@GottaLaff Hé he’s the best businessman #america has ever seen. He’s know what he’s doing. The #walmart #target people should know that. Euh,

While a lot of the stories in this thread focus on the cowardice of institutional actors in either submitting to, or even assisting the fascist Trump regime in installing a Christian Nationalist dictatorship, when the history of this political moment is written, it will be noted that it was actually big companies in the US private sector that embraced the regime's white nationalist policy platforms first and in doing so, helped legitimate Trump's quest to rule as King of America. Unlike institutional actors in higher education, lawyers targeted for revenge by Der Führer, or bodies controlled by the (openly fascist) US government through funding, large corporations in the private sector required little if any incentive to adopt Trump's authoritarian "anti-DEI" policies; indeed, companies like Walmart, Paramount, and even Victoria's Secret practically fell all over themselves to align with the regime's agenda, essentially obeying in advance, before the administration had to apply any pressure at all.

Why would they do that? As this short essay in The Guardian lays bare, the truth is that they never really wanted to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion even before the rise of Trump - which is why the programs they installed after the twin motivating factors of the George Floyd protests against police violence, and the COVID pandemic, were never really designed to achieve those objectives in the first place.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/06/diversity-equity-business-trump-history

American corporations didn’t want to diversify, anyway

"Within days of taking office, Donald Trump signed an executive order that would eliminate Johnson’s civil rights order. The order directed the office of federal contract compliance to stop “promoting diversity” and holding contractors responsible for “affirmative action”. To Smith, the administration’s early actions amount to “a blatant effort in order to not only uphold the white power structure, but to remove any government responsibility to uphold the rights of individuals of color, specifically Black people”. It is the fruit of a conservative movement that has been trying to reverse course ever since the government began taking seriously efforts to protect the rights of Americans regardless of race, sex, religion or national origin.

In 2020, hundreds of private companies pledged to change their culture – to use their power and influence and, most importantly, money, to re-shape American society toward more just ends. Now, the three largest employers in the nation – Walmart, Amazon, and the federal government – have all rolled those policies back. Dozens of other corporations have turned back the clock on even pretending to care about equality in the workplace as well.

To businesses’ credit, they had a difficult task ahead of them in 2020. “They’re faced with putting a policy in place quickly that’s responsive and doesn’t sound like lip service to frustrated people,” Dawkins said. But in doing so, they made an admission: they had not been taking diversity seriously before – and the capitulation to the administration’s demands since has betrayed that truth. And they made clear their efforts were always lip service."

Look, I don't think it's really news that much of the American private sector's DEI initiatives were motivated more by *appearing* to oppose white supremacy and enforced social hierarchies in an increasingly Christian Nationalist political environment, than actually opposing those problems. This was pointed out long before Trump's second term, and obviously their actions since the regime was installed have demonstrated that critics were right to question the commitment of American corporations that directly profit from a white supremacist order that marks out certain groups of people for brutal exploitation. In that context then, it's important to understand that we are in fact not "all in this together" and a corporate sector that gladly donated to Trump's election campaigns must be understood as *active* partners in the installation of a Christian Nationalist dictatorship in America. The fact that they did so because they think it'll improve their bottom line is largely irrelevant; fascist collaboration is still fascist collaboration, regardless of the motives that inspire it.

@HamonWry

Oh Mr. Mittens

Also, you won't make any money in that hideous dress.

Let me take you to #walmart.

@GottaLaff

Well, I've only seen a handful of #TikToks... maybe a couple dozen.

And I gotta say, #Walmart seems like a good fit.

I'm often leery of sharing stories like this because the point isn't, and cannot be, that anti-trans policies and the dehumanization of trans people in our society is bad, because it also affects cis people, particularly women, in horrifyingly negative ways. One of the primary reasons we've facing down a politically empowered fascist Trump regime, is that Americans as a society have already accepted the idea that some people don't matter, and aren't human enough for the full spectrum of human rights; even if the folks making those arguments rarely admit what they're actually arguing for in a big picture sense. As in the case of Muslims, migrants, student protestors and women who want to control their own bodies, our society's casual disregard for the human and civil rights of trans people has acted as a permission gate for the Trump regime's larger project to strip the rights of anyone they don't like, or who dares to speak out in dissent.

Despite my reservations about centering cis experiences when talking about the anti-trans pogrom however, the fact is that cis women *are* negatively affected by the war on trans existences in both a micro and macro sense; whether it's hate-fueled transinvestigators invading women's bathrooms to "protect women," or the way anti-trans propaganda serves as a stepping stone for larger patriarchal efforts to possess women's bodies, this is a very real consequence of a normalized anti-trans pogrom that dehumanizes, otherizes, and criminalizes trans people (particularly trans women.) Furthermore, as the story of Dani Davis, a Florida woman fired by Walmart for being tall enough to trigger abusive behavior from a raging transphobe, demonstrates - the reality is that a society that isn't prepared to stand up for the human rights of trans people, isn't likely to stand up for the human rights of women, or workers, either.

For more on that, let's turn to this short (14 minute) video by Mike Figueredo from THR:

The Humanist Report: Walmart Fires Cis Employee *BECAUSE* She Was Harassed by Transphobic Customer in Bathroom

"A Walmart employee named Dani Davis was accosted and threatened by a transphobic customer during her shift, and she was subsequently fired because of it. The customer followed her into the bathroom and accused her of being a man and yelled transphobic slurs at her. Days after she reported the incident to her supervisor, she was fired because she supposedly posed a “security risk” to others in the store. In this video we’ll talk about this disturbing story and discuss how transphobia harms ALL women; both trans and cis alike."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nauz7001Q0U