00:02:19.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:03:05.000We do this every couple weeks to kind of give an update of what's going on with woke corporations.
00:03:11.000What's going on in our multi-trillion dollar economy of how these companies are increasingly waging war on our values and our worldview.
00:03:21.000And I'm really glad we do this because I think it's important that people at home realize that the companies that they might be spending a fair amount of money with actually might not be representing their value.
00:03:33.000And I, you know, we were right before we started this interview, we were hearing about the success of this audience and what they, what the engagement with Second Vote that's already happening as a result.
00:03:47.000So, Charlie, you know, with your permission, I thought we'd just start right there.
00:03:51.000And we'd love to hear from you guys and, you know, the response that you're receiving.
00:05:00.000And just for everyone that might not have listened to this episode or this type of conversation before, we go through specifics of kind of what's going on in corporate America.
00:05:10.000And some people are really surprised by it.
00:05:12.000So Andrew, why don't you take the lead and we'll go from there?
00:05:14.000Yeah, we call this the rise of the corporate villains.
00:05:18.000I'm not going to, you know, but really, I mean, this whole last year, when it, you know, we came from the all-star break or the all-star game getting moved from Atlanta to Colorado.
00:05:30.000I mean, we saw this rise in the power of corporations and the power of the MLB in that instance to really push back against common sense reforms.
00:05:39.000And it just, it seems, it seems like the news cycle can't keep up with it.
00:05:42.000I mean, every day there's a new article about some corporation somewhere doing something that completely grates against the values of traditional Americans, conservative, Christian, social conservatives.
00:05:54.000And so, you know, I thought, you know, Diane, with your expertise on the pro-life issue, I thought we'd just jump in right there.
00:06:04.000There is a lot of news coming out of Uber and Lyft.
00:06:34.000And so we are seeing now corporations that are getting involved in this issue by saying, for instance, Lyft and Uber say if the person who performs the abortion illegally, because it is past the time of the heartbeat, that they will pay the legal fees for the folks who are riding in their vehicles or for the folks that are sued.
00:06:56.000And so we have a corporation that is supposed to just be providing you a ride now getting involved in what the Texas law was passed.
00:07:08.000And so just as a side note to this, one of the ways that people are attacking the Texas law is they say, oh, well, even an Uber driver could end up getting looped into the civil complaint if he's driving someone to the abortion clinic.
00:07:22.000Where the answer is, well, of course, if you knowingly drive someone to a place of murder, then of course you're going to be possibly looped into a criminal or civil complaint.
00:07:32.000For example, if you get into a taxi after you land at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport and you tell the taxi cab driver, like, hey, can you drive me to my boyfriend's house?
00:07:47.000And so one of the complaints people have been giving against this law is that it unnecessarily loops in people that could be accessories to this.
00:07:56.000Now, what you're talking about, though, is that Uber and Lyft are saying that they are going to pay the legal fees for anyone that might get looped into this.
00:08:03.000But however, that's kind of strange because if they actually read the law, women themselves are actually exempt from any sort of civil complaint under the Texas law.
00:08:14.000So it is now up to the physicians and those who are encouraging abortion to be held responsible because many of these women are so vulnerable.
00:08:39.000And what's interesting, go ahead, is they call this pro-choice, but oftentimes the women are not provided the choice when they go to these clinics.
00:08:46.000They're really convinced at the clinic that their only real option is to go through that abortion, which, yeah, there's so many aspects of this that are so troubling with regard to the manner in which this is acted out.
00:08:59.000But then now we have Lyft and Uber providing additional financial support.
00:09:07.000But what's really remarkable too, that's not their money.
00:09:11.000You know, that's the money of the investors.
00:09:15.000You know, these are publicly traded companies and their investors are the ones.
00:09:20.000These CEOs that are making these decisions are really, you know, I call this business egonomics, not economics.
00:09:28.000These guys use other people's money to put themselves in the news and get this camera attention, acting like they're these great benefactors or compassionate people.
00:09:40.000But really, they're using other people's money.
00:09:42.000And the CEO of Uber in 2015 was the highest paid CEO in America.
00:10:21.000There's over 50 companies that have done this.
00:10:23.000And it seems as if they're trying to pander to some sort of pro-abortion market there.
00:10:29.000And if we continue on, we will see that there's a lot happening around this Texas drama.
