Here’s something you won’t hear on the channel that told you “go woke, go broke” for two straight years: the companies that told the mob to pound sand actually did better.
New research out of UC Berkeley, published Friday in the Guardian, tracked S&P 500 companies after Trump signed his January executive orders gutting DEI across the federal government and threatening private firms that kept it. A guy named Jacob Grumbach ran the numbers using what economists call “abnormal returns,” which is just a fancy way of saying he compared what stocks were supposed to do against what they actually did. The result? Companies that kept their DEI policies, outfits like Costco, Apple, and Delta, performed just as well as the ones that scrambled to comply. In the days right after the executive orders, the DEI-keepers actually outperformed the fold-artists on the stock market.
Now ask yourself: who benefits from making you believe otherwise?
Robby Starbuck, the activist filmmaker who built a whole career pressuring companies like Walmart, Ford, John Deere, and Harley-Davidson into dumping their diversity programs, told Fox Business he “won’t stop until corporate America is sane again.” Funny how sanity always seems to mean doing exactly what one guy with a camera and a social media account tells you to do. Stephen Miller, Trump’s old policy hand, filed lawsuits against Meta and Amazon claiming their DEI programs discriminated against white people. Meta folded. Amazon folded. McDonald’s folded. And what did folding get them? The same stock performance as the companies that told Miller and Starbuck to go kick rocks.
Costco’s shareholders voted 98 percent against an anti-DEI proposal. Apple told a conservative pressure group to take a hike. Disney shareholders voted 99 percent to stay in the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index. These aren’t activist organizations. They’re some of the most ruthlessly profit-driven entities on the planet. They ran the math and decided the outrage machine was a paper tiger.
So the entire “go woke, go broke” campaign, the Bud Light boycott, the Target pride merchandise freakout, the DeSantis-Disney feud, all of it, was built on a foundation of nothing. The threats were hollow. The financial doom never arrived. And every executive who panicked and scrapped their programs did it because they were afraid of a headline, not because the numbers told them to.
David Glasgow, who runs a diversity center at NYU’s law school, told the Guardian that most companies he spoke to were in a “messy middle,” quietly keeping some programs, deleting others, and rebranding the rest. Which is exactly what you’d expect from a corporate class that has no convictions about anything except its own stock price. They’ll put a rainbow on a beer can when it’s safe and pull it when it’s not. They’ll cut a diversity initiative when a filmmaker yells at them and quietly rehire the same people under a different job title six months later.
Grumbach said the real lesson is that corporations can resist executive branch pressure and “end up fine.” That’s the part the establishment doesn’t want you sitting with. If Apple and Costco can tell a president to get lost and still make money, what exactly is the mechanism that’s supposed to keep the little guy in line? The same fear that made Walmart cave made you think you had no leverage either.
The whole culture war was a sales pitch. The people selling it got famous. The companies that bought it got nothing. And the ones who ignored it got richer.