
Loading summary
A
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do@mintmobile.com
B
Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month Required intro rate first 3 months only then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com what if the architecture of modern DEI is a psyop envisioned and established by our intelligence agencies, laundered through institutional networks like the Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations and built on Cold War strategies with one specific purpose. To make sure that when Americans get angry, they aim at each other instead of aiming at the people running the machine. What if the goal was never to liberate the marginalized and downtrodden, but to capture them? To take every movement that threatened to unite working people across racial lines around economic power and replace it with a managed, credentialed, institutionally approved substitute that generates maximum division and zero threat to the people at the top? Well, today I'm going to lay out the facts, and as always, you'll form your own conclusions. But the evidence is overwhelmingly convincing. We're told the DEI is a grassroots movement, a moral awakening, the natural result of America finally confronting its past sins. Every year, corporations pour tens of billions of dollars into diversity training. Every major university has entire bureaucracies that are dedicated to equity and inclusion. Fortune 500 companies hire chief diversity officers. HR departments across America now operate through the language of identity representation and ideological compliance. All of which is theoretically counterintuitive because real grassroots movements threaten power, disrupt systems, and make elites uncomfortable. Yet DEI has been embraced by the entire establishment, and if you dare to question it, you're swiftly labeled immoral, dangerous, unemployable. DEI is not a reckoning, it's a substitute for one. And it was engineered to be exactly that. There is a direct, documented, unbroken line from the CIA's Cold War propaganda machine to the DEI architecture of today that now saturates corporate America, dominates university curriculum, and determines who gets hired, promoted and platformed in this country country. Their Senate reports, congressional investigations, declassified CIA documents, foundation internal records, all of them documenting that the same men, the same foundations and the same mechanisms first pointed outward to contain communism, then pointed inward at the American people to neutralize economic dissent and preserve the financial architecture of the elite. This is the story behind the story about dei. You were never supposed to know. Keeping It Real with Jillian Michaels. We begin in the early 1950s. An intelligence operative named Frank Wisner coined a term for the propaganda machine that he was building, and he called it the Mighty Wurlitzer, because a Wurlitzer is a theater organ that requires one musician, it has hundreds of pipes, and it plays any tune you want. And Wisner's Wurlitzer was a sprawling, invisible network of front organizations, journals, international conferences, cultural exchanges and academic programs, all designed to make CIA propaganda sound like the organic output of free, independent, brilliant minds. One tune controlled from one place by one invisible hand. Now, after World War II, the Soviets were winning the propaganda war across Western Europe. Communist parties were gaining real mass traction in France, in Italy, across Latin America. And the argument they were making was simple and effective. American capitalism was a system built on inequality, racism and imperial violence. And left wing intellectuals across the world, well, they were listening. So the CIA needed to fight back with ideas weaponized as freedom and influence disguised as independence. Now, they didn't do this by funding conservatives, because that would be useless, right? Nobody being recruited by the Communist Party in 1952 was going to be persuaded by William F. Buckley. Instead, they funded an alternate version of the Left itself, specifically what they called in their internal documents the non communist left. And the mission was to create a version of liberalism that was, in the words used, internally housebroken. A left that critiqued capitalism's excesses without threatening capitalism's existence. A Left that talked about freedom while accepting the basic architecture of American institutional power. A left that was above all, anti communist, even if it called itself progressive. So it sounds not too bad, right? And they began bankrolling highbrow journals in a dozen languages. They funded moderate labor unions specifically to ensure that workers movements would negotiate for wages and benefits rather than challenging the ownership structure of the economy. Ask for a 5% raise, never ask for the keys to the factory. They funded independent transatlantic exchanges that brought promising European intellectuals to American universities. They wined them, they dined them, they showed them the best of American life. All to cultivate personal loyalty towards Western institutions. They funded academic research designed to produce scientific sounding consensus around Cold War priorities, to make the Western position look like the conclusion of objective science rather than the preferred outcome of the intelligence community. And the enemy was always the same. Any movement anywhere on the spectrum that might mobilize the working class around economic grievance and threaten corporate or financial power. Period. But here's the problem. The moment the source is known, the credibility evaporates. Academics don't take direction from intelligence agencies. Intellectuals don't attend CIA sponsored