DEI Hunter Claims Another Victim: McDonald’s Latest Mega-Corp to Back Off Diversity Policies Thanks to Pressure

Well, you can tentatively put another DEI notch on conservative activist Robby Starbuck’s belt.

Starbuck — a filmmaker who has specialized in getting corporations to drop diversity, equity, and inclusion programs or scale them back greatly — says he managed to pressure America’s biggest fast-food chain, McDonald’s, into announcing the end of some DEI programs.

According to Starbuck, an internal memo from Golden Arches executives was released on Monday, three days after he said he was going to be doing a story on the company’s woke policies.

Conservative outlet National Review noted that the decision came “in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to ban race-based college admissions policies and amid a growing conservative push to restrict the progressive corporate initiatives” without mentioning Starbuck specifically, but it’s pretty clear what had happened in the memo: McDonald’s had claimed success for the programs, then also said it was basically scaling them back.

“The initiatives McDonald’s is walking back include its DEI pledge for suppliers and demographic-based representational goals. McDonald’s is also changing how it refers to its diversity team and is pausing its external surveys to focus on internal improvements,” James Lynch at National Review reported.

“Last year, we completed a comprehensive Civil Rights Audit (CRA) that looked at all aspects of inclusion across our system,” the memo from McDonald’s executives read.

“We also engaged with holders to understand their expectations and assessed the overall landscape of holder proposals. Following the Supreme Court ruling in STUDENTS FOR FAIR ADMISSIONS, INC. v. PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE, we also assessed the shifting legal landscape to anticipate how this ruling may impact corporations such as McDonald’s.

“And finally, we benchmarked our approach to other companies who are also re-evaluating their own programs.”

The result? The company said it was “retiring setting aspirational representation goals and instead keeping our focus on continuing to embed inclusion practices that grow our business into our everyday process and operations” and “pausing external surveys to focus on the work we are doing internally to grow the business.”

While the company didn’t necessarily detail that last point, it’s pretty obvious what was meant by it: They likely would not continue to provide the LGBT-centric Human Rights Campaign with data to give them a ranking based on perceived equity measures aimed toward homosexual, bisexual, or transgender employees.

In addition: “We are retiring Supply Chain’s Mutual Commitment to DEI pledge in favor of a more integrated discussion with suppliers about inclusion as it relates to business performance.

“We are evolving how we refer to our diversity team, which will now be the Global Inclusion Team. This name change is more fitting for McDonald’s in light of our inclusion value and better aligns with this team’s work.”

Earlier in the memo, the company said it was “also excited to introduce a new concept: the power of OUR ‘Golden Rule’ – treating everyone with dignity, fairness and respect, always. For the last several months, a small team has been working on refining our language to better capture McDonald’s commitment to inclusion.”

In a post on X, Starbuck summed the memo up and noted what the corporate-speak in the memo really meant:

BIG news: @McDonalds is ending a number of woke DEI policies today. Now let me tell you what’s changing and how it happened.

3 days ago I told McDonald’s that I’d be doing a story on woke policies there. Today they’ve announced the following changes:

• Hiring: They will END… pic.twitter.com/bvFglf6pxw

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) January 6, 2025

As he said, the biggest win here might be that DEI was going to be sacrificed in the name of what’s best for the value of the corporation as a whole — a huge victory for making America sane again. It’s not just Donald Trump who’s doing it, folks.

Now, whether they follow through on this is another thing entirely; businesses can manage to get themselves sucked back into the whirlpool of wokeism very easily. That being said, look at the number of corporations that have scaled back their DEI efforts after being targeted by conservative customers in general and Starbuck in particular: Nissan of America, Tractor Supply, John Deere, Harley-Davidson, Lowe’s, Ford, Walmart, and now McDonald’s.

I wish I could say the only corporation left for Starbuck to de-woke would be Starbucks. While that would be fitting, the problem is that these corporations still represent just a drop in the bucket of American corporations, particularly given the paroxysms of performativity that broke out after the summer of George Floyd.

There’s a lot of work to do — but, at least for the moment, fans of sanity can celebrate another victory.

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