I’m Canadian. It’s not just our government that has gone quiet…. The citizens, without any professional organizing, have withdrawn their money and attention. We have done this by no longer visiting the US nor by buying their products. We are tuning out. And it doesn’t matter how many Senators visit and beg nor how many times the US Ambassador insults us we are not budging. It’s definitely driving the regime nuts. We won’t be budged nor bullied by the loud voices. We may look and sound the same as Americans but we are fundamentally different and the regime can’t see it. “Elbows up” as they say.
Yep. It's automatic for me now to turn over the product. If its ‘Made in the USA’ I not only put it back - I turn all of them around so the label faces forward. Easy peasy. Doesn't take much to create a new habit. And this is one I'm never giving up.
Sara, I have never been so damn proud to be Canadian as I have over the last 6-7 months since these shenanigans began. I’m gladdened to hear that the boycotts are ongoing and the sentiment is still strong (I’m trapped down here right now and so I’m getting all this info from online sources and friends/family)
Some of my neighbours have had difficulty getting supplies for their businesses and hobbies, and specifically mentioned that it’s because parts or goods came from Canada and they can’t be acquired any longer. None of them are all that upset about it. They get it.
Sara…I have attempted to support this approach my your citizens daily on this platform. When I visit Canada in September I have planned ways to mirror your actions. The world needs to move on. Detach from any and all interdependencies each country has had with the US. Find alternative markets, alternative reliable allies, and alternative media. Stop watching the performance going on in the US. Make us totally irrelevant. And by all means, stop visiting the Oval Office. Do not get caste as a player on that theater.
Can't believe nobody wanted to publish this! Seriously though, I think you're onto the secret to handling Trump. Attention is like oxygen or Diet Coke to him. Deprive him of it and he goes even more insane than he already is.
I think I can - it is tactical and nothing about the tactic makes 'news' or increases clicks for the media. They don't particularly want to get rid of Trump - they don't care either way. They only want readership/viewers.
Disengaging from the media is part of not shouting and instead acting. The article describes how to take down the big media outlets just as much as it describes a way to resist Trump.
I cancelled my subscriptions to US news outlets. They desperately offer me more and more discounts to come back. But I don't. They don't get my custom and, more importantly, they don't get to tell me what they want to tell me. They are irrelevant as far as my life is concerned. Editors and owners hate that just as Trump does.
💯. And there is the rare occasion someone points out an article that is behind a paywall that would be of rare benefit. We need to be exploring if our local libraries offer us access using our library cards. Mine does, and I can even gift articles up to 10x through it. Starve the NYT, the WSJ, the WP, the LAT as much as we can. And we need to be increasing our boycott efforts as Canada is effectively doing…stop buying all items sold by companies providing advertising revenues to Fox News.
Protests are not to try to convince the regime to change. Protests are to build the movement, show people that they are not alone, and get them involved so we CAN be non-cooperative and resist in every way possible. I agree 100% with your solutions. Explain how you get the word out without making yourself publicly visible? Not everyone is on Substack. To build a movement you have to start somewhere, and protests are a terrific way to spread a message. Non-cooperation is one of our biggest tools, but it only works if the majority does it. First you build the movement, then you take action (or non-action). That's the only way this works.
We’ve had several one day protests, and nothing has changed. Nothing. Nobody is even talking about what the next steps might be. Where is this building movement? Who is planning next steps? Zip. Nada. Nothing. You’re believing a pipe dream.
Who? Indivisible and other groups with their One Million Rising program. 50501. Working Families Party. Move On. ACLU. Showing Up for Racial Justice. I could keep naming them, but I'm assuming you have checked all of them out, looked at their plans, and invalidated them? You are certainly not just talking about things you haven't even tried to look into, correct?
These organizations you name all seem to be working against the regime. I have been to several demonstrations and seen evidence of cooperation. I’m starting to think these actions are easy for the regime to ignore. They seem to believe their propaganda media and election fixing is going to win despite overwhelming policy disapproval. The way to overcome this must be organization. Organization in protest is only a starting point. We must move on to organize around a real agenda that represents working people! An agenda that represents working people has the power to unite. An agenda represents what we move forward with. An agenda can be the magnet that pulls people of different views into united reality. Represent working people! This is the agenda. Organize people and media is the recipe for success.
