Frank Luntz, Lester Luntz: A Family of Fraudsters
One man's polling contract is another man's payoff...
The problem of the right is its disdain for new means of gathering information; the problem of the left is its willingness to trust experts rather than evidence.
In the days leading up to 2016 election I was betting my reputation.
I had key insight which I’ll call the genetic nepotism theory of politics. It’s namely this — that whatever the ethnic group of the candidate the larger the share of the vote that candidate will elicit from his coethnics. As it happens, Trump, who is half Scotch Irish and half German, was well positioned to win the heavily German Rustbelt and the heavily Scotch Irish South. Indeed, in many respects, Trump is the redneck Obama. When name ID is high — and with Trump it was approximating roughly 100 percent — you get a very interesting turnout model.
My model of the electorate had Donald Trump narrowly winning the presidency but few shared my views. Indeed, the professional commentariat and polling class found my assessment to be wrongheaded and hopelessly naive. No matter: I pressed on.
Once upon a time I was a member in good standing of Conservatism Inc. and I attended a discussion put on by the Novak Foundation of which I was then a fellow. (I wrote a long essay in 2011 about “Enemies, Domestic: An Investigation into the Appeasement of Evil by America’s College,” essentially laying out how the colleges became captured by foreign governments. I was, as I often am, ahead of the curve.)
In my misspent youth I entered and won many of these contests and awards and won not a few. Today my juvenile awards are boxed up or thrown out or make for an interesting conversation piece in the bathroom of one of my apartments. I deeply regret spending this time in my life as I did but it did make me a sort of Forrest Gump of the Republicana. Curiosity drove me. It was all so devilishly interesting.
There, in full display, was Chris Wilson, the pollsters for Ted Cruz’s ill-fated presidential campaign, addressing the crowd assembled in the swanky Manhattan hotel.
His assessment? Trump was going to go down for defeat and lose some 40 states to Hillary Clinton. I found this preposterous and I asked Chris Wilson, pollster for Senator Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign, if he bet. He asked me why and I said I was testing whether or not he believed in his model. He didn’t bet, he told me, but some of his unnamed employees did. OK, then!
Later I apologized to Wilson for being so aggressive in front of the entire audience though not for my question. I wasn’t ungentlemanly but I do think much of modern polling is more than a little fraudulent. These campaign consultants and polling experts are the new gurus and to question their methods is to make yourself
I asked him a pointed question about Cambridge Analytica in the coffee line, the weird firm which had contracted with the ill-fated Cruz campaign. He said that it was a fraud. That was my own initial assessment of what materials I could find on Cambridge Analytica. But I’ve become to believe it was a data gathering op by the Russian federation.
Watch Zuckerberg squirm.
Why was my model of the 2016 election so right and theirs so wrong?
Some day someone will build an ethnographic/genetic map of the United States, as they have attempted to in Britain. It will be a little harder in America where there’s plenty of mass internal migration but I strongly suspect it’s doable.
It’s my very well informed view that the Russians and the Chinese are already building up those biometrics databases of Americans through compromising the National Rifle Association and scraping Facebook and Zoom and TikTok. These two countries ultimately want to extend the social credit score to everyone and they are well on their way.
Political affiliation is largely heritable. So, too, is behavior.
(One of the lessons of the Elizabeth Homes is that fraudulent behavior seemingly runs in families. Holmes was a daughter of an Enron executive-turned-government bureaucrat and a descendant of medical fraudster Charles Fleischmann.)
Pseudoscience travels in families too.
This genealogical assessment of people isn’t often discussed but it’s well understood, especially by countries outside of America.
It’s important. We are hardwired to appreciate genealogy (which explains why, in part, Ancestry has a larger genetics database than 23AndMe.com, which is focused on serving Big Pharma and GlaxoSmithKline.) We should take this genealogy stuff seriously but we don’t, at least officially.
Well, we do, don’t we?
