Jeff Green | Bloomberg News (TNS)
Robby Starbuck is a long way from Hollywood and, as he tells it, the liberals who canceled him for “coming out” MAGA.
But not even Starbuck — conservative activist or conspiracy theorist, depending on who’s talking — might’ve imagined he’d end up here in Tennessee, with two shaggy mini Scottish Highland cows, TeddyBear and HoneyBear.
Back when “The Apprentice” was creating the TV version of Donald Trump, Starbuck was making a name for himself directing music videos for Snoop Dogg and Megadeth. Nowadays, the ponytailed 35-year-old spends his time tending to his cows, two Great Danes, a pair of rabbits and a coop-full of chickens on his gentleman’s farm south of Nashville, 2,000 miles away from LA.
And also plotting to stamp out “woke-ism” from corporate America.
As a polarized nation dashes toward Election Day, Starbuck is having a moment. A year ago, you would’ve been hard-pressed to find a CEO who’d heard of him. Now the boyish West Coast transplant has emerged as a key figure in the right-wing fight to roll back diversity initiatives, particularly those regarding the LGBTQ community.
From his farm in Franklin, in the gentle hills of Middle Tennessee, the Cuban-American Starbuck is notching wins against household names like Ford Motor Co. and Harley-Davidson Inc. Suddenly he seems to be everywhere: CNN, Fortune, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal. But his public persona still lives mostly on X, where he posts videos “exposing” company DEI programs, and flits from one MAGA allegation to another on topics (cat-eating migrants, stolen elections) that would be familiar to regular viewers of Fox News or Tucker Carlson.
Then there’s the conspiracy-fueled documentary, “The War on Children,” that he worked on with his wife. Criticized as anti-trans propaganda, it’s gotten a thumbs up from Elon Musk, Donald Trump’s richest fan. Musk recommended the movie to his nearly 200 million followers on X and tweeted out all 2 hours and 21 minutes of it. (Starbuck said that Amazon banned the film, which, among other things, accuses liberals of grooming children for gender transition; Amazon didn’t immediately comment.)
Starbuck isn’t about to back off, particularly with a coin-toss election – and prospect of a Trump restoration – now less than 45 days away.
“I think even my biggest detractors would say we are winning,” Starbuck says in an interview at his farm. “Honestly, I don’t know of anything that even scratches the surface of what we’ve done in just a couple months.”
Tractors and Whiskey
His dark hair is slicked back into a tight, glossy coif. His outfit — navy button-up, fitted jeans, walking-heeled boots – throws off an urban cowboy vibe. His target of companies so far – makers of pickups, farm supplies, tractors, whiskey and beer – read like the lyrics to the country music he enjoys.
Starbuck begins each anti-DEI campaign, and announces each victory, with a video from his studio with documents and videos displayed on a screen behind him. Most of the videos exceed a million views. He peppers the companies on X with screenshots and video clips, usually from their own programs, that he says show the extreme nature of DEI efforts. Often, he chooses companies that have a conservative consumer base and calls for a boycott.
Starbuck’s critics – and he has plenty – say his influence is overrated. Backers of DEI initiatives, which are mostly policies or procedures that encourage representation, say he’s providing cover for some businesses that are eager to pull back from diversity programs or are reluctant to set them up at all.
“In some ways, Robby Starbuck is just actually giving the companies what they want,” says Rashad Robinson, president of civil-rights group Color of Change. “Robby Starbuck is just helping them keep the status quo.”
He’s come a long way from Temecula, southeast of LA, where he was sneaking into bars by the age of 14 to shoot music videos. The young Starbuck built cred as a MySpace influencer, moved out of his mom’s place at 16 and got married at 18. Then came Snoop, Megadeth, The Smashing Pumpkins and all the rest. In 2015, he was shunned after publicly embracing Trump. His business began to wither away and by 2019, he and his wife, Landon, left for red-state Tennessee.
His Network
From Franklin, Starbuck and his two employees are spreading his anti-DEI doctrine to more than half a million followers on X. He says his recent fame has led to an influx of direct messages from aggrieved employees looking to Starbuck to dismantle their firms’ DEI policies. He stopped counting after getting more than 5,000 tips, he says. Their job: find out what companies are doing about diversity, equity and inclusion and report back to Starbuck.
“We will find out if companies say one thing publicly and then do something else privately,” Starbuck says.
His overarching message – echoed by wealthy Trump supporters like Musk, tech billionaire Peter Thiel and hedge-fund mogul Bill Ackman – sounds familiar: No one deserves a leg-up because of their sex, race or anything else. Now that the Supreme Court has done away with affirmative action in higher education, conservatives are itching to wipe out DEI in corporate America too.
