Another One Bites the Dust: Car Giant Ditches DEI as Robby Starbuck Notches Another Win for Normalcy

Robby Starbuck is on one heck of a winning streak against his mortal enemy: DEI programs.

In his latest victory, the conservative activist announced carmaker Nissan agreed to do away with its DEI initiatives after what Starbuck called “productive conversations” with the company.

The Japanese carmaker was the latest to be threatened with a boycott by Starbuck, who has a large social media following, over its DEI initiatives, according to the New York Post.

Other targets include “major US red-state employers like Tractor Supply, John Deere, Harley-Davidson, Lowe’s, Ford and Walmart – all of which Starbuck threatened with boycotts on X” — and all of which capitulated in one way or another.

Nissan, which has two of its major production facilities in Tennessee, had been pretty upfront about its DEI initiatives.

“Nissan Americas’ DEI efforts bolster our heritage of always daring to do what others do not,” Nissan Americas chair Jeremie Papin said in a 2023 report.

“While other companies may shy away from DEI, it is front and center at Nissan, starting on an employee’s very first day,” said Chandra Vasser, Nissan’s chief DEI officer.

Well, guess what? Nissan’s shied away from DEI. Merry Christmas!

“As many of y’all know, I’m a Tennessean, so this one makes me particularly proud because Nissan is one of our biggest employers,” Starbuck said in a social media video Wednesday announcing the changes, “and it’s my goal for every Tennessean to go to work without being bombarded with wokeness.”

Starbuck said the company agreed to a number of changes, including doing away with “quotas for hiring, promotions or diverse suppliers” and training for DEI-related issues that are not “related to the core business going forward.”

In addition, the company has promised not to participate in the Corporate Equality Index peddled by the LGBT-centric Human Rights Campaign — the activist group that famously delisted Anheuser-Busch from the score after it failed to adequately support Dylan Mulvaney in the wake of the Bud Light debacle, in their view.

“You didn’t think I was going to let Christmas come and go without giving @X the gift of another company changing woke policies, did you?” he said in a post on the social media platform.

“This list is a bit shorter than other companies we’ve focused on because Nissan was not as far gone as other companies we’ve changed but Nissan was important to me because they’re one of the top employers in Tennessee and I wanted to get this done for my fellow Tennesseans.”

Big news: Nissan is ending a number of woke policies today. I can now exclusively tell you what’s changing and how it happened.

Weeks ago I informed execs at @NissanUSA @nissan that I was doing a story on wokeness there. Instead we had productive conversations about how to fix… pic.twitter.com/iSsVGFlYEZ

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) December 18, 2024

“This won’t just have a positive impact for their employees who will have a neutral workplace without divisive issues being injected but it will no doubt also extend to their many suppliers dropping woke policies,” he added.

“We’ve now changed policy at companies worth well over $2 Trillion dollars, with many millions of employees who have better workplace environments as a result … We are winning and one by one we WILL bring sanity back to corporate America.”

Not only that, but — as many have been noticing — DEI policies are being rebranded these days, always a sign something’s on the way out:

If you’re still referring to it as DEI, you’re a software update behind.

It’s JEDI now. pic.twitter.com/W2YgBGkmzC

— L (@SomeBitchIIKnow) February 27, 2024

DEI is NOT defeated.

It is being rebranded. Be aware of the “new” term.

BRIDGE. It’s already everywhere. Working on a video now.

— TheQuartering (@TheQuartering) April 5, 2024

BRIDGE, in case you really needed to know, means “Belonging, Representation, Inclusion, Diversity, the Gap, and Equity.” It’s an organization that openly notes it peddles DEI piffle to corporate America, but corporations themselves will probably offer it as BRIDGE training, not that three-letter acronym of doom.

Yes, the battle is not yet won, and yes, the idea that we’ve reached “peak woke” — as some have speculated — is rather too optimistic. But there are still reasons for optimism, Nissan’s quiet capitulation being one of them.

The cultural left is in disarray because they thought the battle had already been won, and long ago. Now the tide has turned, and they don’t know what to do to re-sell the unsellable. What they can do is cry “hatred” (predictable headline from Gawker-spun lefty auto outlet Jalopnik: “Nissan Is The Latest Automaker To Give In To Bigots, Reverse DEI Policies”), this is a matter of the boy who cries “wolf.” We can only take solace in the fact that there are few enough real wolves to be found that such sources can safely be ignored without the threat of actual lupine bigots devouring the boy and the village alive.

Point being: The forces of DEI can retrench all they want, but common sense and Main Street America will be much wiser to the spiel when they do, and Wall Street will be, as well.

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