The Journal Science Retracts Homosexual Marriage Paper After Lead Author Accused of Falsifying Data

This is the best thing to happen to the political science discipline in a long time. I mean, actual scholarly integrity appears to be taking a priority over favored ideological findings that have now been roundly attacked as faked.

Lying and bullying to push homosexual marriage has never been a problem for the left. But turns out making political science look bad is bad. What folks mustn't forget is that this scandal reflects even more harshly on the homosexual rights movement. Here's one instance where radical leftist fraud ain't getting a pass. Too much is at stake for political scientists and their media shills to let it go. Perhaps leftists see homosexual marriage as a sure thing now, in any case, and are willing to throw this dude Michael LaCour under the bus. Either way, homosexual marriage politics is getting to be like "climate change": it's a scam in which leftists hoodwink the people only to see a rational backlash in public opinion reverse the left's purported gains. It's going to be a major setback if the Supreme Court rules against the depraved leftists in Obergefell v. Hodges next month.

Either way, all traces of LaCour, a grad student at UCLA, have been removed from the Political Science Department's homepage, and the journal Science has formally retracted the research.

The Los Angeles Times has a great report, "Gay marriage canvassing success detailed, dashed as study's findings are doubted":

I am embarrassed (seriously) at how excited I am to see LaCour's "defense" tomorrow. Does this mean I'm a bad person?

— Michael Munger (@mungowitz) May 29, 2015

Laura Gardiner knew she was making a difference with her work.

As national mentoring coordinator at the Los Angeles LGBT Center's Leadership Lab, she and her colleagues had toiled to train 1,000 volunteers who had fanned out across Los Angeles and beyond, lobbying voters in precincts that had cast ballots against gay rights.

The idea was to push back against prejudice, house by house — and over the years, the group's internal evaluations indicated, the Leadership Lab had gotten quite good at changing voter minds.

When an independent study published in the prestigious journal Science confirmed the group's success, Gardiner had been thrilled.

Then, last week, a report was issued raising significant doubts about the study's validity.

“It felt like being cheated on in a relationship,” she said Thursday after the journal issued a formal retraction. “Breakup songs have been cathartic this week.”

The study had excited readers well beyond Gardiner's circle for its surprising conclusion that a single doorstep chat could prompt a skeptic to embrace marriage equality. It even reported a “spillover” effect that extended to household members who didn't talk to canvassers.

Although the findings contradicted a body of research that said firmly held opinions weren't easily swayed by lobbying and political advertising, they seemed to confirm an idea people were happy to embrace — that honest conversation and open minds could bring people together.

The study made headlines across the country and was featured on the public radio program “This American Life.” Its primary author, UCLA graduate student Michael LaCour, scored a job offer from Princeton University.

As LaCour prepared to decamp for New Jersey, he handed off the study to a team at Stanford and UC Berkeley.

That's how things began to unravel.

The new researchers were the first to suspect that something wasn't quite right with LaCour's data. They produced a report that persuaded LaCour's coauthor, Columbia University political scientist Donald Green, to request a retraction last week.

The editors of Science agreed, citing three reasons for retracting the study. They said LaCour lied about the way he recruited participants for his study and did not pay volunteers to complete online surveys, as he had claimed. They also said he lied about receiving research funding from the Williams Institute, the Ford Foundation and the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund. LaCour's attorney has acknowledged both of these deceptions.

Perhaps most significantly, the editors said, “LaCour has not produced the original survey data from which someone else could independently confirm the validity of the reported findings.”

LaCour still maintains that his study is sound. He said he has been preparing a “definitive response” to his critics, which he plans to provide Friday.

“I appreciate your patience, as I gather evidence and relevant information,” he said Thursday in an email to The Times....

The study results purported to show that after speaking with canvassers, people were more  inclined to support same-sex marriage, an increase from 39% to 47%. One year later, support for gay marriage was 14 percentage points higher among people who were lobbied by a gay person and 3 percentage points higher among those who were canvassed by a straight person, the study said.

With LaCour wrapping things up at UCLA, the LGBT Center brought on David Broockman, a professor of political economy at Stanford, and Joshua Kalla, a political science graduate student at UC Berkeley, to carry on the research.

