I have no idea whether Dr Oz and RFK are more popular with black or white Americans, for that matter. RFK apparently did produce an antivaxx film aimed at the black community:
Department of Education reverts to Trump's Title IX rule.
The Trump administration has been actively involved in modifying regulations related to Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in education, including sexual harassment and assault. These changes have stirred debate, with critics arguing they could hinder survivors’ access to justice and supporters emphasizing fairness and due process for the accused.
- Reverting to 2020 Regulations: The Trump administration, through the U.S. Department of Education, announced in February 2025 that it would officially enforce the 2020 Title IX regulations enacted during the first Trump term. This action followed a federal judge’s decision to strike down the Biden administration’s expanded regulations from April 2024.
- Emphasis on Due Process for the Accused: The 2020 regulations emphasize due process for individuals accused of sexual misconduct. This includes requiring live hearings where accused individuals can cross-examine their accusers through an advisor.
- Narrower Definition of Sexual Harassment: The 2020 rules adopted by the Trump administration narrow the definition of sexual harassment to conduct that is “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive”. This change requires stricter criteria for an incident to be considered sexual harassment under Title IX.
- Limited Off-Campus Responsibility: The 2020 regulations restrict the scope of cases colleges and universities are obligated to address, limiting their responsibility to investigate incidents that occur within their own programs or activities. This means many off-campus cases may not be subject to Title IX procedures.
- Enforcement Consistent with Executive Order: The Education Department’s approach to enforcing Title IX is guided by a Trump executive order that declares there are two sexes, male and female, and mandates consistent enforcement with that directive
CNN —
A federal judge said Wednesday that the Trump Justice Department likely engaged in unconstitutional retaliation when it cut off grants to American Bar Association programs assisting victims of domestic violence.
The preliminary order from US District Judge Casey Cooper requires the Trump administration to pay out the $2 million in grant funding it still owes to the programs, which provide training to lawyers who work with victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse.
Adding to the uncertainty is the Republican spending package Congress passed in March. Pushed through with some Democratic support to avert a government shutdown, the package empowered the Trump administration to cancel or redirect federal dollars. Domestic violence groups are now bracing for the possibility that Trump will stop the OVW funding once the existing grants expire at the end of the fiscal year in September.
Science does have a replication crisis. That doesn’t change the fact that racism, sexism, RWA and SDO have been found to correlate to Trump support in a variety of studies.
We have those.
In the five factor model, openness to experience is correlated with liberalism.
Jonathan Haidt found that liberals have 2 factor morality while conservatives have 5 factor morality.
Liberals also score lower on a need for cognitive closure, while conservatives tend to score higher.
Politics plays a huge role in how we act as a civilization. Understanding the cognitive and emotional underpinnings of it is important. Its like asking people not to study how to increase crop yields or improve antibiotic effectiveness. A lot of nations have descended into tyranny and dysfunction due to politics, and some of those nations have been democracies that experienced backsliding.
Venezuela used to be a functioning democracy, now its a dictatorship. Hungary is on the way to becoming a dictatorship. Understanding this stuff is important.
I mention venezuela because its not just right wing politics that can be dysfunctional. Mao probably set China back 30 years. Stalin set Russia back dramatically, who knows what Russia would’ve been like in 2025 if the communists and Stalin had never taken over and created a culture of oppression and terror. Maybe it’d be more like the Baltic states (a rich democracy) instead of a warlike, barely upper income country run by a strongman.
I agree. Part of that could be higher ACE scores (adverse childhood experiences like various kinds of abuse and neglect). Liberals are more likely to have had childhood trauma. A higher ACE score also predisposes you to endless poor life outcomes including a higher likelihood of mental illness.
