RUSH: Folks, over the weekend, I came across a very lengthy piece in the New York Times. I was directed to it because I don’t read the New York Times. Somebody sent me a note about it, “You really need to check this out.” The only way I ever see anything in the New York Times is when somebody says check it out. Anyway, it was a story about a social psychologist, sociologist, famed clinical sociologist. His name is Diederik Stapel. He’s a Dutch social scientist. He was renowned for his surveys, his research, his clinical data.
It turns out that everything he did was a lie. Every research project, every published result was a fraud. The guy had a set of desires that he wanted people to think about society, about race, about the way people interact with each other. And he set about creating false studies that never happened, publishing the results. Within his peer group, he was well known, highly respected, and the guy is a total fraud. I never heard of him before this. The story was written by somebody who writes for Science magazine, and they were devastated by this guy, and they were worried about what it means for the entire field of social psychology.
Fifty-five different studies and research papers, and all of it, 100 percent of it was lies generated by his political preferences. He literally made things up from scratch and reported it in exhaustive hours of clinical research, interviews of thousands of people took place when he never talked to a single person. And my guess is that this guy is the tip of iceberg in this kind of stuff.
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RUSH: Folks, stick with me on this. This is — well, it’s fascinating, but it’s also fundamentally crucially important. I want to go back to November 4th of 2011, on this program. Back then, I, your host, as a descriptive tool, created for your visualizing The Four Corners of Deceit in our culture that altogether combined, suffice to lie to students and the American people. The Four Corners of Deceit are government, academia, science, and the media.
One of the things that I pointed out back on this program on November 4th of 2011, a year and a half ago, is that one of the things the left in this country attempts to do is to codify elements of their ideology as science. Liberalism is science, and therefore it’s irrefutable. Science is what is. Science allows for no agreement. Once science says something, then that something is, and you can’t refute it and you can’t disagree with it. You can, but you would be a kook. This is one of the techniques that the left has used. Global warming is nothing more than the left’s political ideology. It’s nothing more than one of the planks of their grand design, but they codify it as science so it’s indisputable.
I’m talking about the way that they interact and impose things on the low-information crowd.
Global warming, many other things are attempted and achieved this way. Codify liberalism as science, therefore making it irrefutable, making it inarguable. But in the case of global warming, it’s failed, everybody knows it’s a hoax. Well, not everybody, but a growing number do. Now, up until the global warming hoax, science had almost total credibility. If somebody was a scientist and said something, it was automatically believed. Just the way, by the way, journalists used to be believed. Make no mistake, there’s a very important, major story that we touched on back in November of 2011, and it was this Dutch professor.
“Dutch Social Psychologist Found to Have Faked Data — A prominent Dutch social psychologist who once claimed to have shown that the very act of thinking about eating meat makes people behave more selfishly has been found to have faked data throughout much of his career.” We had this story a year and a half ago on this fake Dutch social psychologist. His name is Diederik Stapel, and he did a study — not making this up — he did a study where he said that he conclusively proved, studying thousands of people, that the very act of thinking about eating meat made people behave more selfishly. This guy, during his career, was lionized, he was treated as a hero.
“In one of the worst cases of scientific fraud on record in the Netherlands, a review committee made up of some of the country’s top scientists has found that University of Tilburg Prof. Diederik Stapel systematically falsified data to achieve the results he wanted.” Just like what happened at the University of East Anglia on climate prediction and research. They fired Stapel. They plan to file fraud charges against him. Stapel acknowledged in a statement that all the accusations were true. He said he manipulated study data, he fabricated investigations, and the story in the New York Times — written by a guy from Science magazine — they finally caught up to this, and they’re devastated. This guy was a hero.
Let me give you an example. He designed a study to test whether individuals are inclined to consume more when primed with the idea of capitalism. Remember, now, consumption is bad. So he and his research partner developed a questionnaire that subjects would have to fill out under two subtly different conditions. In one condition, an M&M-filled coffee mug with the word “capitalism” printed on it would sit on a table in front of the subject. In the other, the mug’s word would be different, a jumble of the letters in capitalism.
Although the questionnaire included questions related to capitalism and consumption, such as whether big cars were superior to small ones, the study’s key measure were the amount of M&Ms eaten by the subject while answering these questions. Stapel and his colleague hypothesized that subjects facing a mug printed with “capitalism” would end up eating more M&Ms. This guy was a socialist, and he was out to prove that capitalism was inherently bad because it made people selfish, people consumed more than their share.
So he had a student arrange to get the mugs and the M&Ms and later to load them into his car along with a box of questionnaires and then drove off, saying that he was gonna run the study at a High School in Rotterdam where a friend worked as a teacher. But he didn’t go to Rotterdam. He dumped most of the questionnaires into a trash bin outside campus. At home, using his own scale, he weighed a mug filled with M&Ms, sat down to simulate the experiment. While filling out the questionnaire, he ate the M&Ms at what he believed was a reasonable rate, weighed the mug again to estimate the amount a subject could be expected to eat. He built the rest of the date around that number. He said he gave away some of the M&M stash, ate a lot of it himself, said, “I was the only subject in these studies.”