That’s what One Million Rising is about. Organizing enough people so our agenda, the actions we take, have a chance of making a difference. These things don’t work if only a few participate. I feel like you missed the entire point of my comment. First we organize, then we act. People calling for a national strike for example have a good idea, but what preparations have they made to carry it out? First we need as many people as possible. That doesn’t come from memes on social. Then we need resources for people who risk losing their jobs by striking, or just losing a day’s wages, which for some is the difference between feeding their kids and not. There needs to be people AND organizing before any meaningful action can be taken.
August 2nd is a Saturday, and I’ve heard nothing of it as of yet and I’m regularly on Substack and Reddit in communities I would expect to hear about it. I think the notion is a good one, but it needs much more organizing and buy-in from organizations with large memberships.
Great article. This strategy is what is known among the young folks as “quiet quitting”. I used it successfully myself to get out of a relationship with an abuser. It’s what marginalized people have done for millennia. Do the bare minimum and quietly put energy into building decentralized systems that work for you. Let them be King of Nothing. Let them clean up their own messes. Starve the Beast.
Narcissists thrive on attention and malignant narcissists to an even greater degree. Their need for constant validation and adoration is insatiable. Unless you've dealt with a malignant narcissist it's hard to comprehend the depths of their depravity. Everything is Trump, but it doesn't have to be. It only is as long as it sells the soap and feeds the algorithms. Our attention has massive value and we're squandering it on a two bit snake oil salesman and his crappy carnival of corrupt cronies. Grey rocking works. Thank you for banging this drum, it's good to know I'm not alone!
This is awesome. Our group of writers should explore ways to exit even for those who don’t emigrate. It’s an honorable American tradition going back (of course) to Thoreau. We need to call on the better angels of our nation’s nature (not my line, obviously).
So, how can an average citizen disengage? It sounds great in theory, but how do you do that. One person refuses to pay their taxes, that person gets arrested.
There are so many ways to reduce the need for and amount of taxable income. Imputed income isn’t taxed. A lower burn rate lifestyle has a lower tax footprint and tax drag. The right approach to side business operation makes many lifestyle elements legitimately deductible. The OG on all the above is large part is Vicki Robin and her book on voluntary simplicity and financial independence: “Your Money or Your Life.” Don’t lose hope!
when the Nazis invaded and occupied Denmark in the 1940s, noncooperation was near-total. No one remembered how to run the railroad. Teachers had to leave school early to tend to their gardens. Factory workers slowed down or stopped production altogether. Danes obscured the identities of their Jewish neighbors, gave them temporary haven and secured their passage through fishing boats to neutral territory, saving thousands of lives.
Similarly, in Czechoslovakia, six days after the Soviet invasion in 1968, the newspaper Večerní Praha published “10 commandments”, writing: “When a Soviet soldier comes to you, YOU: 1. Don’t know 2. Don’t care 3. Don’t tell 4. Don’t have 5. Don’t know how to 6. Don’t give 7. Can’t do 8. Don’t sell 9. Don’t show 10. Do nothing.”
I need a tutorial on scrubbing the internet of my data. I have left almost every platform except Substack (and with the algorithm change may need to leave that in the near future) but not sure how to do a deeper cleanse. Any link to further reading would be appreciated.
We’re using a service called DeleteMe to clean our names off databases that have paid for our info. Ditched Meta and X. Out of all google apps. Would love to ditch Amazon too, but that’s harder. Follow Jason Rowe here. Tons of good tips, resources, and product discounts.
Hello, We did what you are doing a couple of years ago after reading a multi-part essay on Gizmo, I believe it was an English blog newsletter. The author decided to try and disconnect from Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon - each for a month at a time cumulatively- and reported on how it affected her work as a journalist operating from home and how it affected her family. She too found it hard to disconnect from Amazon and that was before it consumed most internet retailers by becoming their fulfillment and storage partner. Apple has gotten worse, not better at privacy because they want your data too just like the others.
