Two legacy media outlets refused to publish stories covering a study that said diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) education “increased hostility” and made people more likely to agree with the modified statements of Adolf Hitler.
The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) claimed The New York Times and Bloomberg informed them that they would not publish stories concerning their study, citing editorial concerns, according to communications obtained by the National Review. The study, titled “Instructing Animosity: How DEI Pedagogy Produces the Hostile Attribution Bias,” found that people who read material espousing left-wing ideas on race and identity often amplified “perceptions of prejudicial hostility where none was present, and punitive responses to the imaginary prejudice.”
“Unfortunately, both publications jumped on the story enthusiastically only for it to be inexplicably pulled at the highest editorial levels,” a NCRI researcher told National Review. “This has never happened to the NCRI in its 5-year history.”
A New York Times reporter told the NCRI that they would reconsider publishing the article on the study if the paper went under peer review, according to National Review.
“The piece was reported and ready for publication, but at the eleventh hour, the New York Times insisted the research undergo peer review after discussions with editorial staff — an unprecedented demand for our work,” a NCRI researcher told National Review. “The journalist involved had previously covered far more sensitive NCRI findings, such as our QAnon and January 6th studies, without any such request.”
The New York Times denied having an article ready to publish in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“Our journalists are always considering potential topics for news coverage, evaluating them for newsworthiness, and often choose not to pursue further reporting for a variety of reasons,” a Times spokesperson told the DCNF. “Speculative claims from outside parties about The Times’s editorial process are just that. It’s not true that The Times had prepared a story ‘ready for publication’ on this topic.”
The two Bloomberg reporters had a piece ready to publish, but Nabila Ahmed, the team leader for Global Equality at Bloomberg News, informed the NCRI that they wouldn’t publish the article, saying it was an “editorial decision.” Ahmed’s responsibilities are to “elevate issues of race, gender, diversity and fairness within companies, governments and societies that Bloomberg News covers,” according to her LinkedIn.
The reporters previously communicated to the NCRI that the research would create “an important story” and they would’ve been “eager” to publish on it, according to National Review.
In the experiment, researchers took 850 participants and gave one group a neutral essay on the caste system in India, and gave the other caste-sensitivity-training material from Equality Labs, a left-wing human rights organization, according to the study.
When participants who read the DEI-inspired material viewed modified past statements from Hitler which replaced the word “Jew” with “Brahmin,” the upper class in the caste system, they were more likely to agree that Brahmins were “‘parasites’ (+35.4%), ‘viruses’ (+33.8%), and ‘the devil personified’ (+27.1%),” according to the study.
The DEI-charged material seemed to “engender a hostile attribution bias and heighten racial suspicion, prejudicial attitudes, authoritarian policing, and support for punitive behaviors in the absence of evidence for a transgression deserving punishment,” according to the study.
The NCRI and Bloomberg did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
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US Vice President JD Vance criticized the European Union this week after rumors reportedly surfaced that Brussels may seek to punish X for refusing to remove certain online speech.
In a post on X, Vance wrote, “Rumors swirling that the EU commission will fine X hundreds of millions of dollars for not engaging in censorship. The EU should be supporting free speech not attacking American companies over garbage.”
His remarks reflect growing tension between the United States and the EU over the future of online speech and the expanding role of governments in dictating what can be said on global digital platforms.
Vance was likely referring to rumors that Brussels intends to impose massive penalties under the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA), a censorship framework that requires major platforms to delete what regulators define as “illegal” or “harmful” speech, with violations punishable by fines up to six percent of global annual revenue.
For Vance, this development fits a pattern he’s been warning about since the spring.
In a May 2025 interview, he cautioned that “The kind of social media censorship that we’ve seen in Western Europe, it will and in some ways, it already has, made its way to the United States. That was the story of the Biden administration silencing people on social media.”
He added, “We’re going to be very protective of American interests when it comes to things like social media regulation. We want to promote free speech. We don’t want our European friends telling social media companies that they have to silence Christians or silence conservatives.”
Yet while the Vice President points to Europe as the source of the problem, a similar agenda is also advancing in Washington under the banner of “protecting children online.”
