Tag Archives: dartmouth

Who Was Devin Nunes’ Secret White House Source?

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking minority member on the House Intelligence Committee, has called for Devin Nunes to recuse himself from further involvement in the Russia probe. This comes after Nunes’ bizarre unveiling of supposed evidence that the Obama White House really did surveil Trump aides during the transition. Nunes still hasn’t shown his evidence to anyone, and it appears increasingly likely that it doesn’t really show anything at all. Nor will he tell us who he met with on the White House grounds to procure his evidence. Here is Michael Isikoff:

The Schiff statement came as panel staffers speculated on the possible identity of Nunes’ White House source, focusing on Michael Ellis, a lawyer who worked for Nunes on the intelligence panel and who was recently hired to work on national security matters at the White House counsel’s office. A White House official and spokesman for Nunes declined to comment on whether Ellis was involved in providing information to Nunes, as did a spokesman for Schiff. White House press secretary Sean Spicer insisted that White House officials were not aware of Nunes’ secret trip to meet his source and referred all questions to Nunes’ office.

Democrats have been furious that Nunes has yet to describe precisely the classified intelligence he has seen. Nor has he shared any documents with others on the House intelligence panel. Nunes, for his part, defended his previously undisclosed trip to the White House grounds, telling CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that he had to view the classified documents in an executive branch location because the intelligence community had not yet provided them to Congress.

Michael Ellis is a former editor-in-chief of the Dartmouth Review and a longtime “promising young conservative.” Sadly, he’s not related to the Ellis side of the Bush family, which would have been great.

Link to article: 

Who Was Devin Nunes’ Secret White House Source?

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Who Was Devin Nunes’ Secret White House Source?

Study: You Can’t Change an Anti-Vaxxer’s Mind

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Vaccine denial is dangerous. We know this for many reasons, but just consider one of them: In California in 2010, 10 children died in a whooping cough outbreak that was later linked, in part, to the presence of 39 separate clusters of unvaccinated children in the state. It’s that simple: When too many children go unvaccinated, vaccine-preventable diseases spread more easily, and sometimes children die. Nonetheless, as scientifically unfounded fears about childhood vaccines causing autism have proliferated over the past decade or more, a minority of parents are turning to “personal belief exemptions,” so-called “alternative vaccine schedules,” and other ways to dodge or delay vaccinating their kids.

So as a rational person, you might think it would be of the utmost importance to try to talk some sense into these people. But there’s a problem: According to a major new study in the journal Pediatrics, trying to do so may actually make the problem worse. The paper tested the effectiveness of four separate pro-vaccine messages, three of which were based very closely on how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) itself talks about vaccines. The results can only be called grim: Not a single one of the messages was successful when it came to increasing parents’ professed intent to vaccinate their children. And in several cases the messages actually backfired, either increasing the ill-founded belief that vaccines cause autism or even, in one case, apparently reducing parents’ intent to vaccinate.

Click here for more on vaccine-dodging parents.

The study, by political scientist Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College* and three colleagues, adds to a large body of frustrating research on how hard it is to correct false information and get people to accept indisputable facts. Nyhan and one of his coauthors, Jason Reifler of the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, are actually the coauthors of a much discussed previous study showing that when politically conservative test subjects read a fake newspaper article containing a quotation of George W. Bush asserting that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, followed by a factual correction stating that this was not actually true, they believed Bush’s falsehood more strongly afterwards—an outcome that Nyhan and Reifler dubbed a “backfire effect.”

Unfortunately, the vaccine issue is prime terrain for such biased and motivated reasoning; recent research even suggests that a conspiratorial, paranoid mindset prevails among some vaccine rejectionists. To try to figure out how to persuade them, in the new study researchers surveyed a representative sample of 1,759 Americans with at least one child living in their home. A first phase of the study determined their beliefs about vaccines; then, in a follow-up, respondents were asked to consider one of four messages (or a control message) about vaccine effectiveness and the importance of kids getting the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine.

The first message, dubbed “Autism correction,” was a factual, science-heavy correction of false claims that the MMR vaccine causes autism, assuring parents that the vaccine is “safe and effective” and citing multiple studies that disprove claims of an autism link. The second message, dubbed “Disease risks,” simply listed the many risks of contracting the measles, the mumps, or rubella, describing the nasty complications that can come with these diseases. The third message, dubbed “Disease narrative,” told a “true story” about a 10-month-old whose temperature shot up to a terrifying 106 degrees after he contracted measles from another child in a pediatrician’s waiting room.

