John Mullin’s Spending Spotlight is helping consumers redirect their dollars away from companies funding attacks on reproductive freedom, LGBTQ+ rights and democracy itself—because our spending choices have power.
Ms. recently sat down with John Mullin, founder of the nonprofit Spending Spotlight, which is seeking to rally progressive consumers to redirect their individual spending patterns to counter the influence of corporate spending on right-wing causes.
As Mullin explained, the seeds for Spending Spotlight were planted a few years ago when a “flurry of things … happened in a relatively short time frame,” including the murder of George Floyd, the school killings in Uvalde, Texas, the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the white supremacist mass shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., which left him and others he knew reeling and with “an overwhelming desire to make a difference, to do SOMETHING on a range of issues we face as a society.”
Recognizing, as he explained, that as a resident of Seattle, his “elected officials [were] already doing things on these issues that are in alignment with what I would like to see happen,” such that his vote was not “actually making a huge difference,” Mullin began to consider the idea of “voting” through the redirection of consumer dollars.
He conducted an informal poll of about 100 family members and friends (without any claims that his sample was impartial) to determine which issues made them feel like “you want to do something, you don’t know what to do, and you put your head back in the sand and wait for the next headline.” Reproductive freedom, LGBTQ+ rights and equality, gun violence, the environment, systemic racism and … “threats to democracy” topped the list.
Committed to redirecting the defeatist cycle of, as Mullin put it, “lather, rinse, repeat,” Spending Spotlight was launched to “drive the change we wish to see.” Mullin and his small volunteer team developed a strategically targeted plan for how consumers can shift their spending away from “companies using their dollars against our rights and freedoms.”
As he told Ms.,
“Out of all those six issues… reproductive freedom and LGBTQ+ would be the first two both because of the focus and the interest of many, many people… but also because it was relatively straightforward to look at the people who are driving these issues from the extreme right and who were the companies that are supporting them. …
“So, we started with something where it was a little easier to point to somebody and say, you know, this person is a sponsor of X amount of legislation, they are a caucus leader, they are receiving dollars from Susan B. Anthony, they’re not just voting with the pack, they’re leading this issue, and here are the companies that are supporting them.”
Mullin also explained that their methodology is to zero in on financial support that is channeled through corporate PACs “versus from an individual who happens to be part of the corporation … because we want to have that direct linkage to a decision made at the corporate level.”
Under the banner, “The fight for reproductive freedom/LGBTQ+ equality isn’t just happening in the legislatures—it’s happening in the checkout aisle,” the Spending Spotlight website then channels this information into a user-friendly visual guide for how we as consumers can “put our spending power to work for reproductive freedom/LGBTQ+ equality.”
To encourage a high likelihood of initial success, the website suggests consumers “start small” by “switch[ing] away from one or two products” from companies that “provide the greatest amount of direct support” to politicians driving the antiabortion and/or anti-equality legislative agenda to “green light companies”—meaning those who have not provided any direct support to these lawmakers.
Building outwards from individual spending, Mullin shared the broader vision behind Spending Spotlight’s mission: “If we can get enough of us to do this, to have a meaningful impact on companies … I feel very confident that under the right circumstances, we can change companies, and if anything, maybe just get them out of politics altogether,” which he stressed was the ultimate goal.
The Spending Spotlight website uses the example of three common products—toilet paper, paper towels and internet access—to illustrate how this collective consumer power “can be harnessed to drive the change we wish to see.” Calculating that an individual’s switch “away from companies using their dollars against our rights and freedom” for these three products would result in an annual average of $1,250 in “redirected individual purchasing power,” visitors to the website are asked to envision the “potential fiscal impact … if the 180 million Americans who support marriage equality join together to make the same three product switches, that becomes a whopping $225 billion in annual aggregate spending power.”
In the first in a series of post-inaugural website updates entitled “The Spot,” Mullin highlights how Trump’s “flooding of the zone” in an effort to “undermine our democratic values and norms” has, as he explained to Ms., necessitated a shift in methodology. “This evolution is based on the recognition that legislation is not the only means for pushing an agenda on these items, and that the executive order and other things related to what the administration is doing can have an equal, if not more powerful and negative impact [than legislation] on the issues that we have focused on.”
Accordingly, Mullin and his team are now exploring how they can adapt their consumer activist model to combat the “many outrageous actions and pronouncements” coming out of the executive branch.
By way of example, Mullin points to the Spotlight’s recent recommendation that consumers switch away from Uber, which contributed one million dollars to Trump’s inaugural fund (with the CEO kicking in another million) to Lyft, which, in addition to not having made any direct contributions to the administration has also “kept its promise to withhold donations from election deniers.”
As Mullin’s March 4 update entitled “Airbnb—Should You Switch?” makes clear, this is not a straightforward task.
As detailed, using their current methodology, Airbnb would not be on their “recommended switch list” because it has not made any “significant direct contributions … as a company to Trump or the politicians on our watch list working against reproductive freedom, LGBTQ+ equality, or other issues we’re tracking.”
At the same time, however, Mullin stresses they want people to be aware that Joe Gebbia, an Airbnb co-founder, board member and major shareholder, but who is no longer employed by the company, is “reportedly joining Elon Musk at DOGE,” which Mullin notes is “for many of us” good cause for making the switch.
Spending Spotlight is committed to evolving their methodologies so it can also make recommendations for switching consumer dollars away from companies who help fund Trump administration as it attacks “LGBTQ+ communities, reproductive freedom, and democratic values and norms” in favor of green light companies. As Mullin encouragingly writes, “if we can cut through the noise, there are many ways to take action and fight back,” including collectively redirecting our spending dollars towards companies that promote progressive “values, rights, and beliefs.”
