The following is an edited transcript of a Morning Wire interview between Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley and filmmaker and conservative activist Robby Starbuck.
Is corporate America beginning to turn away from DEI? A string of high-profile companies have announced they are now abandoning their Diversity Equity and Inclusion policies and programs and cutting ties with controversial progressive groups, including the Human Rights Campaign.
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JOHN: Joining us now is filmmaker and conservative activist Robby Starbuck. Robby, thanks for coming on. So you’ve been racking up millions of views and some big headlines in recent weeks with your work exposing DEI practices in major companies. For those who haven’t been tracking this as closely, could you walk us through some of the developments sparked by your efforts?
ROBBY: Yeah, definitely. So this all started with a whistleblower that came forward to me about Tractor Supply and essentially, they were an employee there, and they said, “Robby, you’ve got to know what has changed here because I’ve been here a long time and I don’t recognize the company and the culture and the direction it’s going and neither can a lot of my friends who work for the company.” So, I reviewed the stuff they sent me and to be perfectly candid with you, I did not believe it. I own a farm, I’ve got cattle. I’ve got chickens. I take my kids to Tractor Supply on a weekly basis and I just couldn’t reconcile the place that I went to and the people who worked there with the stuff I was seeing. And so for folks who haven’t seen the stuff I’ve been exposing — in the case of Tractor Supply, they’d been funding these crazy Pride events, LGBTQ+ youth centers where they’re pro transitioning kids, a group in favor of illegal immigration and stopping deportations, and so on and so forth. Now there was some disconnect, I will say this, from the CEO and these policies. I don’t think these were the dictates of the CEO who was a true believer. I think he sort of lost control of the culture in some downstream stuff. But to Tractor Supply’s credit, I will say, they did the most complete turnaround we have seen and it was a great standard that they set for other companies — to show that you’re not going to lose everything if you turn around on this woke ideology that has been poisoning companies.
The way we ran the Tractor Supply thing was a little different. At the very beginning, when I realized there was a serious problem here, I said, “What has been the problem with boycotts in America? Why have they not been successful and how did we get here?” And so I had to put together the fact that all of this accelerated after George Floyd. And it was under the noses of a lot of executives who didn’t quite realize what they were greenlighting. Now they’ve had four years to experience it and many of those people have buyer’s remorse. And so they just need an excuse to get rid of it because this is essentially a house of cards. There’s a group called the HRC (Human Rights Campaign) who has this scoring system called the CEI, Corporate Equality Index. It’s essentially a social credit system for wokeness, to inject woke policies into the workplace. And I identified the same thing with them, they don’t have actual popular support with people, it’s a house of cards. They’re only popular among gender studies professors, Marxist college students, and maybe the elite centers of power in our country. Because of that, they were able to fool companies into believing they needed to listen to them. And so this is where I go back to blaming conservatives — for too long we accepted the idea of being a “silent majority.” That’s something we should all be ashamed of. We should never be a silent majority because it allows very loud, small groups of people like these radicals to run everything. So then we asked: what is the PR strategy they will run in return against us exposing policies like this? And it’s very simple: You would wait for things to blow over. That’s the expected policy route PR takes on things like this because they’re used to them being one, maybe two day stories. If it’s really bad, maybe three days. And we said, no, we’re going to build something out where this goes on, informing the customer base for over a month if necessary. Let’s see how the companies do with that long of an education campaign. And so it proved very effective in that respect. We were able to flip the policies entirely at Tractor Supply.
Then we moved on to John Deere, where we also changed corporate policy, got them to stop funding Pride events and stop woke trainings. After that, we moved on to Harley Davidson. Harley Davidson was a real battle because their CEO is a true believer. He was, I think at least, the first true believer that we faced off with. And so he’s a man who was intent on spreading these types of woke, progressive, so called — which I hate even using because it’s the most regressive mindset you could possibly have but they call it progressive — set of policy measures and ideologies that they want to force into global companies. In fact, he co founded The B Team with Sir Richard Branson, which has the explicit purpose of replacing leadership in global corporations from people who were just trying to make good money for their company to people who are social activists. So this was an explicit purpose for him, he wanted to turn Harley Davidson all electric by 2030. They had injected the craziest trainings, recommending books like “White Fragility” to their employee base and funding Pride events. In fact, one Pride event they sponsored had a “Rage Room” for angry people next to the section where kids could interact with drag queens next to the “Play Catch with the Dad” section for people with daddy issues. So, I mean, we’re talking crazy town. This is just pure lunacy. And we exposed it along the way. It took a long time, but we were able to flip Harley Davidson as well. They changed a myriad of their policies, a ton of them, and that’s all listed. One of the big things with all these companies, we got them to disengage from the HRC CEI scoring system because we’ve explained very clearly how this is a partisan group who essentially hates your customer base. That’s the way I see it, at least. When I look at their social media and see the stuff they say about Republicans — just today they called me a MAGA weirdo, okay? So, why would a company with a conservative consumer base ever do anything with this group? And so, they’re only making it easier for us to make that point as they use terms like calling me a MAGA weirdo.