I agree with the comments that this is a very good article.
I also agree with the questions about the "how". How does a regular person just go quiet? It's fine and dandy to suggest a more simple and frugal day to day-to-day living. If one is already living hand-to-mouth, what more can they do?
Finally, I agree starving this regime (trump) the oxygen of attention is good, I equally believe reminding our elected proxies that they work on our dime is important. Important enough to change their votes occasionally.
Appreciate the thoughtful read — and yes, I agree: the “how” is the hardest part.
But here’s the truth, uncomfortable as it may be…
Most people aren’t powerless.
They’re paralyzed.
They ask “What can I do?” while still bingeing MSNBC, doomscrolling Twitter, and texting outrage memes to the same four friends who already agree with them.
When I say “go quiet,” I don’t mean crawl into a cave.
I mean: stop feeding the machine.
Don’t amplify the outrage-bait.
Don’t lend your attention to every manufactured scandal.
Don’t let your emotional bandwidth become another form of rent the regime collects.
You may not be able to move countries.
But you can unsubscribe.
You can de-platform lies in your own household.
You can refuse the script — and trust me, that’s not nothing.
As for elected officials — absolutely: remind them. Relentlessly. But do it without illusion.
Most of them aren’t moved by facts.
They’re moved by fear — of donors, of backlash, of being outflanked.
Make them afraid of you.
That starts by refusing to play the part the system wrote for you:
the outraged, exhausted, obedient citizen who always shows up to argue but never withdraws their consent.
You don’t have to burn anything down.
You just have to stop holding it up.
Thanks again for sharing the piece. That's where it begins.
I used this tactic in the classroom with disruptive or bullying students. We just turned our backs and attention away from them. Helped defuse the attention seeking behavior. Let’s GOOOOO!
Starve the machine by turning our main attention from bad actors to people who are actually providing hope in the form of tangible solutions to current problems. The best protest comes in the form of celebration.
Don't participate. $ is the only thing this country stands for. If 20+ states rerouted all federal withholding for one pay cycle to trusts controlled by each state, it would crash the world economy. It would hurt all of us but the end result would be a hard reset. Take control of the $.
Unfortunately, federal withholding goes directly from employers/businesses to the US Treasury. States don't even touch that money, so they can't reroute it.
Gandhi's movement did this, and the British left India.
The US ambassador to Canada has been reduced to calling us "mean and nasty" because we just stopped visiting the US or buying American stuff. We aren't arguing, we're just voting with our paychecks and our plane tickets.
Foot voting is not new. In my personal experience it was effective in Portugal. Contributed to dissolve a hardened dictatorship, stop several colonial wars and make the Carnation Revolution without bloodshed.
The Portuguese emigration also contributed to the BNP of many countries, perhaps specially France. And most certainly to the finances of the dictatorship including the colonial wars trough remittances. Likewise the survival of many people, buying private property and construction.
Which is just to say that it may be a method but probably not a panacea.
As a footnote: I heard of a a woman that actually walked 1.687 km from Lisbon to Paris with her 3 children.
Out of a population of about 8 millions in 1975 (the year of the Revolution) 750 thousand were to be found mainly around Paris whereas 400 thousand men were in the colonies.
Which again is just to say that this method was quite demanding there and then.
I’m Canadian. It’s not just our government that has gone quiet…. The citizens, without any professional organizing, have withdrawn their money and attention. We have done this by no longer visiting the US nor by buying their products. We are tuning out. And it doesn’t matter how many Senators visit and beg nor how many times the US Ambassador insults us we are not budging. It’s definitely driving the regime nuts. We won’t be budged nor bullied by the loud voices. We may look and sound the same as Americans but we are fundamentally different and the regime can’t see it. “Elbows up” as they say.
Yep. It's automatic for me now to turn over the product. If its ‘Made in the USA’ I not only put it back - I turn all of them around so the label faces forward. Easy peasy. Doesn't take much to create a new habit. And this is one I'm never giving up.
