Corporate Media Outlets Ignore New Study Questioning Effectiveness of DEI

Study concluding that DEI is ineffective, and perhaps counterproductive, ignored by "news" media because it runs against the prevailing narrative. This excerpt is from Colin Wright's article: "Why Was This Groundbreaking Study on DEI Silenced? Two leading media organizations abruptly shelved coverage of a groundbreaking study that went against their narrative":

In a stunning series of events, two leading media organizations—The New York Times and Bloomberg—abruptly shelved coverage of a groundbreaking study that raises serious concerns about the psychological impacts of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) pedagogy. The study, conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) in collaboration with Rutgers University, found that certain DEI practices could induce hostility, increase authoritarian tendencies, and foster agreement with extreme rhetoric. With billions of dollars invested annually in these initiatives, the public has a right to know if such programs—heralded as effective moral solutions to bigotry and hate—might instead be fueling the very problems they claim to solve. The decision to withhold coverage raises serious questions about transparency, editorial independence, and the growing influence of ideological biases in the media.

The NCRI study investigated the psychological effects of DEI pedagogy, specifically training programs that draw heavily from texts like Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. The findings were unsettling, though perhaps not surprising to longstanding opponents of such programs. Through carefully controlled experiments, the researchers demonstrated that exposure to anti-oppressive (i.e., anti-racist) rhetoric—common in many DEI initiatives—consistently amplified perceptions of bias where none existed. Participants were more likely to see prejudice in neutral scenarios and to support punitive actions against imagined offenders. These effects were not marginal; hostility and punitive tendencies increased by double-digit percentages across multiple measures. Perhaps most troubling, the study revealed a chilling convergence with authoritarian attitudes, suggesting that such training is fostering not empathy, but coercion and control.

The implications of these findings cannot be downplayed. DEI programs have become a fixture in workplaces, schools, and universities across the United States, with a 2023 Pew Research Center report indicating that more than half of U.S. workers have attended some form of DEI training. Institutions collectively spend approximately $8 billion annually on these initiatives, yet the NCRI study underscores how little scrutiny they receive. While proponents of DEI argue that these programs are essential to achieving equity and dismantling systemic oppression, the NCRI’s data suggests that such efforts may actually be deepening divisions and cultivating hostility.

Wrighty's article includes details of the study, showing strongly that exposure to DEI causes people to be more divisive. In short, DIE does the opposite of what it pretends to do. Yet, major news outlets that have often reported on work by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) refuse to report on this particular study, despite the widespread implementation of DEI and the potential widespread harm caused gy these programs.

Continue ReadingCorporate Media Outlets Ignore New Study Questioning Effectiveness of DEI

Why the Elites Are Panicking Over Free Speech

Why are the Elites freaking out over free speech? In a mass-email to subscribers, Catherine Herridge explains:

The new super consumers of news are flocking to X and other platforms that support independent journalism, diverse voices, and embrace transparency which can strengthen democracy. This is nothing short of an industrial revolution driven both by technology and by loss of trust in corporate media. In 2023, Human Rights lawyer Jacob Mchangama wrote about the upheaval and resulting, 'elite panic.

Elite panic is this recurring phenomenon throughout the history of free speech, where whenever the public sphere is expanded, either through new communications technology, or to segments of the population that were previously marginalized, the traditional gatekeepers, the elites who control access to information, tend to fret about the dangers of allowing the unwashed mob — who are too fickle, too unsophisticated, too unlearned — unmediated access to information. They need information to be filtered through the responsible gatekeepers and it may be even more dangerous to allow them to speak without adult supervision. That's a phenomenon that we see again and again. And we're seeing it play out now on social media. … [Elite panic is] one contributing factor to the free speech recession.

Continue ReadingWhy the Elites Are Panicking Over Free Speech

Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn Discuss Ukraine, Censorship and Insanity

Fascinating discussion about Ukraine, censorship and the insanity of the neocons (of the U.S. and western Europe). Here's an excerpt from a much longer conversation titled "Gambling with Nukes" by Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi 0:16

There's a gamble implicit in it. You are firing missiles at a nuclear power and you are gambling that they are not going to fire them back, right? And there was, there were actually quotes from American officials talking about how, you know the real irresponsible people were the Russians. They were the ones you know, who were being irresponsible. Let's see what was the quote? The EU foreign policy chief Joseph Burrell said it's not the first time that Putin plays the nuclear gamble, okay? And this was before the launch of the British missiles, and after the launch of the of the ATACMS missiles. And then, and then this guy, [British Prime Minister, [Keir] Starmer, who comes out, and he looks like a cross of Max Headroom and Noel Coward. I mean, like, I can't even that the whole presentation is so disturbing. This like kind of blinking creature who speaks in that bizarre accent, just repeating catch phrases over and over again while he talks about firing missiles at Russia. It just seems crazy, right? And then that is succeeded by new news that came out that, apparently, the French are going to be next, and they're going to, they're going to be sending something called SCALP missiles into Russia. And, you know, then we get the ICBM fired back. Walter Kirn 1:59 Well, they're, they're all they're all making themselves targets, aren't they? I mean, they're lining up. Should there be any doubt about the legitimacy? Who cares about legitimacy? Who cares about all the rules anymore these? Who cares about the norms? Dude, they just broke the biggest norm in history, which was to send our missiles into a nuclear state to land and explode. That's the biggest norm in American or world history, since those kind of things were invented, frankly, so the rules based international order--that's out the window. Norms are out the window, not shooting missiles into the home territory of the greatest nuclear power next to the United States is out the window. All of this being led by a lame duck American president who is all week in South America, while his vice president, who just ran for president, is vacationing in Hawaii. Well, Aloha. The whole mask is off.

