Robby Starbuck's Crusade Against Woke

Robby Starbuck first came on my radar sometime in 2018 as I was flicking through Instagram, compiling a list of filmmakers and producers I could tell were not unrepentant liberals as I explored a move to Los Angeles.

By that point, Starbuck had already been exiled from Hollywood after he came out in support of Trump three years prior. His name registered in my mind as I wandered across the country to send emails for a producer, but it wasn't until his move to Middle Tennessee a few years later and his bid to represent the 5th Congressional District in 2021 that he came back on my radar.

Oddly enough, Robby had moved to Nashville (or the Nashville area) around the same time I had moved back to Nashville and found myself writing this here newsletter instead of pawing my way through a desperate career in film and entertainment. Our paths mirrored each other’s in a way, but as the Congressional race progressed and Starbuck fell on the wrong side of the "bona fide" Republican debacle that saw him, Morgan Ortagus, and Baxter Lee axed from the ballot, my nativist hackles kicked up a bit, and I decided that we needn't anymore Californians telling us Tennesseans how to govern.

Needless to say, in the intervening years between his ill-fated run for public office and his steady commitment to the area, I slowly warmed to him. And as Starbuck has, by all accounts, returned to his first love, video production, and introduced a political bent to it, the niche he’s carved out has been both effective and hard to ignore.

For the past couple of months, Starbuck has been on a crusade. Focusing his efforts on exposing diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in companies popular with conservative customers, he's successfully cajoled Tractor Supply, John Deere, Harley-Davidson, Brown-Forman, Lowe's, Ford Motor Company, Molson Coors, and Caterpillar Inc. into dropping their DEI programs. At this point, Robby’s efforts have been so effective that all it takes for a company to reverse course is for him to post one of his signature videos. By the time you read this, it's not unlikely that another company will have announced their change of face at the behest of Starbuck’s reporting.

I was curious about his strategy, how he expects corporate culture to change in the wake of his jihad, and whether these corporate about-faces were sincere. Laying down the battle ax I waved against him during his run for Congress, we caught up over the phone: me in my office, Robby at his farm, Great Danes howling in the background. What follows is a transcript of our conversation.

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Tell us how this started and why you thought you could find success getting companies to shutter their DEI programs. Did you expect them to fold as easily as they have when you started reporting on this?

 We had a thesis. I wouldn't say I thought it would work from the very beginning. But the model we put together and the metrics for how we choose companies and things like that, it did prove out to be correct, and it's working. 

As to why, I mean, it's kind of multipronged, but I would say for me, it was part personal and the other part ideological. Because when I think about the future, the way that wokeness—and what's referred to as the woke mind virus—has infected corporate America is really a symptom of a larger problem.

Nobody would argue with my assertion that [Americans] are the most divided we've ever been in our lifetimes. So the question is, why? Because every segment of our life, every cultural institution, all of those things, they’re divided. Everything's about politics. When I was younger, that wasn't the case: you know, work was work, school was school. I don't know that when I was in school—and I went to public school—that politics was really ever brought up. No woke ideology, no queer theory or gender ideology or any of this stuff. 

It accelerated after George Floyd, and the Overton Window shifted rapidly and wildly to the left. So when we looked at this issue, we said, Well, how do you bring it back? How do you bring that window of acceptable discourse back to some semblance of sanity? And what we came up with is that you've got to look at the companies that have very conservative consumer bases whom they depend on, start with them, and pick them off one by one. 

Everybody's stronger as a pack. So you remove the pack mentality, you go after a singular entity, and make sure that that entity has to face the music of their [corporate] culture and values. If they’re really proud of it, they’re gonna stand by it. [laughs] And to this point, not one of them has. You know, we have a one hundred percent strike rate of having successfully flipped the companies we’ve focused on. 

We’ve proved very credibly that we can move markets, we can deliver enough customers that are angry, and companies can’t ignore it. We can carry out a sustained campaign for a period of a month or more. So companies that we talk to now, they understand that. And we’re able to change our tactics a little bit, from [spreading] negative stories, to what I prefer, which is [sharing] positive stories of change. We can go to them and say, “Hey, here are the issues we’ve identified. We’re working on a story about it and we want to make sure it’s accurate, so if you guys are considering changes in alignment with some of the companies you’ve seen flip, we’d like to know ahead of time, because we’d prefer to do a story about the positive changes versus the negative failures of the past.” 

We reached out to another company Friday with– they’ve got north of a $150 billion market cap, and we sent them a letter. We got a phone call by Sunday, and they agreed to all the changes, so we’re just going to wait for them to let their employees know and change some things internally over the next ten days. Then that one will be announced. And we’ve got another one doing that same thing.