This week’s congressional hearing on that subject opened in the usual way: familiar talking points, bipartisan outrage, and the recurring claim that online censorship is necessary for safety.
The House Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade convened to promote a bundle of bills collectively branded as the “Kids Online Safety Package.”
The session, titled “Legislative Solutions to Protect Children and Teens Online,” quickly turned into a competition over who could endorse broader surveillance and moderation powers with the most moral conviction.
Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-FL) opened the hearing by pledging that the bills were “mindful of the Constitution’s protections for free speech,” before conceding that “laws with good intentions have been struck down for violating the First Amendment.”
Despite that admission, lawmakers from both parties pressed ahead with proposals requiring digital ID age verification systems, platform-level content filters, and expanded government authority to police online spaces; all similar to the EU’s DSA censorship law.
Vance has cautioned that these measures, however well-intentioned, mark a deeper ideological divide. “It’s not that we are not friends,” he said earlier this year, “but there’re gonna have some disagreements you didn’t see 10 years ago.”
That divide is now visible on both sides of the Atlantic: a shared willingness among policymakers to restrict speech for perceived social benefit, and a shrinking space for those who argue that freedom itself is the safeguard worth protecting.
Frances Widdowson, a former colleague professor at Mount Royal University, was arrested this past week on the University of Victoria campus. Her offence? Walking, conversing, and asking questions on a university campus. She was not carrying a megaphone, making threats, organizing a protest, or waving foreign flags. She was planning quietly to discuss, with whoever wished it, a widespread claim that has curiously evaded forensic scrutiny in Canada for five years: that the remains of 215 Indigenous children lie beneath the grounds of the former Kamloops Residential School.
UVic Campus security did not treat her as a scholar. Nor even as a citizen. They treated her as a contaminating source.
The director of security, a woman more reminiscent of a diversity consultant than a peace officer, almost shaking, presented Widdowson with papers and told her to vacate “the property.” When Widdowson questioned the order, citing her Charter rights and the university’s public nature, she was told to leave. She refused, and she was arrested. No force, no defiance, only a refusal to concede that inquiry is trespass.
Widdowson is no provocateur in the modern sense. She is not a shock-jock in a cardigan. She is a once-tenured academic with a long record of challenging orthodoxies in Indigenous policy, identity politics, and campus culture.
In 2008, she co-authored Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry, a book that deconstructed the bureaucratic machinery that profits from preserving Indigenous dependency. The book was methodical, sourced, and daring enough to be labelled heretical in some quarters, but simultaneously boringly Marxist materialistic.
Her arguments have made people uncomfortable for a long time. When I assigned her book to my political science students in the Department of Policy Studies, where Frances also taught, I was summoned by the department head’s office. Someone in my class complained about the book, though I ignored what was said, and the technocratic colleague, as chair of the department, had prepared a host of arguments to chastise me for assigning the book.
Widdowson was good enough to be hired as a colleague of that department, but they were all afraid of her ideas, and perhaps her manner. I have often wondered if the folks in the Mount Royal hiring committee had bothered to read her book. Hey, they had a female Marxist applying for a teaching job. Knowing how they operate makes me think they made giant assumptions about Frances.
My bureaucratic colleague relented. I got the impression that the department head was putting on a show, going through motions he didn’t want to engage in, but which he had to perform for administrative purposes. He had to act on the complaint, though the complaint had no substance. He tried to tell me that the ideas in the book might offend some students, and then went on with the typical dribble about being caring, but agreed that protecting feelings was not the objective of an education, nor the job of a professor.
I went to my campus office after the conversation with the department head, typed up a memo detailing our discussion, and emailed it to him to ensure there was a record of my viewpoint. The email got no response. He never mentioned it again, and to this day, 15 or 16 years later, we still haven’t spoken about it.
Some academic arguments are meant to shake things up. That is the purpose of scholarship: to stir the sediment of consensus. To challenge conventional views. Marxist or no, scholars are supposed to push the envelope. Expand the boundaries of our understanding. But in today’s academic culture, discomfort is treated as injury and dissent as violence. So, Widdowson was treated as a threat merely by walking and speaking.
