Robby Starbuck declared war on DEI. Trump’s win could add momentum.
Robby Starbuck has a keen sense of timing.
During the past five months, the conservative activist has pressured several large companies to ditch anti-racism training, Pride Month festivities and other programs meant to promote diversity, equity and inclusion. This campaign - part of his quest “to restore sanity to corporate America” - comes as DEI policies across the business world, federal government and higher education have endured intensifying legal scrutiny.
Last week, as Starbuck watched the votes trickle in for Donald Trump between filming hits for Fox News and the Daily Wire, he sensed that business leaders would find his arguments more persuasive going forward. The election was “a referendum on wokeness,” he said, one that will force companies to take a hard look at how their DEI programs will fare under a president who has vowed to fight “anti-White feeling.”
“I think there’s a lot of executives who woke up after that election going, ‘We have got some policies to get rid of,’” Starbuck told The Washington Post. “We become an easy excuse for them to do it.”
Starbuck has emerged as a forceful voice in the anti-DEI movement that solidified after the Supreme Court barred race-conscious college admissions in June 2023. While some conservative activists leveraged the legal system to alter or end DEI in the public and private sectors, and others throw their weight behind dozens of anti-DEI bills advancing through state legislatures, Starbuck’s campaigns serve as more of a litmus test of a company’s willingness to defend such policies - which many claim to prioritize - in the court of public opinion.
So far, the answer has been a resounding no - much to the frustration of DEI advocates and experts, who are broadly in agreement that with Trump returning to the White House, momentum has swung to Starbuck’s side.
“We haven’t exposed or made a company a target of our reporting and not had them change their policies yet,” Starbuck said.
A former music video director turned conservative commentator, Starbuck breaks down corporate DEI initiatives in videos posted to X, drawing on information from “whistleblowers” who contact him about their employer’s practices, as well as companies’ marketing material and public statements. Some of his campaigns, which are routinely amplified on YouTube and TikTok, have translated to limited consumer boycotts. Tractor Supply, for example, saw its share price fall more than 5 percent after a weeks-long campaign before it dropped DEI outright.
“We have heard from customers that we have disappointed them,” the company said in June. “We have taken this feedback to heart.”
Starbuck trumpets his victories to his 693,000 followers on X (Elon Musk and JD Vance among them), frequently sharing a meme that depicts him as the Grim Reaper knocking on the doors of Fortune 500 companies - a portent of doom for their DEI efforts. He’s building a “trophy wall” in his Tennessee home with framed statements from companies that altered policies after he targeted them, including Boeing, Caterpillar, Toyota, Brown-Forman, Molson Coors, Deere & Co., Stanley Black & Decker, Ford and Tractor Supply.
Starbuck, who considers DEI “a Trojan horse for left-wing policy,” said he began his activism by focusing on such brands as Tractor Supply, John Deere and Harley-Davidson because their consumers are generally conservative and “do not agree with this stuff.” His early success moved him to seek out targets he views as “50/50 jump balls” such as Toyota as well as more left-leaning companies until “the norm is looking a lot more like not having these programs.”
Companies have to face the reality that DEI is dividing their customers, Starbuck said. “If you’re going to push it, they’re going to punish you, because we’ve awakened enough of the base of these people to the power they have in their wallet.”
DEI encompasses a wide range of practices designed to diversify companies, schools and organizations and improve access to opportunity for people who have been historically marginalized. It includes recruiting and mentorship programs, as well as anti-bias training and employee resource groups. But critics contend such policies disadvantage nonminorities and that the real goal should be race-neutrality.
Starbuck is presenting companies with a public off-ramp from DEI efforts at a critical moment. Corporate support for DEI reached new heights after the 2020 murder of George Floyd sparked a national reckoning, with major brands pledging billions of dollars to the fight for racial justice. But four years later, the landscape has drastically shifted after a succession of lawsuits has persuaded the courts that some DEI policies violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.
That’s forced many companies to play defense, with some recasting or discarding race- and ethnicity-based initiatives. Others have rebranded their programs, overhauled internal DEI teams, or moved away from using racial and gender considerations in hiring and promotion.
The Post contacted to 10 companies targeted by Starbuck; none was willing to make executives available to discuss their responses to his campaigns.