A theoretical interpretation of these observed effects of childhood experience on political ideology falls outside the scope if this paper but merits further research and discussion. A tentative logic would be that the experience of childhood trauma, as well as school and neighborhood insecurity, may instill a heightened sense of vulnerability in individuals. In turn, a sense of individual vulnerability is likely to incline people to political views that favor social programs and government intervention if a need arises. It could also be speculated that individuals who suffered childhood maltreatment will be wary of authority, while the added complexity of dealing with negative childhood emotions may draw them to a greater variety of experiences and less impulse control. Such psychological and behavioral consequences of childhood trauma may distance these individuals from conservative principles. However, prudence is required in interpreting these results and, ultimately, this research remains agnostic on the precise dynamics that link childhood experience to political ideology. This empirical work may serve to corroborate past research on the influence of childhood experience (Erikson 1968, Erikson 1963, Carver & Scheier 2000, Sameroff, Lewis & Miller 2000, Campbell 2006) and hopefully spur new research.
Because they hate women (and also homeless people), and want to be able to keep on abusing them with impunity. The answer being horrible doesn’t mean that it’s not true.
Well, he said he was, and that was the only sense in which he was. He’s never held Democratic positions, and he’s never been elected anything as a Democrat.
How is a right-winger like Stalin a warning against left-wing politics? Lenin, yes, was probably left, but Stalin wasn’t much different from the Nazis.
Psychology Today: “Survey data show that extreme liberals have poorer mental health than conservatives.”
Note that this comparison isn’t between liberals and conservatives, or extreme liberals and extreme conservatives.
Because he got into power using left wing politics, even if one considers him personally right wing.
Not that it matters much; Stalin was mostly about Stalin, not left or right. Authoritarianism with himself as the absolute authority.
That is not the same thing as characterising a negative personality type specifically to describe (some of) your political opposition. The underlying assumption that liberal beliefs are good and correct is very obvious if you don’t share it.
I’m also not sure how meaningful it is to say openness to experience correlates with liberalism when Wikipedia describes it as having six facets, one of which is challenging authority (psychological liberalism). If you define a construct that includes psychological liberalism, it’s unsurprising if it correlates with self-identification as a liberal.
The first chart shows that liberals place a lower importance on loyalty, authority and sanctity than conservatives, not no importance. But I think there’s a deeper problem in terms of the assumptions behind the questions: when looking at loyalty to an ingroup, for example, questions usually assume the ingroup is the person’s country, while Western liberals are generally not nationalistic, and instead treat members of various oppressed groups as their ingroup, and political conservatives, especially movements like Maga and Christian fundamentalists, as their outgroup. If questions don’t address this difference, they can easily miss pro-loyalty attitudes in liberals. For example, the refusal to “throw <oppressed minority> under the bus”, even to save democracy, and knowing they will be treated far worse if you lose the election, is likely an expression of loyalty.
The sanctity/purity factor is similar: the common saying that “if 10 people sit at a table with 1 Nazi, there are 11 Nazis” is clearly a left-wing expression of the purity foundation. Sitting down with a Nazi will contaminate you with Nazism (an interesting contrast to the approvingly-quoted Bible verses about Jesus sharing meals with tax collectors and sinners). The modern left is famous for excessive purity policing of members, but if the quiz questions don’t address these expressions of the sanctity foundation, they won’t pick up on relevant beliefs.
I don’t think we shouldn’t study it, but we should be cautious in how we interpret the findings. Correlations are famously tricky things. Here’s a study that seems to show the genetic component of personality factors does not influence the genetic component of political beliefs; instead, for social and military views, it is the other way around (political beliefs influence personality, and for economic ones, they are independent.
(This contains another example of the bias I was talking about, not from the authors but summarised by them:
Instead of allowing that there might be valid arguments in favour of political conservatism, they explain it as a ‘coping mechanism’.
The study also contains this passage:
It’s similar to what I wrote above, that the ‘openness’ personality factor includes political views within it, so it’s unsurprising it correlates with such views.
