In early June, Robby Starbuck sat on the screened-in patio of his home in suburban Tennessee and recorded an eight-minute monologue on his mobile phone — a no-frills, TikTok-style video entitled “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, Mr. 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, Tenn. It provided unconscious bias training for 40,000 employees. It paid $50 to employees who got the Covid vaccine.
Mr. 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 X and 353,000 followers on Instagram, Mr. 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 D.E.I. goals. It would stop sponsoring pride festivals. And it would no longer submit data to the Human Rights Campaign, the Washington, D.C., nonprofit that grades companies on their policies when it comes to L.G.B.T.Q. workers.
“We have heard from customers that we have disappointed them,” the company wrote. “We have taken this feedback to heart.”
The reversal made national headlines and ushered a clamorous new voice into a highly divisive issue. In the months that followed, Mr. Starbuck kept prodding one of the more jangled nerves of the body politic, posting 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 D.E.I. policies, though almost none would discuss their reasons for this article.
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 the social media influencer and trans activist Dylan Mulvaney. Detractors howled — Kid Rock posted a video of himself machine gunning Bud Light cases — and sales plummeted.
Mr. Starbuck says his posts and videos on X have been viewed hundreds of million of times per month, and claims they have occasionally slashed billions of dollars from the market cap of companies, all of which are publicly traded.
His videos “have a material effect that’s not lost on us,” Mr. Starbuck said during a recent interview at his home about 20 miles south of Nashville. “But what’s interesting is, when they’ve turned around” — when the companies change their D.E.I. policies, which he announces in a triumphant follow-up video — “stock’s fine. It goes up. Everything’s good.”
Wall Street analysts doubt that Mr. Starbuck has had such puppeteer-like control over share prices, which they say have risen and fallen for unrelated reasons. And in some cases, the changes that mollified Mr. Starbuck, and caused him to declare victory, seemed far from momentous.
Still, his campaign is nothing if not well timed. More than 30 states have introduced or enacted laws curtailing or eliminating D.E.I. initiatives in higher education. The topic has surfaced in the presidential race, with former President Donald J. Trump vowing that, if re-elected, he would review and reverse any actions taken by federal agencies under what he called President Biden’s “equity agenda.” A Bloomberg headline put it bluntly: “Corporate America Braces for D.E.I.’s Death if Trump Wins.”
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 D.E.I. programs could be challenged next, a fear that grew after a number of law firms were sued for diversity fellowship programs by the lawyer Edward Blum, who prevailed in the university affirmative action case.
Google and Meta pulled back from their D.E.I. programs last year. Others have renamed them. The Society for Human Resource Management, an organization for H.R. professionals, announced in July that it was dropping the “equity” part of its D.E.I. 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. Despite Tractor Supply and other companies dropping out, that’s a five percent 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 H.R.C. And the loudest proponents of that backlash are having a moment. 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.”
He’s one of the flashier lights in a constellation of anti-D.E.I. media personalities. Together, they are complicating the choices of chief executives who are trying to build and nurture a diverse work force while also searching for a middle path that will infuriate the smallest number of employees and consumers.
The problem is that the line they are carefully treading has moved. Momentum around the topic has shifted and, in ways, so has the law. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, said Julie Levenson Warner, an employment lawyer, “I got a lot of calls from companies saying, ‘What is our D.E.I.? What are we doing? How are we investing? Can we hire a special intern?’”
She doesn’t get those calls anymore.
“Now it’s: ‘Should we revisit this? Should we call it something different? Will this pass muster?’”
A Sinister Plot
Mr. Starbuck pulls his dark, shoulder-length hair into a man bun; when we met, he wore an untucked navy shirt, bluejeans and black cowboy boots, looking like a guy ready to line dance in a honky-tonk. As a self-professed homebody, that’s a place you are unlikely to find him. He speaks much as he does in his videos, in an even and nearly nonstop torrent of words. He is friendly, intense and expansive.