Jennifer Martinez, an employment lawyer at Hanson Bridgett in California, said the rollback of DEI “is not a neutral position.” These programs exist to level the playing field for groups that have been historically marginalized at work, she said, and abandoning them can open companies to greater legal risk than the claims of “reverse discrimination” levied by conservative activists.
But in this environment, companies that want to preserve DEI get the impression “they’re out on an island,” Martinez said.
Despite the pushback, most Americans approve of corporate DEI, according to a poll this spring from The Post and Ipsos: Roughly 6 in 10 believe diversity, equity and inclusion programs are “a good thing.” Support was even higher for specific programs such as internships for underrepresented groups and anti-bias training.
“I wish that companies understood that a little bit more, that in fact these agitators are a tiny minority,” Martinez said.
Though most companies have downplayed any changes made after a Starbuck campaign, their actions can weigh on workers. At Toyota, employees didn’t learn about them until after Starbuck posted a video claiming victory and the story was picked up by the media, according to one worker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly address the company’s policies.
In internal communications, the automaker said it remained committed to DEI but provided little rationale for its decision to stop sponsoring Pride events and end corporate culture surveys beyond a need to “narrow [its] community activities to align with STEM education and workforce readiness.” The changes announced in early October left many workers “confused, sad and frustrated,” said the employee, who identifies as LGBTQ+ and is a person of color.
The move also left the worker questioning “whether I can trust Toyota to stand up for me.”
Starbuck said corporate unease over the growing legal risks of such policies has been easy to leverage. In June, after Tractor Supply moved to ax DEI, he noticed several employees from Lowe’s DEI department looking him up on LinkedIn. At the time, Starbuck hadn’t been planning to target the retailer, he told The Post. Afterward, he made it a priority.
The Supreme Court changed the calculus last year when it struck down affirmative action in college admissions, creating “a culture of fear” around diversity initiatives, according to Jarvis Sam, the former head of DEI at Nike and founder of the Rainbow Disruption, a DEI consultancy. Starbuck is capitalizing on this dynamic by giving executives a level of “plausible deniability” to back away. But, he added, the ease by which some have dispensed with their programs suggests “that they were never that invested to begin with.”
“These organizations built their DEI programs and strategies on incredibly shaky foundations,” Sam said. “It was never rooted in authenticity and actual commitment.”
Starbuck agrees executives haven’t put up much of defense. In calls and meetings, many reacted with “genuine astonishment about what’s going on in their companies,” Starbuck said, while others thanked him for his work, having privately harbored frustrations about DEI. On a call with one company executive, Starbuck recalled, “the first words out of his mouth were, ‘I love you.’” Some have approached him directly, asking him to investigate their firms.
DEI puts companies “in a weird position of constantly having to police employee resource groups, what they donate to” and the political ramifications of their policies, Starbuck said. “This makes it a lot easier.”
Although Starbuck claims to be undefeated, only Tractor Supply - his first campaign - fully retreated, saying in June that it would “eliminate its DEI team and retire our current DEI goals while still ensuring a respectful environment.”
Other firms targeted by Starbuck opted to modify their policies. Common changes included ending identity-based employee resource groups and stopping sponsorships for causes not directly related to the company’s core business, such as Pride events and voting rights. Most firms targeted by Starbuck have agreed to stop submitting data to the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, a benchmark for corporate efforts to treat LGBTQ+ employees, investors and consumers fairly.
These moves are “low-hanging fruit,” since many companies were already revisiting their DEI policies, said Rosalind Chow, associate professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon University.
“Nothing he’s asking these companies to do actually costs them anything,” Chow said, unless they were trying to court a more left-leaning consumer base. “And for companies, it’s always easier to keep the consumers you already have than to get new ones.”
This probably explains why no company has been willing to stand up to Starbuck completely, Chow said. And his apparent success makes it likely “that other people will also then start trying to do this with other companies.”
Starbuck said Trump’s return to the White House bolsters his message. We’ll have “tons of allies,” he notes, including vocal DEI opponents Vance and Musk. “You may actually see incentive for the companies to break away from these policies, totally separate from what I’m doing.”
And now that the election is over, he said, “We’re going to ramp up.”
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