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Democrats Are Gaining Ground With One Key Demographic: The Mentally Ill
In just the last six months, a socialist torched the governor’s mansion in Pennsylvania. A trust-fund psycho stalked a healthcare CEO and then shot him in the back. An illegal alien from Egypt named Mohammed threw Molotov cocktails at a group of Jewish demonstrators. Mobs of visibly unhealthy Antifa activists attacked a Christian concert in Seattle, injuring several people and sending one police officer to the hospital. (And then the attackers effectively received an endorsement from the mayor of Seattle.) A man from Massachusetts was arrested at the Capitol after admitting that he planned to set fire to the conservative Heritage Foundation and murder Pete Hegseth, whom he called a “Nazi.” An assassin who complained about white people on the internet murdered two diplomats in Washington, shouting “free Palestine” as he was dragged away by police. A pro-abortion extremist blew up a car outside of a fertility clinic in California, causing the single biggest explosion that Southern California had ever seen in its history.
Every single one of these acts of terrorism was committed either by an avowed Leftist, or by someone acting on behalf of Left-wing causes. It’s a far cry from the “greatest domestic terror threat” that Merrick Garland and Joe Biden repeatedly warned us about, which was supposedly “white supremacy.” And this is just a sampling of what these people have been up to, over the past six months. All of these incidents, keep in mind, happened after they tried to assassinate Donald Trump twice last summer. By contrast, you won’t find a single comparable example of right-wing terrorism in the same time period. Not a single one. There are no roving mobs of angry Christians throwing objects at self-identifying “trans people” who are attending a concert. There are no Right-wingers detonating car bombs at abortion facilities, or walking into the Capitol and announcing their intention to murder prominent Democrats.
For all intents and purposes, this is a tendency that’s unique to the Left. That’s not to say that no conservative has ever committed an act of violence. But if you look at the trends, especially in recent years, it’s a very stark disparity. Everyone knows that’s true. And yet, despite how obvious this trend is, no one on the Left has even attempted to provide an honest explanation about what exactly is going on.
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Instead, when they’re not blaming Donald Trump for everything, prominent figures on the Left are pumping out some of the most vapid and irrelevant content that you can imagine. Michelle Obama is doing podcasts with her brother where they debate whether a hotdog is really a sandwich. They’ve also argued over whether beets should “come with a warning label” when they appear on restaurant menus, because a lot of people hate eating them. It’s compelling stuff for their 40,000 viewers, most of whom aren’t even watching the videos. They’re just popping into the comments section to call Michelle Obama a man. Meanwhile, Gavin Newsom, the presumed frontrunner for the Democrats’ presidential nomination in 2024, is hosting his own podcast that’s bombing terribly because — predictably enough — it’s an extremely insincere production. Newsom will interview conservatives, but he won’t actually engage with anything they’re saying. And he certainly won’t offer any kind of genuine explanation for the current state of the Democrat Party. In other words, Newsom’s podcast is as phony as he is.
But recently, there was one notable attempt on the Left to try to explain, from a dispassionate perspective, what’s wrong with their whole movement. I’m talking about a recent Substack post by Nate Silver. In case you’re not familiar with Nate Silver, he’s the data guy who’s famous for constructing an extremely elaborate computer model that crunches data from a wide variety of political polls, runs them through a highly proprietary and complicated algorithm, and then tells you that the election is basically a toss-up. He ran the website “538” back in the day, and even though it was either wrong or useless most of the time, it was still pretty successful because in general, people love to hear about the “odds” that something will, or will not happen. It doesn’t matter if the odds are made up. People just love odds.
For example, nervous liberals loved hearing from Nate Silver that Hillary Clinton had an 85% chance of winning shortly before the 2016 election, whether or not that figure had any basis in reality.
In this particular case, though, Silver has written a breakdown of data that’s actually worth talking about. I’m referring to his article entitled, “Why young men don’t like Democrats.” In this article, Silver includes this chart:
Credit: Cooperation Election Study, 2022. Nate Silver.
This is data from the “Cooperative Election Study” at Harvard. The chart is entitled, “Higher self-reported mental health correlates with conservative political views.” And as you’ll see, that turns out to be an understatement.
Specifically, the data show that, when you look at voters who report that they have “poor mental health,” liberals outnumber conservatives 45% to 19%. That’s a 26-point swing. And then if you look at voters who reported having “excellent” mental health, you’ll find that conservatives make up 51% of those voters, while liberals make up just 20%. That’s a 31-point differential.
Here’s how Silver interprets these results, after saying he was “surprised” by the numbers:
The young men that Democrats have trouble with aren’t necessarily the ones who have been captured by the conservative ‘manosphere’ or who are looking for a helping hand. Rather, it’s those who report relatively high mental health and see Democrats as being too neurotic and perhaps constraining their opportunity to compete and reap the rewards of their work.
As far as I can tell, as mild as this observation might seem, it’s the first serious effort on the Left to understand why voters are rebelling against the Democrat Party. The more blunt way to put this, of course, is that Democrats have gone insane. The violence that we’re seeing all over the country, from Pennsylvania to California, isn’t the result of one or two lone gunmen. It’s the natural byproduct of a political party that now caters, almost exclusively, to people with serious mental health conditions. And a lot of voters — particularly young men — are tired of associating with this nonsense, so they’re voting Republican in greater numbers than ever before.
But while that’s obviously true, it’s an oversimplification. It’s important to point out that, among Democrats, it’s fashionable to say that you’re suffering from some kind of mental health problem. It’s an easy way to gain some victimhood currency, while also excusing your own antisocial behavior. Therefore, many of these people who “self-report” having “poor mental health,” in reality, aren’t completely insane. They could probably become ten times happier if they ditched their 200-square-foot studio apartment in New York City, stopped obsessing over Donald Trump and decided to start a family. But that would require some introspection on the part of these disaffected liberals. It would also require breaking away from the mold, and rejecting the comfort of conformity, which is the hardest thing for a liberal to do. It’s a lot easier to say you suffer from a mental health disorder, and absolve yourself of all responsibility for your own life. And unquestionably, that’s a big part of what these numbers reflect.
