In talking about pseudo-intellectual dismissals, I am appealing to the prior news.YC discussions about middlebrow dismissals, which would have been better wording. Sorry about that. How is what I mean different from an appeal to authority? Mostly it has to do with the type of evidence selected by statin "opponents", which tends to be of lower quality.

As for studies that I find instructive, here are a few:

People with loss of function mutations in PCSK9 have lower LDL-cholesterol. These people have an even lower risk of ischemic heart disease than you would expect based on the degree of LDL-cholesterol lowering. [1]

Mendelian randomization demonstrates that genetic scores for LDL cholesterol associate with reduced risk of myocardial infarction (suggesting causality, since cholesterol doesn't reverse-cause a genotype).[2]

IMPROVE-IT showed that a non-statin medication (ezetemibe) added to a statin regimen further reduced the risk of second heart attacks after suffering a first heart attack. This is probably the clearest experimental evidence to date that suggest it's not only statins that reduce cardiovascular risk, but LDL-cholesterol reducing agents more generally that lead to reduced risk of heart attack. [3]

This is a very contemporary summary of genetic and clinical trial data; there is a wealth of older data that I won't get into.

1 = http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa054013

2 = http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3419820/

3 = http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1410489