By: Lathan Watts – nationalreview.com – February 21, 2025

The company is leading the marketplace back to its highest and best use of providing goods and services.

The company is not only listening to customers, employees, and shareholders but leading the marketplace back to its highest and best use of providing goods and services.

There is an old cliché in global economics that, when America sneezes, the world catches a cold. Every cliché contains a grain of truth, or it would never become cliché. One hopes the positive alternative is true as well. If America’s economy shifts course in a new, positive direction, the world economy follows.

Walmart is not only a giant in corporate America but also among the largest corporations in the world; its impact is global. Strange, then, that when influencer Robby Starbuck and the #RollbackDEI campaign broke the news that Walmart has publicly distanced itself from its diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and the Human Rights Campaign’s “Corporate Equality Index,” the American and global media did not pay more attention. Thankfully, some very important audiences did pay attention.

Investment advisers, corporate-engagement consultants, and investors who manage billions in assets and millions in Walmart stock recently sent a letter of encouragement to Walmart. Joining as signatories to the investors’ letter were members of the State Financial Officers Foundation, a coalition of 38 financial officers from 28 states — representing more than half the country — that focuses on free market principles, federalism, and economic freedom while protecting taxpayer dollars through strong fiscal responsibility and responsible financial management.

Their letter stated in part, “We write to offer our support for Walmart’s timely decision to cut ties with the legally suspect, reputationally risky, and divisive ideology known as ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.’ The last several years have proven that DEI has the opposite effect of its stated goals. DEI policies introduce serious legal, operational, and reputational risk to companies because they sacrifice equal opportunity and true diversity by focusing only on differences based on skin color, sex, or religious status.”

The investors and state financial officers also noted that President Donald Trump has recently “issued a series of executive orders aimed at rooting out discriminatory DEI practices from the federal government and private companies — including corporations like yours. Companies that double-down on DEI policies are now playing a dangerous game of chicken with the administration, and they are doing so at the expense of the shareholders we represent.”

Walmart has undoubtedly learned from the cautionary tales of household brands like Bud Light, Disney, and Target, which have sustained significant losses from making business decisions and promoting divisive political positions demanded by DEI advocates. Bud Light’s and Target’s respective mea culpa demonstrate how the cultural collapse of DEI influence is proceeding at an astonishing pace.

George Orwell once quipped that some ideas are so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them. Yet even on college campuses, where the often self-proclaimed Marxists who nurtured the ideology behind DEI policies implemented them at will, the resounding thud of the failure to deliver the promised results is inescapable. New York Times Magazine recently reported that the University of Michigan’s study of its ten-year, $250 million DEI program found that “in striving to become more diverse and equitable, the school has also become less inclusive.”

DEI programs are losing propositions. As the letter of support to Walmart articulated, while claiming to promote belonging and inclusion, DEI sacrifices diversity of thought or viewpoint and equal opportunity by focusing only on a superficial, skin-deep diversity that views employees, customers, and shareholders through a myopic lens of skin color, sex, or religious group status. DEI in practice is morally dubious, legally risky, and to call it “unproven in the marketplace” would be an understatement. In fact, it is proving to create hostility and division, the exact opposite of its promised results.

Walmart made the right decision by abandoning DEI policies and the radical Human Rights Campaign, which recently pressured companies to provide puberty blockers for minors in their health care plans. In doing so, Walmart is not only listening to customers, employees, and shareholders but leading the marketplace back to its highest and best use of providing goods and services.

The ideological politicization of business has hijacked corporate America for far too long. And when it comes to returning to fundamental principles, what is good for American business is good for the world.

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Source: Corporate DEI: Will Walmart Lead in Abandoning Wokeness? | National Review