Sara, I have never been so damn proud to be Canadian as I have over the last 6-7 months since these shenanigans began. I’m gladdened to hear that the boycotts are ongoing and the sentiment is still strong (I’m trapped down here right now and so I’m getting all this info from online sources and friends/family)
Some of my neighbours have had difficulty getting supplies for their businesses and hobbies, and specifically mentioned that it’s because parts or goods came from Canada and they can’t be acquired any longer. None of them are all that upset about it. They get it.
Elbows up. ❤️
Sara…I have attempted to support this approach my your citizens daily on this platform. When I visit Canada in September I have planned ways to mirror your actions. The world needs to move on. Detach from any and all interdependencies each country has had with the US. Find alternative markets, alternative reliable allies, and alternative media. Stop watching the performance going on in the US. Make us totally irrelevant. And by all means, stop visiting the Oval Office. Do not get caste as a player on that theater.
Thank you.
That’s wonderful to hear. Keep it up!
Can't believe nobody wanted to publish this! Seriously though, I think you're onto the secret to handling Trump. Attention is like oxygen or Diet Coke to him. Deprive him of it and he goes even more insane than he already is.
I think I can - it is tactical and nothing about the tactic makes 'news' or increases clicks for the media. They don't particularly want to get rid of Trump - they don't care either way. They only want readership/viewers.
Disengaging from the media is part of not shouting and instead acting. The article describes how to take down the big media outlets just as much as it describes a way to resist Trump.
I cancelled my subscriptions to US news outlets. They desperately offer me more and more discounts to come back. But I don't. They don't get my custom and, more importantly, they don't get to tell me what they want to tell me. They are irrelevant as far as my life is concerned. Editors and owners hate that just as Trump does.
💯. And there is the rare occasion someone points out an article that is behind a paywall that would be of rare benefit. We need to be exploring if our local libraries offer us access using our library cards. Mine does, and I can even gift articles up to 10x through it. Starve the NYT, the WSJ, the WP, the LAT as much as we can. And we need to be increasing our boycott efforts as Canada is effectively doing…stop buying all items sold by companies providing advertising revenues to Fox News.
Protests are not to try to convince the regime to change. Protests are to build the movement, show people that they are not alone, and get them involved so we CAN be non-cooperative and resist in every way possible. I agree 100% with your solutions. Explain how you get the word out without making yourself publicly visible? Not everyone is on Substack. To build a movement you have to start somewhere, and protests are a terrific way to spread a message. Non-cooperation is one of our biggest tools, but it only works if the majority does it. First you build the movement, then you take action (or non-action). That's the only way this works.
We’ve had several one day protests, and nothing has changed. Nothing. Nobody is even talking about what the next steps might be. Where is this building movement? Who is planning next steps? Zip. Nada. Nothing. You’re believing a pipe dream.
Who? Indivisible and other groups with their One Million Rising program. 50501. Working Families Party. Move On. ACLU. Showing Up for Racial Justice. I could keep naming them, but I'm assuming you have checked all of them out, looked at their plans, and invalidated them? You are certainly not just talking about things you haven't even tried to look into, correct?
These organizations you name all seem to be working against the regime. I have been to several demonstrations and seen evidence of cooperation. I’m starting to think these actions are easy for the regime to ignore. They seem to believe their propaganda media and election fixing is going to win despite overwhelming policy disapproval. The way to overcome this must be organization. Organization in protest is only a starting point. We must move on to organize around a real agenda that represents working people! An agenda that represents working people has the power to unite. An agenda represents what we move forward with. An agenda can be the magnet that pulls people of different views into united reality. Represent working people! This is the agenda. Organize people and media is the recipe for success.
That’s what One Million Rising is about. Organizing enough people so our agenda, the actions we take, have a chance of making a difference. These things don’t work if only a few participate. I feel like you missed the entire point of my comment. First we organize, then we act. People calling for a national strike for example have a good idea, but what preparations have they made to carry it out? First we need as many people as possible. That doesn’t come from memes on social. Then we need resources for people who risk losing their jobs by striking, or just losing a day’s wages, which for some is the difference between feeding their kids and not. There needs to be people AND organizing before any meaningful action can be taken.
