Robby Starbuck has been collecting scalps.
First came Tractor Supply Co. Then John Deere. Most recently, Coors scrapped their participation in the Human Rights Campaign’s (HRC) Corporate Equity Index, a social credit score-style running tally of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) marks for publicly traded companies.
The corporations all dropped their participation in HRC’s index after Starbuck simply started highlighting them in public, amplifying complaints from internal whistleblowers to his massive X (formerly Twitter) following.
Harley Davidson, Ford, Lowe’s and the parent company of Jack Daniels have all joined the ranks of companies that ended their participation in the index and committed to backtracking on woke corporate policies like deploying racial quotas, segregating employees into resource groups based on race and sexuality and celebrating pride events.
Each company announced the policy shift after Starbuck merely shined a spotlight on their practices.
“We’ve shown our teeth here. We’ve shown what we’re capable of. We’ve shown that we will be relentless when a company does not do the right thing, and that we will not stop, will not back down,” Starbuck, a conservative activist who focuses mostly on issues of family, told the Daily Caller.
The First Domino To Fall
Tractor Supply Co. was Starbuck’s first target after an internal whistleblower tipped him off to some of their HRC-compliant policies like providing LGBT and intersectionality training and sponsoring a “family friendly” drag show.
“I didn’t believe it until we vetted the information,” Starbuck told the Caller. “I go to Tractor Supply … I took my kids there every week,” Starbuck said.
But upon review, Starbuck found that the Brentwood, Tennessee-based farm supply company was engaged in things like selling the Queer Agenda card game on their website.
Starbuck released a seven-minute video detailing the company’s comprehensive compliance with the HRC’s index and their CEO Hal Lawton’s support for progressive causes in early June.
WATCH: ‘We Will Be Relentless’: Corporations Scramble To Kill ‘Divisive’ Diversity Policies
He included contact information for the company in the video. What happened next, he told the Caller, was the result of a grassroots campaign of thousands of the company’s customers calling and placing pressure on the company to drop their policies.
Three weeks after his video, Tractor Supply Co. released a statement detailing policy changes that included ending their submission of data to the Human Rights Campaign, eliminating DEI roles and DEI goals and a withdrawal of their carbon emission goals.
“This monumental change is thanks to all of you who supported my work exposing this, to the whistleblowers in Tractor Supply and my fellow farm owners who respectfully spoke up,” Starbuck wrote on X.
Others took notice. “Robbie Starbuck is a hero. He’s a one-man band,” Monica Crowley, a former Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs for the U.S. Treasury Department under President Trump, told the Caller.
“It’s perfectly within the American consumers’ right to understand and decide for themselves whether or not they want to support those companies with their hard earned disposable income,” Crowley said.
Starbuck replicated this model for other companies, continuing to use social media — X in particular — to highlight companies with a largely conservative consumer base for their woke policies.
“When I recognized that a company that depended on conservative consumers had fallen for this woke nonsense, I said they’re probably not the only one.”
Social Credit Scores For Business
The companies all announced they would stop sending data to the HRC, which had previously given many of them high scores on its Corporate Equality Index (CEI).
The CEI is a social credit score-like rating system that awards businesses up to 100 points on a scale that includes criteria like “nondiscrimination policies,” “equitable benefits for LGBTQ+ workers” and “supporting an inclusive culture,” according to their website.
The seemingly innocuous language stands in front of policies that, upon closer inspection, represent explicitly discriminatory policies like requiring companies to buy from suppliers with specific same sex preferences.
“82 percent of rated employers in this year’s CEI have supplier mandates with respect to non-discrimination in place, and 98 percent of these mandates (1105 of 1131 companies) explicitly include sexual orientation and gender identity alongside other named categories,” the HRC touts on its website.
The index also encourages businesses to “provide education, training, and accountability measures on diversity and inclusion in the workplace.” The index specifically mentions the formation of LGBT employee resource groups and “diversity councils.”
“When a company offers ’employee resource groups’ to support workers of certain skin colors or ethnicities, it’s also unwittingly supporting a form of segregation by separating employees based on their immutable characteristics,” Monica Harris, the Executive Director at the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR), told the Daily Caller. “When employers separate people who are supposed to work together, it’s not inclusive; it’s divisive,” she said.
Before breaking with the HRC, some of the businesses courted high scores on their index by setting targets for hiring specific percentages of employees of different racial heritage.
John Deere said they aspired to increase black hires by 85 percent, hispanic hires by 61 percent and Asian hires by 10 percent, according to company documents obtained by Starbuck.
John Deere also apparently tied employee bonuses and pay raises specifically to DEI performance, writing in their 2022 Sustainability report that “DEI is the only global behavioral performance metric upon which salaried employees are evaluated,” according to Starbuck.
They also encouraged employees to snitch on each other. In July, their mandatory code of conduct included a pledge to “report any diversity, equity, or inclusion-related concerns to a manager … ” a screenshot Starbuck took of the code of conduct shows.
John Deere dropped their participation in the HRC’s index after their stock price reached a one-year low and announced it would stop its participation in “social or culture awareness parades, festivals, or events,” following Starbuck’s campaign.
HRC has pushed back against the companies’ rejection of their index in a big way, noting that they would still be indexing companies that choose not to send them data. Their website landing page now has a large graphic highlighting Ford and other companies that rejected their index and says “This Isn’t Just Policy. It’s Personal. Millions of hardworking Americans and their families count on these companies.”
They’ve also returned fire on Starbuck, starting their own pressure campaign against him.