Child with measles CDC/llinois Department of Public Health

All three of these messages are closely based on messages (here, here, and here) that appear on the CDC website. And then there was a final message that was not directly based on CDC communications, dubbed “Disease images.” In this case, as a way of emphasizing the importance of vaccines, test subjects were asked to examine three fairly disturbing images of children afflicted with measles, mumps, and rubella. One of those images used is at right.

The results showed that by far, the least successful messages were “Disease narrative” and “Disease images.” Hearing the frightening narrative actually increased respondents’ likelihood of thinking that getting the MMR vaccine will cause serious side effects, from 7.7 percent to 13.8 percent. Similarly, looking at the disturbing images increased test subjects’ belief that vaccines cause autism. In other words, both of these messages backfired.

Why did that happen? Dartmouth’s Nyhan isn’t sure, but he comments that “if people read about or see sick children, it may be easier to imagine other kinds of health risks to children, including possibly side effects of vaccines that are actually quite rare.” (When it comes to side effects, Nyhan is referring not to autism but to the small minority of cases in which vaccines cause adverse reactions.)

The two more straightforward text-only messages, “Austism correction” and “Disease risks,” had more mixed effects. “Disease risks” didn’t cause any harm, but it didn’t really produce any benefits either.

As for “Autism correction,” it actually worked, among survey respondents as a whole, to somewhat reduce belief in the falsehood that vaccines cause autism. But at the same time, the message had an unexpected negative effect, decreasing the percentage of parents saying that they would be likely to vaccinate their children.

Looking more closely, the researchers found that this occurred because of a strong backfire effect among the minority of test subjects who were the most distrustful of vaccines. In this group, the likelihood of saying they would give their kids the MMR vaccine decreased to 45 percent (versus 70 percent in the control group) after they received factual, scientific information debunking the vaccines-autism link. Indeed, the study therefore concluded that “no intervention increased intent to vaccinate among parents who are the least favorable toward vaccines.”

Nyhan carefully emphasizes that the study cannot say anything about the effectiveness of other possible messages beyond the ones that were tested. So there may be winners out there that simply weren’t in the experiment—although as Nyhan added, “I don’t have a good candidate.” In any event, given results like these, any new messages ought to be tested as well.

“I don’t think our results imply that they shouldn’t communicate why vaccines are a good idea,” adds Nyhan. “But they do suggest that we should be more careful to test the messages that we use, and to question the intuition that countering misinformation is likely to be the most effective strategy.”

Finally, Nyhan adds that in order to protect public health by encouraging widespread vaccinations, public communication efforts aren’t the only tools at our disposal. “Other policy measures might be more effective,” he notes. For instance, recently we reported on how easy it is for parents to dodge getting their kids vaccinated in some states; in some cases, it requires little more than a onetime signature on a form. Tightening these policies might be considerably more helpful than trying to win hearts and minds. That wasn’t really working out anyway, and thanks to the new study, we now know that vaccine deniers’ imperviousness to facts may be a key part of the reason why.

* This article previously referred to Dartmouth College as Dartmouth University. We regret the error.

From – 

Study: You Can’t Change an Anti-Vaxxer’s Mind

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Study: You Can’t Change an Anti-Vaxxer’s Mind

Remember How Dinesh D’Souza Outed Gay Classmates—and Thought It Was Awesome?

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

On Thursday evening, as the news broke that conservative author Dinesh D’Souza had been indicted by the feds for allegedly making illegal campaign donations to an unnamed 2012 Senate candidate (widely presumed to be Wendy Long, a long-shot Republican who was crushed by incumbent Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand in New York), liberal commentators had trouble hiding their glee—or, what I called on Twitter, Dineshenfreude. After all, for years D’Souza has been a right-wing bad boy spouting the most noxious criticism of the left and being rewarded for his exploits. More recently, he was the fellow who derived the odious theory that President Barack Obama could only be understood if viewed as the secret keeper of the flame of Kenyan anti-colonialism—a notion that Newt Gingrich giddily embraced and promoted. D’Souza’s movie, 2016: Obama’s America, contends that Obama, driven by the remnants of this anti-colonial rage inherited from his father, had a covert second-term plan to weaken and impoverish the United States of America. It depicts Obama as anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-white.