But as they made plans to track a forthcoming canvassing project the Leadership Lab is undertaking in Miami, they started noticing problems with the work. For instance, as they began their own pilot survey, they noticed that their response rate was “notably lower” than LaCour's.

When they sought additional advice from the survey firm that LaCour had reportedly employed, they quickly realized something was amiss.

“The survey firm claimed they had no familiarity with the project and that they had never had an employee with the name of the staffer we were asking for,” the researchers wrote. “The firm also denied having the capabilities to perform many aspects of the recruitment procedures described.”

Alarmed, Broockman and Kalla turned a skeptical eye toward LaCour's data and began investigating further with the help of Yale political scientist Peter Aronow. They soon realized that some of the paper's key data were identical to that of a different national survey conducted in 2012: the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project. That discovery raised “suspicions that the data might have been lifted from CCAP,” the researchers wrote.

The researchers compiled their findings in a 26-page report and sent it to Green. When confronted with the findings, Green immediately sent a letter to Science requesting that the paper be retracted.

“I am deeply embarrassed by this turn of events and apologize to the editors, reviewers, and readers of Science,” Green wrote.

Also at BuzzFeed, "UCLA Student at Center of Science Scandal Apparently Faked Another Study, About Media Bias," and at New York Magazine, "Michael LaCour Made Up a Teaching Award, Too."

Still more at the New Republic, "Science Fiction: Michael LaCour's Gay Rights Canvassing Hoax Shows the Limits of Peer Review."

And see Tim Groseclose especially, at Richochet, "A Scandal in Political Science":

I predict that UCLA will refuse to award him a PhD, and I predict that Princeton will retract the assistant professorship that it offered him. I predict that UCLA or Princeton or both will conduct an investigation. I suspect that they will find that LaCour faked results in a few papers, not just one.

Also noteworthy is that co-author Donald Philip Green, a major political science scholar and professor at Columbia University, cut ties with LaCour so fast it's like you don't know what hit you. And Professor Lynn Vavreck of UCLA, who is LaCour's dissertation chair, has also thrown the dude under the bus faster than you can say the "science is settled."

Expect updates tomorrow when this flaming fraud LaCour comes clean on his deceit.

Michael LaCour, 'Gay Canvassers' Fabulist, Responds to Attacks on Retracted Homosexual Marriage Study

Stick a fork in him, this dude's cooked.

Michael LaCour, the embattled UCLA political science graduate student, has released his long-awaited response to the incendiary controversy surrounding his retracted research paper, published at Science, "When Contact Changes Minds: An Experiment on Transmission of Support for Gay Equality."

If you're now just getting up to speed on this, see my previous entries, "'In a couple weeks I'm betting there's going to have to be a shakeup at UCLA...'," and "The Journal Science Retracts Homosexual Marriage Paper After Lead Author Accused of Falsifying Data."

LaCour's response is here, "Response to Irregularities in LaCour and Green (2014)." Also at Political Science Rumors, "Michael J. LaCour - Response to Irregularities in LaCour and Green (pdf)."

As I continue to learn more about this controversy, I'm increasingly convinced of one thing: LaCour needs to own up to his responsibility, tell the truth, and move on while he still has a (sliver of a) chance to salvage his life.

His main argument at the response is that the research data was sound, but that his methods were flawed. One problem, however, is that no one can review his data, because he deleted the entire data set that was the basis for the study. LaCour claims that he was required to delete his data in order to protect the privacy rights of the survey participants, and that he was required to do so by UCLA's North General Institutional Review Board (NGIRB) of the university's Office of the Human Research Protection Program (here and here). But the NGIRB indicates that LaCour conducted all of his research prior to ever contacting the Review Board, and thus without official pre-clearance, LaCour "was in violation of University policy." Also noted by the Review Board:

The NGIRB notes that your paper in the December 12, 2014 edition of Science indicated that the research had UCLA approval. The NGIRB recommends that you notify Science that the research was not reviewed by the UCLA IRB. [Bold in the original.]

LaCour wasn't required of anything by the NGIRB, because the university washed its hands of the matter. They cut the dude loose. Threw him under the bus. Whatever you wanna call it. His claim that he had to delete his files is belied by the facts.

