"The" Science Says Liberalism is a Mental Disorder

(& Liberals Try to Lie About It)

Jun 24, 2022

Radical leftist zealot and middle school teacher Yvette “Felarca” Capistrano

You’ve heard the phrase; liberalism is a mental disorder. While that may not be literally true, some studies suggest that there’s a correlation between liberalism and mental illness.

In this piece, the term liberalism is used in the sense it is used in America and Canada (progressives or social justice warriors) outside of which the term is closer in meaning to what we call libertarianism.

The, umm, person who is famous for screaming “No!” because Orange Man bad.

Tabby and I were talking about a new anti-2nd Amendment piece of legislation being pushed through Congress that they claim will pave the way for more funding to enforce red flag laws and supposedly better background checks.

Source: **Red Flag Laws Spur Debate Over Due Process** **by Matt Vasilogambros for Pew Charitable Trusts,** September 4, 2019

Tabby pointed out that this would disproportionately affect the left because, she said, there’s a correlation between leftism and mental illness. So, of course, I fact checked her. Meanwhile, she expanded on her claim and you can hear what she had to say in the upcoming video on this.

Please know that neither of us are trying to convince anyone to become more conservative, Republican and/or Christian or more religious at all. However, we’d both be happy if we convince someone to be less liberal (in the American sense of the term).

Melissa Click, college teacher famous for yelling, “I need some muscle over here!”. She was asking student protesters to physically intimidate the camera person.

The study, Mental Illness and the Left by Emil O. W. Kirkegaard from May 2020 states…

It has been claimed that left-wingers or liberals (US sense) tend to more often suffer from mental illness than right-wingers or conservatives. This potential link was investigated using the General Social Survey cumulative cross-sectional dataset (1972-2018). A search of the available variables resulted in 5 items measuring one's own mental illness (e.g., ”Do you have any emotional or mental disability?”)…analysis showed that the relationship between mental illness, happiness, and political ideology has existed in the GSS data since the 1970s and still existed in the 2010s. Within-study meta-analysis of all the results found that extreme liberals had a 150% increased rate of mental illness compared to moderates. The finding of increased mental illness among left-wingers is congruent with numerous findings based on related constructs, such as positive relationships between conservatism, religiousness and health in general.

Regarding this study’s link between religiosity and mental health, Scott A. McGreal MSc. notes in Psychology Today…

However, the beneficial relationship between religiosity and health has only been found to apply in cultures in which religion is highly respected, and does not occur in more secular cultures (Stavrova, 2015).

In other words, whereas a person’s high level of religiosity in a highly religious society may be an indication of good mental health, a person’s high level of religiosity in a more secular society may be a sign of mentally illness.

Here’s some data from the study…

Michael Reineohl who shot and killed Aaron Jay Danielson because he subscribed to the insane belief that Danielson was a “Nazi”.

Some may cite a study from 2011 that seems to suggest opposite results. But as it was later revealed, these results were, um, accidentally switched. They wrote…

in the original manuscript, the descriptive analyses report that those higher in Eysenck's psychoticism are more conservative, but they are actually more liberal;

They also write that despite what the original reported, the study actually indicated that those with higher social desirability tend to be more conservative.

Sure. It was an accident. Also, the fact that it took years for them to admit the, um, mistake, is not at all suspicious. Sure. Except, in that correction, they, um, accidentally maintained one of the switched details. You see, in the, well, in the piece they passed off as a correction, there was still an incorrect statement. They write…

and where the original manuscript reports those higher in neuroticism…are more liberal, they are, in fact, more conservative.

That doesn’t seem right, does it? It seems to be either a statistical anomaly in the study or a falsehood written by the authors of this, um, correction. As the aforementioned article in Psychology Today states…

conservatism and liberalism are associated with the personality traits of conscientiousness and neuroticism, respectively, which are more robustly linked with mental health than religiosity.

In other words, neuroticism is correlated with liberalism, not conservatism.

In other words, not only was the study, um, accidentally switched around, to, um, coincidentally deceive people in a way that just accidentally happened to be along politically biased lines, and not only did it innocently take years for them to admit the, um, mistake, but when they did so, they still got it wrong - accidentally.

Mugshot of a person arrested for rioting.

The New York Post reported…

Brad Verhulst, a Virginia Commonwealth University researcher and a co-author of the paper, said he was not sure who was to blame.
“I don’t know where it happened. All I know is it happened,” he told Retraction Watch, a blog that tracks corrections in academic papers. “It’s our fault for not figuring it out before.”
The journal said the error doesn’t change the main conclusions of the paper, which found that “personality traits do not cause people to develop political attitudes.”
But professor Steven Ludeke of the University of Southern Denmark, who pointed out the errors, told Retraction Watch that they “matter quite a lot.”
“The erroneous results represented some of the larger correlations between personality and politics ever reported; they were reported and interpreted, repeatedly, in the wrong direction,” he said.

At any rate, the damage is done. According to the NY Post…

The erroneous report has been cited 45 times, according to Thomson Reuters Web of Science.

Conner Betts, mass shooter in Dayton, Ohio.

But before you grumble that left-wingers are liars, let me point something out here: it seems a hoax was propagated in furtherance of the view that liberalism is correlated with mental illness. It seems someone by the name of Zach Goldberg put out a twitter thread about the Pew study that he said shows more evidence that leftism and insanity are correlated.

If Zach Goldberg was indeed hoaxing, I fail to see what his angle is. If he wanted to convince people that the left is crazy, he could have pointed to studies like the one we looked at above. But it seems he chose to lie instead. It’s like he has the right answer to a math problem but he got that answer by cheating. It seems his lie trickled all the way up to Tucker Carlson who mentioned the study on his TV show.

This apparent hoax may cause people to say that it is not true that leftism and mental illness are correlated because this study does not suggest that. Such people may not be aware of other studies, legitimate studies, that do show that correlation. They might say the claims that liberalism is correlated with mental disorders are based on a hoax. This may convince people that there is no correlation between liberalism and madness when, according to studies that actually exist, there is.

So, be careful. It took me a lot of time to dig deep enough to see that this study does not show what Zach Goldberg claims. See the note below if you want the details and “receipts”.1

In conclusion, it seems that liberalism and mental illness go hand-in-hand.