From there, as a byproduct of exposing Harley, we also flipped Polaris, another motorcycle brand and motorsports company, and Indian Motorcycle, and they also got rid of DEI. After that, we turned our sights on Jack Daniels, but Jack Daniels noticed we were looking through their LinkedIn pages and they preemptively changed their woke policies and broke away from the HRC. That trend continued again with Lowe’s. Lowe’s also preemptively changed their policies. After I wrote an email to them on Friday, by Monday morning I received an anonymous email. I would be willing to guess that it was probably sent by corporate because they had my email address. They reached out on the Monday following the Friday where I sent them these messages and then announce all these policy changes and drop all of this crazy woke stuff.
And then it happens again, yesterday, with Ford Motor Company. So Ford’s CEO is on the board of Harley Davidson, saw everything that that company was exposed for. Also on the board of Ford is the CEO of John Deere who experienced what their company went through from me exposing them. So there was, I think, a mood at Ford of, “Hey, we don’t want to go through that.” And there is a lot of material. So they changed their policies yesterday and you know, we’re going company by company.
What I’ve said is we are going to go one by one and inject sanity back into corporate America and make things normal again. I’m not asking them to take on my policy positions. I’m asking them to just be neutral. Get rid of the politics and social issues, stop shoving it down people’s throats, just have them go to work, do a great job, provide great service, great products, and you’re gonna do just fine in this economy. But if you go down this route, there is a new awakened consumer that wants to make companies very aware that the customer is going to be king again. Not BlackRock — that’s not the person walking through your door. BlackRock’s not walking in, Vanguard’s not walking in, the HRC’s not walking in, State Street’s not, none of these places are, okay? These woke Wall Street entities don’t shop at your store, normal, everyday people do, and they’re very acutely aware of their buying power and how they can vote with their dollar now. We’ve made that point very clear to these companies at this point. Many companies just fear being next and they don’t want to be next. So I think we’re going to continue to see a cascade of these policies being removed from major companies.
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JOHN: As you noted, it seems like there’s an eagerness by some of these companies – not all of them, for sure – an eagerness to have an excuse to get out of this. Are you sensing that about the marketplace in general?
ROBBY: Yes. Let’s just think about the reality of the economy. You’re at a place right now where the economy is not great. Companies have to tighten their belt if they want to be able to turn a profit and thrive, especially if they’re a public company who has a fiduciary duty to their shareholders. So, traditionally, when that happens, what do you do? You go look at your company top to bottom and say, “What’s costing us money? What’s making us money?” You focus on the areas making you money and cut the fat on the things that don’t. Well, guess what? DEI doesn’t make any of these companies money. If it did, they would not remove one policy. Period. I would have no effect. They would not do anything I’m asking them to do if DEI made them money.
The premise that DEI would make companies money was sold by McKinsey. And to be perfectly honest with you, I am shocked there has not been lawsuits from people who were advised by McKinsey to that effect, because it has not only not been profitable, it is now a liability for companies and it’s a massive one. And if you look at actual intangibles — if you look at measurable results, okay, look at the London Stock Exchange. They have a diversity ETF. It underperforms every other index fund, It’s very clear this stuff is not a moneymaker. And so I think there’s definitely those executives that are just sitting there going, “Well, this is a great excuse to cut the fat and be able to do it with the excuse that, hey, we didn’t realize there was such division among the customer base as to what these policies mean to them and how offensive this could be to a sizable portion of our customer base. So we’ve just got to disengage and go into neutral.” And that’s why you’ve seen in a number of these sessions, statements, they talk about the changing landscape in our country, the changing mood. Well, the mood is one of people have experienced this for four years, and anybody who’s watching that’s had to do one of these trainings knows that you would prefer to get a colonoscopy rather than go through another one of them, and you’re not alone. In fact, I’ve had a ton of Democrats reach out to me telling me they’re so sick of this stuff, they disagree with me on this issue, on that issue — which by the way, I think is kind of funny, when they reach out and they’re like, “Just so you know, I disagree with you on all these other things,” it’s like, okay, nobody needed to know that, this is not an airport, you don’t need to announce it, but thank you for letting me know all the things you disagree with me on — but then they end it with, “but I agree with you on DEI, this stuff’s crazy, this is what happened in my workplace, I was passed up for a job that I was eminently qualified for, that I had been working toward for a decade, and they brought in somebody that checked a diversity box and I was directly told that it was because we needed to increase diversity and this is not what I signed up for…” So, that’s kind of like the person who voted for the leopard who said they wouldn’t eat their face and then after they win the election they get their face eaten off by the leopard. That’s kind of what’s happening to a lot of these Democrats who work in these companies and then get affected by DEI policy. So, I think there’s definitely this big movement against it, and a lot of executives are just happy to have an excuse to get rid of it.
JOHN: Yeah, there’s financial disincentive to be involved in this. There’s also the legal risk, and you mentioned this in one particular instance. Have you heard much about that from anybody that you’ve consulted with on how to approach these situations? Is there a legal component? Or is there a sort of a veiled threat about that, that they should fear amongst their work force and amongst their customer base?