D’Souza’s extremism traces back to his college days, when he was an editor of the Dartmouth Review, the leading conservative college publication of the early 1980s. (Wendy Long was a Dartmouth student and served as a trustee of the Review in the 1990s.) In that post, D’Souza became a hero to young conservatives across the nation (and the right-wing foundations looking to fund them). While he helmed the Review, it published a “lighthearted interview with a former Klan leader”—accompanied by a staged photo of a black person hanging from a tree—and an assault on affirmative action titled, “Dis Sho Ain’t No Jive, Bro,” which was written in Ebonics. (“Now we be comin’ to Dartmut and be up over our ‘fros in studies, but we still be not graduatin’ Phi Beta Kappa.”) The “Jive” article caused Jack Kemp, a conservative icon mindful of the right’s problems with minority outreach, to resign from the Review‘s advisory board. Decades later, it’s clear that D’Souza chose the path of the foul at an early point. But he also had trouble with trustworthiness—as I discovered in an early encounter.

In 1982, I attended—that is, snuck into—a conference for conservative students journalists held at the New York Athletic Club and sponsored by foundations eager to spread the conservative gospel on college campuses. D’Souza was received at this affair as royalty. And at lunch, I had the good fortune to share a table with him. There he bragged about the Review having made use of a list of Dartmouth alumni it had somehow procured—without the university’s approval—for a mailing. (The university maintained the Review had misappropriated the list and committed a copyright violation.) He and his surrounding acolytes also gloated over an infamous Review article that had outed members of Dartmouth’s Gay Student Association and published excerpts of letters written by the group’s members. (As a result of this article, some members of the group had their sexual orientation disclosed to friends and family members.)

Nine years later, when D’Souza was being hailed upon the publication of his book, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus—the Washington Post called him “palpably smart,” “sober-minded,” and a “gentleman”—I wrote a short piece in The Nation and recalled that I had once witnessed him boasting about improperly purloining documents for the gay-naming article.

D’Souza cried foul, claiming that the Review had not used any underhanded means to gain access to information about the members of the Gay Student Association. I searched my old notes, and it seemed I had conflated two overlapping moments from that lunch, misattributing D’Souza’s boast about the alumni mailing list caper to the outing article.

I duly noted this in a subsequent correction. But here’s where it gets interesting. In his response to my original article, D’Souza had maintained that the Review had only printed the names of the officers of the Gay Student Association, and it had located this information, along with the personal letters written by gay students, in publicly available records the group had filed with the school administration. In other words, the Review had done nothing untoward to unearth the names of the gay students it outed; the paper had merely relied on public information submitted by the group itself. (Put aside, for the sake of this tale, the probity—or mean-spiritedness—of outing a fellow student whose sexual orientation might not be known beyond the campus gay community. As the New York Times reported at the time, “One gay student named by the Review, according to his friends, became severely depressed and talked repeatedly of suicide. The grandfather of another who had not found the courage to tell his family of his homosexuality learned about his grandson when he got his copy of the Review in the mail.”)

At first, I took D’Souza at this word, accepting his account that the Review had used public information for its article naming the officers of the Gay Student Association, and conveyed that in the correction. That was a mistake on my part. After D’Souza complained about the correction, I decided to investigate further. I called Dolores Johnson, director of student activities at Dartmouth. She said it was “absolutely untrue” that the documents the GSA had filed with the school were open to the public. Certainly, she explained, the GSA, like all student groups, had provided her office the names of its officers and a constitution (and perhaps letters written by students about the group). But, she said, “I would never give that information out to the public.” And there was this: She pointed out that shortly before the Review published its article naming the gay students, some documents had disappeared from the GSA’s desk in a student center. Johnson noted that these missing documents were the ones cited in the Review story.

So the evidence—at least, Johnson’s account—suggested that foul play had been involved in the outing article. And D’Souza’s self-serving cover story—we obtained the information from public records—was undercut. He had duped me. Not surprisingly, after I returned to this matter in the pages of The Nation to relate Johnson’s description of the events and partially retract the correction, D’Souza did not respond. His silence spoke loudly.

Much of what D’Souza did in college as a rising conservative star foreshadowed the career of ideological nastiness to come. But relishing the outing of gay students (and at that luncheon there was much relishing) and engaging in dirty tricks to obtain those names—well, that speaks not to ideology, but character. And it is but one reason, even if now dusty, why D’Souza warrants little sympathy for being accused of once again breaking the rules to serve his ideological aims.

Original article: 

Remember How Dinesh D’Souza Outed Gay Classmates—and Thought It Was Awesome?

Posted in alo, Bragg, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Remember How Dinesh D’Souza Outed Gay Classmates—and Thought It Was Awesome?