Ok neg boy
I liked this. I would like specific examples showing how an ordinary American would do it. (I know you’ve given some broad ones.)
August 2 is the first organized one.
-Buy nothing (no shopping, no groceries, no gas)
- Do not use the internet
- Do not go to work if you have a job
This is great, except this is the first time I've seen it, and I'm pretty plugged-in.
One day won’t do anything! Same as with marches and protests. Read the damn article and think more subversive. One day will NOT do anything!
Can you tell me more about August 2nd? I love the idea and would like to pass along information to others who agree with this point of view.
August 2nd is a Saturday, and I’ve heard nothing of it as of yet and I’m regularly on Substack and Reddit in communities I would expect to hear about it. I think the notion is a good one, but it needs much more organizing and buy-in from organizations with large memberships.
Great article. This strategy is what is known among the young folks as “quiet quitting”. I used it successfully myself to get out of a relationship with an abuser. It’s what marginalized people have done for millennia. Do the bare minimum and quietly put energy into building decentralized systems that work for you. Let them be King of Nothing. Let them clean up their own messes. Starve the Beast.
Narcissists thrive on attention and malignant narcissists to an even greater degree. Their need for constant validation and adoration is insatiable. Unless you've dealt with a malignant narcissist it's hard to comprehend the depths of their depravity. Everything is Trump, but it doesn't have to be. It only is as long as it sells the soap and feeds the algorithms. Our attention has massive value and we're squandering it on a two bit snake oil salesman and his crappy carnival of corrupt cronies. Grey rocking works. Thank you for banging this drum, it's good to know I'm not alone!
This is awesome. Our group of writers should explore ways to exit even for those who don’t emigrate. It’s an honorable American tradition going back (of course) to Thoreau. We need to call on the better angels of our nation’s nature (not my line, obviously).
So, how can an average citizen disengage? It sounds great in theory, but how do you do that. One person refuses to pay their taxes, that person gets arrested.
There are so many ways to reduce the need for and amount of taxable income. Imputed income isn’t taxed. A lower burn rate lifestyle has a lower tax footprint and tax drag. The right approach to side business operation makes many lifestyle elements legitimately deductible. The OG on all the above is large part is Vicki Robin and her book on voluntary simplicity and financial independence: “Your Money or Your Life.” Don’t lose hope!
Transfer your spending to local small businesses as much as is practicable.
Review your media subscriptions and realise you can do without some, or all, of them.
Spend your leisure time differently e.g. hold party at home, don't go out spending in a bar, club or whatever.
Boycott products associated with the regime. There are always alternatives.
Basically cut down your participation in the country's economic lifestyle where you can do so without harming yourself or your family.
Erica Chenoweth gives some examples in this piece:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/28/protest-research-trump-musk
when the Nazis invaded and occupied Denmark in the 1940s, noncooperation was near-total. No one remembered how to run the railroad. Teachers had to leave school early to tend to their gardens. Factory workers slowed down or stopped production altogether. Danes obscured the identities of their Jewish neighbors, gave them temporary haven and secured their passage through fishing boats to neutral territory, saving thousands of lives.
Similarly, in Czechoslovakia, six days after the Soviet invasion in 1968, the newspaper Večerní Praha published “10 commandments”, writing: “When a Soviet soldier comes to you, YOU: 1. Don’t know 2. Don’t care 3. Don’t tell 4. Don’t have 5. Don’t know how to 6. Don’t give 7. Can’t do 8. Don’t sell 9. Don’t show 10. Do nothing.”
Nailed it. We exited techno-bro platforms and are scouring the internet removing our data. Non-participation.
I recommend Jason Rowe’s Substack. Beyond the Firewall. I’ve learned a lot about how Big Data acquires and uses our personal information.
I need a tutorial on scrubbing the internet of my data. I have left almost every platform except Substack (and with the algorithm change may need to leave that in the near future) but not sure how to do a deeper cleanse. Any link to further reading would be appreciated.
