(The Daily Signal)—The company that imports Corona beer into the U.S. rejected the diversity, equity, and inclusion movement Tuesday.
Constellation Brands—which owns the rights to sell the Mexican-made beers Corona, Modelo, and Pacifico in the U.S.—told employees that it would cease DEI practices, stop working with the LGBTQ activist group the Human Rights Campaign, stop using the term “Latinx,” end its advocacy for bills like the Equality Act, and direct employees not to inject personal activism while representing the company brand.
“We’re delivering big wins for the conservative movement and we’re just getting started,” Robby Starbuck, a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Capital Markets Initiative, told The Daily Signal.
“No woke company is safe and they’re all better off if they start changing NOW before we get to them next,” added Starbuck, a former music video director. “We’re a new, energized movement that believes in going on offense and using the financial power of conservatives to end the poisonous reign of wokeness.”
Starbuck has exposed DEI practices at major companies, pressuring them to reconsider. His activism has changed corporate policies at Tractor Supply, John Deere, Harley-Davidson, Lowe’s, Ford, Coors, Jack Daniels, Boeing, Toyota, Walmart, McDonald’s, and others.
Why the Human Rights Campaign?
Many of Starbuck’s campaigns have centered on convincing major companies to withdraw from the Human Rights Campaign’s “Corporate Equality Index.”
HRC bills itself as “the nation’s largest LGBTQ+ civil rights organization,” and it takes credit for “transforming the institutions and systems that shape our everyday lives by advancing LGBTQ+ inclusive policies and practices in schools, workplaces, hospitals, communities and beyond.”
These “inclusive policies” involve allowing men into women’s intimate spaces, forcing employees to endorse gender ideology, and celebrating as “joyful” behaviors that many Americans consider sinful or depraved.
HRC publishes a corporate equality index that gives major companies a rating to show just how pro-“equality” they are. Investors in the environmental, social, and governance movement have used the index to determine where their money goes, and this makes the index extremely powerful.
The Human Rights Campaign promises these brands protection from the Left’s activist investors and protester shock troops in exchange for a generous cut. In order to demonstrate their “inclusion,” companies make contributions to LGBTQ groups, partner with transgender influencers like Dylan Mulvaney, and promote rainbow products.
“I’d say the HRC certainly resembles something like a Marxist mafia that uses LGBTQ-related issues to advance their far left politics,” Starbuck previously told The Daily Signal. “The politics and policy seems like their real goal.”
Starbuck explained the HRC score as “a social credit system to push leftism into corporate America.”
As I wrote in my book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” HRC had a great deal of influence in the Biden administration, as well.
The Corona distributor backing out of the HRC index will weaken the LGBTQ activist group’s power in corporate board rooms.
The Context of Corona’s Move
Corporate America has been reversing many DEI policies after President Donald Trump signed multiple executive orders stating that key aspects of DEI, such as racial preferences, violate federal civil rights laws. He also reversed previous executive orders that had established a DEI superstructure in the federal government—a superstructure that seems to have encouraged the woke tilt in corporate America.
Shortly after Trump’s moves, Target became a harbinger of the move away from DEI when it pulled out of the HRC index. Other companies had rejected the index last year, due to Starbuck’s advocacy, but the Trump administration breathed fresh air into the sails of the anti-woke campaign.
These moves do not mean that Corporate America is crossing the political aisle and now aims to support conservative causes. They do, however, suggest that the leftist bias in board rooms may be abating.
The anti-woke forces may want to avoid resting on their laurels, however. Some companies may preserve DEI programs, merely renaming them to hide their true nature. Some activists have been cooking up “work-arounds” to preserve DEI in this new environment.