“I’m guilty of being a rambler, which my wife will tell you,” he said.
He had just ended a quick tour of what he calls his farm, which consists of chickens, a cow, a bull and some rabbits. His white Tesla sits in the driveway. The interior of his house looks like a smartly furnished and very spacious model home. His wife, Landon, is a singer and songwriter who is “passionate about faith, family, freedom, truth and justice for the vulnerable,” as it says on her website. The couple have four children.
Mr. Starbuck sat on the same patio where he recorded many of his videos, using nothing but his mobile phone. Two employees work in a small studio on the second floor of a building attached to the house, gathering information and helping with production. A “liberty or death” flag hangs on the wall. More videos are in the works, including attacks on the D.E.I. policies of companies with a customer base he describes as “50-50,” which is to say that they are appealing to customers on both sides of the political divide, rather than ones that presumably rely primarily on conservative buyers, like Tractor Supply.
Born Robby Starbuck Newsom, he grew up in Temecula, Calif., a city between San Diego and Los Angeles. His mother is an immigrant from Cuba; he had a troubled relationship with his American father, now deceased.
Mr. 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 buy video recording equipment and start a production company of his own in Los Angeles. He made music videos for Snoop Dogg, Smashing Pumpkins and other acts. For a time, he and his family lived in the same gated community as the Kardashians.
He came to loathe his work. He had married Landon when he was 18 years old, 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. He saw a malign force at work, and behind that force, the Democratic Party.
“Entertainment was being used as a weapon to engineer specific political beliefs and to openly sexualize kids,” he wrote in a text, “because ultimately, overly sexualized kids will eventually vote for the party that promotes the most hedonistic behavior.”
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 Mr. Trump came along for his first presidential run, Mr. Starbuck concluded that he was in the wrong place and the wrong business. On his social media channels, Mr. Starbuck embraced the candidate, fully understanding that it would have a self-immolating impact on his career in a liberal bastion. He says that 85 percent of his clients, which included major labels, dropped him.
“He pretty much got canceled out of the industry,” said Matthew Stevenson, a cinematographer who worked with Mr. Starbuck.
Mr. Starbuck and his family relocated to Tennessee in 2018, a place he barely knew, but where he felt he would find people with values more aligned with his own. He says he supports his campaigns with investments of money from his video production company, now defunct; an undisclosed number of $5-a-month subscribers to his X channel; and from proceeds from his 2024 documentary, “The War on Children.”
The film, 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-D.E.I. campaign.
As director, reporter and narrator, Mr. 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. Their efforts, he says through interviews and over a stirring score, will result in nothing less than a Marxist government.
The film captures what is so tricky about Mr. Starbuck’s work. He starts with an ember of reality — teenage depression rates are really rising, for instance — and fans it into an unrecognizable political apocalypse.
His objections to D.E.I. are similarly alarmist. He doesn’t see the initiatives as merely misguided, dumb or wasteful. To him, they are part of a sinister plot by the Democratic Party to shove the country toward communism.
“We have a bunch of left-wing authoritarian-like figures now who understand that it’s a major optics hit to come out and say, ‘I’m a communist,’” he said. “What you need is to be able to control the ideology, the minds of the people who are in control of the means of production and corporations.”
In his videos, Mr. Starbuck rarely emphasizes the idea of a communist takeover. Instead, critics say, he cherry picks well-intentioned elements of D.E.I. and recasts them as wokeness run amok.
“Part of the danger of Starbuck’s rhetoric is that it focuses on one divisive dimension of D.E.I.” — 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.”
Mr. Starbuck’s worldview was shaped by his maternal great-grandfather, who lived through the rise of Fidel Castro in Cuba, and told his great-grandson that nobody saw the perils of the regime until it was too late. Before the dictatorship, there had been lots of uplifting talk about free health care and racial justice, which sounds, to Mr. Starbuck’s ears, a lot like the rhetoric of purportedly well-meaning Democrats.
