Robbie Starbuck
Appearances
Morning Wire
Meta Curbs Censorship & Trump's Second Term Plans | 1.8.25
The fact that everybody has some sort of connection to McDonald's means that when you see them do something, it feels like there's some extra power behind it.
Morning Wire
Meta Curbs Censorship & Trump's Second Term Plans | 1.8.25
McDonald's is a huge win because obviously when you look out at the marketplace in the world, there's certain brands that are just so noticeable. Everybody knows what it is and they have a feeling associated to it. You've got these other corporations out there that are trying to decide what they're going to do next.
Morning Wire
Meta Curbs Censorship & Trump's Second Term Plans | 1.8.25
And the more we get these cultural icon brands to change, the more likely it is that other companies change.
Morning Wire
Meta Curbs Censorship & Trump's Second Term Plans | 1.8.25
This election and before it was really the beginning of an awakening among the silent majority that being a silent majority is actually kind of a stupid thing to do. You need to be a majority that speaks up or else you cede ground to this tiny minority of people who are frankly just really crazy Marxists.
Morning Wire
Meta Curbs Censorship & Trump's Second Term Plans | 1.8.25
I think what you're going to see is companies go into multiple boxes. One will be a total elimination of DEI and the other box will be an attempt to try to save it by renaming it and things along those lines. But we're going to sniff that out and we are going to make things very difficult for companies to do that.
Morning Wire
Hegseth’s Nomination Fight & U.S. v. Skrmetti | 12.5.24
So there have been several high-profile organizations that have recently backed off of DEI. The latest is Walmart. Just last week, that company made a number of different pledges. It said that it was going to stop giving a preference to suppliers on the basis of race and sex. It also said that it would ensure that transgender products were not marketed to children on its website.
Morning Wire
Hegseth’s Nomination Fight & U.S. v. Skrmetti | 12.5.24
And they even said they would stop funding the Center for Racial Equity, Walmart made the announcement following a campaign from activist Robbie Starbuck, who has also led successful anti-DEI campaigns against Tractor Supply, Home Depot, and other name brand companies. Starbuck spoke to Morning Wire about his strategy.
Morning Wire
Hegseth’s Nomination Fight & U.S. v. Skrmetti | 12.5.24
So some of these programs might actually be against the law. A series of Daily Wire investigations have documented professional development programs, internships, and job postings that discriminate against white and sometimes against Asian applicants in the name of DEI.
Morning Wire
Hegseth’s Nomination Fight & U.S. v. Skrmetti | 12.5.24
In some of those cases, legal experts have actually said that these programs are blatantly illegal, and the incoming Trump administration, particularly his attorney general, could take action against these discriminatory DEI programs. I talked with David Pivtrack.
Morning Wire
Hegseth’s Nomination Fight & U.S. v. Skrmetti | 12.5.24
He's a lawyer who has active lawsuits against American Express, which allegedly discriminated against white men through its DEI policies. He told me that, quote, the DOJ has a panoply of remedies it can seek to address the discrimination that results from these DEI programs.
Morning Wire
Hegseth’s Nomination Fight & U.S. v. Skrmetti | 12.5.24
The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division could launch investigations to obtain, quote, a wide variety of a company's internal data and documents or file lawsuits to, quote, take depositions of high-level executives and even the CEO or board of directors if they were directly involved in implementing these DEI programs.
Morning Wire
Hegseth’s Nomination Fight & U.S. v. Skrmetti | 12.5.24
But there's also even more severe measures that the DOJ could take as well. If the Justice Department issued a consent decree, it would allow the agency to, quote, oversee a company's operations for years to come. And PIV Direct says that this type of action from the DOJ could incentivize companies to drop their DEI programs altogether.
Morning Wire
Hegseth’s Nomination Fight & U.S. v. Skrmetti | 12.5.24
So these DEI programs are pretty ubiquitous right now, but there are a few high-profile examples. At Oracle, the Daily Wire found that white and Asian students were expressly barred from applying for two different internships, and a similar situation unfolded at IBM. The Daily Wire found that IBM hosted two internships that had discriminatory selection criteria.
Morning Wire
Hegseth’s Nomination Fight & U.S. v. Skrmetti | 12.5.24
One was an internship for underrepresented minorities, which barred whites and Asians from applying, and the other, an internship for undergraduate women, barred men from applying, unless those men were transgender and identified as women.
Morning Wire
Hegseth’s Nomination Fight & U.S. v. Skrmetti | 12.5.24
There are similar discriminatory DEI programs that have also been found at McKinsey & Company, Morgan Stanley, and The Craft Group, which owns the New England Patriots, among various other corporations.
Morning Wire
Willis Disqualified & Israel Strikes Houthis | Afternoon Update | 12.19.24
normal everyday people, they're very acutely aware of their buying power and how they can vote with their dollar now. And so we've made that point very clear to these companies at this point where 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.