Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Former Congresswoman Diane Black and her husband Dr. David Black to the studio to discuss how 2nd Vote has made a difference with corporations that supported abortion and how elitists look at Middle Americans.
Leahy: In-studio with us, the founders of 2ndvote.com on the web at 2ndvote.com Dr. David Black and former Congresswoman Diane Black. Don’t you just love hearing live from our studios on Music Row in Nashville, Tennessee? Isn’t that fun?
Black: I love the way you say it, too, with that deep voice. That makes me want to listen.
Leahy: Who wouldn’t want to be live in a studio on Music Row in Nashville, Tennessee? You know, it’s just such a great, cool kind of place. Down the road, places where – just a couple blocks away, Chet Atkins Square.
Elvis was recording up here. Amy Grant’s recorded around here, Vince, all those guys. It’s just kind of a cool place to be. Speaking of cool places on the web, 2ndvote.com. You’re telling us about how it got started, Diane, and tell us what it does right now today.
Black: 2ndVote is an opportunity for people to understand when they spend their dollars, whether the organization they’re spending their dollars with is using their dollars for things they believe in.
If I’m a gun owner and I go and shop at Dick’s Sporting Goods, who are against guns, it’s kind of like a chicken eating at Chick-Fil-A. It doesn’t make sense.
Leahy: That’s a good one. For this hour of the morning, you guys have very good lines.
Dr. Black: And she doesn’t even drink coffee. (Laughter)
Black: But I want to know when I spend my dollars, I’m not supporting something that is totally against what I believe in. And that’s really what 2ndVote allows you to do is to figure that out.
And so you can come to the website 2ndvote.com and find out where it is that your dollars are being spent and whether they’re being spent in the way that matches your beliefs.
Leahy: You have a whole team of analysts that look at – how many publicly traded companies do you look at, Dr. Black?
Dr. Black: Currently, while it’s a mixture, I might have to get the different numbers between the nonprofits and the for-profits. Although it’s by far and away majority for profit, we’re around 2,500 that we have researched and scored.
We have posted on the website about 1,500 because, in that context, we’re dealing with retailers and donated dollars. But we’ve scored many more companies for the investment side for the invested dollars.
Leahy: When you score them, you’ve got a scale in terms of their public actions and what they support, what their money supports. It goes from three, which is neutral, which is really preferred, right?
When I was growing up, companies just all wanted to be neutral. They didn’t want to offend anybody either on the left or the right. You rate them as three for neutral, one for very liberal, and five for very conservative. It seems to me that most of these companies now are pretty close to one.
Dr. Black: There has been absolutely a shift from the left to less than threescore. The scoring is really 1.00 up to 5.00 since that’s not just simple addition and subtraction.
Leahy: For instance, like Starbucks, I think, is like at 1.5 or something like that.
Dr. Black: Yes. Starbucks is among the worst. And in the coffee industry, they are definitely the worst. And what’s remarkable to me is you have so many locally-owned coffee shops you could go and shop and support your neighbors or the people you go to church with or whatever. But people go to Starbucks and that money goes to a lot of bad.
Leahy: So speaking of local shops in Gallatin, up near where you are there’s a coffee shop called Blessed Day Coffee on the web at blesseddaycoffee.com. They brought us some coffee.
We made it yesterday. Wahoo Coffee. Fabulous. Chris Brown is a small business owner there. And he’s not been rated yet, but I’m guessing he’s more towards a 5.0.
Dr. Black: Well, if you shop with folks that are in your local, in your neighborhood, you’re going to be shopping principally with people who share your values. We at 2ndVote, we always say shop local first if you can, and then second to that, always shop the highest score you can.
You can’t not shop. But what you can do if you’re shopping at a company or a retail outlet that you don’t like what they’re doing, right through our website you can communicate directly to them. From most companies, we’ve got that link.
Leahy: 2ndvote.com. Just go to that website. I like that phrase – shop local first because then you’re also supporting a small business, and there’s a lot of pressure against small businesses these days.
Dr. Black: We say shop local, give local, love local, stay local.
Leahy: And you’re a scientist, but you’re pretty good at phrase-making. I like those phrases. It’s very good.
Dr. Black: (Chuckles) I had to do a lot of it with a business as well. It’s pretty hard to take analytical toxicology and turn that into a good phrase. (Leahy chuckles) But we managed to do it.