conferences. You cannot manufacture authentic dissent from government letterhead. So they needed the ideas to appear free. They needed the influence to appear organic and altruistic. They needed a long leash. Institutions prestigious enough to launder the ideology without anyone tracing it back to Langley. They needed the Ford foundation, the Rockefeller foundation, the Carnegie Corporation. Three of the most respected, most trusted, most seemingly independent institutions in America. And if you're wondering why these foundations allowed this, the answer is because they were built for it. The men running the government and the intelligence agencies are the same men that were running Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie. Same name, same careers moving seamlessly between Langley presidential administrations. In the boardroom, for example, Richard Bissell, a Ford consultant, went on to become the CIA's Deputy Director of Plans. He's the guy who ran the U2 spy plane program and planned the Bay of Pigs invasion. John W. Gardner ran Carnegie and then walked directly into LBJ's cabinet. These men do not navigate a conflict of interest because the foundations and the agency were in their minds the exact same project, just with different letterheads. It was an inside job from the beginning. Now, the man who ran the ford foundation from 1958 to 1965 was John J. McCloy. He was a former Assistant Secretary of War, a founding father of the oss, the Office of Strategic Services, which is the direct institutional predecessor of the CIA. He built the architecture that became the CIA and he made that merger structural. McCloy created a formal administrative unit inside Ford, a three man committee headed by himself of course, that had to be consulted every time the CIA wanted to use the foundation as a pass through. So when the Agency needed to fund a journal or a conference or a dissident intellectual, it went to three men in one room at Ford. The operation was approved, the check was written, bing bang boom. And we know this because of McCloy's own correspondence and internal memos from his tenure at Ford. We know it from declassified CIA documents released through FOIA requests and we know it through congressional investigations in later years. This is not a theory someone cooked up on the Internet. It's an extensive paper trail. Each institution served a different purpose. So Ford offered scale. In the 1950s, it was the wealthiest private foundation in the world. Its endowment was so enormous that it could absorb millions of dollars in CIA black budget funds without triggering a single IRS audit, a single journalist question, a single eyebrow raised by a single Accountant. So if a small, obscure foundation suddenly writes a $5 million check to an intellectual journal in Paris, well, people are going to ask questions. But if Ford writes the same check, it's just another Tuesday. In philanthropy, the scale provided the COVID And then Rockefeller offered cultural reach. Nelson Rockefeller had run psychological warfare operations during World War II. He understood that culture was a weapon. And through the Museum of Modern Art, essentially a Rockefeller family project, they controlled what the world understood as American freedom. And they didn't just fund ideas, they defined culture and taste. Carnegie offered institutional permanence. Control the universities, control the credentials, control the lawyers, and you control the next generation before it knows it's even been programmed. Together, they deployed what the agency called the long leash. You can't order a free thinking intellectual to change his mind. You can't tell a celebrated French philosopher what to write. But you can fund the journal that publishes him. You can sponsor the conference where he speaks, you can build the ecosystem his career depends on, and you can shape it quietly, from the inside. Their goal, in their own words, wasn't to defeat leftist intellectuals in dialectical combat, because that never works. They wanted to seduce them. Make the approved worldview feel prestigious and the radical worldview feels embarrassing. Give the revolutionary a beautiful platform, an international conference, a byline in a magazine that serious people read. The radicalism softens on its own. You don't win the argument. You incentivize them to temper the narrative. Take Encounter magazine, the CIA's flagship intellectual journal. It published George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, Isaiah Berlin. It was sophisticated career making, the kind of publication that serious people read at serious universities. Nobody told the contributors what to write because nobody had to. The editorial direction shaped which ideas got commissioned and which ideas got rejected. And over time, that created a gravitational pull of its own. If you wanted to be taken seriously, you wrote the kind of thing that Encounter published and Encounter didn't publish. People who called for dismantling capitalism encountered it, published people who critiqued it elegantly, from within, in ways that left the architecture completely intact. The revolutionaries didn't get censored, they got ignored. And in that world, being ignored was worse than being wrong. So many people walk out of a doctor's appointment with no real answers, no data, no plan, just, you're good, you're fine. Meanwhile, you're left guessing about everything. And that's exactly why I'm so into superpower. You can do a lab test from home or a nearby lab, and it measures 100 plus biomarkers, giving you a full picture of your heart Your liver, your thyroid, your hormones, metabolism, vitamins, and so much more. Members get a personalized health plan that includes supplements, lifestyle changes, and even prescriptions, all based