We’ve got a meeting Friday to finalize the story that we’re doing and talk to some executives there, then they’ll announce the following week. So, we’re working through with these companies and being very pragmatic about it. Like, they know we’re not threatening them or anything like that. It’s just that we’re doing stories on this, and we want to do the right story. If companies are changing, that’s good news, and we want to tell people about it.

At the center of a lot of this seems to be the Human Rights Campaign and their use of CEI scores to rank companies on their inclusiveness. What has their response been?

I mean, honestly? It’s kind of a weird response. They're trying to fundraise off of me, which is fine, you know, it's kind of expected. But I think they don’t know what to do, because they have a really difficult issue on their end. Which is that the HRC used to feign some sort of…they would at least try to have a mask on, where they were not explicitly, insanely partisan. Now they’re so insane; they’re probably one of the most partisan groups in our country, in terms of political advocacy. The name of their organization is so absurd, because this is a group that literally spends every day on social media attacking half the country, and they want to talk about human rights.

So companies have to look at this from a vantage point of like, even if only fifteen percent of your customers are conservative, if they’re going to leave because you guys are aligning yourselves with a group and an entity that essentially just, I would say, vomits, uh…very… vile hatred toward them, is that really worth it as a company? What are you getting out of it? Well, the answer to that question is nothing. You’re not getting anything except for the ability to virtue signal. But what is it costing you as a company? Well, it’s going to cost you customers. It’s going to cost you credibility. It’s going to make you look explicitly partisan, and it’s going to do real damage to your brand and the trustability of your brand name—so why would you align with that?

It’s time we have the same rules for everybody, for neutrality to come back into play. The HRC doesn’t have a really great strategy to neuter this. We’ll probably see some more flailing around. But I do think what we’ve begun to see here is the beginning of the end of the CEI scoring system. They will try to continue scoring companies until it’s so absurd and embarrassing that they can’t go on anymore because so many companies have pulled out. But in reality–here’s the other part of it that’s really funny—no average person cares what a company’s CEI score is.

There’s just not. I mean, maybe you’ll find a few crazy people, but in general, people aren’t going to apply for a job and think, “Oh, let me check their CEI score first.” If you need a job, you’re going to go apply for a job. You’re not going to check the CEI score of a company unless you’re somebody who wants your company to pay for your transition. Which, again, is an insanely small group of people.

Do you think companies will make efforts to remove their DEI departments while continuing to implement these policies in a more, I don’t know, decentralized, invisible manner to appease consumers or do you think they are undergoing a genuine ideological shift?

Well, I think you’re going to see a mix, if I’m being candid. Because that’s the nature of corporate America: all of these DEI programs that we’re investigating are so varied in nature, I think their response is going to be like that too. You’re going to have some go all the way. You know, “We’re going to be diametrically opposed to this, we’re going to completely gut it. We want nothing to do with it, it’s been nothing but a money suck, it has only hurt our business, we’re going to totally detach.” And then you’re going to see some pull back from the craziest stuff, but keep some elements they feel aren’t political.

Let me give you an example. There’s one company we’re talking to right now. They haven’t said when they’re going to announce this or anything, but essentially, the way they’re going to approach this is by getting rid of the people who they felt were bringing activism to work, and were violating some of the rules, because the executives of the company were not even aware of a bunch of the stuff that we brought forward in our emails to them. And when they found out about it, they were rightfully pissed off, because it sullies the name of the company and attaches them to some pretty grotesque stuff. 

So they’re firing [the] group of people who are responsible for that. However, there are other people in the company who don’t focus on the crazy stuff. Instead, they’ve been dedicated to disability stuff; they’ve got a great program they support for disabled kids and things like that. They’ll bring all the good stuff under a new banner, something like “Company Culture.” So you’ll have a VP of Company Culture. And instead of having these decentralized things where you’ve got these Employee Resource Groups groups with leaders who are activists, the new approach we’re going to see will be a very centralized, controlled mechanism for Employee Resource Groups and Business Resource Groups. 

I think BRGs are going to become more of the norm, where it's unified under one BRG, where all of their employees and special events are in it, and the company has a lot of control over it, so they can see how their brand is being used. So I think you’re going to see [companies] pull away from decentralization because the problem with all the crazy stuff we’re seeing is it came from an approach that gave a lot of control to the “leaders” within these ERGs. They were able to use company resources and logos to support things that aren’t aligned with the brand or to push the brand into political situations it doesn’t want to be involved in.

That’s one discussion I’ve had many times with many different executives in many different companies; you know, “I didn’t know this was happening.” And when they say that, I tell them they’re not alone, that I’m hearing it from all the executives. But here’s the reality: if you guys didn’t know, that’s a problem; because these people are fundamentally altering the ability for people to trust your brand and to support your brand, because they feel like you're taking it in a direction where you’re explicitly supporting an ideology. And I’ve had pretty much general agreement [from executives] that yeah, that’s correct, and we need to fix it. 

