One day after political commentator and podcast host Robby Starbuck announced that Walmart had agreed to distance itself from radical diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices, a high-ranking Walmart executive chose to do a legacy media interview. Here’s how that went.
The CEO of Walmart U.S., John Furner appeared on the Nov. 26 edition of CBS Mornings and immediately fielded questions from the show’s co-hosts Tony Dokoupil and Gayle King about the changes. Dokoupil mentioned that Walmart has decided to ensure that no racial discrimination takes place in the name of supplier diversity and that it will end its Center for Racial Equity. But when asked about Why Walmart made the changes, Furner made clear that Walmart was prioritizing customers and said nothing about the demands of the radical left.
“What we're trying to do is ensure that every customer, every associate feels welcome here to shop and feel like they belong,” Furner said, emphasizing the use of the term “belonging” by his company. “We're going to continue to make the best decisions we can that makes everyone, our customers, our associates, feel like this is an environment they can shop in and thrive in.”
The day before the interview, Starbuck wrote in a post on X that Walmart had agreed to stop supplying data to the radical LGBTQ+ pressure group the Human Rights Campaign, to drop the terms DEI and Latinx and to make several moves to protect children from gender theory and avoid racial discrimination and race-based harassment. According to Starbuck, these changes included abandoning “racial equity training,” declining to extend its Racial Equity Center, and ensuring that there is no racial discrimination in “supplier diversity programs.”
Starbuck also said that Walmart would try to root out any “inappropriate sexual and/or transgender products marketed to children” while reviewing any “Pride” funding to “avoid funding inappropriate sexualized content targeting kids.”
MASSIVE news: Walmart is ending their woke policies. I can now exclusively tell you what’s changing and how it happened.
— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) November 25, 2024
Last week I told execs at @Walmart that I was doing a story on wokeness there. Instead we had productive conversations to find solutions.
Below are the… pic.twitter.com/BD02xJQ0X2
During the CBS interview, King asked Furner, “Is diversity among your suppliers still important to you at Walmart?” While Furner did not address the actual changes, he cast supplier diversity in terms of working with small suppliers rather than discriminating against white or male suppliers.
Walmart is only the most recent company to move against DEI. Since June 27, Ford, Toyota, Molson-Coors, Tractor Supply, Harley-Davidson, Jack Daniel’s parent company Brown-Furman, Stanley Black & Decker, Caterpillar and Lowe’s have also stepped away from DEI and the HRC.
As more and more companies reform after Starbuck’s anti-discrimination anti-gender theory campaigns, leftist pushback has fallen on deaf ears. After HRC president Kelley Robinson tried to ostracize a number of companies for abandoning her organization, she suffered the additional humiliation of losing a company she had recently praised for loyalty to her leftist brand.
[Read More: Which Company is Pushing DEI on Employees and ‘Pronouns’ on Customers?]
Conservatives are under attack! Conservatives are under attack! Contact ABC News (818) 460-7477, CBS News (212) 975-3247 and NBC News (212) 664-6192 and demand they report on the dangers of leftist DEI ideology infecting corporate America.