on your actual results. You can track your biological age over time and actually see progress year after year. And instead of waiting weeks or googling results, you've got an on demand care team that's ready to help. So make this year the year you stop guessing about your health. With Superpower. For a limited time, our listeners get $20 off to unlock their new health intelligence. So head over to superpower.com and use the code Jillian for $20 off your membership. That's Code Jillian. And after you sign up, they'll ask you how you heard about superpowers. So do me a favor if you could, and tell them that Jillian sent you to support the show. Think about how social media algorithms work today. Content that challenges institutional power quietly disappears. Content that divides people along identity lines gets amplified and goes viral. Some content gets censored, some gets amplified. And creators are obviously going to lean into one versus the other. It is the same playbook, different century. Now, beneath these foundations was a shadow plumbing system, and the Agency called them dummy foundations. Fronts with no offices, no staff, no purpose except to move money and obscure the trail. The Fairfield foundation, the J.M. kaplan Fund, the Beacon Fund, the Kent Field Fund. All CIA fronts that existed solely to launder cash. And the money moved like this CIA black budget to dummy foundation to Ford to the actual target, which was the journal, the conference, the research center, the labor union. Every layer added separation. So by the time the check arrived at the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Paris, it looked like enlightened American philanthropy. Nobody in Paris needed to know where it came from, and it wouldn't have worked if they did. The scale was staggering. In fact, one Senate Investigation in the mid-1960s examined 700 grants over $10,000 made by 164 private foundations. More than 100 of them involved CIA funding. And this wasn't only happening abroad. From the very beginning, the CIA was also running a parallel domestic operation. And the man running it was Thomas Braden. Braden was a CIA operative, a card carrying member of the Georgetown set, whose explicit mandate was, in his own words, to control potential radicals and steer them to the right. Not foreign radicals, American ones. Then in 1967, Ramparts magazine wrote an expose that blew the whole thing wide open. And they published proof that the CIA had been secretly funding the National Students association, which was America's largest student organization. They'd been doing it for over a decade all to ensure that campus organizing stayed within approved boundaries and never developed into genuine radicalism. And it turns out that Braden wasn't subtle or ashamed about the strategy at all. Because when it eventually got uncovered, he wrote about it openly. He defended it publicly, entitled his confession, which he published in the Saturday Evening Post. I'm glad the CIA is immoral. And that was the thread when it got pulled. Everything unraveled. And what emerged over the following years, through Braden's own confession, subsequent journalism, and finally the Church Committee Senate investigation in 1975, was the full scope of what Braden had been running. A systematic, taxpayer funded program to infiltrate every major institution of American civil life and ensure that none of them ever developed enough independent power to threaten the people at the top. And here are a few examples. The Congress for Cultural freedom. Active in 35 countries, publishing over 20 prestigious magazines, running art exhibitions and music festivals, and a global news service. All of it was funded by CIA money flowing through the foundation conduit system, managing what the intellectual left was allowed to think and say. The United Auto Workers. Braden personally flew to Detroit to hand the UAW president, Walter Reuther, a cash payment specifically to keep the labor movement focused on wages rather than ownership. The National Council of Churches, the African American Institute, every single one of them was funded for the same explicit purpose stated in the CIA's own internal instructions. Give them a platform so they can blow off steam. Let them protest, let them publish, let them organize. Just make sure that you're the one writing the check. Because the moment any of them crossed from managed dissent into genuine threat, the money stopped and that concern kept them in line. And it's worth pausing here because there's a pattern that repeats itself throughout history right up to the present day. The people who preach collective sacrifice, they never practice it. Look at Gavin Newsom. He's made a career weaponizing DEI as a political cudgel. And he's a lily white Nepo baby whose every door was opened by the Getty family. He has never spent a day outside the bubble of inherited privilege and yet positions himself as the tribune of the oppressed. Or how about Zoran Mamdani, the self proclaimed socialist and current darling of the institutional left who calls for abolishing private property in America while sitting securely atop four acres of inherited ancestral land in Uganda. The latter is for dismantling, just not his ladder.
C
Hey, this is Mike Slater. I have a podcast called Politics by Faith. I would love for you to listen. We take the news of the day and we run it through the Bible what does the Bible have to say about this? Because there's nothing new under the sun. Read the headlines. Everything's all crazy. World's coming to an end. It's all in the Bible. And after every episode, hopefully you leave with a proper perspective and a biblical piece. Please join us wherever you listen to podcasts and we also have a YouTube page as well. YouTube.com politics by faith.
