The anti-DEI agitator that big companies fear most

In early June, Robby Starbuck sat on the patio of his home in suburban Tennessee and recorded an eight-minute monologue on his mobile phone — a no-frills, TikTok-style video titled “Exposed: Tractor Supply Went Woke.”

“All right y’all,” he began, “you’re going to want to see this.”

Speaking in tones that swung between urgent, amused and appalled, Starbuck listed an inventory of what he considered to be outrages committed by Tractor Supply, which sells feed and farm equipment.

The company hung Pride flags at a distribution center, he said. It offered equal health care for transgender people. It sponsored a Pride event near its headquarters in Brentwood, Tennessee. It provided unconscious bias training for 40,000 employees. It paid $50 to employees who got the COVID vaccine.

Starbuck, a 35-year-old former music video producer, wrapped up with a call to boycott the company until it changed course and dropped its policies aimed at diversity, equity and inclusion.

“So now everybody, remind Tractor Supply who their customers actually are,” he said.

With 674,000 followers on social platform X and 353,000 followers on Instagram, Starbuck has a not-exactly-gigantic fan base when measured against other influencers’. But his posts about Tractor Supply — roughly 30 in total, over the course of a few weeks — were forwarded and posted so often that the name of the company started trending on X.

The company, which has nearly $15 billion in annual revenue, took notice. On June 27, it announced in a statement that it would retire its DEI goals. It would stop sponsoring Pride festivals. And it would no longer submit data to the Human Rights Campaign, the nonprofit that grades companies on their policies when it comes to LGBTQ+ workers.

“We have heard from customers that we have disappointed them,” the company wrote. “We have taken this feedback to heart.”

The reversal made headlines and ushered a clamorous new voice into a highly divisive issue. In the months that followed, Starbuck posted a series of similar videos about John Deere, Harley-Davidson, Caterpillar, Stanley Black &Decker, Jack Daniel’s, Lowe’s, Ford Motor, Molson Coors and, most recently, Toyota. All have since announced retreats from their DEI policies.

His playbook is to exhort his audience to pressure companies and threaten them with economic pain. For corporations, the worst-case fate is what happened to Bud Light in 2023, after it formed a partnership with social media influencer and transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney. Detractors howled — Kid Rock posted a video of himself machine gunning Bud Light cases — and sales plummeted.

Starbuck says his posts and videos on X have been viewed hundreds of millions of times per month, and says they have occasionally slashed billions of dollars from the market cap of publicly traded companies.

His videos “have a material effect that’s not lost on us,” Starbuck said during a recent interview. “But what’s interesting is, when they’ve turned around” — when the companies change their DEI policies — “stock’s fine. It goes up. Everything’s good.”

Wall Street analysts doubt that Starbuck has had such puppeteerlike control over share prices, which they say have risen and fallen for unrelated reasons. And in some cases, the changes that mollified Starbuck, and caused him to declare victory, seemed far from momentous.

Still, his campaign is nothing if not well timed. It’s part of an atmospheric change hastened by the Supreme Court ruling last year that rejected affirmative action at universities and colleges. That decision prompted corporations to worry that their DEI programs could be challenged next.

Google and Meta pulled back from their DEI programs last year. Others have renamed them. The Society for Human Resource Management, an organization for HR professionals, announced in July that it was dropping the “equity” part of its DEI program because it had become a “distraction.”

Which is not to say that diversity drives have been canceled. The Human Rights Campaign says that the number of companies participating in its scorecard, the Corporate Equality Index, will reach a record high next year: 1,400, a 5% increase over this year’s numbers.

“I think it’s a steady progression forward at a time when we’re experiencing backlash,” said Kelley Robinson, the president of the campaign. And the loudest proponents of that backlash are grabbing attention. Robby Starbuck, she said, is one of a handful of “extremist conservative activists that are doing all they can to pull back the progress that we’ve made.”