ROBBY: Well, for us, we don’t have to be the person making that threat. Because the truth is, everybody understands the pitfalls here and the liabilities. There are major liabilities surrounding what has happened with the DEI policy, specifically the targets. All these companies like to say, “We don’t have quotas, we don’t have quotas.” Well, if you have goals or targets, you’re just using different words for quota. And when you go into your hiring profiles, and I can see that you put their race by their name, their skin color by their name, in consideration of their hiring, it’s very clear what’s going on there. And then when you have whistleblowers within the company saying, “Oh yeah, explicitly, we get rewarded for hiring minorities. We get extra money for that versus hiring a white person.” It’s very clear there has been discriminatory policies throughout many parts of corporate America, and lawyers at those companies know the pitfalls, they know the liabilities, and many of them, to their credit I will say, even some who agree with the whole DEI mindset, have actually been warning their companies for a while about the potential for there being major liabilities here. I think we have only begun to step into that area, there’s some great groups like America First Legal who are beginning to try to hold companies accountable with lawsuits. I think it’s just the tip of the iceberg. You’re going to see this for the next five, six years, just grow in terms of the number of lawsuits and legal ramifications for what has been done here in these DEI departments. And then there’s the religious side of this. You know, there’s people being forced to essentially violate their closely held faith values, which has its own pitfalls for a legal department at a corporation. If you’re doing that in such a way that threatens somebody’s livelihood, and you’re asking them to violate their faith in order to keep their livelihood. There’s a lot of angles to this legally that are areas companies need to be concerned about. But to be frank, they’re so obvious that I don’t even have to be the one to point them out. And that’s kind of a great thing because I can stick to just asking for neutrality because when it comes to the legal side of this, they are acutely aware that they are in dangerous territory.
JOHN: Now, you mentioned your approach with Tractor Supply, the first company in which you started to expose the DEI agenda. Can you talk us through your approach – how did you actually make this a longer term issue for them rather than a two or three day news cycle problem?
ROBBY: Well, I recognize that if I put everything in one video, what I had put together on the company via whistleblowers and also open source investigation, that it was going to be so much content I couldn’t possibly expect one person to sit there and listen to it for four hours. So I said, “Well, the smart approach is to give a concise summary in like a 10 minute video.” It ended up being, I think, nine minutes and we’re gonna give sort of the broad strokes and then every day we’re gonna give them more new information. And that’s what we’ve done, we’ve kept a consistent stream of information about the woke policies and practices of these companies. And that has given people time to take this information in on their own time. Because maybe that first day I posted that big video with the broad strokes, maybe a quarter of my audience wasn’t online that day. Well, what happens the next day when I post the next thing that quarter sees it and then they amplify to their audience and then new people start to see what it is that we’re sharing on a day over day basis. So you extend the network of people who become aware of the problem by just kind of stringing it out over a longer period of time. So it’s good for reporting and getting the information out there to a wider audience, but also, you know, has the added bonus of kind of defeating the PR strategy to get over the hump of a bad story.
JOHN: Final question, a more personal one. You’re not only an activist but also a filmmaker. What brought you to this point? How did you go from making music videos in LA to breaking major political stories here in Nashville?
ROBBY: Well, I directed Oscar winning actors, actresses, some of the biggest music stars, but I decided to come out in 2015 and endorse President Trump during the Republican primary because I knew that the country needed a disruptor, and frankly, the world needed a disruptor. We had kind of gotten into this “politics as usual” that had led us down a very dangerous path. And my family coming from Cuba, I’m very concerned about the direction we are turning being one that is going to lead us to a new form of communism — not the type that my family faced in Cuba, not the type from the USSR, but a whole new brand of it where optically they will never admit they’re communists, but they have total ideological control of the companies and the institutions that surround our daily life. And it’s a very dangerous idea because it’s something that could outlive other more brutal forms of communism, but will be just as merciless in the way that it destroys the lives of citizens. But once you consolidate that power, it’s an incredibly dangerous thing. So I knew I had to use every piece of influence I could possibly muster to try to change some hearts and minds, and explain to them why somebody of my background is opposed to this Left-wing policy and why we need to stand up for our rights and our country at this point and be willing to lose things. You know, I lost my career in Hollywood. I burned it down, essentially. We lost business overnight by me endorsing Trump, but it was the right thing to do and it also cleared the way to make it a little bit easier for the next person in that industry. And, I knew I needed to throw myself into my work and what I believed in, and that’s what we’ve done. We created “The War on Children,” which has been the most watched documentary of the year with over 50 million views. And I think it’s opened a lot of eyes to the dangers our kids face and how we can stand up against this monstrous Marxist machine. And then now, with defeating these woke companies, we want to do what we can in every which way to help bring this country back to sanity so that we can give our kids the opportunity they deserve to have the American dream, because it has slipped through our fingers. Kids no longer have that promise of the American dream. We need to deliver that back to them. And so, step by step, that’s kind of what we’re working towards doing between me and my wife.
JOHN: A very compelling story, and it’s clear that your personal passion is really driving your work. Robby, thanks so much for coming on.
ROBBY: Thank you. I appreciate you covering it.
JOHN: That was filmmaker and activist Robby Starbuck – and this has been an Extra edition of Morning Wire.
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