That’s just one. There were 55 of these. There was another study where he attempted to explain racism by having black people sit in filthy neighborhoods. This is what he said. He had black people sit in filthy neighborhoods, and had people walk through it and make associations about black people and filth and this kind of stuff. It never happened. He never did it. It never, ever happened. He made it all up.
He was an academic star in the Netherlands, the author of several well regarded studies on human attitudes and behavior. The study I just talked about was this. It was published in Science magazine. He did it at the Utrecht train station. He showed that a trash filled environment tended to bring out racist tendencies in individuals. He didn’t do it. It didn’t happen. A total con man, a total fraud. Folks, the importance of this is that he is the tip of the iceberg, is my guess. Because I have a companion story here. It’s a Yahoo Finance story.
The headline: “Universities Getting the Most Government Money — The federal government gave out more than $40 billion for research and development (R&D) to universities across the country in fiscal 2011. Universities depend heavily on federal funding,” i.e., tax dollars, i.e., grant money, i.e., giveaways, “with many of the top programs relying on the government for more than 60% of their R&D budgets. As a result, many research program directors fear that the federal cuts promoted by the sequester will hurt future funding.”
The best thing we could do is stop funding all of this because most of it is fraudulent, or a good percentage of it is fraudulent. Who is in universities? Left-wingers, liberals. What are they doing? Promoting liberalism. They’re not teaching anything. They are programming people. They have their political conclusions. They want certain things to be certain ways. They have the power of science behind them. They simply create circumstances in their minds, they write peer reviewed articles that indicate studied research, data and so forth. We really need to start questioning how much of all this clinical, social psychology that we have been told is irrefutable science is nothing but fraud.
You know, I probably have said this so many the times you’re tired of hearing it. I really do wish that more people were able to understand exactly who a person is when they learn that a person is liberal. It matters. Because to a liberal the fact that he or she is liberal is the most important thing about them, not that they’re Jewish, not that they’re gay, if they are, not that they’re straight, not that they’re Presbyterian, not that they’re athlete. That liberalism, first and foremost, is an activist way of life. It is an indoctrination way of life. It is way of life not open to debate or argument or discussion or anything. It’s just what is, and they exist purely and simply to dominate. And they do not care, obviously, whether they do it honestly or not.
So here is one of the rising stars, one of the biggest stars of social psychology, a sociologist, social scientist, who is an utter fraud. We reported on it a year and a half ago, Science magazine and the New York Times have just picked up on it. But these people are everywhere. They’re not just in science. They’re teaching math. They’re teaching everything. They’re in Hollywood. They are in politics. They are Democrats. It is striking how much of who they are and what they believe is fraudulent. And this article in the New York Times is amazing because it’s sympathetic. Why did he do it? Oh, it’s so unfortunate.
They actually have the guy in his car driving to the train station where this imaginary thing took place. He’s with the guy writing the story for the New York Times, Science magazine. They go to this area of the Utrecht train station, and the fraud, the con man, Diederik Stapel, looking at it (imating Stapel), “No, no, I can’t find it here. It didn’t happen, it just didn’t happen.” And I’m stunned reading this. They actually went to the site of something that never happened, together. The author of the story and the con man. They go to the site of a fraudulent study, and the guy looks around hoping against hope that maybe it did happen, and he’d just forgotten, and he was looking for something at the train station to remind him that his research project actually did happen. No, it didn’t happen.
They portray this guy as a lost liberal, much like the Unabomber. So sad, such a brilliant mind. Oh, what a waste. We’re dealing with a utter fraud, a phony, simply a liar. A lazy liar. And, by the way, he didn’t just do this himself. He incorporated his doctoral students into all of this fraud. All the people that worked with this guy. All of this guy’s students who helped him along the way, they participated in the fraud, some unknowingly, amazingly. He’s destroyed not only his own career, but the careers of others. And so the effort is underway now to make it look like he’s just an aberration, he’s just a lone wolf, don’t judge all of social psychology this way. Well, I think we must. We now just have too much evidence. Global warming, a hoax, a fraud, whatever data, make it up, if we need to, to have it fit our conclusion.
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RUSH: Folks, these frauds get their money to do this fraudulent research via government grant around the world, wherever they are. They get it either from nonprofits, from the government, from donations, or what have you. The fraud and the deceit are everywhere, and it’s always a fraud and a deceit on the left. Let me read to you what I was just describing from the New York Times about this con man, Diederik Stapel.
“On his return trip to Tilburg, Stapel stopped at the train station in Utrecht. This was the site of his study linking racism to environmental untidiness, supposedly conducted during a strike by sanitation workers. In the experiment described in the Science paper, white volunteers were invited to fill out a questionnaire in a seat among a row of six chairs; the row was empty except for the first chair, which was taken by a black occupant or a white one. Stapel and his co-author claimed that white volunteers tended to sit farther away from the black person when the surrounding area was strewn with garbage. Now, looking around during rush hour, as people streamed on and off the platforms, Stapel could not find a location that matched the conditions described in his experiment. ‘No, Diederik, this is ridiculous,’ he told himself at last. ‘You really need to give it up.'”
