It’s pretty big news when the largest retailer in America abandons wokeness.
Anti-woke crusader Robby Starbuck has been on a mission to shift the corporate landscape in America from insanity and rainbows to what he considers “sanity and neutrality.” He has successfully pressured companies such as Tractor Supply, John Deere, Harley-Davidson, Polaris, Indian Motorcycle, Lowe’s, Ford, Coors, Stanley Black & Decker, Jack Daniel’s, DeWalt Tools, Craftsman, Caterpillar, Boeing, and Toyota to move away from toxic Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) practices.
Now, Starbuck is at it again. He wrote on X that America’s largest employer, Walmart, has decided to end its woke policies after he “had productive conversations to find solutions” with management.
He stated that the changes Walmart committed to “will send shockwaves throughout corporate America,” adding that their executives deserve “major credit” for wanting to end corporate wokeness.
“This is the biggest win yet for our movement to end wokeness in corporate America,” Starbuck said.
Here are the changes Walmart committed to:
Surveys: Walmart will no longer participate in the HRC’s woke Corporate Equality Index. Products: Monitor the Walmart marketplace to identify and remove inappropriate sexual and / or transgender products marketed to children. Funding of Grants: Review all funding of Pride, and other events, to avoid funding inappropriate sexualized content targeting kids. Equity: We will not extend the Racial Equity Center which was established in 2020 as a special five-year initiative. Supplier Diversity: We will evaluate supplier diversity programs and ensure they do not provide preferential treatment and benefits to suppliers based on diversity. We don’t have quotas and won’t going forward. Financing eligibility will no longer be predicated on providing certain demographic data. LatinX: Walmart will no longer use the term in official communications. Trainings: Walmart will discontinue racial equity training through the Racial Equity Institute. DEI: Walmart will discontinue the use of DEI as a term while ensuring a respectful and supportive environment. Our focus is on Belonging for ALL associates and customers.
Starbuck continued:
Remember, Walmart is the #1 employer in America with over 1.6 Million Employees and they have a market cap of nearly $800B. This won’t just have a massive effect for their employees who will have a neutral workplace without feeling that divisive issues are being injected but it will also extend to their many suppliers.
We’ve now changed policy at companies worth over $2 Trillion dollars, with many millions of employees who have better workplace environments as a result. I’m happy to have secured these changes before Christmas when shoppers have very few large retail brands they can spend money with who aren’t pushing woke policies. Companies like Amazon and Target should be very nervous that their top competitor dropped woke policies first. I think Target specifically will suffer serious sales problems as a result and Walmart will benefit.
Our campaigns are now so effective that we’re getting the biggest companies on earth to change their policies without me even posting a story outlining their woke policies. Companies can clearly see that America wants normalcy back. The era of wokeness is dying right in front of our eyes. The landscape of corporate America is quickly shifting to sanity and neutrality. We are now the trend, not the anomaly.
We are winning and one by one we WILL bring sanity back to corporate America.
Kevin O’Leary on Fox Business had some choice things to say:
Indeed, O’Leary called the Bud Light debacle “a complete combination of idiot management and the inability to read the room.”
This particular turn of phrase stuck out to me, because I remember, very clearly, that the phrase “read the room” was used like a club to justify whatever woke idiocy was coming down the pike at the time: Football players kneeling, defunding the police, treating #BlackLivesMatter riots as justification to break Flu Manchu quarantine, etc. It was a lie based on systemic preference falsification then, but more than true now, as America as a whole is done with wokeness.
Walmart is a big, big domino, and expect most of American companies looking to toss all their woke idiocy on the dunghill of history, no matter how much their HR department might object.
Pink slip by pink slip, progress is made.
Tags: DEI, Democrats, gay, Kevin O'Leary, Robby Starbuck, Social Justice Warriors, video, Walmart
A win, but too many weasel words in their statement. They’ll change its name and move people around, but it will continue to exist and there will be precious few layoffs. Watch.