In any case, LaCour's critics David Broockman, Josh Kalla, and Peter Aronow stand by their original rebuttal of the study, and they've rejected LaCour's attempt to respond to the allegations:

BKA's statement on "Response to Irregularities in LaCour and Green (2014)" cc @dbroockman pic.twitter.com/IbZ7c0SXNK

— Josh Kalla (@j_kalla) May 30, 2015

The New York Times has more, "Study Using Gay Canvassers Erred in Methods, Not Results, Author Says":

I suspect this is what the LaCour story will eventually come down to: http://t.co/LztMWk6HTa pic.twitter.com/PVHYvFTvmj

— Laura Seay (@texasinafrica) May 30, 2015

Need to repeat again, LaCour claiming he deleted data at IRB behest while posting letter showing study not approved! https://t.co/kVYT0rjTL8

— femonomics (@femonomics) May 30, 2015

Seriously, I'm done with this story until I know a survey firm that admits to doing the interviewing and someone who admits to paying for it

— Jonathan Ladd (@jonmladd) May 30, 2015

"Mr. LaCour said he lied about the funding of his study to give it more credibility." http://t.co/xQnwGq1i8u

— Daniel Drezner (@dandrezner) May 30, 2015

This is just sad - lies upon lies at this point from LaCour. How much longer until UCLA strips his PhD? http://t.co/Hpy0dNbuTB

— Edward Miguel (@tedmiguel) May 30, 2015

.@UCLaCour meets self-imposed deadline to answer faked-data claim and includes fighting words https://t.co/MTjrTOB4Ws pic.twitter.com/220xOHhxww

— Carl Bialik (@CarlBialik) May 30, 2015

The graduate student at the center of a scandal over a newly retracted study that has shaken trust in the conduct of social science apologized for lying about aspects of the study, including who paid for it and its methodology, but he said Friday in his first interview that he stands by its finding that gay canvassers can influence voters’ attitudes on same-sex marriage.

The student, Michael J. LaCour, a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the attack on his study — which was retracted Thursday by the journal Science — amounted to an academic ambush. “It’s completely unprecedented in the way it was done,” he said, referring to an account of the case posted by two colleagues last week, questioning his work. “They never contacted me directly, there was no transparency, and as a grad student I don’t have the same protection as a professor.”

Mr. LaCour disputes one of the main charges against him: that he improperly erased his raw data. That was one of the charges that led his co-author, Donald P. Green, a widely respected political scientist at Columbia University, to ask the journal to retract the study last week. The destruction of the data was not improper, he said, but in fact was required by U.C.L.A.’s institutional guidelines to protect study participants.

“At the end of the day, I was the one responsible for the raw data, and if something were to happen and reporters tracked people down, that’s a lawsuit,” he said.

But a researcher familiar with U.C.L.A. guidelines, but who declined to identified by name because of the continuing investigation of the case at the university, said the language in the guidelines requires only that researchers erase “unique identifiers” and not the entire data set.

Mr. LaCour said he lied about the funding of his study to give it more credibility. He said that some of his colleagues had doubted his work because they thought he did not have enough money to pay for a such a complex study, among them David Broockman, a political scientist at Stanford and one of the authors of a critique of his work published last week. Mr. LaCour said he thought the funding sources he claimed would shore up the plausibility of the work. “I messed up in that sense, and it could be my downfall,” he said.

Three funding sources that Mr. LaCour listed as providing support for his published paper denied on Thursday that they had done so. The Ford Foundation, the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund and the Williams Institute at U.C.L.A. said they had not given Mr. LaCour any money. But the Haas Jr. Fund had provided money to the group that Mr. LaCour was working with, the Los Angeles LGBT Center, and the graduate student had applied for and received a grant from the Williams Institute, but it came too late to help with the study, he said.

“The Ford Foundation grant did not exist,” Mr. LaCour wrote in a public timeline posted late on Friday.

One of the most damning facts in the critical review of Mr. LaCour’s work was that the survey company he told the Los Angeles LGBT Center he was working with did not have any knowledge of his project. He now says that, in fact, he did not end up using that survey company but another one.