The more you talk to Mr. Starbuck, the more you grasp that he sees danger, invisible to most, everywhere. During our visit, he mused about an experiment, conducted by a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in which frogs were exposed to a common herbicide called Atrazine.
“The end result,” he said, “is that the majority of the frogs turned gay.”
Actually, the experiment found that many of the frogs became hermaphrodites. But the idea that a chemical turns frogs into homosexuals, and that it could do the same to humans, lives on. Its most vocal proponent is the conspiracy theorist and disinformation profiteer Alex Jones.
By contrast, Mr. Starbuck appears utterly sincere — about gay frogs, a Communist plot, everything. He’s on the attack because he is certain that he, and every lucid American, is locked in a battle, whether they know it or not.
“The question we face now,” he says at the end of “The War on Children,” “is whether good or evil will win this war.”
Backlash to the Backlash
Mr. Starbuck’s social media following has its roots in his days as a music video director, when he was posting on social media about current events and stars like Akon. His numbers increased after his pivot to politics, and 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 D.E.I. 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, where they’ve been called racist, sexist bigots.”
The programs haven’t always helped employers diversify the work force, he added. This frustrates employees, including those who want more diversity, and may explain why support for D.E.I. is a mixed picture. A Pew Research Center survey last year found that 56 percent of employed adults thought focusing on increasing D.E.I. in the workplace was a good idea; 16 percent said it was a bad idea. Twenty-eight percent of Black employees felt their companies weren’t doing enough.
Along with D.E.I. fatigue, what’s unfolding now is arguably the latest example of a pattern in this country that is as fixed as a rule of physics: Any force applied to elevate minorities will eventually be met with a counterforce. As Professor Dobbin noted, the success of the civil rights movement of the 1960s led to the rise of George Wallace, an Alabama segregationist who stoked racial resentments when he ran for president in 1972. Corporations reacted to the Black Lives Matter protests by expanding D.E.I.; a counterreaction is now underway.
Mr. Starbuck nearly always interprets corporate responses to his campaigns as complete surrender and often overstates his financial effect on corporate profits. On Aug. 15, he implied on X that a $1.2 billion drop in John Deere’s third-quarter sales was his doing. (He had posted his first video about the company five weeks earlier.) “Wokeness destroys businesses,” he wrote.
Wall Street analysts had a different take. Some large farmers were giving “serious consideration” to switching brands as a result of Mr. Starbuck’s video, a research note written by Greg Badishkanian of Wolfe Research said. But analysts blamed the drop on interest rate changes and weak crop prices. (These analysts work for “woke” institutions, Mr. Starbuck countered.)
A spokesman for Ford, the only company targeted by Mr. Starbuck that would speak for this article, said it made the decision not to participate in H.R.C.’s Corporate Equality Index scoring system before Mr. Starbuck was in touch.
“We decided to look at what kind of workplace we want to foster as opposed to meeting the guidelines of other people’s surveys,” said Richard Binhammer, the spokesman.
Whether Mr. Starbuck caused the changes or merely caught the shifting direction of the wind, some companies are hiring public relations specialists and law firms to gird against his 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 also 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 chief executives appear eager to minimize static and appease everybody, which is perhaps what they’ve always wanted. It’s just become harder to achieve.
In fact, the backlash to D.E.I. may already be producing a backlash of its own. After Tractor Supply and John Deere announced their post-Starbuck D.E.I. 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 N.B.F.A. “When they say they are doing away with their diversity programs, that sends the wrong signal.”
Mr. Starbuck says he’s heard from 5,000 people who want to spill about their companies and that he will contact many in the coming months. What he wants more than anything is a future in which everyone looks at this complicated topic — one that ropes in thorny and nuanced questions about race, history and fairness — and adopts his very uncomplicated solution.
One fine day, 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?
The post The Anti-D.E.I. Agitator That Big Companies Fear Most appeared first on New York Times.