If you drill down a little deeper into the numbers, you’ll see exactly which demographic is prone to this kind of thinking. Nate Silver doesn’t get into this, but many of these supposedly “troubled” Democrat voters are women. This is a survey from Pew from a few years back:
Pew Research.
Pew American Trends Panel.
Pew asked a series of different demographics whether a healthcare professional had ever told them that they had a mental health condition. And the results are even harder to believe than the figures that Nate Silver cited. It turns out that more than half of white liberal women aged 18 to 29 answered in the affirmative. Specifically, 56% of them said yes, they’d been told by a mental health professional that they have some kind of disorder. Meanwhile, only around 28% of “white moderate women” and “white conservative women” in that same age group said yes to that question — still an extremely high number, but nowhere near what liberal women are reporting.
If you look at liberal men in the 18 to 29 age group, you’ll see that the numbers aren’t much better. Thirty three percent of white liberal men said they had been told they had a mental health condition. But only 16% of conservative white men said they had been told the same thing. That’s yet another big disparity. To be clear, this data says that liberal men are diagnosed with mental illness at a much higher rate than conservative and moderate women. And liberal women are on another planet, essentially.
Again, this data doesn’t necessarily mean that most liberal women and men do, in fact, suffer from mental health conditions (although many of them clearly do). But it does mean that they’re seeking out therapy to deal with their problems — which almost always results in a diagnosis, because that’s how therapists make money. This is the doom-loop that Democrat voters have found themselves in. They recognize they have a problem, but because they’re told to “trust the science” and “listen to the experts,” they don’t try to find a solution on their own. Instead, they pay someone to find that solution for them — even though the therapist they’re paying has a clear conflict of interest, and doesn’t have any actual financial incentive to cure them.
A couple of more data points are worth talking about, especially if you’re tempted to chalk all of these differences up to biology. Here’s a chart showing how many men report having good mental health (that’s the blue number), as compared to the number of women who report having good mental health:
Credit: Cooperation Election Study, 2022. Nate Silver.
The data goes back to the 1920s. As you can see, men have always reported having better mental health than women. But the disparity is far larger now than it’s ever been. From the article:
The gap is much bigger for Gen Z than for earlier generations, corresponding with a widening gender gap among young voters in the United States and other countries. Indeed, in the United States, higher self-reported mental health is strongly correlated with holding conservative political views.
This is a phenomenon that’s happening all over the world, although it’s especially pronounced in this country. Liberals are increasingly reporting that they’re losing their minds, at a higher rate than ever before. Liberal women are particularly affected.
So what exactly is going on here? For Democrats, it’s a classic chicken-or-the-egg problem. People like Nate Silver are trying to figure it out: Is liberalism simply attracting crazy people? Or is liberalism making people crazy? The answer, of course, is both.
On the one hand, liberalism is clearly the ideology of choice for misfits who already suffer from mental illness. They’ll find affirmation on the Left, as well as encouragement to pursue whatever depraved course of action they’re thinking of. Additionally, liberalism — and the indoctrination and propaganda that millions of young people are forced to endure, starting at a young age — is creating new mental patients, or at least people who think they’re mentally disturbed. It’s turning otherwise healthy people into neurotic, unpleasant and unhinged activists.
This is the inevitable consequence of embracing an ideology that’s completely divorced from reality. And that’s exactly what Democrats have done. The effect is particularly pronounced among young women, who are now more bitter and unhappy than ever before, relative to men — even though feminism promised the opposite result. In the end, as it turns out, women aren’t happy when they’re encouraged to murder their children, or pressured into working 80-hour weeks for a Fortune 500 corporation. They’re not actually thrilled at the prospect that “womanhood” is a completely arbitrary and meaningless concept. But the leaders of the Democrat Party don’t care about any of this, because when it counts, women have been reliable voters for Democrats. So whether they’re miserable or not, Democrats don’t care.
This analysis by Nate Silver suggests that, at some level, liberals are finally starting to recognize that this is an unsustainable approach. When you invent an alternate universe and then bombard everyone with obvious lies, then you’ve created a very fragile and unstable coalition. And with every act of terrorism that the Left commits, in broad daylight, that coalition is becoming smaller and smaller because moderates — and sane people in general — realize what’s going on. The last election didn’t simply reflect Kamala Harris’ lack of political talent, although that was certainly a big factor. It also reflected the public’s disdain for political terrorism and mental disorder. And in the seven months since that election, Democrats have only offered more of the same — more violence, more attacks, and more intimidation. Two assassination attempts on Trump, though unprecedented, were just the opening salvo for these people. Now we’re hearing about a new assassination every other week, because — for an increasing number of Democrats — that’s their preferred way of expressing themselves.
Yes, one Nate Silver article at a time, this sad reality is finally dawning on the supposedly “intellectual” wing of the Democrat Party. But Democrats still don’t have any solutions, probably because they don’t want any. That means, inevitably, that Left-wing terrorists will continue to attack many more people on a regular cadence. They’ll continue to become more violent and brazen as we approach the midterm elections. This is the party that Democrats have created. This is the constituency they have cultivated. It’s far worse than highly credentialed “experts” like Nate Silver ever imagined it could possibly be. But it’s what the leaders of the Democrat Party wanted. They sought out the least happy, most deranged people they could find. And precisely because their constituency is so unstable, no one — including those Democrat leaders — truly has any idea what’s coming next.
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