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Walmart has joined a growing list of American companies who have renounced DEI programs and initiatives. Walmart’s announcement was precipitated by pressure from activist Robby Starbuck:

Walmart has said it will no longer consider race and gender policies when granting supplier contracts after facing pressure from a conservative activist.
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Walmart is winding down the Center for Racial Equity, a non-profit organisation awarded $100 million of funding by Walmart in 2020 for five years.

It will end some racial equity staff training and has agreed to review its support for Pride events and withdraw from rankings by the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBT advocacy group.

This is important, since Walmart buys billions of dollars worth of goods annually from its suppliers, many of which are heavily depending on that company.

Walmart also said it would monitor online merchants for sexual or transgender products marketed to children and remove items where deemed necessary.

The “trans” movement is in full retreat.

The commitments come after Robby Starbuck, a conservative “anti-woke” activist, threatened Walmart with a customer boycott days before Black Friday.

In a post on X, Starbuck, 36, said: “I’m happy to have secured these changes before Christmas when shoppers have very few large retail brands they can spend money with who aren’t pushing woke policies.

“Companies like Amazon and Target should be very nervous that their top competitor dropped woke policies first.”

That is what we need to see–a competition among major companies for who can jettison wokeness the fastest. Starbuck has been doing great work.

Several things are going on here. The political winds have shifted against DEI, although I don’t think that public support for DEI initiatives was ever very strong. More important, perhaps, is the legal landscape. Race and sex discrimination in employment, and in various other contexts, are illegal. For decades, corporate America has taken a “wink wink” attitude toward the Civil Rights Act, and engaged in affirmative action discrimination, followed more recently by DEI discrimination.

But the Supreme Court decision in the Harvard and University of North Carolina cases has rendered that attitude obsolete. Those cases found that race discrimination is illegal in the context of college admissions, but corporate lawyers immediately realized that exactly the same logic applies in the context of employment. The day will soon come when the Supreme Court says, as it did in Harvard and UNC, that the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act mean what they say. Race and sex discrimination are not only immoral, they are illegal.

DEI consists of nothing other than race and sex discrimination, and thus, in many contexts, is against federal law. Pressure from Robby Starbuck certainly helps, but I think this fact is what is leading many corporations to jettison DEI programs. And, of course, it is also relevant that DEI programs cost money, hurt corporate cultures, and do nothing to improve the bottom line.