D
Hey, Bill O'Reilly here. Please check out my new interview series, We'll Do It Live. Each Thursday, I sit down with the most influential people in America. We're a no spin chat, no script. Anything could happen. You can find We'll do it live on Billorilly.com, youTube, or wherever you download your podcast.
B
Then you've got Hasan Piker, the left's new favorite communist influencer. And this guy drives a Porsche, he wears a Rolex, and he donned $5,000 Cartier sunglasses on his infamous trip to Communist Cuba. He lives in a multi million dollar mansion while telling his audience that capitalism is evil. I got one more. The leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement were caught embezzling donor funds to purchase large homes in Los Angeles's whitest, most expensive neighborhoods. Turns out the revolution comes with a pool. It's always the same. Socialism for the luxury. For me, I could go on and on. And the CIA understood this better than anyone. You don't need to defeat an idea. You just need to control the purse strings of the people who hold it. And that's exactly what Braden did, was organization by organization, union by union, keep them contained, keep them within approved boundaries. But when the Ramparts expose came out, you'd think the system would crumble, but it didn't. Because the next phase was already running. And it was something far more nefarious than a firewall. It was a counterfeit replacement. In 1966, one year before Ramparts, McGeorge Bundy became the president of the Ford foundation. He was JFK's National Security Advisor, LBJ's National Security Advisor, one of the principal architects of the Vietnam War. This is a guy who sat in the Situation Room and approved the escalation that killed 58,000Americans and millions of Vietnamese. So why would a man whose entire career revolved around geopolitical strategy and military escalation suddenly become a philanthropist with a specific focus on racial equality? Well, he was interested in social stability. And to the establishment, controlling those things are one and the same. In a 1966 Foreign affairs article, Bundy described America as being in the middle of a True social revolution at home. And he wasn't celebrating it. He was identifying a threat that required management at the level of national security. At that time, America was in turmoil. The militant black power movement was accomplishing something the establishment couldn't. Coalitions. The Black Panther Party's original program was not primarily about race at all. It was about class. They were running free breakfast programs, free health clinics, neighborhood patrols. They were building genuine community infrastructure that made the state look incompetent and the economic system look disposable. And they were doing it across racial lines. The BPP was building active coalitions with the young patriots who are poor white Appalachian kids in Chicago, with the young lords who were Puerto Rican organizers, with the American Indian movement and so on. Fred Hampton, the Chicago BPP chairman, called it the rainbow coalition. That's where that comes from, in case you didn't know. And he was explicit. The enemy was not white people. The enemy was the ruling class. And he's famous for the line, we don't fight racism with racism. We fight racism with solidarity. He was 21 years old, organizing poor white people on the south side of Chicago alongside poor black people on the west side. And he was telling anyone who would listen that they had the same enemy and the same landlord. And that's what got him. He killed the FBI assassinated Fred Hampton in his bed in December of 1969. Because a cross racial, cross class economic coalition can't be dismissed as racial grievance. It can't be contained with identity politics and it can't be managed by a diversity training program. It's everybody looking up at the same target. And that is the one thing that the 1% can't survive. Alright everybody, picture this. It's late at night, you're scrolling and bam. The perfect product hits your feet. You add to the cart, you shop a bit more, you head to checkout, but your wallet is across the room or even worse, in the car. I always leave my wallet in the car. I know. Then you spot it, that purple shop pay button. No digging for your card, no forgotten passwords, just one tap and you're done. It's a game changer in the chaos of online shopping. So guys, that is the power of Shopify for millions of businesses worldwide. And in fact, Shopify drives 10% of all US E commerce. From household names like Alaia Naturals and Kylie Cosmetics to small businesses just starting out like Ranch Rich Streetwear. So if you have a dream to build an online store, there is no better platform than Shopify. With hundreds of stunning Templates that match your brand. AI tools that write killer product descriptions, headlines and even enhance photos in seconds. Their tools let you market like a pro. Create emails and social campaigns that reach customers wherever they're scrolling. And best of all, you can handle inventory, payments, analytics and more in one intuitive dashboard. Basically, Shopify is your expert partner with 24. 7 award winning support. So see less carts go abandoned and more sales go with Shopify and their shop pay button. