CNN News Night: Personal Grievance Makes Better Television than Solutions

Diversity, equity and inclusion [DEI]: a set of values, policies and practices focused on establishing a group culture of equitable and inclusive treatment and on attracting and retaining a diverse group of participants, including people who have historically been excluded or discriminated against.  Through our focus on [DEI] we increase the number of female attorneys, people of colour, and members of the LGBTQ+ community [boldface added] in the leadership pipeline.

Definition of DEI, Merrian Webster Diction

It shouldn’t be surprising that most diversity programs aren’t increasing diversity.  … Your organization will become less diverse [boldface added], not more, if you require managers to go to diversity training, try to regulate their hiring and promotion decisions, and put in a legalistic grievance system.

Harvard Business Review, July-August, 2016

If this evidence is correct, we now have fewer African-American physicians, scientists, engineers …, college professors and lawyers … than we would have had using race-neutral admissions policies. Affirmative action has backfired

National Affairs, Winter 2025

Do you think that all [boldface added] of America’s ills […] can be attributed to DEI?

Abby Phillip, 2/6/25

I know I do not have the same opportunities as you [Scott Jennings]. Let me tell you about me!  I do not have the same opportunity as you. I know I don’t.  … I’m not talking about how you feel.  I’m talking about how I feel, a black woman in this city. … I have a law degree, a Master’s degree and two Bachelors [degrees], probably more than all y’all at this table added up together and I have always been the least paid person on payroll at every institution [all boldface added].

Ashley Allison, CNN News Night, 2/6/25

OJ Simpson … represented something for the black community … particularly because there were two white people who had been killed.

Former member of the Obama Administration and Biden-Harris campaign committee member and CNN guest Ashley Allison, 4/12/24

If anyone ever gets the urge to watch a panel dominated by “liberals” yell at, accuse and talk over a small group of Republicans and tell you how smart they are on a show whose motto is that people with different perspectives can talk to each other there, CNN’s Abby Phillip’s show is for you.  On a recent show (2/6/25) about the question whether it is fair to blame “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives for the Los Angeles wildfires and fatal plane crashes”, Ashley Allison decided to talk about her favourite subject, herself:  “Let me tell you about me!” The panel was composed of Republican Scott Jennings and “liberals” Ashely Allison, Cari Champion, Abby Phillip, Democrat Arthur Aidala and former member of the Trump administration, now anti-Trumper, Alyssa Farrah Griffin.  That is about the show’s usual ratio: 5 to 1 against Republicans.  Aidala did push back on Allison, but he is still a Democrat.

Abby began the discussion with the biassed question whether “all [boldface added] of America’s ills can be blamed on DEI?”  Of course, no one has stated that “all” of America’s problems can be blamed on DEI.  This is a textbook example of a “Straw Person” fallacy.  One creates an absurd position that is easy to refute, and then pretends that when one has refuted it one has refuted the real more complex issue in question, in this case, whether DEI might have been a factor in the recent LA wildfires or the plane crash on the Potomac.

Unfortunately, as the Daily Mail puts it, the panel “explodes” when Allison makes the discussion about herself when she “fumes [that] she gets paid less than white male colleagues” and rattles off her list of degrees.  Aidala replies, “Even in the [Obama] White House.  Well [then], who’s fault is that?  Maybe you should have worked for George W or Trump?”  Aidala’s point is that she needs to take up the issue with her beloved Obama and Biden-Harris, not blame the alleged problem on America per se.  Allison, glaring at Aidala, angrily replies, “Well guess what! They didn’t have DEI when I was there.”  Allison doesn’t appear to have noticed that she just admitted that even Democrats and “liberals” apparently need to be forced to pay her what she believes she deserves.  Now why might that be?

There was a time long ago when possessing fancy degrees meant that one can pass a community college critical reasoning course.  But since “affirmative action” and DEI, perhaps with the best of intentions, have morphed into the program to force equality of outcomes in academia and the workplace by putting degrees in people’s hands because of the race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, this can no longer be assumed.  That is, Allison’s argument, based on her de facto list of degrees, that she deserves more pay than she has received relative to her colleagues is the fallacy of “Begging the Question” (assuming what one purports to prove).  And it is as a result of race-based programs like affirmative action and DEI that a degree no longer means what it did before affirmative action and DEI were in place.  See also City Journal: “The Soft Bigotry of Affirmative Action”.

Thomas Sowell, the justly famous black economist (University of Chicago Ph.D., professor at Stanford, Cornell, UCLA, Rutgers and Howard), argues that race-based programs actually harm minority students:

“Half of the Black students [at Cornell in my day] were on academic probation … Something like one-fourth of all the Black students going to MIT do not graduate. [There is] a pool of people whom you are artificially turning into failures by mismatching them with the school.“

That is, race based programs actually harm minority students by putting people who would be fine students at a decent university in the Ivy League with the top 1% where they cannot compete, resulting in failure and self-doubt. 

One of the things many “liberals” refuse to understand is that most conservatives agree with their long-term goal to produce a truly egalitarian society.  The conservative’s point is that it depends mightily on how exactly one does this.  Simply forcing equal outcomes on the society with race-based programs does tremendous damage, not only to the alleged beneficiaries themselves, but to the society in general.   There is no bogyman here, simply a disagreement about the proper methods to achieve the goal. 

The proper way to bring about equality would require taking on the teacher’s unions that, being more concerned with their prosperity and rights of teachers and less with student achievement, have presided over a sharp decline in educational quality in America, especially in Democratically controlled inner cities in which minority students predominate.  Unfortunately, Democrats, for a variety of reasons, e.g., the teacher’s unions overwhelmingly support the Democrats in elections, do not have the courage or will to take on the teacher’s unions and place the advancement of minority students over that of the teacher’s unions.

Since people tend not to be very objective about themselves (objectivity being roughly inversely proportional to one’s personal stake in the issue), it is never a good idea to make a political argument rest on one’s own self-evaluation.  Unfortunately, Allison’s obsession with her own feelings of grievance, fed by her own racial animus, is so important to her that she cannot help herself, resulting in a completely unconvincing argument for her views on DEI.  The race-mongers on TV are often talking about themselves when they accuse others. 

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