Scott Galloway Goes on Epic Tirade Warning of Revolution

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

To paraphrase the great Gil Scott Heron, the revolution may not be televised, but on Wednesday's Morning Joe, Scott Galloway warned of a looming revolution based on "out of control" income inequality.

Galloway's Wednesday morning appearance ostensibly focused on Mark Zuckerberg'sdecision to remove fact-checking from Meta's social media platforms, which is seen as a clear suck-up to President-elect Donald Trump but also a huge financial windfall for the Meta CEO and its shareholders.

Galloway's calling Trump a "rapist" and Mika Brzezinski's quick on-air clarification will get immediate clicks. Yet, his jeremiad against massive income inequality and warning of a looming risk of "revolution" deserves its own place on the Internet.

Galloway is a frequently booked opiner of cultural and socioeconomic insights and a public speaker, author, podcast host, and entrepreneur. He is a clinical professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business and sold his business intelligence company, L2, for an undisclosed amount. Still, Galloway has revealed he made $160 million in the sale.

So he's a super wealthy dude with a very well-informed but DNGAF approach to calling it as he sees it. Right now, it's clear that he does not like what he sees, and he took much of what he said in a Tuesday night CNN appearance to another level.

Joe Scarborough teed his guest up by noting Galloway's past position that "this entire system is rigged, and it is rigged against working Americans and rigged for billionaires."

"And you've also said people like yourself who made a lot of money in the market's been very successful. But the tax system is, and again, this was — we've been saying this for four years now. Talk about how this is accelerating. You talked about the Elon Musk example. Talk about how this is accelerating, and I say this is a small government conservative. This is a threat to American capitalism," Scarborough continued, eventually landing on "the fact that billionaires are getting richer and richer by the second wall screaming socialism."

"What does that say about where American capitalism is going over the next five, ten years?" the Morning Joe host asked his guest.

"I think it comes down to a basic question: What is America? " Galloway replied. "And I would .. my kind of economic role model — Peter Drucker — I think an economy in America exists to create a robust middle class. The most ascendant countries over the last 20 years have been China and India. And it's one basic litmus test. How many people are you bringing into the middle class? The greatest innovation in history is not the iPhone or the semiconductor. It's the American middle class."

"To beat back fascism in the middle of World War Two has financed and built the greatest innovations, whether it's radar, whether it's the Internet, whether it's vaccines. The middle class in America is the greatest innovation in history," he continued. "And people like to fall back into this right-wing notion that it's naturally self-healing. It's not. It's an accident In history, typically throughout history, you have a small number of people who weaponize government. They're very talented. They aggregate power, they weaponize government, and they aggregate more and more spoils."

"And then the good news is it's self-correcting. This level of income inequality is usually self-correcting. The bad news is the means of self-correction are typically war, famine, or revolution," he said, pivoting to tax policy. "And if you want to talk about tax policy, the myth in tax policy is that the rich don't pay their taxes. That's just not true."

He then explained how when he sold his business, he benefitted from a tax code that takes care of the super wealthy and that the current tax codes continue to help the very wealthy in a way that is designed to, "quite frankly, is there to screw the middle class and continue to transfer more money to the super wealthy."

"The fastest growing demographic group in America is not seniors, it's not Latins, it's billionaires," he continued. "We had 500 billionaires ten years ago, we now have 2500. So, if you want to cram more and more wealth into a smaller group of people, we're on our way. And the weird thing about America is that we support it because our superpower is our optimism."

He then noted how NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, whose net worth is reported to be $130 billion, is now worth more than Boeing, adding, "I mean, something is wrong here!"

"These individuals have weaponized the government, and we risk revolution," he warned. "Whether it's CEOs being murdered in the street, whether it's a MeToo movement that had righteous components of it, or Black Lives Matter. What are these movements? They are targeting the wealthy."

"We are in the midst of a series of small revolutions to correct income inequality. And the reason we put an insurrectionist and a rapist in office is because, for the first time in our nation's history, a 30-year-old man or woman isn't doing as well as his or his or her parents were at third. Why? Because the majority of households are having the oxygen sucked out of the room such that a small number of individuals and a small number of companies can be worth more than nation-states," he said.

"Income inequality is out of control. Our tax policy has gone full oligarch."