In an earlier interview, Dr. Green of Columbia said he had asked Mr. LaCour repeatedly to store his raw data in a databank at the University of Michigan. Asked about that, Mr. LaCour said he had not been sure whether Dr. Green was referring to the analyzed, “clean” data, or the raw material, which included names, addresses and phone numbers. “Again, I was under strict guidelines to protect identities, and it’s not that commonplace to ask for that data,” he said.

More.

I suspect the lawsuits LaCour alludes to are far from a distant possibility. Indeed, as you can see from the embedded tweets above, it looks like the Los Angeles LGBT Center may be gearing up for litigation already.

Expect updates. Meanwhile ICYMI, from Maria Konnikova, at the New Yorker, "How a Gay-Marriage Study Went Wrong."

'In a couple weeks I'm betting there's going to have to be a shakeup at UCLA...'

The quote's from commenter Pansy, at the Political Science Rumors comment-board thread, "Lynn Vavreck is skating on this one huh?"

Vavreck is a professor of political science and communication studies at UCLA, and most notoriously, she's the dissertation adviser to disgraced UCLA graduate student Michael LaCour, the homosexual marriage researcher who fabricated data to claim that face-to-face communications ("canvassing") by gay activists can change the opinions of opponents of homosexual marriage. Lacour and Donald Philip Green's Science article based on this research has been retracted. My earlier post is here, "The Journal Science Retracts Homosexual Marriage Paper After Lead Author Accused of Falsifying Data."

Yes, this is getting to be a massive scandal, and I'm interested to see what shakes out at UCLA. Word is that LaCour's the ultimate conman, obviously since (major scholar) Donald Philip Green at Columbia was so easily hoodwinked by this bogus research. And despite the harsh slams against Vavreck at Political Science Rumors, she's written letters of recommendation for applicants to job positions in my department at LBCC, and I can't remember anyone who's written more comprehensive and effective recommendations. She's not lazy, that's for sure.

In any case, I think she should face discipline for her lapses as an adviser, particularly in that she's brought enormous shame to her department and UCLA as a whole.

Meanwhile, LaCour was supposed to be out with a major "defense" of his research today, but there's been no word yet. No doubt it's taking him a lot longer than he expected to "gather" the evidence needed to make the case.

More from Jesse Singal, at New York Magazine (where I found the reference to Political Science Rumors), "The Case of the Amazing Gay-Marriage Data: How a Graduate Student Reluctantly Uncovered a Huge Scientific Fraud":

How to get published: Fake your research to make people look better than they are. http://t.co/uPPymJLPZ2

— Tim Beidel (@tjb1013) May 29, 2015

Don't worry Michael LaCour - there's always a place for you at @RollingStone ! http://t.co/WPs9edxnHi pic.twitter.com/Fuq2c9lQ2N

— Jim Hughes (@TheJimHughes) May 28, 2015

How David Broockman reluctantly uncovered the Michael Lacour fraud. Great story by @jessesingal http://t.co/gB09F4Mija

— Kevin Davies (@KevinADavies) May 29, 2015

Last week, [David] Broockman, along with his friend and fellow UC Berkeley graduate student Josh Kalla and Yale University political scientist Peter Aronow, released an explosive 27-page report recounting many “irregularities” in LaCour and Green’s paper. “Irregularities” is diplomatic phrasing; what the trio found was that there’s no evidence LaCour ever actually collaborated with uSamp, the survey firm he claimed to have worked with to produce his data, and that he most likely didn’t commission any surveys whatsoever. Instead, he took a pre-existing dataset, pawned it off as his own, and faked the persuasion “effects” of the canvassing. It’s the sort of brazen data fraud you just don’t see that often, especially in a journal like Science. Green quickly fired off an email to the journal asking for a retraction; Science granted that wish yesterday, albeit without LaCour’s consent. And while there’s no word out of central New Jersey just yet, there’s a good chance, once the legal dust settles, that Princeton University will figure out a way to rescind the job offer it extended to LaCour, who was supposed to start in July. (Princeton offered no comment other than an emailed statement: “We will review all available information and determine the next steps.”) LaCour, for his part, has lawyered up and isn’t talking to the media, although he was caught attempting to cover up faked elements of his curriculum vitae earlier this week. His website claims that he will “supply a definitive response” by the end of the day today.

