Follow the Money: DEI Dominoes Are All Falling Now

Alternate headline: Robby Starbuck Really Gets Around. 

In this case, though, we may have reached the cultural tipping point on DEI. Last week, we learned that the politically well-connected Goldman Sachs had decided to abandon ship on the Left’s attempt to force quotas onto corporate America. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reports that the entire banking industry will soon follow suit:

Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup are removing or watering down public language around efforts to promote or support diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, according to people familiar with the matter. Wells Fargo and Bank of America have also started to pore over their language, some of the people said.

The moves mark the beginning of a pullback from Wall Street’s push into DEI, according to bank executives and lawyers, which came after the 2020 protests over the death of George Floyd, a Black man murdered by police. The banks are joining a retreat by many other big companies that have dialed back similar efforts, including Ford, McDonald’s and Walmart. Tech giants such as Meta Platforms and Alphabet’s Google have done so, too.

More changes are in the works at banks in the coming weeks, when companies release their annual reports, proxies and other public filings. Banks have also launched audits of DEI policies, programs and events that could open them up to legal risks. 

Executives’ worries about DEI efforts increased after President Trump’s executive order last month directing federal departments and agencies to launch civil investigations into the programs at companies. 

Are they worried? Or are they relieved? Because this looks much more like the latter in corporate America. 

To return to Starbuck, he began getting results long before Trump got elected. Starbuck launched a very public campaign a couple of years ago to embarrass corporate boards that imposed racial and gender quotas in hiring and promotion, and began to score victories while Joe Biden was still in the presidential race. The more of these victories Starbuck scored, the more that came his way — and that was no accident. Naming and shaming turned out to be a very successful strategy, not because DEI was broadly popular, but because it wasn’t. Starbuck’s campaign of ridicule and public criticism alerted consumers to these practices, who turned out to dislike then intensely. 

Even by September 2024 — while the media celebrated the Joy McBrat campaign of Democrats’ DEI anointee — Starbuck had begun to gain converts merely by mention. At that point, Starbuck had convinced a number of significant corporations to dump DEI:

• Molson Coors
• Harley-Davidson
• Lowe’s 
• Tractor Supply
• The parent company of Jack Daniels whiskey

A month later, Toyota and Ford had thrown in the towel. After the election but before Trump had articulated a specific DEI policy, Walmart reversed course, followed by McDonald’s and Amazon two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, and Target immediately after it. Google dumped their DEI ‘hiring targets’ after Trump’s EOs, and now we have the banking industry about to follow suit. What had been a Sisyphean task for Starbuck in 2023 and early 2024 had already turned into an avalanche, now seemingly on auto-pilot. 

So what’s really going on? The banking industry has significant regulatory ties to the federal government, so one could assume that Trump’s threats to stamp out DEI may play a part in this decision. The rest of these corporations don’t have that problem, though, and they tumbled sooner than the financial institutions did. The real impetus for this acceleration is that corporate executives have belatedly discovered how deeply unpopular these quotas-in-all-but-name actually are. Trump’s election certainly provides evidence for that, along with the polling that shows a vast majority of Americans support the end of DEI, affirmative action, and especially the radical transgender activism that provided the straw that broke the camel’s back for DEI. 

Starbuck deserves a ton of credit for battling out the war for the culture — and for its success.