Why America’s Biggest Companies Are Going Anti-’Woke’ | WSJ

- It is time to expose Toyota. They have gone totally woke. - [Narrator] Meet Robby Starbuck.

- If you spend money at John Deere, are you helping pay for the sexual transitions of children? This is Harley-Davidson. It's time for them to be exposed.

- [Narrator] The conservative activist has been taking on corporations over what he calls their woke policies, and he's been having a lot of success. - All right, y'all, we've got another massive win to report. Toyota has just sent this email out to their employees and dealership.

Walmart has decided on making some changes. - [Narrator] Since last summer, Starbuck has claimed responsibility for over a dozen public companies dialing back their diversity efforts. - I think Starbuck's activism definitely lends some strength to the go woke go broke sentiment that you hear from some on the right.

- Your wallet is a weapon. You do have a voice in this. - [Narrator] To learn about his activism and which companies are his newest targets, "The Wall Street Journal" visited Starbuck to get a never-before-seen look at his work behind the scenes.

(soft pensive music) - All right, guys. Hey, this is Robby Starbuck. We're on the set where I typically do my TV hits.

Right now, I'm about to go on to do a hit for TBN. - Welcome back to "Stakelbeck. " Tonight we're talking to filmmaker, activist, and host of "The Robby Starbuck Show," Robby Starbuck.

Why would these companies do this? - [Narrator] Starbuck works on his crusade against diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI programs, from a studio in his home outside of Nashville. - A lot of this is predicated on what happened in 2020.

So after George Floyd, what happened was executives got put in this position where they were incredibly fearful of being framed as racist. - [Narrator] Today, Starbuck is best known for his activism, but his venture into conservative politics is a relatively recent endeavor. ♪ Shining like a flashlight ♪ - [Narrator] In a previous life, Starbuck directed music videos in Hollywood for big names like Snoop Dogg and Megadeth.

- My journey from the entertainment industry to today, you know, it started in many ways as a father seeing it come into my kids' schools, this ideology that has permeated corporate America now. A lot of people describe it as wokeness. And my kid comes home and she says, "Dad, they had this person come to the school and they talked about white privilege.

" And at the time I had never heard of the term white privilege. So I look it up and I do research on the person that they had come in and I find they're just a total radical Marxist. - [Narrator] Starbuck's politics are rooted in his family's history.

He says his family fled Cuba in 1965 after their ranch was confiscated by the Castro regime. - My family, they lost everything to communism, you know, and I see this ideology as sort of a modern form of communism. I don't think there's a polite way to say it.

I raised hell over it, you know, and I was really the first parent to speak up. And me being able to do it from a lens of being a minority myself made it a little more awkward for, you know, the faculty there who were mostly, you know, from a certain subset of the left where they didn't have that same ability but they thought that they had the wisdom to speak for all minorities, right? All right, y'all, you're gonna wanna see this.

- [Narrator] Last summer, Starbuck began his first corporate campaign targeting the agricultural equipment chain Tractor Supply Company. - We're gonna expose it all. All the craziness that they have done that their customers have no clue about.

You know, every day we were dropping a new piece of information about how they had sort of strayed from the values of their consumers. And at the time, a lot of people were still of the mindset, there's no way you're gonna get this company to change things. They're worth billions and billions of dollars.

You're one guy. - [Narrator] Three weeks later, Tractor Supply caved. The company said in a statement that it would retire its DEI goals, stop sponsoring pride festivals, and no longer submit data to the Human Rights Campaign, the nonprofit that grades companies on their policies when it comes to LGBTQ workers.

Tractor Supply and the Human Rights Campaign declined to comment on the story. - So these are all the statements from companies that we have convinced to change. You've got Brown-Forman, owner of Jack Daniel's, Lowe's.

- [Narrator] Starbuck has gone after over a dozen public companies, each of which has since announced retreats from their DEI policies, according to Starbuck. - Caterpillar, Harley-Davidson, John Deere, and the one that started it all, Tractor Supply. - Starbuck's impact has been really significant so far.

Companies have rolled back policies. They are worried about a social media attack by him. And this is on top of already mounting pressure from shareholder initiatives to litigation around DEI policies.