Sam Walton’s descendants lurched left in 2014. Not coincidentally, that was the year that the Democrats’ PPACA raised the capital gains tax rate.
By fluffing the Democrats, the Walton family was able to limit their damage to a 5% rate increase.
OMG! First those military-looking security guards, and now this! I won’t feel safe anymore in Walmart! What if an employee misgenders me, what will I do, where will I go?
Seriously, though, we need more of this, and soon. Put this genie back in the bottle, and never let it out again.
I believe wally world will just hide their dei policies too deep for the general public to see.
The smoking gun:
“Walmart Inc. has launched a critical race theory training program that denounces the United States as a ‘white supremacy system’ and teaches white, hourly wage employees that they are guilty of ‘white supremacy thinking’ and “internalized racial superiority.’
“According to a cache of internal documents I* have obtained from a whistleblower, Walmart launched the program in 2018 in partnership with the Racial Equity Institute, a Greensboro, North Carolina, consulting firm that has worked extensively with universities, government agencies, and private corporations. The program is based on the core principles of critical race theory, including ‘intersectionality,’ ‘internalized racial oppression,’ ‘internalized racial inferiority,’ and ‘white anti-racist development.’
“When reached for comment, Walmart confirmed that the company has ‘engaged REI for a number of training sessions since 2018’ and has ‘found these sessions to be thought provoking and constructive.’”
—*Christopher F. Rufo
https://www.city-journal.org/article/walmart-vs-whiteness
This is tortious conduct and exposes Walmart to litigation. So naturally they are backtracking from their high-minded principles.
Walmart’s Racial Equity Center: a program originally running for five years, a five year plan, starting in 2020. Five years later is 2024 (operating in 2020, 21, 22, 23 and 24.) Was Walmart planning to extend it, or is Starbuck claiming credit for the sun rising?
Starbuck is, as usual, short on details and exhorting his audience to assume the best, because the best outcome means that Starbuck is effective, and that means more clout. Whether he’s foolish and on the level or perhaps smarter and not as straightforward as he’d like us to believe.
Walmart’s supplier diversity programs: Are being evaluated, but not ended. What exactly can they do if they don’t ‘provide preferential treatment and benefits to suppliers based on diversity?’ Claiming a lack of quotas just means that they’re not requiring specific numbers, which isn’t a surprise when the DEI position is that there’s never enough diversity.
Training: It’s telling that they only commit to ending racial equity training with one organization. Yay? As if there’s only one organization that grifts in that way. Come back to me when you end all racial equity training, and I may care.
DEI: Oh, boy. They’re changing language. As if the words of people create the world. Walmart doesn’t refer to ‘the work’ but a capital ‘Belonging’ certainly seems to imply it.
“[T]he best outcome means that Starbuck is effective,..”
It only requires a small rudder to turn a big ship. Starbuck was in the right place at the right time with the right message, making his influence outsized in at least this one instance. This is how reputations are earned.
Whether or not Starbuck is a mighty culture warrior, Walmart’s scalp hanging from your tent pole shows you have heap big medicine at the next pow wow.
The survival instinct of middle class, common sense Americans has caused the revolutionaries to miss a step with this election but, how ’bout we nip this in the bud and kill it off for good?
Big industry is one of the ‘institutions’ but not the wellspring.
The ‘march through the institutions’ started with the universities and teachers schools. Marcuse and friends were welcome with open arms at Columbia – and from there our current crop of hard left, America hating ‘educators’ sprung.
Given that Cultural Marxists prey on the impressionable minds of the young within what Marcuse called the ‘ghetto population’ our incoming Trump Administration should review all Federal Aid to students and refuse any funds to universities and colleges that have Cultural Marxists practices like DEI – or whatever new name DEI will be taking shortly.
Herbert Marcuse was at UC San Diego while I was there (1969-1974). I am guessing that he was associated with the John Muir College, I attended the Revelle college with the rest of the Dweebs. Never ran into anybody who ever mentioned his existence. The rot in higher education cuts very deep. Angela Davis also spent some time at UCSD. Go figure.