We should take a lot of things seriously, especially human differences.
After our recent remembrance of the late E. O. Wilson a friend wrote in and sent me this interview with Professor Wilson in Quillette. I was particularly struck by this section where Wilson discussed the role that the controversial left-wing professor Richard Lewontin played in trying to smear the field of forensics as racist.
In the early days of forensic DNA analysis, [Richard] Lewontin came out with a tremendous blast against it and, to my astonishment, he actually had a paper published in Science. He said that since the odds of making a mistake with an African American was greater than making a mistake with whites, forensic DNA analysis was racist and should not be used. He was talking about how the chances of making a false match by chance alone was one in, say, 150 million (I’m just making up numbers here to illustrate his point) in African Americans, while in whites it was something like one in 300 million, so we shouldn’t use the technology. Of course, soon afterwards we saw not people being unjustly convicted, but people being freed when their convictions were overturned, many of whom were African Americans who had been wrongly convicted! I use that as an example of how it is possible for a few individuals like Tierney or Lewontin to do a lot of damage. Lewontin’s forensic DNA paper was quickly forgotten.
How similar the arguments against facial recognition where there’s a misunderstanding about how biometrics actually works. There again we have a dishonest press corps pursuing discredited narratives to advance their agenda. That’s why the Biden Administration has continued to support facial recognition.
Anthropology as a field is being slowly turned on its head by genetics. See especially the work of David Reich, whose book, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (2018), remains interesting and the definitive entrance point for the lay reader.
Both the forensics fight and the facial recognition point to an underlying rule for decision making: Where possible we should always try to get as much information as we can before making judgments, especially when it comes to life or death matters.
The need for genetics in decision making has never been greater. In my view every prisoner in America ought to be sequenced. (Indeed if your loved one is in jail wrongly and you want to sequence them, check with your local laws but I have no objection to sequence them.)
Alas, much of the country continues to use forensic dentistry to make very bad decisions and many different groups have called for the end of its practice. The seminal essay on this topic is “The Tooth Fairy Science of Bite Mark Comparisons.” I quote from its author
When they have been tested for their expertise, forensic odontologists comparing bite mark patterns have not performed well. A 1975 study showed one in four incorrect matches when using perfect conditions, with that number climbing to nine in ten when bite marks were photographed 24 hours after having been made. At a 1999 workshop for forensic odontologists, participants were asked to match four bite marks to seven models, and while the exercise was retrospectively denounced as not having been a formal proficiency test, nearly two in three matches reported were wrong. A 2001 study estimated the rate of false matches using the technique as being between 11.9 and 22%. Worse: forensic odontologists cannot reliably agree if a mark was left by human teeth or not.
This pseudo-expertise can have grave consequences. The Innocence Project, dedicated to exonerating the wrongly convicted through DNA testing, reports that at least 26 people in the United Stateshave been wrongfully convicted, arrested, or charged based on bite mark comparisons. Once the pseudoscience genie is out of the bottle, it’s very hard to put it back in.
Among them was Alfred Swinton, who was wrongly convicted thanks to the testimony of Dr. Lester Luntz. Lester and his wife Phyllis Luntz literally wrote the book on using the discredited pseudoscience.
Let’s see how the Innocence Project describes Luntz’s role:
He [Alfred Swinton] was arrested for the murder after police conducted a search of the basement of the apartment building where he lived and recovered a bra in a box in a common area that contained other clothing and objects. In addition to the bra, which the state theorized belonged to the victim, the state presented bite mark analyst Dr. Lester Luntz at a probable cause hearing who claimed that bite marks on the victim’s body were linked to Swinton. The court concluded that the evidence was insufficient to establish probable cause and Swinton was released.