Starbuck, a father of three, with another on the way, says he wants to protect his children from subjects he thinks are inappropriate. That includes Pride festivals, drag shows and classroom or workplace discussions about race, gender and sexual orientation. He says he’s heavily influenced by the views of his great-grandfather, who was kicked out of Cuba for refusing to join the communist party.
“Some people have tried to frame my disapproval of these types of events as me hating the people who are involved,” Starbuck says when asked about criticisms that attacking corporations for sponsoring events like Pride is because he’s against the existence of LGBTQ people. “I think the problem is when corporations attach themselves to it.”
His wins are piling up. In recent months, Starbuck has trained his sites on a string of heartland brands, including Harley-Davidson, Deere & Co., Tractor Supply Co., Molson Coors Beverage Co. and Brown-Forman Corp., maker of Jack Daniels Old No. 7 Tennessee Whiskey. Recently, Caterpillar Inc. joined the list after executives engaged with Starbuck. (Starbuck says he’s been talking to several other companies but declined to get into specifics.)
Hammering Away
So far, all three businesses Starbuck has targeted with his social-media blitzkriegs have agreed to scale back DEI efforts. Another almost half dozen didn’t even put up a fight, he says, agreeing to changes without an attack. A friend and fellow conservative, Andy Puzder, an anti-ESG activist and an unsuccessful candidate for a Trump administration labor secretary, says influencers like Starbuck have a not-so-secret weapon: They can reach more people than the traditional news media – and can keep hammering away day after week after month.
“He can hit on it every night,” Puzder says.
With conservatives villainizing DEI, the mere threat of being singled out publicly – with all the PR headaches and, in the case of Bud Light’s campaigns featuring a transwoman influencer, consumer boycotts – can be enough to prompt a company to cave.
“It’s the fear,” says Alyssa Dver, chair of the ERG Leadership Alliance, a nonprofit that advises employee resource groups, which are a frequent target of Starbuck’s campaigns. “It’s a very loud group of anti-everything, right? They’re worried about the negative PR. They’re worried about the negative ramifications.”
Virtually every major US corporation has said it is committed to building a diverse workforce and promoting equality, and surveys suggest that support is mostly intact, if fraying. Supporters point out that though Starbuck and others malign DEI as unfair to White men, workers of color remain underrepresented at just about every level of power in corporate America.
The purpose of DEI, supporters counter, is to ensure companies hire and retain diverse talent, are inclusive of workers from underrepresented groups, and foster an environment that boosts creativity and innovation. They also say it makes for good business. CEOs including Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase & Co. have repeatedly said they need to strengthen diversity in their workforce in order to reach customers from all communities across America.
But the retreat from DEI in business and academia has many practitioners wondering just how real such promises were to begin with. One strategy that corporations have adopted lately: just stop talking about it. Mentions of DEI and related topics have declined at corporate meetings in the past two years, a Bloomberg analysis of conference calls, earnings calls and investor calls found.
‘MAGA Bully’
The Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group which has been a frequent target of Starbuck’s social media posts, has called him a failed political candidate, right wing extremist, internet troll and MAGA bully and urged companies not to be intimidated.
HRC CEO Kelley Robinson has warned companies that bowing down to Starbuck would have a price. She was speaking at the organization’s annual dinner in Washington this month, where she said executives from more than 1,000 companies were in attendance.
“There are some companies right now that have the nerve to turn their back on the programs and the people that made them profitable.” said Robinson. “Like dykes don’t ride bikes. Like queers don’t drink beers. Like sissies don’t drive F-150s.”
The half a dozen or so boardrooms that wilted when Starbuck came calling reflects the wider rethink of how companies approach race, sexuality and gender, according to people who track corporate behavior. After trying to answer calls for inclusiveness following the racial reckoning of 2020, some businesses have experienced pushback from conservative workers and customers – and are looking for a way to avoid taking a position on hot-button political and social issues.
Starbuck doesn’t dispute the idea that many of the executives that he has dealt with were ready to make the kinds of changes he was seeking. “It does feel a bit like these are surrenders,” he says.
Starbuck declines to discuss the financial aspects of his personal war on woke. He says his campaigns have been funded through $5 monthly X subscriptions, as well as streaming revenue from “The War on Children” which he says has been viewed more than 60 million times. No one else is bankrolling the effort, he says. For now, he’s happy to wage this fight as a private citizen rather than an elected official (he tried to run for Congress in 2022 but couldn’t get on the ballot in Tennessee).
“I genuinely feel we’re doing more to change the country and the world right now outside of politics,” Starbuck says.
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