How are you doing that?
We’re using a service called DeleteMe to clean our names off databases that have paid for our info. Ditched Meta and X. Out of all google apps. Would love to ditch Amazon too, but that’s harder. Follow Jason Rowe here. Tons of good tips, resources, and product discounts.
Hello, We did what you are doing a couple of years ago after reading a multi-part essay on Gizmo, I believe it was an English blog newsletter. The author decided to try and disconnect from Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon - each for a month at a time cumulatively- and reported on how it affected her work as a journalist operating from home and how it affected her family. She too found it hard to disconnect from Amazon and that was before it consumed most internet retailers by becoming their fulfillment and storage partner. Apple has gotten worse, not better at privacy because they want your data too just like the others.
I agree with the comments that this is a very good article.
I also agree with the questions about the "how". How does a regular person just go quiet? It's fine and dandy to suggest a more simple and frugal day to day-to-day living. If one is already living hand-to-mouth, what more can they do?
Finally, I agree starving this regime (trump) the oxygen of attention is good, I equally believe reminding our elected proxies that they work on our dime is important. Important enough to change their votes occasionally.
I will re-post this article.
Appreciate the thoughtful read — and yes, I agree: the “how” is the hardest part.
But here’s the truth, uncomfortable as it may be…
Most people aren’t powerless.
They’re paralyzed.
They ask “What can I do?” while still bingeing MSNBC, doomscrolling Twitter, and texting outrage memes to the same four friends who already agree with them.
When I say “go quiet,” I don’t mean crawl into a cave.
I mean: stop feeding the machine.
Don’t amplify the outrage-bait.
Don’t lend your attention to every manufactured scandal.
Don’t let your emotional bandwidth become another form of rent the regime collects.
You may not be able to move countries.
But you can unsubscribe.
You can de-platform lies in your own household.
You can refuse the script — and trust me, that’s not nothing.
As for elected officials — absolutely: remind them. Relentlessly. But do it without illusion.
Most of them aren’t moved by facts.
They’re moved by fear — of donors, of backlash, of being outflanked.
Make them afraid of you.
That starts by refusing to play the part the system wrote for you:
the outraged, exhausted, obedient citizen who always shows up to argue but never withdraws their consent.
You don’t have to burn anything down.
You just have to stop holding it up.
Thanks again for sharing the piece. That's where it begins.
I used this tactic in the classroom with disruptive or bullying students. We just turned our backs and attention away from them. Helped defuse the attention seeking behavior. Let’s GOOOOO!
Starve the machine by turning our main attention from bad actors to people who are actually providing hope in the form of tangible solutions to current problems. The best protest comes in the form of celebration.
Don't participate. $ is the only thing this country stands for. If 20+ states rerouted all federal withholding for one pay cycle to trusts controlled by each state, it would crash the world economy. It would hurt all of us but the end result would be a hard reset. Take control of the $.
Unfortunately, federal withholding goes directly from employers/businesses to the US Treasury. States don't even touch that money, so they can't reroute it.
Gandhi's movement did this, and the British left India.
The US ambassador to Canada has been reduced to calling us "mean and nasty" because we just stopped visiting the US or buying American stuff. We aren't arguing, we're just voting with our paychecks and our plane tickets.
“vote with your feet”
Foot voting is not new. In my personal experience it was effective in Portugal. Contributed to dissolve a hardened dictatorship, stop several colonial wars and make the Carnation Revolution without bloodshed.
The Portuguese emigration also contributed to the BNP of many countries, perhaps specially France. And most certainly to the finances of the dictatorship including the colonial wars trough remittances. Likewise the survival of many people, buying private property and construction.
Which is just to say that it may be a method but probably not a panacea.
As a footnote: I heard of a a woman that actually walked 1.687 km from Lisbon to Paris with her 3 children.
Out of a population of about 8 millions in 1975 (the year of the Revolution) 750 thousand were to be found mainly around Paris whereas 400 thousand men were in the colonies.
Which again is just to say that this method was quite demanding there and then.