Jack Daniel's ditches DEI initiatives rather than face boycott

The company that owns the iconic whiskey brand Jack Daniel's terminated its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies on Wednesday. This comes after a boycott was threatened against the brand.

In a company-wide letter issued by its executive leadership team, Brown-Forman Corp. announced: "We launched our diversity and inclusion strategy in 2019. Since then, the world has evolved, our business has changed, and the legal and external landscape has shifted dramatically, particularly within the United States. With these new dynamics at play, we must adjust our work to ensure it continues to drive business results while appropriately recognizing the current environment in which we find ourselves."

"We believe we must make some changes to account for the ever-changing landscape," the company said, explaining that it would be "removing our quantitative workforce and supplier diversity ambitions; ending participation in the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index survey; and reviewing training programs for consistency with an evolved strategy."

The announcement comes after conservative activist and filmmaker Robby Starbuck, who has been leading an effort to take down DEI departments at companies across the United States through boycott campaigns, planned to "expose" Jack Daniel's next.

"They must have been tipped off by us going through employee LinkedIn pages. They just preemptively announced that they'll be making these changes," said Starbuck on X, who added a screenshot of a file indicating that he had 15GB of DEI evidence on Jack Daniel's he was set to reveal.

"We're now forcing multi-billion dollar organizations to change their policies without even posting just from fear they have of being the next company that we expose," wrote Starbuck. "We are winning and one by one we will bring sanity back to corporate America."

Starbuck's work to expose DEI policies at companies and corporations across the US has been effective. He was at the forefront of exposing John Deere and the Tractor Supply Co., both of which reversed course and eliminated their DEI departments after suffering damages due to the boycotts.