00:10:38.000So can you talk about Salesforce that is now offering to relocate employees and their families after the Texas abortion law goes into effect?
00:10:48.000Isn't that just really something that you have Salesforce now that says that if we will pay for you to move if you want an abortion, we will pay for you to move because of what Texas has done.
00:11:01.000And here's the other thing, Charlie, you know, I'm a little bit older and back in 1973 when Roe v. Wade was decided and science did not show us that this really was a baby.
00:11:12.000And now we know we have much better information to say this is a baby and in six weeks, it has a heartbeat.
00:11:20.000It's no longer what was said back then, just a blob of tissue.
00:11:24.000And by the way, the abortion industry then said, we want it to be legal.
00:11:28.000We want it to be safe, which we know is not safe even now because we have people like Gosnell who are just doing procedures that make my stomach turn and rare.
00:11:43.000There is no reason why there can't be a lesser number of unwanted pregnancies.
00:11:51.000So there's so much out there that has changed over the last 50 years now that we know that this is a baby.
00:12:00.000We know that at 15 weeks, which is, by the way, the Dobbs case now coming out of Mississippi, we know at 15 weeks that these babies suck their thumb.
00:12:09.000We actually have video of twins playing with one another in the womb.
00:12:14.000So science has really changed this whole issue of abortion and birth control being free to everyone really should be stopping the number of necessary unwanted pregnancies.
00:12:28.000Well, you know, see, I have a, I have a contrarian take on this.
00:12:31.000I'm actually, you know, I think it's abhorrent.
00:12:33.000Don't get me wrong, but I actually, my take is good riddance.
00:12:51.000Because the, you know, people are fleeing all the liberal, you know, strongholds like New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania.
00:12:58.000Well, Pennsylvania is kind of half and half, but California.
00:13:02.000And they're moving into the red states where life is still good, the land is still free, and it still feels like America.
00:13:09.000Well, how do you keep, how do you do that?
00:13:10.000Well, you pass laws that the left finds so onerous that they're willing to spend their corporate money to move out the liberal Democrat voters out into the hinterlands of back to California.
00:13:22.000So on the one hand, I find this abhorrent.
00:13:24.000On the other hand, it's like, well, what else could we pass that will offend them so mightily?
00:13:32.000But the point being is, this is such a reveal by the woke corporates that they would be willing to take shareholder value away from their shareholders to relocate.
00:14:13.000He's using my money, your money, whoever is a customer of them.
00:14:17.000But also, they're very bad also on religious liberty.
00:14:20.000You know, when Indiana passed their Religious Freedom Act, it was Salesforce that real, among others, that really went after the state of Indiana and pushed back on there where the Indiana legislature did change that law that they had passed for religious liberty.
00:14:36.000So these are anti-First Amendment people.
00:14:38.000These are bad actors across the board.
00:14:44.000This is not the first time that we've seen something like this.
00:14:49.000And I'm reminded now of Georgia, when Georgia passed a similar sort of measure that was trying to curtail the period in ingestation that you could have an abortion.
00:15:27.000I mean, this is, I think, a new era in the conservative movement where we have to, you know, as Charlie always calls them, ribbon-cutting Republicans where we just want to make, you know, we, and this is happening in Miami, by the way, right now.
00:15:40.000We got a, the mayor there is luring all of the Silicon Valley big, big tech to Miami.
00:15:47.000It's like, well, listen, we're just getting Florida back into a place where we, you know, this might be a predictably conservative state for a decade.
00:15:54.000So, what we're going to just bring in all the corporate and their employees.
00:15:58.000So, anyways, the point is, I think the whole paradigm needs to be shifted.
00:16:02.000And we need to start looking at not all company, all jobs, good.
00:16:08.000As conservatives, we need to say, hey, some industries, some jobs are good.
00:16:11.000And if they're going to represent our values, and I think that's the whole point of second vote and your guys's mission is to sort of, you know, separate the wheat from the chaff.
00:16:22.000So, anyways, we've got lots more stories here.
00:16:51.000Well, again, we have these major big international corporations that are in collusion with big government, really attacking our government, big business socialism attacking our liberty, individual liberties.
00:17:07.000And these mandates are not good science, they're not good medicine, but they are controlling and they do deny individuals their rights.