- [Narrator] Starbuck shares his findings with his followers on X and Instagram. His posts about Tractor Supply were forwarded and posted so often that the name of the company started trending on X. - Social media is very important for Starbuck's success.

And rather than a more private forum like a shareholder proposal or a litigation, this is very public, and companies, I think, are thinking through the fact that they will need to react. - [Narrator] To date, Starbuck says the most challenging campaign was Harley-Davidson. - It wasn't hard from the context that I thought we couldn't change them.

It was hard from the context of, I knew how damaging this was in the process and I couldn't believe that they were willing to continue down this path of essentially lighting money on fire and slapping their existing customer base in the face. To the CEO of Harley-Davidson, I know you're watching this video. No more donations to woke causes.

No more donations to pride parades that parade sexuality to children. Just make motorcycles, period. - [Narrator] Starbuck's posts about Harley-Davidson were also amplified by billionaire Elon Musk.

- We did an analysis of impressions, and found that it was upward of a billion impressions via all of our Harley-Davidson stories that had occurred and all of the influencers who made videos and things like that. So anybody who knows the ad world knows companies pay enormous amounts of money to get a billion impressions on something. This is not the billion impressions you wanted.

- [Narrator] Harley-Davidson did not respond to a request for comment. Starbuck's activism appears to the world in his social media blitzes, but his campaigns are based on his own small team's painstaking, weeks-long investigations. - It's always predicated off of whistleblower testimony or them bring forward evidence, things along those lines.

We examine that and then we dig deeper into an open source investigation where we're looking at things that are public but that most people never look at like sustainability reports and things like that. But we collect that all together and build a real portrait of how an ideology may have shaped or taken over a company. - [Narrator] When "The Wall Street Journal" visited Starbuck he was working on a campaign for the automaker Nissan.

- This document I have in front of me is the 2023 Nissan DEI report. It's titled "Accelerating Allyship. " And the reason that we're looking at this is because oftentimes inside these, you find different threads to pull about exactly what these companies are doing.

So on this form they say, "We define DEI as," and they've got equity listed. And it says, "Recognizing that each person has different circumstances and allocating the resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome. " The horror of it is that it sounds so similar to equality that people get tricked into believing that they should accept equity.

But equity, in fact, is something that seeks to strip excellence and really everything that makes you special and individual away from you. All right, y'all, I've got amazing news once again. Another company is dropping woke policies.

Today, it is Nissan. - [Narrator] Notably Nissan decided to roll back its DEI policies before Starbuck went public with his investigation. - When we approached Nissan with one of our findings and the story we were thinking about putting out, Nissan was ready to listen right away.

Now we're very proud to be able to bring you these changes. - [Narrator] In response to a request for comment, Nissan wrote, "For nearly four decades, our commitment to respect and inclusion has been rooted in our values, shaped an environment where each of our team members can contribute at work, and ultimately contributed to the success of our business. " Starbuck says he has mostly focused on companies that have a conservative customer base.

- You have to have a strategy to first start with the companies that depend on the right-wing consumer. Once you start to shift those, you're starting to shift the psychology of the country. And in doing so, you start to be able to move a little bit further away from being so vastly populated by right-wing consumers.

So that's how you eventually have seen us take on Toyota and Boeing and Walmart. - [Narrator] Starbuck's activism is controversial and has attracted plenty of critics, some of whom have labeled his views racist and homophobic. - Proponents of DEI policies believe that this is good for the workforce, this is good for customers, and it is good potentially for companies' financials as well.

- So for my critics who claim that DEI improves anything at work, I think there's really only one answer I can give them and it's that I hope they enjoyed reading the book, "How to Lie with Statistics," because that's all they're doing. - [Narrator] For companies that he has yet to target, Starbuck has a message. - We're reasonable people.

We're not here to shake companies down. Don't be afraid to reach out and ask questions. You know, I will offer advice for free to any of these executives at major companies and tell them what needs to change.

You don't need to be a story to change. They're supposed to play the game. Pitching you of my bullpen session to like the whole.