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com Jillian just go to shopify.com Jillian that's shopify.com Jillian J. Edgar Hoover called the Black Panthers free breakfast program, the greatest threat to internal security in America. Not guns, not protests, but a program that fed kids and built community trust across racial lines. Hoover understood, just as Bundy understood, that unity was the danger, not anger and malcontent horizontal solidarity was the real threat that Bundy was sent to manage. Not racism, not inequality, not even communism. The possibility that black anger and white working class anger might unite and realize they had the same enemy. So Bundy set out to replace the Rainbow Coalition with a professionally managed, foundation funded, grant dependent, substitute institutionalized activism operating entirely within elite approved boundaries. A decoy designed to absorb the energy and the moral urgency of a genuine populist revolt and permanently redirected away from the people holding the power. And he announced the mission publicly before the National Urban League in August of 1966. And he said, we believe that full equality for all American Negroes is now the most urgent domestic concern of this country. So what posed as justice appears to be an elaborate bait and switch. The Ford foundation under Bundy didn't just fund activists, it built a system that activists became dependent on. The foundation poured money into thousands of nonprofits and community organizations across urban America. And on the surface it looked super duper generous. But in reality, it transformed grassroots organizers into grant writers and administrators whose survival depended less on their community's approval than on the approval of foundation program officers in Manhattan boardrooms. And that changed everything. A revolutionary that's accountable to her community is dangerous. A revolutionary that's accountable to her funder is manageable. And here's what that swap actually cost us. This is not an argument against capitalism. It's an argument against the corruption of it. This apparatus wasn't only pointed at communists. It was pointed at anyone, left or right, who threatened concentrated economic power, free markets, fair competition, equal opportunity under the law. That's what the Rainbow Coalition was actually fighting for. Against monopoly power, against regulatory capture, against Wealthy interests writing the rules that governed their own wealth. A genuine cross racial working class movement organized around economic fairness that would have threatened exactly what the establishment did not want. And that is precisely why it had to go. Bundy replaced that movement with one that incentivized Americans to fight each other. Instead, careers, prestige, grants, media attention and institutional power flowed to activists who kept the focus on representation, inclusion and integration into the existing apparatus of power. The activists who kept the focus on solidarity, economic fairness and corporate accountability were isolated, defunded, pushed to the margins, and in the case of Fred Hampton, the quite literally murdered. But the Ford foundation alone, well, they weren't going to be enough to make the pacification permanent. You've got to go upstream, got to capture the institutions that produce the next generation of leaders. And that was Carnegie's assignment. And their weapon was the credential. So they built the pipeline of lawyers who would take foundation approved arguments into courtrooms and, and turned them into binding legal precedent. They funded the Earl Warren Legal Training Program through the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. They joined Ford and Rockefeller in funding civil rights litigation. And on its face, training black lawyers and funding civil rights litigation sounds like awesome progress, right? And for the individuals involved, it may well have been. But if you look at what it produced at the institutional level, questionable. They didn't fund lawyers who would challenge the ownership of wealth. They didn't fund lawyers who would prosecute wage theft, bus monopolies, dismantle the financial architecture. They kept entire communities poor. They funded lawyers who would argue about representation, inclusion, who gets a seat at the table, but never who owns the table. The legal framework that Carnegie built made corporations accountable for who sits in the boardroom and left them completely unaccountable for whether the people in the mailroom could pay their rent. It made the color of the face at the top of the hierarchy a matter of law and left the existence of the hierarchy itself completely untouched. You can sue your employer for not having enough diversity officers, but you can't sue them for suppressing your wages or buying your congressman crazy. Then came the Commission on Higher Education. Carnegie established it in the 1960s to answer a question that sounded academic but was anything but. What is a university for? Their answer fundamentally redefined American higher education from learning to social transformation. If you control who gets the degree, if you determine who receives the certification, the title, the institutional stamp of approval, you, you control who enters the elite class. And if you shape what those degrees require and what those programs teach and what values the curriculum embeds, you mold the thoughts the feelings and the beliefs of the next generation of leaders. The students trained in Carnegie funded universities became the professors. The activists funded by Ford grants became the executives. The HR directors, the foundation officers, the federal regulators. The lawyers trained through Carnegie's legal programs became the judges and the compliance architects. The ideology didn't need to be imposed anymore. It was the inside. It was self reproducing. The machine learned to run itself and the final piece came together when Rockefeller built the corporate template, the model that would scale this entire operation into every workplace in America. Privilege frameworks, sensitivity training and identity hierarchies increasingly taught workers to interpret inequality primarily through their relationship with one another, not through their shared relationship to concentrated wealth and