The thing that scares me is how these people ever expect that they and their party will be taken seriously for five seconds should they ever try to float a peace message or a humanitarian message. Again, the party of social justice, and in England, the left wing party, the Labor Party, to which Starmer belongs, are at a moment when we have actually, in the United States, the center, the crown, of this power structure, voted out our executive It is beyond insane, and it will not end well. Matt, just as I was upset on Monday, I can tell you that next week we will be even more upset. Things are going to happen, and things are already happening every day, when this missile went off this morning. Every power in the world that has modern warning systems had an alarm go off right for the first moments after its launch. The United States had to assume that it was under nuclear attack.

[MORE . . .]

Continue ReadingMatt Taibbi and Walter Kirn Discuss Ukraine, Censorship and Insanity

Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson Discuss Ukraine and Propaganda

What follows is an excerpt from a Nov 20, 2024 discussion between Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson. This is a critically important discussion regarding recent developments in the Ukraine War and related U.S. Propaganda:

Glenn Greenwald [00:18:53] Tucker, there's nobody I'm certain of this in the United States, just an average, ordinary American voter who believes that their life is affected in any way by the question of who rules various provinces in the Donbass in eastern Ukraine. Nobody thinks about Ukraine, let alone the Donbass, let alone eastern Ukraine. It's an incredibly complex situation there in terms of the people's allegiances, which are far closer to Moscow than they are to Kiev. The question of what that territory should be, should it be somehow autonomous, should it be used as a buffer against the West? The whole framework, as you well know, and as other people have pointed out, when Russia agreed to the reunification of Germany, which was obviously an extraordinary thing for the Russians to agree to, given the Russian history in the 20th century with respect to Germany, when they opened, the Berlin Wall fell and they allowed the eastern and the western parts of Germany to reunite and to become part of the West and become part of the EU. The only concession they extracted in exchange for that was with reunification. NATO's now moving eastward, closer to our border in a country that has devastated our country twice in two world wars, invaded Russia twice, killed tens of millions of Russian citizens. The only thing we need as a security guarantee in exchange for allowing that is that NATO will never expand one inch eastward beyond what was East Germany and the United States agreed to that. And immediately in the 90s, an administration, the administration started talking about it and implementing NATO's expansion eastward toward Russia. Exactly what was promised to Gorbachev the United States would not do in exchange for them agreeing to reunification. And why? Why? Why did we need to expand eastward toward Russia. And now it's not just eastward in general. It's going directly up to the Russian border on the part of their border that has been invaded twice in Ukraine to destroy Russia. And both of those world wars, we also participated in the change of government. We removed the democratically elected leader of Ukraine before his constitutional term was expired in 2014 because we perceived him as being too friendly to Moscow, which is what the Ukrainians voted for and replaced him. [U.S. State Department's] Victoria Nuland constructed a government and they was replaced by a government that was more pro-U.S.. Imagine if the Russians engineered a coup in Mexico to take out the government because they were too friendly to us and put in a hard line, pro Russian, anti-American, anti-NATO president. Imagine how threatening we would regard that as. And that's exactly what we did in Ukraine. The question is, though, this has nothing to do with the national security of the American people. No American is threatened by who governs Ukraine. What they're threatened by is what the United States is doing in Ukraine, including this most recent act.

... This is not a lame duck decision and it's not like there was any emergency to it. It wasn't there was no emergency to it. They just wanted to escalate it because they thought Trump wouldn't. And so they did.

Tucker [00:27:52] It puts us in this remarkable moment where the only adult is Vladimir Putin. This person, we've been told, is Hitler and deranged, crazy, dying of nine different kinds of cancer can't be trusted like the only reason we're not. I mean, we're all relying on his restraint. That's just a fact right now. How weird is that?

Continue ReadingGlenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson Discuss Ukraine and Propaganda

Exhibit A: Joe and Mika Exhibit their Lack of Journalistic Principles by Bending a Knee to Trump

This video has got to be seen to be believed. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski loved and promoted Donald Trump in 2015-2016. They had Trump on their show every week for friendly call-ins, something thoroughly disreputable because it is contrary to the need for reporters to be always antagonistic and distrusting of those in power. Now memory-holed, at that same time Scarborough actively sought to be Trump’s VP. After that didn’t pan out, things then took a dramatic U-Turn. For many years, until two weeks ago, the two pundits pummeled Trump as a fascist, a white supremacist and much worse. It was non-stop hyperbolic ranting that played to an ever-dwindling audience. Until now. Glenn Greenwald explains what has been going on, playing numerous Morning Joe video clips to substantiate his claims. Watch and enjoy this exquisite story of unvarnished media whoring.

Continue ReadingExhibit A: Joe and Mika Exhibit their Lack of Journalistic Principles by Bending a Knee to Trump