A sinister plot

Born Robby Starbuck Newsom, he grew up in Temecula, California. His mother is an immigrant from Cuba; he had a troubled relationship with his American father, now deceased.

Starbuck graduated from high school at 16, and dropped out of community college to work for a video production company. Through that job and others, he earned enough to start a production company in Los Angeles. He made music videos for Snoop Dogg, Smashing Pumpkins and other acts.

He had married his wife, Landon, a singer-songwriter, when he was 18, and they started having children. As a new father, he felt that the entertainment industry was pumping cultural bile intended for teens into the American bloodstream.

“Entertainment was being used as a weapon to engineer specific political beliefs and to openly sexualize kids,” he wrote in a text.

His role in the entertainment industry started to feel like a form of cowardice. All the more so after he gave his life to Jesus, as he put it. He had always been a Republican, but by the time Donald Trump came along for his first presidential run, Starbuck concluded that he was in the wrong place and the wrong business.

Starbuck and his family relocated to Tennessee in 2018, a place he felt he would find people with values more aligned with his own.

The 2024 documentary, “The War on Children,” his most ambitious foray into activist media, covers a litany of familiar problems: the rise of gender dysphoria; alarming rates of depression among children; easy access to pornography. The film also captures his antipathy toward transgender rights activism, a frequent target of his current anti-DEI campaign.

As director, reporter and narrator, Starbuck argues that American children now live in a terrifying hellscape of predators — greedy corporations, left-leaning politicians, witless school boards, all of them in the thrall of a woke agenda.

“The question we face now,” he says at the end of “The War on Children,” “is whether good or evil will win this war.”

“Part of the danger of Starbuck’s rhetoric is that it focuses on one divisive dimension of DEI” — like Pride flags at Tractor Supply’s distribution center — “and misrepresents it as the wholeness of it, without understanding that these policies have implications for pay equity for women, for stamping out antisemitism, for creating inclusive workplace environments for veterans and so on,” said Shaun Harper, a professor of business, education and public policy at the University of Southern California. “It’s a misrepresentation of the facts as opposed to straight up lies.”

Backlash to the backlash

Starbuck’s social media following has its roots in his days as a music video director. Today, the relatively modest size of his audience is multiplied by a cadre of X accounts, YouTube channels and TikTokers, some of them well known (“The Dennis Prager Show,” Newsmax), some part of an ecosystem of conservative bro social media sites and podcasts (The Quartering, Benny Johnson).

These sites amplify an idea that seems to be gaining traction: that many DEI programs have features that annoy as many people as they edify.

“I do think a lot of white, middle-class Americans, working-class Americans, are pretty fed up with diversity programs as they experienced them at work,” said Frank Dobbin, a professor of sociology at Harvard University and the author of “Inventing Equal Opportunity,” a book about workplace discrimination. “In part, it’s because they’ve been having the same poorly designed diversity training for the last 20 years.”

Some companies are hiring public relations specialists and law firms to gird against Starbuck’s attacks. Corporations tend to change course, to varying degrees, once they are in his sights. Molson Coors, Lowe’s, Harley-Davidson and others have said they will sponsor only events core to the company’s business. (In Molson’s case, that means “hometown communities” and goals like alcohol responsibility.) Harley ended “socially motivated content” in employee training programs.

At the same time, many companies announced their changes while restating a broad commitment to a diverse workplace. More than anything, the CEOs appear eager to minimize static and appease everybody, which is perhaps what they’ve always wanted. It’s just become harder to achieve.

The backlash to DEI may already be producing a backlash of its own. After Tractor Supply and John Deere announced their post-Starbuck DEI policies, the National Black Farmers Association declared that both would be boycotted.

“I see it as going backward,” said John Boyd, the founder of the association. “When they say they are doing away with their diversity programs, that sends the wrong signal.”

One fine day, Starbuck says, executives all over the country will wake up and say, “You know what? We’re going to stop being crazy,” and just return to what he calls American values.

Could it be any simpler?

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.