Duke Lacrosse Accuser Confesses that She Made it All Up

"Believe women" was always an idiotic principle. The only principle we should ever follow is Believe Evidence. Back in 2006, DNA exonerated these three men, but the DA forged ahead anyway. Then the media credulously jumped on the bandwagon because the false story fit their male-bashing race-baiting narrative. Now the woman who falsely accused these three innocent men has confessed that she made the entire thing up (She is now in prison for murder of her boyfriend in 2016).

This article by Ted Balaker is titled: “I testified falsely”Woman who accused three Duke lacrosse players of rape admits she lied. Excerpt from this article: "The court threw out the charges, DA Mike Nifong was disbarred, and the students forced Duke into a settlement for defamation."

Ten years ago, I produced a documentary short for FIRE that features K.C. Johnson, co-author of the book Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case. Here’s how Johnson summarized the episode:

This was a case that served different agendas of differing groups. For [the DA] Mike Nifong, he wanted guilt because it would help his cause in the primary. For the Duke faculty members, portraying their own students as racist advanced an on-campus agenda of making more hires dealing with race, class, and gender, and requiring more courses in race, class, and gender.

And for The New York Times, this was a case that fit very much the basic assumptions of a typical Times journalist that white, male athletes were out of control, with both sexual and racial connotations, and that advancing this would sort of advance a broader ideological agenda of The Times. And so it was almost a perfect storm of a case in which a variety of different groups could exploit the case for their own purposes

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America’s Meta-Problem

Michael Shellenberger accurately sums up America's biggest challenge, the problem that underlies and exacerbates most of our other problems:

There is an epidemic of white police officers killing unarmed black men, we must block the puberty of children born in the wrong bodies to prevent them from killing themselves, the Russians control Trump through a sex blackmail operation, the Covid vaccine prevents infection, millions or billions will die from starvation and harsh weather from climate change, there's no way a Covid virus could have escaped from a lab, mass migration improves societies with no trade-offs, it's best for addicts if we give them hard drugs to use in special sites downtown, we need the government to fight misinformation online in order to save democracy, Biden is sharper than ever, Kamala is 100% prepared to be president, and anyone who disagrees is racist, sexist, and/or fascist.

While many Americans are increasingly and at least partially aware that all of the above are lies, we are still a long way from coming to grips with their enormity, their monstrous consequences, and the totalitarian ways in which the mainstream news media, many employers, and governments demanded that we believe them. Current and former heads of state, our most-trusted journalists, and full professors at Ivy League universities created and propagated those Big Lies, repeatedly, for years, even after they had been thoroughly debunked, sometimes within days or hours of them being made, by people who ruling elites then sought to bankrupt, shame, and ostracize.

There has not yet been a proper accounting of the very many abuses of power, including the Big Lies, by elected officials, the media, and other governing elites during the Woke Reign of Terror (2013 - 2024). That accounting will need not only to thoroughly debunk all of the major lies, it will also need to explore why elites created and perpetuated them, why so many people believed them, why they lasted for so long, and what can be learned from them, both separately and how they worked together as a whole, constituting the worldview of the people who run Western societies and nations. Historians, sociologists, psychologists and many others will, for centuries, study the Work Reign of Terror as a uniquely irrational and self-destructive period in America's history. Hopefully something good, including wisdom, courage, and improved self-governance, will come out of those studies and reflections.

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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.

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Wilfred Reilly Weighs in on the Election Results

Many "people of color," including professor of political science, Wilfred Reilly, have spoken. Reilly is one of my favorite voices over the last five years of woke nonsense. His 2020 book, Taboo, is excellent, as is his 2019 book, Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War.

Fun fact from 2021 article about Wilbert Reilly, "Kentucky State professor making waves in conservative media, intellectual circles":

His dissertation at Southern Illinois University involved taking to task a statistic widely circulated to support the idea of white privilege.

“He asked a bunch of white guys in Queens how much they would have to get paid to be Black and the average answer was $50 million,” Reilly said. “His conclusion was that this represents the value of white status institutionally and structurally — that we live in a racist society.”

Reilly’s dissertation found that the average answer among minorities as to how much they would have to get paid to be white at the time was $80 million.

And now I can't help thinking of the time that Ibram Kendi destroyed the foundation for most of his racism arguments:

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