Leahy: You were talking about the March of Dimes that started this whole thing because, Diane, you told David, hey, why are you giving them money? What’s happened with the March of Dimes?
Dr. Black: We’ve received two letters from the current president of the March of Dimes requesting to change the score because they no longer promote abortion or support abortion or work with Planned Parenthood. We’ve had success.
In fact, we’ve had quite a few successes. But this is a treasured success. It’s what began the whole movement, and it’s been personally very rewarding that as a consequence of everything that’s been done over all these years we have those two letters on file.
Leahy: Well, that is impressive. And Diane Black, you’re the one that started all this when you pointed that out. When you got that letter from the March of Dimes saying we no longer support abortion, how did you feel?
Black: Being a nurse and having seen life come into the world and actually bring some of that life in the world in the parking lot at the hospital as an emergency room nurse, I just value life beyond anything else.
I mean, it’s God’s creation. And to think that we would just destroy these little ones and not give them a chance in their life to be all they could be. So for me, this is probably out of everything that we’ve done. It’s the best.
Leahy: Absolutely. So other successes, Dr. David Black, you said there are some other successes. What would be some examples of companies that have been rated by 2ndVote and said, yeah, we probably made a mistake.
We’re going to stop these policies. Any other successes that our listeners will be familiar with those companies?
Dr. Black: Yes. At Christmas a few years ago, Macy’s Department Stores contacted us. They asked us there, in that instance, also to change their score on the life issue that we research because they were discontinuing their support of abortion through donations.
And so here’s a Fortune 500 company responding. What they did say is, we’re tired of hearing from your followers. We’re tired of hearing from the 2ndVote people. And this is important. We can make a difference if we will speak up.
Unfortunately, we’ve been principally silent, while the other side has been very busy at their mischief and turning this country in a negative direction. But if good people will take the time to speak up, and if we will be heard, we can make a difference.
Leahy: This is a very important point, particularly at this time in American history, when you look at the Biden maladministration and all of the terrible things that it’s doing, ruining our international reputation and ruining domestic activities here as well. I think a lot of Conservatives are almost without hope. Diane?
Black: I do agree with you, Michael, because I will have people say to me, well, I don’t know. Can that really make a difference? And then when I tell them the stories of where it has made a difference with companies such as Target and Macy’s, that it really does make a difference.
You can make a difference also locally if you have someone who’s being woke, such as Starbucks or your local coffee shops. But they can make a difference. And we have successes that we can show that if you just a little bit, it doesn’t have to be changing your lifestyle completely.
Because if we say Starbucks is not good, we’ll tell you what’s down the street that is good. And usually, that’s your local folks to support locally, as Dave has already said, is important. But I don’t want people to give up.
I want them to know they can make a difference. And if we have enough voices that are making those calls, they will make a difference.
Dr. Black: Michael, we don’t advocate boycotts. We want you to be informed and then choose by value not to shop somewhere. That’s not the same thing as a boycott.
Leahy: The Left loves boycotts. Why do you not advocate boycotts?
Dr. Black: Because the Left is good at it – we’re not. (Laughs) We tried boycotting Disney. And we failed miserably. And we tried to boycott.
The issue about our side of these issues as I understand it, after all these years of research, we’re principally folks who are trying to raise a family, working in a career, we’re starting a business.
We’re busy with life. And our faith is our faith. For the radical Left especially, their politics is their faith. They’re busy at this around the clock I think. I’m not sure they sleep.
Leahy: And the other thing, too, that I’ve noticed is George Soros and Mark Zuckerberg and all the Silicon Valley billionaires, because at their core, in my view, they are authoritarian Leftists, they write checks like crazy.
And so all these nutcases that otherwise would just be in their underwear in their basement tippy tappin’ on the computer, they are able to make a living getting out and causing trouble with boycotts and other things.
Dr. Black: Absolutely. But they’re really elitists. I mean, what we’ve really got going on here are elitists who imagined themselves to be so much smarter than the everyday American.
When Hillary Clinton referred to Middle America as Deplorables, think about this. This is what she says at a cocktail party. This is how she speaks to her friends. This is her view of those of us in the middle of America.
Leahy: And that’s something that we hear in the studio, and our listening audience completely disagrees with.
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “David Black” by 2nd Vote.