00:17:20.000There is no, and by the way, I still hold academic appointments in immunology and bacteriology and pathology and pharmacology and toxicology.
00:17:29.000So I'd like to think that I'm an educated speaker on this issue, but we're giving no credit for natural immunity.
00:17:38.000We've got 100 million people in America that have had COVID.
00:17:42.000And if you've had COVID, you don't need the vaccine unless you've got some unusual circumstance that is going on in your health.
00:17:50.000But that health issue ought to be between you and your doctor.
00:17:53.000These corporations are inserting themselves between the patient and the doctor.
00:18:00.000It's denying the individual to control their own health.
00:18:04.000And this is just wrong on so many different levels.
00:18:08.000The corporations, of course, are being pushed now by big government, but they're willing actors to participate with big government to go through these exercises.
00:18:19.000So this is a very disturbing story that's replicating itself all across the United States.
00:18:27.000And what's amazing to me, too, in the healthcare industry, where there are doctors and nurses refusing to get the vaccine.
00:18:33.000And, you know, allegedly, we've got all this demand on our healthcare system, and yet big hospitals and all are dismissing employees when it's a health system.
00:18:44.000They should know about natural immunity.
00:18:46.000They should also know about the right for an individual to determine their own health care between themselves and their physician.
00:18:54.000So this is extremely disturbing that these corporations now in collusion with big government are really interfering with your individual liberty, your own health.
00:19:08.000I don't know if you saw the physician declaration that came out several days ago, where thousands of doctors worldwide are calling for this to stop.
00:20:43.000It might be a treatment for certain people, but it's certainly not preventing anyone.
00:20:47.000This also goes to this story where you mentioned the 5,000 doctors and scientists signed the declaration, but now there's all these evictions, except, and the Democrats oppose the attendant evictions, except for the unvaccinated.
00:21:00.000I guess my question is: in all the research you've done, is there any major company that is protecting the rights of their employees?
00:21:13.000We are seeing small companies, we are seeing some companies trying to push back, but the fines that you're going to be subjected to, we do know of a company in Colorado who's a rather good, medium-sized company that's saying, no, we're not going to do this.
00:21:35.000It's all about losing your job or being fined out of existence, seeing such onerous fines.
00:21:42.000And the hypocrisy of evicting this eviction issue of, after spending a year that nobody could be evicted for non-payment of their rent, now we're going to evict people who are deciding on their own health care with their physician or perhaps just even on their own that they're going to be evicted if they choose not to take this injection.
00:22:06.000And you may, you know, Israel's about ready, I think, to move into their fourth shot.
00:22:27.000But when you're injected with that, you get a very limited antibody response.
00:22:30.000It's not like natural immunity where you get a whole family of antibodies.
00:22:35.000Here, you're getting just a limited response of antibodies to that particular spike protein that's being developed by the messenger RNA.
00:22:44.000The net result is you're not fully protected.
00:22:46.000And you're definitely not protected against the variants because you don't have that broad set of antibodies to respond to the next generation infection with the variants.
00:22:57.000So I don't know where the endgame is here.
00:23:19.000The administration also doesn't want to talk about those that are coming over the border that they're not requiring to have vaccines and they're letting them go throughout our country.
00:23:27.000So if you want to not have to worry about taking a vaccine, just go down and come over the Mexican border and then you're okay.
00:24:16.000Well, no, I'm just going to say it is so interesting that all through the COVID experience, there has been various forms of suppression of individual rights.
00:24:26.000And, you know, what's happened to the churches during COVID, where they were shut down, but bars were allowed to be open, or yeah, which I'm not in favor of shutting anything down, but they shut down churches and but other operations, abortion clinics could stay in business.
00:25:13.000They found a real loophole in our system that gets around our constitutional rights and all of our protections under the First Amendment.
00:25:21.000So let's now get into Ben and Jerry's.
00:25:26.000So Ben and Jerry's has come out as openly anti-Semitic and basically going against Israel.
00:25:34.000But there's some good movement, isn't there, Andrew, of some people that are now saying we're going to divest from Ben and Jerry's because you're trying to divest from Israel.
00:25:41.000Yeah, I mean, I love this story too, just as context here, because so many emails that we get to the show, freedom at charliekirk.com, are what can we do?
00:25:56.000And for those of you listening who don't know, this is part of what Second Vote does.