“They’re doing a text and email campaign against me right now,” Starbuck told the Caller. “It’s silly, but in a weird way they’re actually helping me, and I don’t think they realize it. They called me a MAGA weirdo. You’re only proving my point to these major companies that you are a partisan actor. You just said MAGA weirdo. So that means anybody who believes in MAGA that shops in one of these stores at these Fortune 500 companies is going to be thinking, ‘Why are they partnered with a group that calls people who think like me a MAGA weirdo?’”
Many of the companies mentioned the HRC by name in their announcement in policy shifts. A Ford spokesman said their CEO Jim Farley did so because it was the group their employees asked about the most often, according to The Wall Street Journal.
HRC’s President Kelley Robinson said in a statement the decision “will hurt the company’s long-term business success, from employee retention to consumer decisions about how they will spend their dollars.”
Starbuck, however, disagrees.
“If DEI and wokeness were making these companies money, and nobody on my end was making them feel pressure, these companies would not change policy,” he told the Caller.
Some experts note that these extremes are not the only way to go about building an inclusive workspace. Before the DEI craze, companies centered their diversity efforts along non-racial lines like differences in class, geography, religion and political perspective, Harris told the Daily Caller.
“My sense is that companies adopting aggressive, discriminatory DEI policies are out of sync with the current racial landscape in our country, but they don’t realize it,” Harris told the Caller.
“They’re being advised to use a sledgehammer to swat a fly. Does racism still exist in America? Unquestionably, yes. But unlike 60 years ago, race no longer defines the experience of black or white Americans. Increasingly, class, not race, is what’s causing system inequities. As a society, we’ve made tremendous progress in race relations that is being minimized and even ignored and, sadly, many DEI programs lean hard into this distortion of our racial reality,” Harris said.
American corporations spend a pretty penny on DEI training, over $8 billion, according to a review by Harvard’s Iris Bohnet. A McKinsey analysis predicts that number to nearly double by 2026.
While companies are incredibly secretive about the specific figures they spend on DEI initiatives (both Starbuck and the Daily Caller have conducted extensive reviews of HRC-indexed company financials and have been unable to find concrete figures), American educational institutions publicly spend millions on their efforts.
A January analysis by University of Michigan professor Dr. Mark J. Perry found the school was spending over $30 million in salary for employees “whose main duties are to provide DEI programming.”
A 2021 report by the Jefferson Council found the University of Virginia was spending almost $7 million yearly for their DEI efforts.
“I Felt Like I Was Sinning”
Rather than driven by financial motives, the DEI initiatives, incubated at the HRC, are pushed upon companies by their human resources and public relations departments, a nerve center Starbuck likens to “tumors.”
“Those two departments worked in tandem to convince executives you needed to do this or you were going to look racist,” Starbuck told the Caller.
An HR initiative at one of the companies Starbuck took down, Harley-Davidson, apparently encouraged employees to read the book “White Fragility” by author Robin DiAngelo, which among other things, claims “a white supremacist worldview” is “the bedrock of society.”
Other companies encouraged employees to sign LBGT ally pledges. Employees felt pressured to sign the pledges, telling Starbuck they felt they might be fired if they didn’t.
“I thought I would be fired if I didn’t do it. I’m a Christian. I felt like I was sinning by doing it,” Starbuck told the Caller, echoing an employee’s sentiments.
Harley-Davidson even sent white male employees to white male only diversity training, according to Starbuck.
The HR and PR departments are the “nerve center” of these movements, with the CEOs of the companies often wholly unaware of the radical takeovers, Starbuck said.
“They said, ‘Honestly, I watched the video you sent us, and I was shocked. I didn’t know this was going on,’” Starbuck said of some executives he’s spoken to. “‘It’s a real wake up call,’ is the term he used. There were things that were being done that he just didn’t know. He had kind of lost control of a certain department of people, and their ability to just do certain things without him ever knowing about it.”
Outside of the CEOs, many of the companies’ corporate leadership and executive class are simply out of touch with their consumer base, Crowley told the Caller.
These executives tend to all come from the same socioeconomic and educational class, Crowley said.
“There’s tremendous peer pressure to toe the social justice line, policy line, because their social group is all doing it, and that if they refuse to do it, that somehow they would be ostracized from their social group, their economic group, their fellow CEOs,” Crowley said.
Wilfred Reilly, a professor of political science at Arkansas State University, concurred with Crowley’s assessment.
“The root issue here is a total disconnect between an Ivy League and Big 10 educated executive class and hard workers at their own companies … regular Americans who buy motorcycles, heavy equipment and Bud Light,” Reilly told the Caller.
The HR and marketing departments, Starbuck told the Caller, are often spearheaded by young, radical leftists who attach to pseudo-Marxist ideology in college and infect the companies with it.
“The belief system coming out of a lot of colleges that folks have … They think it is their job to inject this stuff into the DNA of a company. Those folks, in many ways, use the fear of CEOs after George Floyd against them to create a lot of the space for wokeness in the workplace, and then it takes on a life zone. It becomes a disease that spreads to every part of the company’s body. And I would say what we’re doing is something akin to removing the tumor.”
While Starbuck has been able to declare victory over many of the companies, he’s not stopping. He has thousands of whistleblowers in his inbox ready to expose more of the over 500 companies who the HRC lists in their index.
“If they were able to shift the Overton window that fast, I realized we could do the same thing by waking up companies to where their customers are,” he told the Caller.
The majority of the companies he’s gone after so far have had largely conservative consumer bases, but Starbuck says it doesn’t have to be solely right-leaning companies who feel the heat.
“If conservatives even just make up 20% of your customer base, you really can’t afford to do things that are just openly sort of discriminatory toward them or violating their values in some way,” Starbuck said.
AUTHOR
Reporter.
RELATED ARTICLE: Bush, Bowman, Gay, Kendi. All Disintegrated. Their Commonality? Woke Acolytes Are On The Run
EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.
