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Data scientist fired from Reuters for questioning BLM

The Reuters Thompson media conglomerate has just fired a superlatively qualified data scientist for refusing to submit to having his thoughts reprogrammed by the company's diversity and inclusion bureaucracy. His crime? Suggesting that BLM demands like defunding the police would wreak havoc on black communities.

It never ends, does it, Antonio Gramsci's "long march through the institutions", that has succeeded so comprehensively that it has even penetrated the corporate behemoths that the old Left vowed to tame, or nationalize.

As with the James Damore case, the young software engineer fired for querying the companies gender equity policies in an internal communication, Zac Kriegman is a data scientist, indeed the director of the Data Science division, specializing in machine learning, artificial intelligence and software engineering.

He made the mistake of bringing his formidable data analysis skills to critique the Black Lives Matter movement, arguing BLM's demands and activism were damaging black lives, and posted his views in an internal corporate communication. For this high crime he was referred to the DEI bureaucracy for correction. For failing to take up this wonderful opportunity he was fired.

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Zac Kriegman had the ideal résumé for the professional-managerial class: a bachelors in economics from Michigan and a J.D. from Harvard and years of experience with high-tech startups, a white-shoe law firm, and an econometrics research consultancy. He then spent six years at Thomson Reuters Corporation, the international media conglomerate, spearheading the company’s efforts on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced software engineering. By the beginning of 2020, Kriegman had assumed the title of Director of Data Science and was leading a team tasked with implementing deep learning throughout the organization.

But within a few months, this would all collapse. A chain of events—beginning with the death of George Floyd and culminating with a statistical analysis of Black Lives Matter’s claims—would turn the 44-year-old data scientist’s life upside-down. By June 2020, as riots raged across the country, Kriegman would be locked out of Reuters’s servers, denounced by his colleagues, and fired by email. Kriegman had committed an unpardonable offense: he directly criticized the Black Lives Matter movement in the company’s internal communications forum, debunked Reuters’s own biased reporting, and violated a corporate taboo. Driven by what he called a “moral obligation” to speak out, Kriegman refused to celebrate unquestioningly the BLM narrative and his company’s “diversity and inclusion” programming; to the contrary, he argued that Reuters was exhibiting significant left-wing bias in the newsroom and that the ongoing BLM protests, riots, and calls to “defund the police” would wreak havoc on minority communities. Week after week, Kriegman felt increasingly disillusioned by the Thomson Reuters line. Finally, on the first Tuesday in May 2021, he posted a long, data-intensive critique of BLM’s and his company’s hypocrisy. He was sent to Human Resources and Diversity & Inclusion for the chance to reform his thoughts.

He refused—so they fired him.

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