Late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s brief suspension by ABC/Disney was an instructive lesson in how the people can bring a multibillion-dollar corporation to its knees simply by withholding our money. And it’s a lesson that can be applied the next time President Donald Trump’s administration overplays its hand (and it will).
Trump’s second term has been so far defined by his willingness to use the full power of the federal government to hound his enemies and intimidate the opposition. The recent indictment of former FBI Director James Comey — which is just two pages long – is an example of how the regime cares less about actually jailing opponents as opposed to simply inflicting reputational and financial harm through the legal system. Both the Kimmel suspension and the Comey indictment were designed to send a message: If the government can go after rich and powerful public figures, ordinary people like us don’t stand a chance.
But that simply isn’t true. Kimmel’s Nielsen ratings on his return clocked in at more than 6.2 million. That’s roughly four times the size of his average viewership, and that’s taking into account the fact that media conglomerates Nexstar and Sinclair weren’t broadcasting his show to a significant portion of American households. That figure also doesn’t even include streaming viewership. Kimmel is bigger and more influential than ever, despite Trump’s attempt to permanently silence him for being a public critic of the regime.
As for Comey, he’s eager for a jury trial, and has retained Patrick Fitzgerald as his defense attorney. Fitzgerald is the former US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, and successfully prosecuted numerous high-profile defendants like former Governors Rod Blagojevich (D) and George Ryan (R), as well as media mogul Conrad Black and al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
Fitzgerald will be going up against Trump’s interim US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Lindsey Halligan, who is a former insurance attorney and beauty pageant contestant who has no prior prosecutorial experience. Halligan failed to secure an indictment on one of the three charges she brought to the grand jury, and the jury was almost evenly split on the other two counts. And that’s just to convince a jury of probable cause, let alone an actual jury trial in which she’ll have to prove guilt beyond all reasonable doubt. Halligan is massively outgunned: Comey may even get the charges dismissed before the case even goes to trial, given the overwhelming evidence he has at his disposal that he is the victim of malicious and vindictive prosecution.
While it’s true that ordinary Americans don’t have the same level of resources that Kimmel and Comey have to fight back against the Trump administration’s abuse of power, we have something that they don’t: Strength in numbers. If we have the power to make one of the world’s biggest media companies kneel, we also have the ability to shut down any attempt by the regime to conduct a nationwide crackdown against the opposition. It’s a virtual certainty that an attempted crackdown is coming, and the time is rapidly approaching for us to ready our secret weapon.
How Americans made a giant megacorporation say uncle
The Walt Disney Company is a titan of a corporation. It’s the 78th largest company in the world, with a market capitalization of $204 billion. It ranks just behind China’s biggest state-run oil company, and just ahead of AT&T and pharmaceutical giant Merck. It’s the second-largest media company in the United States, ranking just behind Comcast in revenue. And yet despite its bottomless resources and immense influence, Americans just twisted its arm behind its back and made it squeal by simply withholding our money.
When Kimmel initially commented that “the MAGA gang” was attempting to “score political points” off of the death of slain far-right activist Charlie Kirk, he drew the attention of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Brendan Carr, who made an ominous threat on right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson’s show. Carr said he was considering revoking the broadcast licenses of ABC stations that continued to air Kimmel’s show, and the FCC could do things “the easy way or the hard way.” He added that more “work” would be ahead for the FCC should stations not take Kimmel off the air.
Media conglomerates Nexstar and Sinclair took Carr’s threat seriously, with the former saying it would preempt Kimmel’s show with other content. Disney — which owns ABC — almost immediately suspended Kimmel “indefinitely,” and Sinclair said that not only would it refuse to carry Kimmel’s show on the TV stations it owns but demanded Kimmel also publicly apologize for his comments and make a donation to both Kirk’s family and to his far-right political advocacy organization.
Americans quickly responded in force with a hard boycott of Disney. A source within Disney told journalist Marisa Kabas that more than a million Disney+ customers cancelled their subscriptions in just a matter of days. Business Insider reported that so many people were cancelling that the Disney+ subscription cancellation page crashed due to traffic overload.
The basic Disney+ plan is around $13 per month, while the ad-free plan is $19 per month. And while it’s unclear how many of those who cancelled had the basic or premium plans, if one were to estimate an average monthly amount of $15 per month, multiplied by a million subscribers, that would be roughly $180 million per year in lost revenue. And that’s not including the people who also cancelled Hulu (which Disney also owns), or who decided not to book visits to Disney’s theme parks or trips on its cruise ships.
Despite its claim that Kimmel would be suspended “indefinitely,” Disney reinstated Kimmel less than a week later after “thoughtful conversations” with the late-night host (attorney Guy Hamilton-Smith quipped that Disney’s “thoughtful conversations” were almost certainly with shareholders more than Kimmel). And while Nexstar and Sinclair initially held out on carrying Kimmel’s show on their TV stations, both ultimately relented. Sinclair ended its boycott of Kimmel without the comedian meeting any of its demands.
Kimmel couldn’t have won his battle more decisively. And just as was the case with Disney, Nexstar and Sinclair cried uncle due to hemorrhaging money from lost advertising revenue. This could be chalked up to consumer boycotts of advertisers on local Nexstar and Sinclair-owned stations in progressive cities like Portland, Oregon; Seattle, Washington and Washington DC. Retired TV meteorologist Dan Satterfield — who worked at Salisbury, Maryland CBS affiliate WBOC-TV — wrote on his Facebook page that TV stations are incredibly vulnerable to boycotts of local advertisers.
Disney, Nexstar, and Sinclair’s prompt about-face on Kimmel was a potent reminder of the immense power Americans have, and exposed the Achilles heel of the most powerful institutions in America. We can and should apply that lesson to the Trump administration the next time it overplays its hand. And that time may be rapidly approaching.