But even before Broockman, Kalla, and Aronow published their report, LaCour’s results were so impressive that, on their face, they didn’t make sense. Jon Krosnick, a Stanford social psychologist who focuses on attitude change and also works on issues of scientific transparency, says that he hadn’t heard about the study until he was contacted by a This American Life producer who described the results to him over the phone. “Gee,” he replied, “that's very surprising and doesn't fit with a huge literature of evidence. It doesn't sound plausible to me.” A few clicks later, Krosnick had pulled up the paper on his computer. “Ah,” he told the producer, “I see Don Green is an author. I trust him completely, so I'm no longer doubtful.” (Some people I spoke to about this case argued that Green, whose name is, after all, on the paper, had failed in his supervisory role. I emailed him to ask whether he thought this was a fair assessment. “Entirely fair,” he responded. “I am deeply embarrassed that I did not suspect and discover the fabrication of the survey data and grateful to the team of researchers who brought it to my attention.” He declined to comment further for this story.)

*****

The first thing Broockman did, back in December of 2013, was get frustrated at his inability to run a survey like LaCour’s. On the 9th, Broockman decided to call uSamp (since renamed). This was when the first of those near-misses occurred — a year and a half later, a similar conversation would help bust the entire scandal wide open. But the first time he called uSamp, Broockman trod carefully, because he thought LaCour was still working with the company. “As far as I’m concerned, he still has an ongoing relationship with this company, and is still gathering data with them,” he explains, “and I didn’t want to upset the apple cart of whatever, and so I don’t recall in any way mentioning him. I just said, ‘I’ve heard you can do this kind of work. Can you do this kind of work for me?’”

The salesperson he spoke with, Broockman explains, said that they weren’t sure the firm could complete this kind of survey, but seemed under-informed and slightly incompetent. “And so I just kind of gave up, because I wasn’t on a witch hunt,” says Broockman. “I was just trying to get a study done.” Had Broockman mentioned LaCour by name or pressed for more details, he would realize later, LaCour’s lack of any real connection to the company might have revealed itself right away.

Things didn’t get any easier when Broockman sent his RFP out to dozens of other survey companies the next day. “We are seeking quotes for a large study we are planning that will necessitate enrolling approximately 10,000 new individuals in a custom internet or phone panel,” it started. The responses indicated that these companies had very little ability to pull off a study on the scale of LaCour’s. Broockman says he “found that pretty weird, because apparently uSamp had managed this in like a day.” “Some small part of my head thought, ‘I wonder if it was fake,’” says Broockman. “But most of me thought, ‘I guess I'll have to wait until Mike is willing to reveal what the magic was.’”

Broockman would also have to wait since, like most academics, he was constantly juggling a thousand different projects. During most of 2014, he was working on the question of how constituents react to communication from their lawmakers, a critique of a prominent statistical method, and research into how polarization affects political representation. As an undergrad, Broockman had done some work with Joshua Kalla, a Pittsburgh native who was a couple years below him — Kalla had been a research assistant on a study about housing discrimination Broockman worked on with Green. As Kalla started looking at grad schools, Broockman aggressively lobbied him to come out West.

These efforts were successful, and once Kalla arrived on campus in the fall of 2014, Broockman’s approach to the LaCour research changed: Now, he thought, he had the teammate he needed to finally build on LaCour’s promising canvassing work. Broockman and Kalla have a strong natural chemistry as research partners. In one class at Berkeley, Kalla, who is straight, highlighted the many similarities between himself and Broockman, who is gay, with a nerdy statistics joke about “matching” — the idea of finding two very similar people in a data set to test what effects emerge when you apply a treatment to one but not the other. “If you exact match,” Kalla said, “you could use me and David to figure out the causal effects of being gay.” Canvassing was a natural subject for two young researchers interested in the dynamics of persuasion. “It turns out that even if you’re not interested in canvassing per se, canvassing is a great medium through which to test other theories of how to persuade people,” Broockman says. Whereas traditional experiments involving opinion change tend to entail certain methodological difficulties — are the anonymous survey-takers really paying attention to the questions? Is the sleepy undergrad actually listening to the prompt you’re reading them? — with canvassing, you can say with relative confidence that the subject of the experiment is actively engaging with whatever argument you’re testing.