00:26:03.000And I love this because this story about Ben and Jerry's is a real life example of how pushing back works, how getting loud works, sending letters, making phone calls, making your voice heard.
00:26:15.000So what's going on with Ben and Jerry's?
00:27:01.000They put lots of money into corporations through their pension funds.
00:27:05.000And yes, individuals are doing that as well.
00:27:08.000We're promoting people to contact Unilever through our website because we have this portal capability.
00:27:15.000And by the way, just to backtrack to Uber and Lyft, for the next seven days, we're opening up our research to anybody and everybody that wants to come on our website and directly communicate to Uber and Lyft about what they're doing.
00:28:36.000But yeah, I mean, I've gotten to the point where, you know, you see that it is effective.
00:28:41.000And when you raise the alarm bell about a company that, hey, this doesn't represent your values, I think ultimately at the end of the day, whether we call it that or not, there is that taking place.
00:28:51.000So at secondvote.com, everyone could check it out, secondvote.com.
00:28:55.000I have to talk about this because I just had a, we had a turning point USA event in the panhandle.
00:29:01.000And I don't know how the topic came up, but all of a sudden Chick-fil-A came up.
00:29:05.000And I had to just inform the audience that Chick-fil-A is a woke Southern Poverty Law Center contributing drag queen story hour supporting organization.
00:29:16.000And most have they gone full drag queen story hour?
00:29:21.000Most people that, and I just have to always reiterate this, because there's this kind of love affair that conservatives have with Chick-fil-A.
00:29:29.000But Chick-fil-A, which used to be very strong, Christian, and conservative, is woke, weak, and pro-transgender.
00:29:37.000So Chick-fil-A, as you guys know, cut off all their donations to the Salvation Army.
00:29:41.000Remember when they did that a couple years ago?
00:29:44.000Well, they also sent a check to Covenant House.
00:29:47.000So they support Covenant House, a group that supports local drag queen story hours across the country and celebrates LGBTQ Pride.
00:29:55.000Further, Chick-fil-A has donated to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is one of the most gross and they are a hate group and they come after conservatives professionally.
00:30:10.000Not to mention the CEO of Chick-fil-A went to a church and got on his knees and says that it's time for white people to start to atone for what they did wrong against the sins of black people.
00:30:21.000And so that's, I just want to say this.
00:30:22.000And I'm happy to say Second Vote reflects that with a negative score of 2.08 on Chick-fil-A.
00:30:29.000Do you guys want to, I know you guys weren't prepared to talk about Chick-fil-A, but I just want to make sure everyone knows that when you get those chicken sandwiches, you're funding Drag Queen Story Hour.
00:30:38.000And we did report on all of this at the time.
00:30:40.000And you mentioned Covenant House, which is very interesting.
00:30:44.000This was another bait and switch organization.
00:30:46.000Covenant House, when they send out their mailings, and I don't know how my dear wife got on their mailing list, but we see their mailings directly to our home.
00:30:55.000But they represent themselves as a Christian organization.
00:31:04.000They work with directing teenage pregnant females to abortions.
00:31:09.000Covenant House, you may get a mailing at your, you know, at home and you read it and you think, oh, this is a great Christian organization.
00:31:19.000Just as Chick-fil-A has been in the process of changing who they are.
00:31:24.000And it is not only did they, they also, Campus Crusade for Christ or one of the college Christian programs, they also withdrew funding from them, which was significant.
00:31:38.000So they really defunded out of their donation list a number of great Christian organizations that help America every day through the Salvation Army, through these.
00:31:57.000And sad to say, I mean, I used to go there all the time because we've got Chick-fil-A's all around us here in Middle Tennessee, but I don't do it anymore.
00:32:05.000It's just, and to go back to the boycott thing, you know, we're advocating be a good steward of your what you have and shop your values.
00:32:16.000You know, we don't use boycott and boycott because Christians and conservatives don't do that very well.
00:32:22.000You know, we tried to boycott Disney years ago, and that was a real failure.
00:32:26.000So what we need to do is to just shop our values.
00:32:30.000And that's what we tried to show at second vote is this is what's going to happen with your money if you spend your money here or if you donate your money there or if you invest in that company.
00:32:40.000Well, Dr. Black, I want to kind of go back to this story from with Ben and Jerry's.