Making the regime kneel is simpler than we think
If Americans can get one of the world’s largest companies to yield, we can do the same thing to the Trump administration. And instead of withholding just our money, we can also withhold our labor — this is also known as a general strike. A nationwide general strike has never happened in the United States. But in unprecedented times, we should never count out the resolve of the American people against an increasingly desperate fascist regime.
The anti-Trump opposition should have no illusion about the regime’s plans. On the same day that the Trump Department of Justice indicted James Comey, Trump issued a presidential memorandum that declared virtually all leftist organizations as domestic terror groups.
The most recent memorandum is different from Trump’s executive order classifying Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization (as anti-fascism is an ideology and not a group). It tasks various agencies like the DOJ, the Treasury, and the IRS with investigating nonprofit organizations, charitable foundations, donor networks, and grassroots groups. And it declares “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” and “extremism on migration, race, and gender” — along with “hostility toward those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality” — to be “common threads” of “violent conduct.”
“This ‘anti-fascist’ lie has become the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties,” the memorandum reads.
The Trump regime has already begun using that same rhetoric to describe Portland, Oregon, where he recently deployed federal troops to ostensibly guard Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations in the staunchly progressive city. In September, he alleged that “professional agitators and anarchists” were carrying out “riots” in Portland. However, the city issued data in August finding that violent crime rates had dropped year-over-year, and that homicides in the city saw a 51 percent drop. Gov. Tina Kotek (D) has stated there is “no national security threat” in Portland and that “our communities are safe and calm.”
“The number of necessary troops is zero, in Portland and any other American city. Our nation has a long memory for acts of oppression, and the president will not find lawlessness or violence here unless he plans to perpetrate it,” Portland mayor Keith Wilson stated.
While there have been protests at Portland’s ICE detention center, the Department of Homeland Security has only given three instances of how protesters “laid siege” to its facility: One person was arrested for shining a laser in the eyes of ICE agents, another threw a smoke grenade, and the third kicked at ICE agents while they were being arrested. This hardly justifies a troop deployment, though Trump has nonetheless made it clear that troops have the authority to “use full force if necessary.”
Americans in other cities Trump has singled out, like Baltimore, Maryland; Chicago, Illinois; New York, New York and elsewhere should have no reason to believe Trump won’t eventually do the same thing there that he’s doing in Portland. And while Trump’s military occupation of Los Angeles was deemed illegal by a federal judge in September, the Supreme Court has ruled that lower courts can no longer issue nationwide injunctions against a president’s actions. This means that every time Trump deploys troops to US cities, they can wreak havoc and cause chaos without interference while the months-long litigation process plays out.
As Harvard University public policy professor Maya Sen wrote earlier this year, Trump is counting on the slow pace of the court system to work in his favor. And he’s also encouraging his administration to simply ignore orders from federal judges, just as Department of Justice official (and now 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals judge) Emil Bove did when it came to a judge’s order to not send Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador’s brutal mega-prison. Sen argued that while the judiciary can occasionally rein in the administration, Americans will have to keep the regime in check in other ways.
“[T]he courts alone will not be sufficient. The courts are like an antibiotic on a cut, helping healing and staving off further infection. They cannot keep a grievously wounded patient alive,” she wrote. “For this, a robust political strategy is necessary. It is in all Americans’ hands collectively to make sure that the constitutional structure is not just enforced, but also sustained.”
It may seem that in such a large and geographically diffuse country as the US that the American people are powerless against a tyrannical federal government. But as the Kimmel suspension demonstrated, we have far more power than we realize when taking unified, collective action. When the Trump regime overplays its hand, we have two powerful weapons: Denying our spending, and denying our labor. It may seem overly simple, but Americans simply stating they won’t go to work or buy anything would very quickly expose how powerless the regime actually is in the face of the people.
Even when just confining a general strike to a handful of essential jobs, Americans can cause deep, profound, lasting damage to the administration. Jobs that serve as the foundation of the economy like truckers, longshoremen, and railroad workers have immense influence and can grind commerce to a screeching halt if they act as one. And because these industries are already unionized, organizing them around the idea of a general strike is more within reach than at-will industries.
Healthcare is one of the largest industries in the US economy, and nurses — many of whom are unionized — are the backbone of the healthcare system . A coordinated strike by nurses would effectively paralyze the entire industry. Teachers are also unionized in most states, and make it possible for millions of Americans with children to be able to work full-time. If teachers all decided to participate in a general strike, many parents would also have no choice but to stay home as well. Municipal, county, and state government workers are also essential to everyday functions of society, and many of them belong to labor unions. Should they withhold their labor, they could also deal a crippling blow to the regime.
These everyday American workers will realize the immense power they have simply by not showing up to work for a period of time. If Trump were to enact his fantasies of carrying out a nationwide crackdown on the opposition, unionized workers could all decide to stay home for several weeks and starve the administration of their essential labor. Just as Disney did, Trump would have no choice but to squeal when ordinary workers twist his arm behind his back. Even just a two-week work stoppage and purchasing pause would have an immense ripple effect for years.
If you know workers in these industries, start talking to them now. Even if they may have voted differently than you, you may be surprised at how much your thinking is aligned when it comes to defying tyranny. The regime likely knows it only has a little more than a year of unified power before a midterm election blowout loss for Republicans next November, and it’s scrambling to consolidate power before it’s too late. Don’t let them.
We are immeasurably more powerful than them when we stand together. They know it and are counting on us to stay divided against each other. Take a stand against this regime for the next No Kings day of action on October 18. Click here to find an event near you, and bring a friend!
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