While transgender orthodoxy seems rooted ever deeper in American education, entertainment, and society, the LGBTQ lobby’s stranglehold over big business is finally loosening. A key organization that uses mafia-like tactics to pressure companies to toe the line on gender ideology has faced setbacks.
Molson Coors Beverage Co., the company that produces Coors Light beer, announced to employees Tuesday that it will no longer participate in the Human Rights Campaign’s corporate equality index.
Robby Starbuck, a former music video director who exposes and combats the Left’s diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, revealed Molson Coors’ announcement on X.
“We will no longer participate in any voluntary ‘best of’ third-party company rankings in the U.S., including the HRC corporate equality index,” the Molson Coors leadership team wrote in the email to staff.
Molson Coors’ announcement follows similar opt-outs from Ford, Harley-Davidson, Jack Daniels, and Lowe’s, according to Axios.
What Is the HRC Equality Index?
The Human Rights Campaign 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.”
That sounds noble. Americans support being “inclusive,” right? Yet many Americans vehemently disagree with HRC’s interpretation of this purported “inclusion.” When it comes to transgender orthodoxy, “inclusion” means allowing men into women’s intimate spaces. In the corporate setting, it means forcing employees to endorse the lie that a man can become a woman and vice versa. It means celebrating as “joyful” behaviors that many Americans of good conscience consider sinful or depraved. The “inclusion” travels only in one direction.
How does HRC “transform” institutions? Its corporate equality index gives every major company a rating to show just how pro-“equality” the company is. Investors in the environmental, social, and governance movement use the index to determine where their money goes, and this makes the index extremely powerful.
Like the mafia or Al Capone, 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. Gone is any notion that this messaging may be divisive for the millions of Americans who believe in traditional Christianity, Judaism, other religions that teach that humans are male and female, or simple biology.
“I’d say the HRC certainly resembles something like a Marxist mafia that uses LGBTQ-related issues to advance their far left politics,” Starbuck 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.”
Sunlight Is the Best Disinfectant
Why are companies abandoning HRC’s index? Starbuck has been asking them pointed questions, revealing how controversial the index is. He reached out to companies like Molson Coors, asking how they respond to criticism about the index’s left-wing bias, and these business leaders realized the index isn’t an unmitigated benefit for their brand.
Last year, two companies suffered tremendous losses after pursuing ever more radical LGBTQ messaging, likely spurred on by the HRC index. Transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney promoted Bud Light, and the publicity didn’t go over well for Bud Light’s customers. America’s best-selling beer lost its top spot in sales rankings.
Similarly, Target infamously launched a new transgender line of products, including “tuck” swimsuits designed to make male bodies appear female. The designer who made many of the products also used the devil in designs such as “Satan loves pronouns.” Target sales slumped following a massive backlash.
When both Bud Light and Target started to distance themselves from this LGBTQ messaging, the Human Rights Campaign downgraded their index ratings.
These examples revealed what many Americans already knew—that LGBTQ messaging drives away many consumers. The companies that have distanced themselves from HRC in recent weeks have consumer bases that are unlikely to agree with HRC’s messaging, so they are vulnerable to backlash of the kind that Bud Light and Target faced. As Starbuck threatens to expose their woke advocacy to their un-woke consumers, they reconsider their decision to take sides in the culture war.
HRC’s Heated Response
The Human Rights Campaign hasn’t exactly taken these defections well, however.
It launched a campaign urging supporters to “tell Corporate America: Robby Starbuck is an extremist troll and dropping DEI initiatives is not okay!”
“Far-right extremists like social media influencer and failed political candidate Robby Starbuck are using Corporate America as pawns, demanding they abandon LGBTQ+ people, people of color, women and the disabled community by dropping commitments to inclusion,” HRC wrote. (Starbuck ran unsuccessfully as a write-in candidate for U.S. Congress in Tennessee in 2022.) “We will send your message to corporate executives at Ford, Jack Daniel’s, Lowe’s, Tractor Supply Co., Harley-Davidson and Deere & Co. who have cowardly succumbed to these anti-business demands.”
HRC’s claim that Starbuck is using Corporate America as a pawn represents a classic case of psychological projection—attributing to its opponent the very thing HRC is doing.
Starbuck wouldn’t be pressuring companies to reconsider their involvement in the index if HRC hadn’t launched it as a comprehensive strategy to pressure them to adopt its ideology in the first place. HRC can play the victim all it likes, but it launched this corporate culture war, and Starbuck is merely encouraging companies to return to neutral.