Over the summer, Ford, Lowe’s, Harley-Davidson, John Deere and Tractor Supply have dropped controversial DEI practices in the workplace — and one man is behind it all.
“Companies are starting to realize the whole DEI thing has been a house of cards,” activist Robby Starbuck told The Post. “Somebody just had to press the cards. The majority of CEOs in America are very happy to have an excuse to get rid of this stuff.”
Starbuck puts companies with divisive DEI programs on blast in online exposés that he posts to his more than 500,000 followers on X.
On Tuesday, Starbuck announced on X that Molson Coors is “preemptively making changes” — including nixing DEI-based training and hiring metrics — after, he said, he messaged with executives and warned them that an exposé could be forthcoming. (The Post has reached out to Molson Coors, the parent of more than 100 beer and spirit brands including Miller High Life, Leinenkugel’s, Foster’s, Blue Moon and the Coors’ varieties.)
The move is similar to Jack Daniel’s reversing its policies once Starbuck simply said he was going to protest the whiskey brand.
Last week, Ford said it would scale back DEI initiatives and stop using diversity quotas.
And late last month, Lowe’s buckled under Starbuck’s pressure too. The big-box retailer agreed to combine all its identity-based employee resource groups into one and to stop participating in LGBTQ+ parades that are unrelated to its business.
While critics have accused Starbuck of riling up mobs, he says he’s merely shedding a light on corporate values that he feels are out of step with everyday Americans’ values.
“You have to be in alignment with your customers — [otherwise,] if someone else is, they’re going to eat your lunch,” Starbuck, 35, said. “That’s how capitalism works. Customers don’t ignore it when you’re violating their values every day.”
Born and raised in California to Cuban-American parents, Starbuck was always acutely aware of Marxist ideology, which he says is echoed in DEI initiatives that promote equity: “Communism took everything from my family, so the warnings about Marxism were constant in my upbringing.”
Living in a notoriously progressive state, Starbuck saw localized spread of the ideology before it became a mainstream concern after the summer of 2020.
“I caught onto DEI and CRT really early because, when you’re living in California, it’s kind of unavoidable,” he said. “I realized it was a virus that was going to spread across the country.”
Before becoming a full-time activist and podcaster, Starbuck owned a successful production company. He has directed music videos for the likes of Snoop Dogg, Akon and Sara Bareilles, and worked with celebrities such as Natalie Portman and Jamie Foxx — until he found Hollywood “too inhospitable” as a conservative.
“In the back of my head, I always knew that I did not fit into that world because my value set was always conservative, and I knew the industry at large was very, very left wing,” he said.
He started publicly speaking out about wokeness while working as a producer in Hollywood and publicly endorsed Donald Trump in 2015.
As a result, he said, he lost 80% of his clients. Rather than put his head back down, Starbuck decided to sell his production company and start a new life with his wife and children on a farm in Franklin, Tennessee.
The ensuing moral panic of the summer of 2020 launched him into an all-out war against corporate DEI initiatives he describes as “fascist.”
“Corporate executives were terrified of being called racist,” he said. “The majority of the Fortune 500 right now are essentially prisoners to this ideology, even if the executives hate it.
“Executives rolled over after George Floyd, but we’re at a different moment now, and it’s time to course correct and unify all of our customers.”
When he zeroes in on a company with inflammatory DEI infrastructure, Starbuck posts video exposés and blasts offending companies in tweets. The bad publicity often leads to brand boycotts and mass anti-woke backlash from his followers.
His recent campaign against Harley-Davidson, which inspired a boycott, was successful in getting the company to reverse course on DEI programming and drop diversity standards with suppliers in August.
However, the motorcycle manufacturer said in a subsequent statement that they were “saddened by the negativity on social media” and claimed the campaign was “designed to divide the Harley-Davidson community.”
But Starbuck, of course, sees things differently.
“In some way, we’re doing a favor to these companies by giving them a reason to stop divisive ideology from continuing to infect their company,” he said. “Corporations do not have a responsibility to stand up on social issues at all. They have a responsibility to make money for their shareholders.”
As a farm owner, he considers Tractor Supply’s dismantling of its DEI program his biggest success so far. After Starbuck called them out for that, as well as lofty climate change goals, the company cut all DEI roles.
Tractor Supply also reoriented its corporate activism toward animal welfare and veterans’ causes, saying in a statement that the company endeavors to reconnect with “rural America priorities” and is committing to “being a good neighbor.”
Now that enough executives have watched other corporations be made an example of on social media, Starbuck says some are proactively scrapping DEI policies before he even puts them on blast.
“We’re at a point where enough companies have seen other companies suffer, and they are deciding to change,” he said. “I’ve heard from some executives who didn’t even realize that some of this stuff was going on at their own company.”
Ultimately, Starbuck said, his goal is to get politics out of the workplace entirely — and he has no plans on letting up on corporate America until he achieves this goal.
“Work is about work. It’s not about who you want to have sex with. It’s not about what your skin color is. It’s not about who you vote for,” he said. “The end goal here is to make work a very neutral environment where people simply do their work.”