The 2014 election also helped focus Broockman and Kalla’s research agenda. They were convinced canvassing worked — at least to a point — and that politicians weren’t capitalizing on this fact nearly enough. After the election, they co-authored a a November 2014 piece in Vox arguing as much. The pair wrote that “research has consistently found that authentic interpersonal exchanges usually have sizable impacts,” linking to a positive pre-election Bloomberg Politics cover story about LaCour and Green’s research.

“When we wrote that piece, all of a sudden we received a ton of inbound interest in doing more studies, both because people were persuaded by our point and because we kind of planted a flag in this,” says Broockman. “And so practitioners who were interested in this decided to come talk to us about it.” It was clearly a good time to hone in on canvassing. “That was the perfect storm for Now the time for this idea has come.”

This was also around the time Broockman first got hold of LaCour’s raw data (he’d read the Science paper when it was under review in late 2014). Certain irregularities quickly jumped out at him: The data was, in short, a bit too orderly given that it came from a big survey sample. In itself this didn’t constitute definitive proof that anything was amiss, but it definitely warranted further investigation. Whatever the excitement-suspicion ratio regarding LaCour’s findings had been in Broockman’s mind previously — maybe 90/10 when he first heard about the experiment — it was now closer to 50/50.

Broockman wasn’t sure what to do. He started to bring up his concerns with other friends and advisers (about a dozen of them), and they mostly told him one of two things: Either there was a reasonable explanation for the anomalies, in which case bringing attention to them would risk harming Green and especially the less established LaCour unnecessarily; or something really was fishy, in which case it still wouldn’t be in Broockman’s interest to risk being seen as challenging LaCour’s work. There was almost no encouragement for him to probe the hints of weirdness he’d uncovered. In fact, he quickly found himself nervous about openly discussing his reservations at all. “How much I said depended on how much I trust the person I was talking to and how inebriated I was at the time I had the conversation,” he explains.

On December 17, 2014, Broockman found himself a bit tipsy with someone he trusted: Neil Malhotra, a professor at Stanford’s business school. Broockman had just been offered a job there, and the two were dining at Oak and Rye, a pizza place in Los Gatos, partly so that Broockman could ask Malhotra for advice about the transition from grad school to the professional academic world. A few drinks in, Broockman shared his concerns about LaCour’s data. Malhotra recalled his response: “As someone in your early career stage, you don’t want to do this,” he told Broockman. “You don’t want to go public with this. Even if you have uncontroversial proof, you still shouldn’t do it. Because there’s just not much reward to someone doing this.” If Broockman thought there was wrongdoing behind the irregularities he’d discovered, Malhotra said, it would be a better bet for him to pass his concerns on to someone like Uri Simonsohn, a University of Pennsylvania researcher who already had established an identity as a debunker (eventually, Simonsohn gave Broockman some feedback on the data, but the exchange didn’t lead to any definitive findings).

This might seem like a strange, mafia-ish argument to a non-academic, but within the small world of political science — particularly within the even smaller world of younger, less job-secure political scientists — it makes sense for at least two reasons. The first is that the moment your name is associated with the questioning of someone else’s work, you could be in trouble. If the target is someone above you, like Green, you’re seen as envious, as shamelessly trying to take down a big name. If the target is someone at your level, you’re throwing elbows in an unseemly manner. In either case, you may end up having one of your papers reviewed by the target of your inquiries (or one of their friends) at some point — in theory, peer reviewers are “blinded” to the identity of the author or authors of a paper they’re reviewing, but between earlier versions of papers floating around the internet and the fact that everyone knows what everyone else is working on, the reality is quite different. Moreover, the very few plum jobs and big grants don’t go to people who investigate other researchers’ work — they go to those who stake out their own research areas.

So Broockman decided he needed a way to get feedback on his suspicions without leaving a trace. He’d recently learned about a strange anonymous message board called poliscirumors.com, or PSR. “I believe I first learned about the board when I received a Google Alert with a page that had my last name on it, which proposed marriage to me,” he says. “So naturally that was a link that I clicked.”