Was the university within its legal rights to remove her? Possibly. Universities can invoke property rights, ironically in Cowichan territory, and provincial legislation sometimes grants them a curious status: publicly funded yet selectively private. But the question is not merely legal. It is cultural and constitutional.
The University of Victoria is a publicly funded institution, governed under provincial authority and subsidized by taxpayers. Its grounds, though some claim they are on unceded Indigenous territory, are functionally administered by the Crown. The university is not a monastery. While it is not a temple to be kept free of doubt, it is not a temple to be torched either. It is a civic institution. An institution of higher learning. When it uses its resources to shield ideology and expel dissenters, it forfeits its academic character.
Consider the contrast. On this same campus, as on many others across the country, protests have called for the destruction of Israel and the extermination of Jews. Banners are waved, slogans chanted, and genocidal euphemisms like “from the river to the sea” are uttered without hesitation. These demonstrations, some of which praise Hamas or glorify martyrdom, proceed unimpeded. Security stands down. The administration issues boilerplate statements about inclusion and respect.
But when a female academic arrives to ask whether the number “215” refers to actual remains or mere radar anomalies, she is marched off by police. The imbalance is not accidental. It is a product of institutional capture.
Contemporary universities have adopted a new moral vocabulary. Terms like “safety,” “inclusion,” and “harm” are now treated as constitutional categories. But their terms are undefined, fluid, shaped by ideology rather than principle. “Safety” no longer refers to bodily security, but has become an emotional preference. “Inclusion” does not mean openness to different ideas and people, but a validation of specific identities. “Harm” is not an act, but a feeling.
Under this logic, Widdowson’s presence becomes a form of injury. Her questions are recast as wounds. And because feelings have been elevated to rights, her removal becomes a public good.
This ideology has structure. It is not random. It rests on a model of revolutionary politics in which dissent must not be part of the conversation. A differing opinion is an obstacle to be cleared. The new inclusivity has become a form of exclusion. It uses the language of welcome to police belief, and the rhetoric of tolerance to enforce conformity.
Charter rights were once the guardrails of public life. They are not supposed to vanish down the rabbit holes when one steps onto that university lawn. The right to free expression, to peaceful assembly, and to enter public space are not conditional on popularity. They are not subject to the feelings of a security director or the preferences of a DEI office.
Widdowson is testing this principle. She did not resist arrest, nor did she make a spectacle of herself. She acted as a citizen asserting a constitutional right. The courts may eventually rule on whether her rights were infringed. But the deeper issue is already visible.
If our public institutions can exile peaceful critics while accommodating radical political agitators who cheer for foreign terror movements, we are not in a neutral society. We are in an elite-managed consensus.
This consensus is enforced by policy. It does not need debate. The consensus managers already know what is true and treat challenges as threats. In this environment, universities are no longer places where young minds wrestle with the pangs of uncertainty. They are enforcing temples of doctrine. Their priests wear lanyards. Their rituals involve land acknowledgments. Their blasphemies include asking inconvenient questions about graves that no one has bothered to exhume.
Frances Widdowson may not be universally admired. No one is. Her conclusions are sharp. Her manner is uncompromising. But that is precisely why her treatment should alarm us. The test of a free society is not how it treats the agreeable, but how it tolerates the disagreeable, to paraphrase Bernard Crick.
When universities lose the confidence to host dissent, they cease to be universities in any meaningful sense. They become echo chambers with fancy libraries. They educate students in the same way a treadmill provides runners with travel: motion without movement.
We are at a moment of reckoning for universities and for Canadian liberal democracy. When citizens cannot openly raise questions without fear of removal, the Charter becomes ornamental. If the test of allowable speech is whether it affirms prevailing narrative and myths, then neither truth nor inquiry has a place among us.
Widdowson’s arrest is not an isolated event. It is a signal that tells us who is welcome in the public square and who is not. It tells us that the basic right to question popular opinions is now conditional. And it affirms for us what we already know: that the guardians of inclusion are, in practice, the agents of exclusion.
No democracy can afford such arbiters. Certainly not one that still calls itself liberal.
