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Emil O. W. Kirkegaard: Leftism, mental health, and visual presentation confirmed

April 20, 2026/8 Comments/in General/by Kevin MacDonald

Leftism, mental health, and visual presentation confirmed

Septum/genital piercings = leftist, mouth/arm tattoos = crazy

So we did another study of leftism, mental health and visual presentation:
  • Hu, M.,& Kirkegaard, E. O. W.(2026). Left-wing ideology, mental health and body modifications. Journal of Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences, 5(1).

Recent research has identified a recurring association between left-wing political ideology and poorer mental health. These findings show both reduced positive well-being (e.g., life satisfaction) and increased negative symptoms (e.g., depression, anxiety). We administered 76 mental health and 41 political ideology items to a sample of 978 fairly representative American adults recruited via the Prolific data platform. Overall, we found that every aspect of mental health correlated negatively with overall leftism (r’s for 18 diagnoses = -0.20, last 2 weeks symptoms = -0.14, MMPI-subset = -0.17, life satisfaction = -0.15, all p’s < .001). Diagnoses were the primary predictor of leftism in multivariate models. This relationship was not explained by measurement bias, as invariance testing revealed only minimal, counter-balancing item bias. Furthermore, we expanded this network by incorporating behavioral markers, finding that body modifications (e.g., unnatural hair color, tattoos) showed weak-to-modest associations with both left-wing ideology and mental health diagnoses.

The purpose of the study was mainly to check the measurement invariance of the relationship, since many people had doubted this. Perhaps leftists are just more likely to see therapy or maybe they fill out questionnaires differently. For this reason, we went a bit overboard with the mental health measurement having 76 questions, 18 concerning specific diagnoses and the remaining the more commonly used self-report questions about various aspects. Politics was measured using 41 questions concerning various current thing political questions for Americans, and scored just using the 1-factor model. (Yes, one can extract other dimensions but this one is dominant.) General results:

The various scales called “p” are mental health reversed (worse) based on different approaches. Symptoms is all the self-report scales items combined, diag = diagnoses count, MMPI = items from MMPI (yes/no format), last2weeks (typical format used in surveys), satisfaction (positively phrased questions about life satisfaction). The rightmost column shows that leftism correlates positively with every variable except for age. Given these demographic associations (age, female), one may want to try a regression model to see if leftism correlates with mental problems merely because it is correlated with age and femaleness:

The answer is no, not only, but maybe in part. Diagnoses correlates 0.20 with leftism but 0.16 controlled for age, sex, US-born, and race (though the CI overlaps with 0.20). More interesting is that the models that include both self-report measures and diagnoses counts, the diagnoses have the signal and the others turn non-significant (but stay positive). With ~1000 people, we can’t say whether diagnoses count mediates the entire effect but possibly. One could even try controlling for self-reported mental problems and see if leftism still predicts diagnoses:

Continues….
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https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.png 0 0 Kevin MacDonald https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.png Kevin MacDonald2026-04-20 08:18:002026-04-20 08:18:00Emil O. W. Kirkegaard: Leftism, mental health, and visual presentation confirmed
8 replies
  1. MC Honkler
    MC Honkler says:
    April 20, 2026 at 9:13 am

    The left hand path=Satanism.
    New Man workers utopia?
    Not on the menu.

  2. JJ
    JJ says:
    April 21, 2026 at 7:01 am

    Why does Occidental Observer keep reposting Emil Kirkegaard when he advocates lowering age of consent to 13 or under?

    https://grokipedia.com/page/emil-kirkegaard#controversial-views-on-age-of-consent

  3. Tim
    Tim says:
    April 21, 2026 at 7:43 am

    Livestream “Day 6 of the new rescue operation for
    the whale Timmy, aka ‘Hope’”: a truly hair-raising
    farce of political, media, technical incompetence.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xTjgb4uKB4

    Instead, other people’s feasible ideas are
    blocked, such as this one from an Austrian.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8m3SIItr3k
    Complete transcript https://sharetext.io/pzk3fy0d

    AI-summary:

    The speaker argues that the original rescue idea was sound and practical: instead of trying to drag or lift the whale immediately, the team proposed creating a temporary basin around it, raising the water level with salt water, and using available emergency resources such as THW and flood-protection equipment to let the whale float free and recover. In his view, this would have reduced suffering quickly, avoided unnecessary bureaucracy, and bought time for a safer transport plan later.

    He strongly criticizes the authorities, especially Minister Backhaus and the expert reports, for treating the whale’s condition as hopeless too early. He says the whale was not beyond saving, that claims about fatal skin damage or immediate death were exaggerated, and that the real issue was not skin but body weight, stress, and compression. He also says the whale was being “managed to death” through indecision, delays, and conflicting public messaging.