00:32:45.000I mean, you know, we, something we say on this show is that the conservative movement, it's not to say that people weren't putting a lot of effort in and there wasn't, you know, battles fought and waged in the past, but in many ways, the conservative movement is only just now waking up to the depth and the seriousness and the urgency of the threat that we're facing.
00:33:39.000Step one, two, and three should be write notes, make phone calls, tell these people in power in charge of these corporates that we do care and we are watching and this will affect you.
00:33:52.000So I mean, I think this is why I love this Ben and Jerry story so much, because it's proof that our efforts, our energies are working.
00:34:00.000I think so many times conservatives feel like we're yelling into the abyss.
00:34:03.000It's like we keep telling everybody how bad things are getting, but it keeps getting worse.
00:34:07.000Well, at some point, there's going to be an inflection point.
00:34:11.000And I think this is part of the story, part of the success story that we can take with us.
00:34:16.000But you're, well, I do agree with you, but I think the issue is, you know, we're about 10 or 20 years behind the curve on what the left has been doing.
00:34:29.000You know, while we've been busy living and raising families, building businesses, going about life, for the left, their religion is their politics.
00:34:47.000This CEO of Lyft, he's a World Economic Forum, Davis, one world government kind of guy.
00:34:55.000Salesforce, every time you spend a dollar for Salesforce, you're spending money with a company that has a CEO that really does not care about America at all.
00:35:07.000He doesn't care about the United States.
00:35:09.000He doesn't care about those small investors that are trying to save money for retirement.
00:35:17.000And a lot of these big international companies are led by CEOs that are adopting that, gee, we might have been birthed in America, but now we're an international company.
00:35:29.000And, you know, we're going to engage in a agenda that ultimately is really an attack on Western civilization and on America itself.
00:35:40.000Well, and there's the pipeline from college campuses to corporate boardrooms.
00:35:43.000What happens on college campuses does not stay there.
00:36:00.000And this is to put it bluntly, and Christians and conservatives don't like it when you say this, we need to inflict pain on our opponents and give support to our friends.
00:36:12.000We need to make it hurt when they do stuff like this.
00:36:14.000And the reason they do stuff like this is they laugh and they chuckle in their boardrooms because they know we won't, because they know that we'll keep on going and going to Chick-fil-A and funding transgender drag queen story hour.
00:36:27.000They know that conservatives are still going to have Disney Plus subscriptions.
00:36:30.000You know, they know we're going to keep on buying iPhones.
00:36:33.000And so until we start to say we want to make them suffer, things won't change.
00:36:39.000But I do think that communicating to them through second vote and getting the information is going to make a big difference, especially in today's time.
00:36:49.000No, I totally agree with what Charlie said.
00:36:53.000I think a lot of people go, well, you know, if we just, you know, if we don't really have any levers at our disposal to really push these companies around.
00:37:03.000And I think there is an underestimation of the power of just making your voice heard, sending the letters and the notes.
00:37:10.000You know, at the end of the day, there are still a few sane people at many of these companies, right?
00:37:15.000And if they, and they want to push back against this younger middle management crowd that's coming up and going into senior leadership roles as well, a lot of these people are sane.
00:37:23.000They just probably feel powerless within these company structures, right?
00:37:28.000Because there is a sort of moral certitude that comes out of the young culture warriors and the activists that are coming up through the ranks.
00:37:37.000When they start getting letters, bombarded with letters from places like Second Vote, and all of you listening are making that happen.
00:37:45.000You're giving the sane ones in the room, the adults in the room, if you will, Charlie, you're giving them an opportunity to say, look, I'm right here and we need to stop this or we're going to see real, real pain inflicted upon the company and our shareholders.
00:37:58.000So I'm all for being loud and doing everything you can.
00:38:21.000Charlie, I do believe that there is hope and I'm always going to have hope.
00:38:26.000And I will tell you when I was in Congress, if I got a call on a particular issue of 10 people, I knew there were a whole lot of other people out there that were looking and watching what was happening.
00:38:36.000And so it doesn't take every single person in the country to call someone or call a company to let them know how they feel.
00:38:45.000And your voice out there too is really helping with this.
00:38:48.000But we need to make sure that we're doing just that.
00:38:51.000We're letting those companies that we know are woke, that we don't like it and we know it and that we are going to spread the word and we're not going to buy their products.