Boycott Bans Are an Assault on Free Speech
America began with boycotts. Angry about Britain’s tax raises, the historian T. H. Breen writes, American colonists saw their refusal to purchase British goods as a “reflexive response to taxation without representation,” and their collective action helped forge an early sense of American identity as a precursor to the Revolution itself.
The Revolution-era boycotts were hardly the last American consumer protests. Abolitionists urged Americans to buy only goods produced by “free labor,” and the 20th-century civil-rights movement famously included the Montgomery bus boycott against Alabama’s segregated public-transportation system. Boycotts, as my colleague Conor Friedersdorf wrote in 2018, are “a bedrock of American civic life, inseparable from the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech and the wariness many feel whenever a law compels humans to violate their conscience.”
[Read: The constitutional right to boycott]
Boycotting as a tactic does not have a particular ideological valence. Conservatives called for a boycott of Dunkin’ Donuts over a and of the shaving company Gillette for an In 2017, they tossed over that company’s decision to stop advertising on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show after he while in his 30s (conservative pundits because he is heterosexual). These probably won’t be remembered as fondly as resisting the British or undermining slavery, but the point is that there’s a boycott for people of any ideological persuasion.