In other words, he went back to the site of a fraud. He went back to the site of something that never happened there, with the writer in tow, looking for the place that he made up to see if it could possibly be real, while he had this writer with him. But he couldn’t find the location that matched the conditions described in his experiment. ‘Cause it didn’t exist. He goes back trying to find someplace he made up and he’s got the writer for Science magazine with him. And they’re desperately hoping that he was sick and that what he did actually happened, and that he’d just forgotten it. Anything but fraud, oh, no. But they couldn’t find it. So he finally said to himself, to the writer, “Diederik, this is ridiculous, you just really need to give it up.” This guy could have a great future as an American journalist, but I don’t know what else. It just boggles the mind, folks.
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RUSH: So here’s a guy who actually wants people to think that if you eat meat, you are more prone to violence and selfishness. He thinks that and he wants everybody to believe it so he makes up a research study using thousands of people. And how many people end up thinking this as a result, in his world?
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RUSH: So we just had a drive-by caller. A drive-by caller is a caller who got hold of Mr. Snerdley but didn’t have time or didn’t wish to go on the air. It was a 20-something young liberal from Los Angeles, Westwood. He said that I am wrong when I say that science is an exclusive ideology of liberals. What I said is that the left has turned science into an agent of its ideology. That’s the purpose of science. Everything, to these people, is political. There is not one aspect of life that is not oriented toward the advancement of a political agenda. That’s the stunning thing, is how few people understand that or realize it, and, when told, reject it. But it’s the case. Science is simply a tool.
Science is simply another prong, if you will, of the liberal agenda, and it’s been corrupted. Conservatives don’t use science to advance conservatism. It wouldn’t even occur to ’em. What conservatism mostly is today is just spent trying to refute everything the left says because they’re omnipresent. They’re oppressive with the attempt to smother everybody with their agenda. Everything is political. He said I’m wrong about that. Then he told Snerdley, “Look, when a majority of scientists agree on something we should just accept it. That’s how it works.” See, in science, there cannot be a consensus. Well, there can be, but it does not mean anything.
Science is not up to a vote. Science is not determined by a majority vote on something. “A consensus of scientists agrees that global warming is being caused by man.” There’s no such thing. It’s politics. It’s not science. Now, just to conclude this, ’cause I don’t want to spend any more time on this than necessary, but this is a fundamental point to me. This is something, if I could wave a magic wand and get people to understand this, I’d be so happy if people understood how they’re being manipulated and defrauded every day with what they think.
So this guy, Diederik Stapel, 55 studies that are now documented to be total frauds. I’ll tell you how the left uses science, folks, it’s like they use anything else. To shut out debate. The left can’t win a debate of ideas. It’s like when Eric Holder comes along and says that illegal aliens have a civil right to amnesty. You know what that means? It means that every person in the world is entitled to US citizenship. If it’s a civil right to be granted amnesty when you come here illegally, then everybody in the world is entitled to US citizenship. To call it a civil right is to shut down debate. The left uses science to shut down any opposition. If it’s science, how can you oppose it? If it’s a civil right, how can you oppose it?
Scientists wear white lab coats and they look really official, and they have instant and total credibility and authority. But they’re frauds. They’re bought and paid for by the left. It’s where they get their lifestyles. It’s how they’re able to buy groceries. Anyway, this guy Stapel did a study that concluded that eating meat made people selfish, less social, and more prone to violence. It was widely circulated, and it ends up in the university. You might not have heard about it, but it gets taught. Your kids, in certain majors, attending certain classes will hear this.
They’ll hear of this great scientist, this great researcher, this great sociologist, he’s impeccable. And he’s concluded that eating meat — how many people are vegans today because of a bunch of fraud? How many people are vegans because of a bunch of lies about what meat does to you? How many people are vegan simply because they just really don’t like meat? How many of them are vegans because they’ve been told that eating meat’s bad for ’em, it turns people into bad things, it harms your health, it shortens your life, all that’s bunk. And how many vegans become activists? How many militant vegetarians are there out there?
So this guy is sitting around one day, personally doesn’t like meat and, like a good liberal, since he doesn’t like it, nobody should, and since he doesn’t like it, nobody should be able to. So he creates this thing in his mind, a total lie and a total fraud, describing the people who eat meat as a bunch of reprobates. Then he goes out and fakes research, publishes it. It’s unquestioned. It ends up being reported far and wide, taught far and wide, and people just end up accepting it. Global warming, same thing. But who in the world sits around and dreams up this kind of stuff? People who are obsessed with a political agenda and their ideology as the defining characteristic of themselves.
So it’s not enough for this guy to not want to eat meat; he’s gotta make sure nobody else does, and those who continue to eat meat are going to be impugned and assaulted for being bad people. And then that study at the train station where people become racists when they see black people in garbage strewn areas. Who conceives of stuff like that but vile racists? So this guy believes that people are inherently racist. He can’t prove it, so he concocts a fraudulent study that does prove it, publishes it, unquestioned because of who he is, and it’s unassailable. But like the global warming hoax, this guy was eventually found and uncovered and now it’s very, very difficult. They’re all struggling with this in the research community.