"Science" is one of those things with which liberals are always trying to bludgeon conservatives. When they're not trying, dishonestly, to use science to "prove" that liberals are smarter than conservatives (they aren't), they're declaring that the science of global warming is incontrovertible (it isn't), that the "science is settled" (it hasn't been) and that any discussion of man-caused climate change is over (which it shouldn't be).
As was abundantly clear five years ago in the Technocracy column "No, liberals aren't smarter than conservatives," when a media outlet of any kind picks up a headline or a sound bite that furthers the left-leaning popular information and entertainment industry's unwritten but nonetheless shared agenda to trash conservatives and libertarians, that bite, clip or statement is repeated ad nauseam in multimedia on the Internet, in print and on television screens. The same is true of any "science" that furthers liberal causes, regardless of whether this allegedly scientific data is, you know, actually true.
Five years ago that action line was the work of "evolutionary psychologist" Satoshi Kanazawa, who at the time was working at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Kanazawa "correlated" – and that term is important – data on political, religious and sexual behaviors with intelligence. His conclusion? As liberals were happy to repeat in the media outlets they dominate, the study's implications were that liberals are smart, worldly, sophisticated individuals, while conservatives are essentially morons. Smug left-wingers around the world claimed that "studies" had "proven" the right is dumb.
This was a lie. The study's conclusion, repeated without critical analysis, did not stand up to even passing logical scrutiny. As NewsBusters' Noel Sheppard commented, the study defines "liberal" only in terms of "concern for genetically nonrelated people and support for private resources that help those people." This is far less than an inclusive endorsement of Democratic politics in defining "liberal." It doesn't begin to touch critical litmus tests (as Sheppard identifies) like abortion, gun control and gay rights.
Don't believe that the right doesn't occasionally indulge in these statistical histrionics, either. The Daily Mail reported earlier this month that liberals are weaklings, whereas right-wingers are physically stronger. It went so far as to claim this link "may reflect psychological traits that evolved in our ancestors."
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"Scientists from Aarhus University in Denmark collected data on bicep size, socio-economic status and support for economic redistribution from hundreds in America, Argentina and Denmark," the article explains. "The figures revealed that men with higher upper-body strength were less likely to support left-wing policies on the redistribution of wealth. Men with less upper body strength are more likely to support the welfare state. ..." The piece goes on to quote one of the researchers, who claims that physically weak males are "more reluctant to assert their self-interest" and that "political views are designed by natural selection to function in the conditions recurrent over human evolutionary history."
To conservatives, the fact that liberals are mentally and emotionally weak is not a surprise, but a number of subjective assumptions must occur before the leap can be made from the study's raw data to the easily digested headline, "Liberals weak, conservatives strong." Yet the article has been shared and re-shared on social media as unquestionable scientific fact. It is just as intellectually questionable as "science" purporting to declare conservatives stupid compared to their left-wing counterparts.
The latest salvo in the war to use science to "prove" political points also underscores another common tendency of the left: the willingness to lie to further their causes. Liberals live in a difficult world, one in which the myriad freedoms enjoyed by their fellow citizens are a constant source of distress. The typical lib worries at every moment that human beings not under total (and totalitarian) government control will, if left to their own devices, choose wrong in their daily lives. Thus, the libs construct an elaborate gulag of laws, rules, regulations and "politically correct" social barbed wire whose purpose is to stop people from acting and even thinking in ways of which liberals disapprove. This elaborate network of control extends also to those things of which liberals do approve – which is to say, when they believe in something, they demand that you believe it, too.
Over the years, various data on global warming have been shown to be fabricated. Why, then, should the libs not also lie about "gay" marriage, another of their pet causes?
In 2014, a Ph.D. candidate at UCLA named Michael LaCour published a study on "marriage equality" that claimed "in-person canvassing" could "produce significant attitude changes" on gay marriage and other issues. The study was part of the pop-culture blitzkrieg in the last few years that has elevated "gay" and transgender rights to the forefront of the liberals' agenda. There's just one problem with Mr. LaCour's groundbreaking study ... and that is that he may simply have made it up. "When a group of researchers were unable to replicate LaCour's findings," writes Jon Green, "they dug a bit deeper into his work and discovered that large portions of his paper appear to be faked. Even the organization credited with funding the study has no record of involvement with LaCour or his work. ..."
As bad as that sounds, it's actually worse. LaCour refuses to share his data. He is determined to become a professor at Princeton, but he cannot permit even the most casual of scrutiny into his study, "When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support for gay equality." His conduct has endangered the academic reputation of his co-author, Columbia University professor Donald Green (who asked the journal Science to retract the paper).
Liberals lie. This is a fact of their ideology, because left-wing politics are incompatible with reality and thus utterly self-destructive. To foment support for their totalitarian ends, liberals must always obscure the truth, distort science and manipulate voters. Twisting science to meet their agenda is not a new trick for the left, but it is one they have used before to great effect. You may expect them to go on using this weapon for as long as we continue to let them.
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