By Suzanne Bowdey

The calendar may have changed, but 2025 is picking up right where last year left off in the battle against corporate wokeness. In the biggest shocker since Walmart, fast-food icon McDonald’s announced that after years of force-feeding DEI to shareholders and customers, political neutrality is back on the menu.

For activists, the news is even more astonishing since the Golden Arches had a perfect 100% score on LGBT activism from the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) just last year. But, like so many boardrooms before it, McDonald’s decided to surrender before Robby Starbuck even declared war. In a letter made public Monday, the hamburger chain announced to their owner/operators, employees, and suppliers that this new year meant turning a new leaf on diversity. Although they declare their steadfast commitment to “inclusion,” Chairman and CEO Chris Kempczinski, along with McDonald’s top leaders, spent the final half of the letter explaining that they’ve identified practices that they intend to “modify,” including:

• The retirement of “aspirational representation goals” (i.e. diversity quotas in hiring)
• The “pausing” of “external surveys” like HRC’s radical Corporate Equality Index
• The end of its “Supply Chain’s Mutual Commitment to DEI pledge.”

While some of this may have been in the works, the changes were hastened by activist Robby Starbuck, who’d contacted the company on Friday and warned the marketing director that he was about to expose McDonald’s woke policies. And while there are things Starbuck wishes the company had worded differently or committed to, he acknowledges that this chain “wasn’t one of the worst to begin with.” But, he emphasized, McDonald’s was “on our list of companies, and there are many companies that we aim to change.”

“Companies need to stay out of divisive issues unless it’s related directly to the regulation of their business,” Starbuck insisted in a video on X. “They should not be involved in politics. We don’t want to know what Macy’s thinks about trans rights, okay? And do you know what? If they want to speak up and talk about it, we don’t want to spend our money there,” he said. “We have a right as customers to know how the money is being spent later. And then we can decide if we want to give our money to that company. And in many cases, now we are waking up and saying, ‘No, we don’t want to give our money to this company that hates our values and everything we believe in.’”

McDonald’s joins a ballooning list of big-name brands like Walmart, Tractor Supply, John Deere, Harley Davidson, Polaris, Indian Motorcycle, Lowe’s, Ford, Coors, Black & Decker, Jack Daniels, DeWalt tools, Craftsman, Caterpillar, Boeing, Toyota, and Nissan, who’ve all made the shift to the better business practices Americans demand.

“We’ve now changed policy at companies worth well over $2.3 [t]rillion dollars,” Starbuck declared, “with many millions of employees who have better workplace environments as a result. Our campaigns are so effective that we’re getting the biggest companies on earth to change their policies without me even posting a story exposing their woke policies first. Companies can see that America wants sanity 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 the trend, not the anomaly anymore. We’re winning,” he insists, “and one by one we WILL bring sanity back to corporate America.”

In the minds of many people, including Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, this is a pivotal moment. “I do believe,” he explained on “Washington Watch” Tuesday, “that there is an open door right now.” Christians, he urged, need to be “talking truth, speaking the truth, talking about the gospel of Jesus Christ, confessing the Lord Jesus Christ, putting these things out there in the public domain, and having that discussion. This is not a time to hold back. It’s not a time to be timid. It’s time to be compassionate, kind, [and] civil in our conversation. But we need to exercise these freedoms so that we can strengthen them and keep them.”

No one knows how long commonsense Americans will have the momentum. “It could be a very short window,” Perkins acknowledged, “but we need to take it, utilize it, and make the most of it.” It’s ironic, he pointed out, because we’re living in the best of times and the worst of times. He talked about the violence, the murder and crime rates, and so many other problems the country is facing. All of that, the FRC president believes, “fed into this election. People have had enough of it.”

And right now, “People are so desperate that they’re open to moving away from the woke ideology — the leftist ideas of silencing. And this is a moment to bring truth to the table, have frank conversations, because we know the truth can bring us to a place of consensus, but also [to a place of] resolution [in] some of these issues that are facing our local communities. So again, I just can’t encourage people enough to take this moment to respectfully [and] redemptively as Ephesians 6 says, [speak] the truth in love.”

As he underscored, “We’re not trying to win a debate here. We’re trying to win hearts and minds — and we’re trying to set people free with the truth. But this is the time to have those conversations. This is that door of opportunity that I believe has been opened to our country, and to the church in particular, in the wake of the events that have occurred.”

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.