Conservative activist's push leads to policy changes at Lowe's, Ford and more

Robby Starbuck

By Jon Styf, The Center Square, Aug. 28, 2024 - Tennessee conservative activist Robby Starbuck has continued to impact corporate policies on diversity, equity and inclusion and donations to pride events, most recently at companies such as Lowe’s, Jack Daniel’s, Indian Motorcycle and Polaris.

Starbuck previously made public policies at Harley-Davidson, John Deere and Tractor Supply that led to corporate statements on how the companies would shift policies to limit or eliminate DEI priorities.

This week, Lowe’s made a statement that it would stop participation in the Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index along with stopping donations to pride events and ending its employee resource groups, which separate employees with specific characteristics such as sexual orientation or gender to provide corporate resources.

On Wednesday, Starbuck said that Ford did the same, ending involvement in HRC's index, pride donations and vowing that ERC groups will be focused on business. Ford also said that it does not have supplier or dealership quotas.

“We’re now forcing multi-billion dollar organizations to change their policies without even posting just from fear they have of being the next company that we expose,” Starbuck wrote. “We are winning and one by one we WILL bring sanity back to corporate America.”

Starbuck said that he was tipped off that Lowe’s was a company to look into after a pair of employees from Lowe’s DEI team visited his LinkedIn profile.

The Lowe’s changes were announced a week after Starbuck messaged its corporate leadership regarding the company’s corporate policies.

Starbuck was a 2022 Republican write-in candidate in Tennessee's 5th Congressional District after being removed from the ballot by the Tennessee Republican Party.

Jack Daniel’s parent company Brown-Forman recently announced changes in its company, just as Starbuck said he was about to write about the company’s policies but after he had gone through many employee LinkedIn pages, meaning they received notification he was looking at their pages.

Jack Daniel’s also left the HRC Corporate Equality Index along with announcing that executive and employee bonuses and goals would be tied to business performance and not DEI and it would end specific training that Starbuck described as “woke.”

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