Three weeks ago, Donald Trump recorded a smashing victory over Kamala Harris, who ran mainly on two arguments. Mainly, she claimed that Trump had disqualified himself in the aftermath of the 2020 election and that everyone owed her their vote as a result. Secondly, Harris and Democrats pushed the idea that America needed its first woman-of-color president on the basis of identity alone -- because Harris certainly never made any other case for herself during the campaign.

Nearly 80 million voters rejected that argument and pushed back against the party of elites. That makes 80 million or so retail shoppers, mainly middle- and working-class consumers, who wanted a return to fair play for all and a restoral of Main Street-oriented policies over Academia-drenched social-justice priorities. 

Guess who paid attention to that result? America's biggest retailer -- the one that caters to working- and middle-class consumers:

Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, is rolling back its diversity, equity and inclusion policies, joining a growing list of major corporations that have done the same after coming under attack by conservative activists.

The changes, confirmed by Walmart on Monday, are sweeping and include everything from not renewing a five-year commitment for an equity racial center set up in 2020 after the police killing of George Floyd, to pulling out of a prominent gay rights index. And when it comes to race or gender, Walmart won’t be giving priority treatment to suppliers.

Walmart’s moves underscore the increasing pressure faced by corporate America as it continues to navigate the fallout from the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in June 2023 ending affirmative action in college admissions. Emboldened by that decision, conservative groups have filed lawsuits making similar arguments about corporations, targeting workplace initiatives such as diversity programs and hiring practices that prioritize historically marginalized groups.

Oh, let's not be coy. These DEI programs pushed by "the gay rights index" -- the Human Rights Campaign -- "prioritize" such groups by discriminating against others.  The Left has promoted forms of discrimination to service their client demographics for years, and the HRC index rewards such behaviors. That is precisely what college admissions offices did for decades before the Supreme Court followed up on a series of warnings it issued by finally declaring it unconstitutional last year. 

However, most of the corporations that have abandoned HRC's index and DEI practices didn't get sued out of them. They got shamed out of them by consumer pressure that exposed the practices for the discrimination they actually represent. One of the chief public activists, Robby Starbuck, had let Walmart know that he was following up on his successes with other corporate giants by investigating their practices. Presto! Starbuck announced yesterday that they had folded rather than fight:

MASSIVE news: Walmart is ending their woke policies. I can now exclusively tell you what’s changing and how it happened.

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

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) November 25, 2024

Remember, Walmart is the #1 employer in America with over 1.6 Million Employees and they have a market cap of nearly $800B. This won’t just have a massive effect for their employees who will have a neutral workplace without feeling that divisive issues are being injected but it will also extend to their many suppliers. 

We’ve now changed policy at companies worth over $2 Trillion dollars, with many millions of employees who have better workplace environments as a result. 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. I think Target specifically will suffer serious sales problems as a result and Walmart will benefit. 

Our campaigns are now so effective that we’re getting the biggest companies on earth to change their policies without me even posting a story outlining their woke policies. Companies can clearly see that America wants normalcy back. The era of wokeness is dying right in front of our eyes. The landscape of corporate America is quickly shifting to sanity and neutrality. We are now the trend, not the anomaly. 

We are winning and one by one we WILL bring sanity back to corporate America. 

Let's put this in proper context. It's impossible to overestimate Walmart's arrogance with suppliers and regulators. They don't do anything that would cut into their bottom line, and they enforce contracts like no one's business. I used to work for a company that sold security-related materials to Walmart, and they had a no-nonsense, take-it-or-leave-it attitude when it came to negotiation. And fair play to them for that; the scale of that business was enormous, even if the margins were razor-thin. 

If Walmart's policies regarding the HRC index were at all defensible to the general public, Walmart would have told Starbuck to pound sand. Walmart has few competitors -- Target may be the only one at scale still left in the brick-and-mortar segment -- and no real need to retreat under fire, unless the exposure would have seriously alienated their core consumers. The fact that they caved as quickly to Starbuck demonstrates what Walmart itself knows what their consumers would think about these DEI policies and discriminatory tactics. 

Or perhaps the election did provide a sharp reality check to Walmart's execs. They adopted these policies largely after the George Floyd riots, and likely did so after putting their finger into the political winds of the time. Donald Trump's clear victory, and the failure of the Woke Elites in this election even with the Protection Racket Media's wall-to-wall propaganda, would have made clear that they had their finger in something other than the wind all along.