Scientific fraud revealed. Progressives hardest hit.

If power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, the same can be said about progressivism. The best example of this found in academia where the humanities and social sciences have been so adulterated by the deceit and stupidity of left wing academics that they have become a drag on civilization.  Usually this bastardization of learning takes place with the full acquiescence of people who know better but on occasion one of these frauds and poseurs is actually nailed.

A study purporting to show that people’s views on gay marriage could change simply by meeting gay people has been retracted following revelations that its data was fabricated.

The study was published last December in Science, and prior to publication drew a great deal of attention from the American media. Vox, for instance, described the findings in the study as “kind of miraculous.” As it turns out, that’s exactly what they were, because they were apparently made up.

According to the study, people from communities hostile to gay marriage could have their opinions shift dramatically after spending just a few minutes speaking with a gay person who canvassed their neighborhood promoting gay marriage. Not only that, but this could have a spillover effect, making not just the people themselves more pro-gay but also other people who lived in the same household.

The study, among other things, lent support to the notion that those opposed to gay marriage simply don’t know or interact with open homosexuals. More broadly, it was seen as an important development in the science of how people can be convinced to change their minds on ideologically-charged issues.

Ummmm… not so much

In what can only be described as a remarkable and swift series of events, one of the authors of a much-ballyhooed Science paper claiming that short conversations could change people’s minds on same-sex marriage is retracting it following revelations that the data were faked by his co-author.

The author is a guy named Michael LaCour, a grad student and budding propagandist at UCLA and slated for bigger things:

According to his website, LaCour will become an assistant professor at Princeton University in July. [Update: As of 8 a.m. Eastern on 5/20/15, that mention had been removed from his site, but it is still available on theGoogle cache version.] We’ve contacted him for comment, and will update with anything we learn.

LaCour, like OJ, is still searching for the real killer:

The real beauty of this bit of academic fraud is that while anyone who knows “people” would instantly laugh at it, the left believes its own bullsh** if you throw in an equation or two and maybe a graph that isn’t too hard to read so it has that “sciency” feel. The results can be hilarious. Let’s go back to October 8, 2014, when Planned Parenthood adopted this tactic:

Smarting from defeats in state legislatures across the nation and seeing the public support for infanticide slipping, Planned Parenthood has come up with a great idea. They will send door-to-door canvassers to convince people that abortion is a good thing. What makes this canvass different from any previous efforts is that the canvassers will be women who have had abortions.

The workshops training these Willie Loman’s of Infanticide was overseen by Michael LaCour. There is a certain rich irony when one contemplates a room full of abortion activists being gaslighted by a fellow leftist into making epic asses of themselves while engaging in research fraud.  In fact, he used the results of this goat-rope as a springboard for another paper. From his CV:

And on the positive side of the ledger, anything that entertains college-age leftists and spends their money does have a positive social impact for the rest of America.

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