By MICHAEL SLOVANOS
IF the name Robbie Starbuck Newsom doesn’t register with you, you’re probably over 50 and not au fait with a swag of rock music performers and the production of music videos. Starbuck recently spoke at length to Jordan Peterson.
Starbuck, whose father was a refugee from communist Cuba, went to Hollywood and became a highly successful music video producer between 2008 and 2013. Although in the thick of Hollywood culture, he didn’t stay there and neither did he become one of its captive minds.
He had been often warned by his father about the signs of encroaching communism and began to see them. In 2013 he took packed up and took his family to Tennessee and went into Republican Party politics, unsuccessfully contesting a House of Representatives seat after being removed from the ballot by the state Republicans.
During Covid he campaigned against masks and vaccine mandates then in 2024 began campaigning on social media against big companies employing DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) initiatives such as support for LGBTQ events, climate change action and other such wokeness.
Starbuck employed people on his campaign and targeted the executives of companies with mostly conservative clients. Those he ran consumer boycott campaigns against included Tractor Supply and John Deere, who announced they would no longer sponsor “social or cultural awareness” events.
Similarly Harley-Davidson, Brown-Forman, Lowe’s, and Ford Motor Company all rolled back several DEI initiatives and ended their relationships with Human Rights Campaign, the major LGBTQ advocacy group. Molson Coors, Caterpillar and Toyota followed suit.
Peterson opened his interview saying he was “no fan of woke capitalism” and he “couldn’t imagine anything more preposterous than woke capitalism because the woke movement is essentially Marxist and is the deadly enemy of anything vaguely smacking of capitalism”.
Starbuck was smart enough to see how the Marxist communism his father had fled had morphed into something different, what he calls a “new age version of the communist party”. We might otherwise know this as the New Left of the Frankfurt School or cultural Marxism.
“What they realized is that you don’t need to seize the means of production, you just need to control the minds of people in charge of production. Look at Google, look at Facebook. Every one of these companies acts as an arm of the state’s ruling party,” he told Peterson.
“We fundamentally shifted from a system of where customer is king to where the needs and desires of the Democratic Party are king and secondary to that are the needs and desires of BlackRock, StateStreet and Vanguard.”