institutional power. Because this was the real danger that the establishment understood Black workers and white workers recognizing their common economic interests and at the same time organizing together around wages, housing, labor rights, monopolies and corporate power, looking up at the same target instead of looking sideways at each other. That kind of cross racial working class solidarity is what terrified power structures from the very beginning. Now streaming podcasts on Fox 1. Because sometimes the headline is not enough. Fox 1 brings you on demand video podcasts that dive deeper into what's happening, getting you closer to the voices shaping the conversation across news, politics and culture. And get this Keeping It Real is Now streaming on Fox 1. And that means that you can watch my show alongside other podcasts like Hang out with Sean Hannity, the Riley Gaines show, and Will Kane country all in one place. From the stories leading the day to hot takes and exclusive interviews, you're gonna hear from some of the boldest voices around. And the best part is that you can watch or listen on your schedule whenever it works for you. Stream podcasts on FOX one anywhere, anytime on your favorite devices. Sign up today@fox.com so the conflict was redirected, not eliminated. The anger stayed alive, but the direction changed. Instead of confronting legitimate grievances like stagnant wages and de industrialization and wealth concentration and corporate extraction, workers were increasingly encouraged to police one another's language, police their privilege, their bias and their identity. Interpersonal moral conflicts were ignited between people who should have been natural allies. And once people were conditioned to see each other as the problem, the system provided endless processes to manage that conflict. Instead of organizing together against the boss, employees sit through mandatory trainings examining their relationships with each other. Instead of demanding ownership, profit sharing or structural reform, they get diversity committees and HR compliance structures. Collective economic leverage is replaced with individual identity management. The grievance becomes bureaucratized. The anger becomes administered, but the underlying power structure remains untouched. The ownership stays the same, the wages stay the same, the concentration of wealth stays the same. Take a look at this. In practice, diversity training doesn't threaten Pfizer's pricing power. Equity audits don't break up monopolies. It's the perfect substitute for accountability. What you fund when you want to appear to care about inequality while doing absolutely nothing to dismantle the architecture that produces it. Pharma funds DEI training while lobbying against drug price capsules, big tech trumpets, gender equity initiatives while crushing union drives. The same foundations that built the architecture of managed dissent now fund the apparatus that ensures the dissent stays managed. The goal was always the same. Guys own the dissent, fund it, credential it, institutionalize it, make it dependent, and then point it forever at targets that don't threaten. Financial and geopolitical architecture of power Everyday Americans, your neighbors, your friends, your co workers and even your family. So in summation, here are my closing thoughts. This is a tale as old as time. Divide, Conquer. I remember when I read People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn, and he described how colonial elites became terrified when poor white indentured servants and black slaves began finding common ground against the wealthy, landowning class. Events like Bacon's Rebellion exposed the danger of a unified underclass aimed upward instead of sideways. And what followed wasn't equality, it was division, because colonial elites increasingly hardened racial categories and they offered poor whites limited social advantages and status above enslaved blacks. The poor white worker now had something the black worker didn't, and that small difference in status gave him a reason to protect the system rather than fight it. And it made the black slaves resent their former white counterparts. A divided working class is easier to control than a united one. It always has been. That's the pattern. Those in power convince ordinary people that the greatest threat to their lives is the person standing beside them, not the structures above them profiting from the labor of both. When the Black Panther Party said fight the power, they didn't mean your neighbor. They didn't mean the guy drowning in debt, working two jobs, angry, isolated and manipulated by the same machine as you. They meant the systems extracting from all of you simultaneously while making sure you blamed each other. The trap is simple. I'll say it one more time. Keep the working class emotionally exhausted, culturally fractured and permanently distracted, and the concentration of power above them proceeds without interference. The anger in this country is justified. The question is whether we are mature enough to stop letting it be weaponized against us. Because if ordinary Americans ever truly rediscover solidarity not performative activism, not corporate slogans, not bureaucratic theater, but real solidarity rooted in shared economic survival, the entire equation changes. And that's how we win. As always, guys, thank you so much for watching. If you're enjoying the show, please be sure to, like, share, comment, and subscribe. It helps us a ton with the algorithm and and make sure to turn in to Friday's weekly rundown. Until then, take good care of yourselves. Thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed the podcast, please, like, comment, subscribe, and share. And make sure to let me know what guests you want to see on in the future.