So, long way of saying, I think it's going to be more centralized with more executive oversight that we’ve seen in the last five years.

Changing gears a bit: thinking about this at a local or state level, you moved here from California and witnessed a lot of this years before most Tennesseans did. I'm wondering what you think states and cities or towns can do to guard themselves against these policies infecting everything from public education to the Chamber of Commerce. What’s the most effective tool for people at a ground level to be able to push back against this? Is it as simple as just not patronizing institutions that perpetuate these practices?

Well, that's step one for a consumer: don't support businesses that support policies and belief systems that fundamentally hate you and everything you believe in. That’s a very simple one. Also, use your voice: make a phone call, send an email. And then there's political leaders and legislators. There's a role here to play, and they've got to get on the same page, especially in red states, where we have the ability to use some levers of power to neutralize this.

So, for instance, government contractors. If we're hiring contractors to do our roads or do anything within our state, we should have the ability to create a set of guidelines that these companies and contractors have to abide by. Because, to give you an example, the federal government had these tax credits for electric cars, recently. And to get those credits, you had to check the boxes for certain DEI training and stuff like that. So, we need to do the opposite. [We need to] fundamentally find that there are liabilities involved with many of the DEI programs out there, that they could fundamentally be in violation of non discrimination laws, and that we as a state can't take the risk of contracting with a company that has any of these programs because we see it as a potential legal liability.

And so, you can create a set of standards that will pass muster, get through the court system, and effectively neuter the ability of other states to force these contractors to do this. The reality is, a lot of these contractors are regional in nature, so you can at least neutralize a lot of these contractors within the South from adopting these ideologies. And in truth, many of them only did it because [they may have] one state that they work in where they've done the opposite, where they get some sort of preferential treatment by doing this. But the reality is, blue states don't have a great way to fight back against this, so if we do it, they understand that these companies don't really have much of a choice but to comply. So we've got to flip the script on what the feds have done and do it on a state level in a way that neutralizes this within those contractor groups.

Another thing is political candidates and eventual politicians who get elected. They have platforms. Maybe not as big as mine, but they have platforms within their communities, and they should use them to call out companies that are doing things the wrong way. You can create a lot of change just by getting citizens activated around understanding what the hell is going on. A lot of companies created these policies under the belief that their customers were stupid, and I created my thesis around the idea that I don't think most people are stupid; if you give them the information, they're going to do the right thing with it. The problem is, most people are busy, and businesses mistaked the fact that people were busy with their being stupid, and they're not. So if you deliver them information in bite-sized form these people will be reactive to it because they don't want to give their money to a company that, let's say, believes children should be able to get sex changes. And for them, it's a very simple thing: you know, “I’ll shift somewhere else.”

The other thing too is we've shifted the boycott strategy to not be purist. So when we go after a company, we're not telling people, “Hey, you need to go find some pure alternative to go spend your money with.” I think that hampers a boycott. What I'm saying is, if we want to win back these companies one by one, then we need to not care where the hell people go in the interim. You know? Like it doesn't really matter, because the goal is to get us back to a place where we can shop with no worries. To get there, I don't really care where people shop in the interim; I care that we win [corporations] back, one by one. And so eventually, when we look around, it's like “Oh, maybe forty percent of the places that are major companies are now in this neutral zone.” And then, maybe a couple months later, it's sixty percent. And then, suddenly the weird companies out there are the ones who are still attached to this stuff.

And so I think if we, if we shift this from the companies that really depend on right-wing consumers and have more of a right-wing brand identity based on people's perception, and then go to the 50/50 jump ball companies, [that are seen as] there for everybody, you know, Republicans and Democrats go there…If you're able to shift some of that, it wildly changes that sort of window of acceptable discourse and normalcy back to some semblance of sanity.

Here’s the other thing too. People on the right, because we value things like honor and integrity, don't do certain things the left does. Part of the reason we're here at this moment in time is because the left, in a very calculated way, hired their own people in every major pillar of government, culture, entertainment, you name it. They did the long march, and we did almost nothing to fight back. So I would tell people in positions where they can do this, [they] need to be hiring like-minded people who are going to be a barrier between this woke ideology and [their] company. Because to achieve parity and some real sanity in corporate America, you have to have people in there who believe in a sane world.

Right, right. I mean, there's inherent value, in these old brands like Harley Davidson. I would have a hard time just jettisoning that whole brand. People have decades-long relationships with their Harley Davidson motorcycles, and it's a huge ask to just be like "Blow up your motorcycle and start buying Hondas." So, reforming existing institutions is inherently valuable, as opposed to the standard “Boycott this, let's go find an alternative and let this one rot” mentality.

Yeah, we want to fix places. That's the goal. We've got to fix them. It’s reforming instead of destroying.