The case went cold for several years, until October 8, 1998, when Swinton was again charged with the murder. At the subsequent probable cause hearing, the victim’s sister, who had not identified the bra in 1991, changed her testimony, claiming she had given it to the victim on the night she was murdered. The state also presented a new bite mark analyst, Dr. [Gus] Karazulas, who testified – based upon a reasonable degree of scientific certainty – that Swinton “caused the bite mark that is depicted in the photographs” of the victim’s breasts, and that he was able to identify that the injury was inflicted “just before or at the time of death.” Based on this new evidence, the court found probable cause to charge Swinton of murder.
Yikes.
Just how many people are wrongly convicted because of bite analysis we will never know but Lester Luntz’s New York Times obituary gives you a sense of how widespread he made forensic dentistry.
Luntz’s hometown press, The Hartford Courant, includes a tidbit about how he worked to build up a database of American service members’ dental records — a problem that still plagues us the U.S. military is very slow to identify the deceased. They prefer using discredited sciences rather than the latest in genetics.
Why Dr. Luntz’s “work” pushing the pseudoscience is literally on his tombstone.
Frank Luntz, who pays for Twitter followers, once called me an “attention whore,” in what is surely the greatest example of projection I've yet come across. Luntz, whose clients include Pfizer and Google, is a corporate whore, willing to do and say anything.
I call him a fraud — and the evidence seems to indicate he is wildly thought of as a fraud, though not by Fox News. Alas I have long suspected something far worse is at play. Hell, his own employees say he’s a “scam.”
I don’t get why Luntz, who left the Republican Party, is still the go to pollster but maybe that’s how Kevin McCarthy and the Republican National Committee do things. I left the party over its unwillingness to take seriously this kind of corruption.
Of course one man’s polling contract is another man’s pay off… a subject we shall turn to in a subsequent article about Kevin McCarthy.
Yes, we will go there with McCarthy. The late Congressman Walter Jones and I stopped McCarthy from being Speaker of the House once before after he asked the innocent question of whether or not McCarthy had anything in his closet.
Since McCarthy stepped down he has gone on to reward his wife Judy with a no show job, his brother in law with millions in federal no bid contracts for being a fake Native American, and his son works as a tech industry lobbyist. Yeah, I wouldn’t expect much regulation of Big Tech either. McCarthy has also worked to get an obvious Chinese affiliated agent into the California Republican Party. He’s even continued to work with those whose firms are being investigated by the FBI.
The way most of these pollsters make money is through networking with corporations who want the appearance of scientific know how to justify whatever they are already planning to do.
Luntz’s political life is devoid of any real semblance of an ideology. Luntz works for seemingly whoever will pay him. And yes, that includes pushing the Iraq war on behalf of Epstein-enabling pro-Israel billionaire donors like Les Wexner.
Here’s how Gabriel Sherman describes it:
During the 1990s, both Epstein’s and Wexner’s profiles grew on the world stage. In 1991, Wexner cofounded a philanthropic organization of Jewish billionaires known as the Mega Group, which uses some of its vast resources to shape Middle East policy. In 2003, Wexner’s foundation commissioned GOP messaging guru Frank Luntz to advise American Jewish leaders on how to rally support for Israel. “For a year—a SOLID YEAR—you should be invoking the name of Saddam Hussein and how Israel was always behind American efforts to rid the world of this ruthless dictator and liberate their people,” Luntz’s recommendation stated.
I was first introduced to Luntz at Sunset Hotel by a man, I would learn, who had deep ties to both the NXIVM cult funders Sara and Clare Bronfman and Jeffrey Epstein. I did not like him then and I do not like him now.
Luntz, despite officially being a Nevadan for tax purposes, lived across the street from the Luxe Hotel. He has apartments all over the country, according to this 2014 Atlantic profile. Luntz even built a 78% replica of the Oval Office which he invited me, a 22-year-old young man, over to see.
Thank God I didn’t. I would have had nightmares.
The University of Maryland School of Dentistry agrees with you: https://www.dental.umaryland.edu/museum/exhibits/online-exhibits/forensic-odontology/wrongful-convictions/