Keeping It Real: Conversations with Jillian Michaels
Episode: DEI’S HIDDEN HISTORY – THE STORY YOU WERE NEVER SUPPOSED TO KNOW
Host: Jillian Michaels
Date: May 13, 2026
In this thought-provoking episode, Jillian Michaels delves into the untold history behind modern Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Michaels presents a controversial yet deeply researched narrative: that the architecture of DEI is not a purely grassroots or moral awakening but was systematically constructed, primarily as a tool by powerful American elites, intelligence agencies, and major foundations. The purpose, she argues, was to defuse genuine economic unity and redirect societal anger away from the ruling class, ensuring that dissent was not only sanctioned but also managed and rendered harmless to those in power.
Jillian uses historical documentation, Senate reports, and declassified CIA documents to make her case, weaving a story that implicates the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations, as well as key government and intelligence figures in the development and propagation of DEI frameworks.
The CIA’s Frank Wisner and his “Mighty Wurlitzer” network, designed to covertly shape public opinion through seemingly independent organizations.
The CIA cultivated the “non-communist left,” creating a managed, ‘housebroken’ left that would not threaten the status quo.
Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations acted as conduits for CIA money, enabling ideological influence under the guise of philanthropy.
Quote:
“The men running the government and the intelligence agencies are the same men that were running Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie… In their minds, the exact same project, just with different letterheads.” [06:04]
The state historically reacts to cross-class, cross-race unity by sowing division—referencing examples from colonial America to modern times.
Example: The original Black Panther Party's Rainbow Coalition with poor white and Latino groups was perceived as dangerous and led to violent suppression.
The Ford Foundation, under leaders like McGeorge Bundy, replaced such radical grassroots movements with a managed, grant-dependent, institutionalized activism focused on representation rather than structural change.
Grassroots activists became grant writers and administrators, reliant on institutional approval:
The legal and academic landscape was shaped not to challenge economic power, but to focus on diversity and representation within existing structures:
Rockefeller’s role in developing the corporate DEI template and spreading identity-based frameworks through HR departments is highlighted as a modern extension of these Cold War tactics.
Michaels argues that modern DEI encourages workers to focus on interpersonal issues (privilege, microaggressions, etc.) instead of organizing together against economic injustice:
Corporate DEI is described as providing a veneer of justice without addressing wealth concentration or corporate power:
“What if the architecture of modern DEI is a psyop envisioned and established by our intelligence agencies… with one specific purpose. To make sure that when Americans get angry, they aim at each other instead of aiming at the people running the machine?”
– Jillian Michaels [00:17]
On foundation-government overlap:
“These men do not navigate a conflict of interest because the foundations and the agency were in their minds the exact same project, just with different letterheads.” [06:21]
On the shift from economic to identity paradigms:
“The legal framework that Carnegie built made corporations accountable for who sits in the boardroom and left them completely unaccountable for whether the people in the mailroom could pay their rent.” [31:08]
On the dangers of real unity:
“J. Edgar Hoover called the Black Panthers’ free breakfast program the greatest threat to internal security in America… Not guns, not protests, but a program that fed kids and built community trust across racial lines.” [23:19]
On the true cost of the swap:
“Revolutionaries didn’t get censored, they got ignored. And in that world, being ignored was worse than being wrong.” [09:48]
On modern implications:
“The activists who kept the focus on solidarity, economic fairness… were isolated, defunded, pushed to the margins, and in the case of Fred Hampton, quite literally murdered.” [28:41]
Michaels adopts a bold, investigative, and somewhat urgent tone, weaving together rigorous historical analysis, institutional critique, and a call for authentic solidarity. She resolutely challenges mainstream narratives, openly names elite figures and organizations, and supports her claims with historical documentation rather than conjecture. The style is direct, fearless, and at times provocative—encouraging listeners to critically reconsider the origins and outcomes of DEI in American society.
Michaels’ episode is a rigorous, critical journey through the real origins and evolution of DEI. She charges that the system, far from empowering the marginalized, was designed to divide and distract, ultimately derailing genuine economic and social unity. Her call to action is for Americans to recognize this pattern, reject managed dissent, and pursue true solidarity—across class and identity lines—as the only path toward systemic change.