Three different people independently described PSR to me as a “cesspool.” No one knows exactly who the site’s primary denizens are, because hardly anyone will admit to perusing it, but it seems to skew young — mostly political-science grad students and untenured professors. While the ostensible purpose of PSR is to provide information about job openings, posts on it have a tendency to devolve into attacks, rumor-mongering, and bitterness fueled by an apocalyptic academic job market. “It is essentially the 4chan of political science,” a political-science researcher told me via email.

It’s not, in short, necessarily the place where one goes for levelheaded debate about the results of statistical analysis...

It's a long piece, as you can tell, loaded with all kinds of interesting hyperlinks, so read the whole thing.

Still more at the New York Times:

Funding for Retracted Science Study Was Misrepresented: In his published study about canvassers changing peopl... http://t.co/BI6X2LlrSY

— Maxy Sharma (@MaxySharma9) May 29, 2015

Michael LaCour and the 'Endemic Problems' of Political Science

From Steven Hayward, who is the Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy 2014-2016, at Pepperdine University's School of Public Policy.

He's a cool dude!

Why everyone's missing what's really wrong with the retracted La-Court-Green Science magazine article: http://t.co/yVQbOw51D1 @powerlineUS

— Steven F. Hayward (@stevenfhayward) May 31, 2015

Some "clear subtexts of this article that reveal endemic problems within the world of academic political science": https://t.co/8eqcKM0Qjn

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) May 31, 2015

And ICYMI, "Michael LaCour, 'Gay Canvassers' Fabulist, Responds to Attacks on Retracted Homosexual Marriage Study."

Time to Question the Inevitability of Homosexual 'Marriage'

I've demonstrated for years that the radical homosexual agenda's been built on lies and coercion.

And all the political scientists wringing their hands about the Michael LaCour scandal have been focusing on everything but the key issue: LaCour fabricated his research to further the far-left homosexual agenda. And the abject incuriosity of the political science establishment let him get away with it, including the so-called "eminent" scholar Donald Philip Green.

The movement's been based on lies, leftist ignorance (especially among the young secular demographic), and propaganda.

I can't wait to see how the Court rules in Obergefell v. Hodges. If the justices affirm the ruling of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, the so-called "inevitability" of homosexual "marriage" will have suffered a crippling blow.

In any case, see Rachel Lu, at the Crisis, "Time to Question Inevitability of Gay 'Marriage'."

Are Social Issues Hurting Democrats?

From the letters to the editor, at the Wall Street Journal, "Do Social Issues Hurt Democrats?":

Karl Rove asks, “Are Social Issues Hurting Republicans?” (op-ed, June 4). I wonder why his question is rarely, if ever, asked about Democrats. Do they not lose as well as gain votes by the positions they take on sociocultural issues? Are the political platforms of the Democrats less laden with these concerns than those of the GOP? I wonder how many votes the Democrats lose because of their position on such issues as late-term abortion, same-sex marriage, their encouragement of dependency on government, their opposition to school choice through vouchers and charter schools, limits on religious freedom, distribution of contraceptives and referrals for abortion to school children without parental consent. Are these social issues hurting Democrats?

Edward Maillet
Charlottesville, Va.

Great questions.

Democrats got hammered last November in the congressional elections, and not just on the economy. I expect we're reaching the tipping point on many of the social issues addressed at the letter, and if the Democrats struggle to mobilize commensurate numbers of voters from 2012, the party's nominee could get hammered in 2016. Immigration, especially, is bound to be a hot-button issue, as it raises both economic and social issues. Homosexual marriage continues to be explosive, even more so with so much uncertainty going forward on constitutional grounds. (Folks like the lying sack Michael LaCour aren't doing the Democrats any favors either.) On racial issues in particular, don't be surprised if the Democrats get tagged with unflattering connections to Rachel Dolezal, especially on racial preferences in the workplace and campus political correctness.

The Democrats are the fringe party of American politics. The media elite also happen to be fringe whackjobs, which is why Hillary can count on a least a two-to-three point handicap going up against the generic GOP nominee, and perhaps even more.