    A major theme is that the people around the case lacked practical rescue experience. He contrasts hands-on rescuers—mountain rescue, fire services, technical rescue teams—with theorists and bureaucrats who, in his opinion, were making decisions from afar without understanding large-animal rescue. He is especially critical of the way the media and some experts framed the situation as a palliative case rather than an active rescue case. In his view, palliative care means making an animal comfortable and pain-free, not leaving it to suffer.

    The speaker says the whale’s behavior proves that some earlier assumptions were wrong. He points out that Timmy/Hope was able to move and turn, which suggests the animal was not as firmly stuck as some claimed. He also says the whale likely does not have a net in its mouth or major swallowed debris, and that the danger zone around the tail means any lifting or sling-based rescue has to be handled extremely carefully. He explains that an un-sedated whale can react suddenly and that a hammock or lifting-sling approach could compress its organs or provoke dangerous movement.

    He describes the current situation as politically and legally messy. In his telling, officials were already preparing for disposal and other downstream steps while publicly saying they were still focused on rescue. He believes some behind-the-scenes actors would prefer the whale to die because a successful rescue would raise uncomfortable legal questions about why the animal had been left in distress for so long. He also argues that if the whale dies in open water, the cost and responsibility may be different than if it dies inside the Kieler Förde, which he says creates a financial incentive to control where the case ends.

    He praises some outside actors, especially private rescuers and animal advocates, while criticizing organizations he thinks have become too political or passive. He says practical, experienced animal-rescue groups are more valuable than organizations that mainly do public relations. He also notes that the whole case has become a symbol: people are watching it worldwide, and in his view it should have become a model for future whale rescues rather than a public relations disaster.

    The emotional core of the speech is simple: he believes Timmy/Hope is a suffering animal that deserved immediate, practical help, and that doing nothing was morally wrong. He says that even if rescue ultimately failed, it would have been better to try decisively than to watch the whale deteriorate for days or weeks while experts argued and politicians hesitated. He ends by insisting that any real rescue effort must prioritize the animal, not ego, politics, or reputational risk.

    • Tim
      Tim says:
      April 21, 2026 at 2:48 pm

      https://captainpaulwatson.substack.com/p/the-effort-to-save-a-stranded-whale

      • Tim
        Tim says:
        April 22, 2026 at 12:14 pm

        The depressing drama surrounding the poor stranded whale—which, at least to outsiders, seems hopeless and incompetent—continues. It has now been in the Baltic Sea for nearly two months, but the salinity is too low, and the food supply is apparently anything but plentiful.

        Now they’ve at least created some space for it with a suction pipe, as the water level at the site is reportedly down to just half a meter now. However, they still don’t have a feasible plan to get the whale back from there to the North Sea (or even the open Atlantic). Hoping and worrying.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVv6k2tefmg
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDZaBhAQDkk
        https://archive.ph/jBOdi

      • Tim
        Tim says:
        April 22, 2026 at 12:45 pm

        https://i.ibb.co/PvFRPt4b/whale.jpg

        • Tim
          Tim says:
          April 22, 2026 at 8:11 pm

          The whole whale issue has really been on my mind, especially because some narrow-minded “politician”—who developed his limited, stupid three brain cells under communism and has absolutely no idea about the world or himself—presumes to pass judgment on a living, breathing giant whose species is 50 million years old.

  4. Terry Fyde
    Terry Fyde says:
    April 21, 2026 at 10:34 am

    A subject well worth investigating further, following previous relevant studies by Gustave Le Bon, Frank S. Meyer, Eugene Methvin and Kerry Bolton (accessible online). Attempts to “fuse” Freud and Marx (e.g. Zalkind, Marcuse, Zizek) deserve a study in itself as the work of “neurodiverse” brains. Freud himself was a fraud medically, and the psycho-analysis movement something of a racket, but he penned some thoughtful and valuable essays on cultural history. The chief menace of Marcuse was his contribution to the mobilization of “blacks, immigrants, ‘wimmin’, students, homosexuals” against western civilization (national culture, family values, personal enterprise); i.e. post-Stalin totalitarian wokery (aka DIE).
    The appeal of communism is to the parasite mentality (to each according to his wants) and to those who exploit and seek to control its adherents; the current Polanski scam in UK politics is a barefaced example
    I would be interested to see Emil Kirkegaard’s (re)view of Laurie M. Johnson, “Ideological Possession & the Rise of the New Right” (2019).

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