurt the economic prospects of the people who comprise his base.  This is due to such factors as the costs of Trump tariffs to ordinary Americans, the harms to American industries and businesses from the international backlash against Trump-ism, and the negative economic impacts of Trump's mass deportations on America's farming sector.  But it must also be acknowledged that some of the negative economic impacts are due to the boycotts of businesses whose owners support Trump-ism.  Consider, for instance, how badly Elon Musk's businesses were hurt by boycotts in early 2025.  Consider also the decrease in revenue suffered by Amazon, Target, and Home Depot over their abandonment of workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in their bid to curry the favor of Donald Trump.

So today I'd like to write a bit more about the agenda of Donald Trump and his supporters, and the necessity of economic noncooperation from those who are the intended victims and targets of Trump and his supporters.  To be quite plain and blunt, Donald Trump is one of the de facto leaders of a revanchist movement among white supremacists.  He and his supporters want to bring back a world which is the undisputed empire and sole possession of a small group of fat, privileged, evil people who have Made Themselves Great Again at the expense of all the other peoples on earth.  This is the goal of his international policy, which is why he is engaged now in violently trying to conquer other people's countries.  It is also his domestic policy, a policy whose goal is to return the United States to being a paradise for one privileged group of people while turning the rest of us into the domestic servants of this privileged group.  

But he and his supporters depend on an economic machinery which in turn depends on the support and patronage of large numbers of the very people whom he wants to dispossess and subjugate.  In this he and his supporters are like the British were in relation to India and China in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  India was a supposed British "possession", yet the prosperity of the British economy depended on Indians buying British goods.  This fact was expertly used by Mohandas Gandhi to hurt the British economy during India's struggle for independence.  For Gandhi persuaded his fellow Indians to stop buying British goods and to begin to develop their own self-sufficiency.  This drastically raised the costs of empire for Britain and was one of the factors that led to India's independence from Britain.  As Marshall Ganz once said, systems of oppression always depend on the people whom they exploit.  One powerfully effective, yet nonviolent way for the oppressed to hurt the owners of these systems of oppression is to deny them the payoff they are hoping to gain from their oppression.  Don't feed the beast.

A more-than-likely fictional example may be helpful.  I'm going to repeat a story I heard long ago when I was a member of an abusive church, and which I've seen repeated since in the evangelical-o-sphere.  Supposedly there are countries in the developing world in which villagers go out day by day to hunt monkeys.  They are supposedly able to trap these monkeys by spreading hollowed-out gourds on the ground.  Each gourd has a small hole in its shell, and inside the gourd are a few peanuts.  When monkeys find the gourds, they reach inside and grab the peanuts as the hunters watch.  When the hunters come to seize the monkeys, the monkeys are so fixated on the peanuts that they won't let them go - even though by holding the peanuts they are unable to remove their hands from the gourds.  The gourds in turn are so big and heavy that the monkeys cannot run away from the hunters.  Thus the hunters are able to catch the monkeys and crack their skulls, and the monkeys are turned into monkey stew.  One note: I personally don't know whether most monkeys anywhere in the world would fall for such a trick, as I've never owned a monkey as a pet.  I specialize in cats.  I also suspect that the originators of this story have never seen a monkey in their lives, except in pictures or on TV. But let's assume for the moment that this story is true.

Now consider a person who is a member of a historically marginalized group, or a group which is targeted for oppression by a rich, powerful piece of garbage like Trump or like one of his supporters.  If the person who has been targeted for oppression continues to buy things made and sold by the Trump-oids, isn't he financing the very people who want to bash his brains out and turn him into cooked monkey meat?  How many of us allowed ourselves to be made into monkeys during this past holiday season?  How many of us splurged in our spending during Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and New Years? How many people of color bought Teslas in 2025?  How many will want to buy a Tesla in 2026? How many of us will watch the Superbowl in 2026? How many of us will join the military in 2026 even though the U.S. military is likely to be deployed against our brothers and sisters in foreign lands?  How many of us are signed up for Amazon Prime and YouTube and Hulu and Fox and Netflix and ESPN and HBO? How many of us are still using Spotify (which has for a long time been involved in cheating musicians out of their earnings, and which in 2025 ran recruitment ads for ICE)? Boycotts and other forms of economic noncooperation mean letting go of the peanuts. Don't let the present system of oppression make a monkey out of you.

Image courtesy of Craiyon (craiyon.com). Created 17 October 2025.

(Yes, yes, I know - this is a picture of an ape and not a monkey.

But you can't expect too much from the free version of an AI service!)