IMO a major issue with this sort of research is that by lumping a bunch of correlated traits together and giving it a name, it feels like you’ve explained something, but in practice you aren’t necessarily any further forward. It just means you now have to explain why some people are high in RWA, instead of why some people support Trump, and it’s going to come back to the same factors either way.
People rarely act senselessly or hate others for no reason (for bad reasons, sure). It’s obvious why Republicans would want to ban aiding the homeless, because helping them attracts more of them, and people living on the streets tend to create a nuisance by begging, taking over public property for their personal use, generating mess and noise, and scaring passersby by acting erratically. If someone doesn’t particularly care about helping rough sleepers, trying to drive them away is the logical solution. But people fleeing domestic violence rarely create a public nuisance, so it’s not clear to me why they were included in the bill.
Hmmm.
https://www.politico.com/story/2008/11/rfk-jr-too-controversial-for-epa-015403
Seems like a prime example of horseshoe theory to me. 
Stalin was a communist who overthrew the established hierarchy, collectivised farms, banned private enterprise, and operated a centrally planned economy. He also suppressed religion and persecuted religious leaders, and vilified and persecuted Kulaks (wealthier peasants who owned land and employed others) as class enemies. Those are far-left policies.
One might certainly say that liberals are loyal to various minorities. But that’s not in-group loyalty, because most of us aren’t members of most of those groups. If I’m a heterosexual white cismale, then gays, black people, women, and transgendered people are all out-groups relative to me.
OK, so why do domestic abusers abuse in the first place? It’s the same root cause.
Well, did he? It’s kind of hard to say “Obama didn’t pick him, therefore he’s a Democrat”. What happened was that, either Obama never even considered him at all, or he considered him and then decided that he wasn’t a good match.
Of course it’s ingroup loyalty. Ingroups don’t have to be defined by those things. They’re your political allies, automatically assumed to be on your side unless they demonstrate otherwise. (And if they do demonstrate otherwise, they’ll be treated very differently by liberals.)
The question is how that came to pass. Back in the day, it wasn’t conservatives that distrusted the experts, at least not on the issue of vaccines. The stereotype, as I remember it, was that the people who distrusted vaccines were hippy dippy liberals and, as you mentioned, poor and uneducated Black people. For anecdotal evidence that this was the stereotype back then, I’d point to an episode of Law & Order SVU, where Martin Mull guest stared as a doctor who catered to the former.
Valid point. However right wing authoritarianism is called right wing because it means someone supports the existing system. In the USSR, people who supported the communists were the right wing authoritarians and the people pushing for reforms like more market economic policies and more personal freedom were seen as the enemies by the RWA types in the USSR. So in the USSR, the RWA were the ones that supported communism because that was the established system.
As far as your statement of labeling your political opposition as bad people, there are objective metrics.
People who score higher in RWA and SDO are more bigoted. There are endless forms of bigotry (sexism, racism, nativism). Granted, this is expected since conservatives score higher on Haidt’s markers like purity, authority and in-group. These are all threatened by out-groups. Because liberals do not care about purity, authority or in-groups as much as conservatives, and because liberals value fairness and harm more than conservatives, liberals only see the harm done by oppression of out-groups, while conservatives more see the threats out-groups pose to purity and in-group loyalty.
Brain scans show liberals feel more compassion than conservatives. Your statement that conservatives have better mental health is likely true, just like the statement that liberals feel more compassion seems to be true.
I think the issue is that there is a sociopolitical continuum that extends beyond a particular culture. A conservative in the US regarding the subject of women’s rights would be considered a liberal in Afghanistan. A liberal regarding taxing the rich in the US would be considered a conservative in China under Mao.
If you assume there is an objective metric that goes from 1-10 on various measurements, in the US maybe a conservative scores a 4 and the liberal scores a 7 on some measurements. But the scale goes beyond that, and it varies by nation and culture. Its often said that a democrat in the US is a conservative in Europe. And like I said, a conservative in the US would be fairly liberal under a far more right wing regime.
Having said that, it fundamentally comes down to utilitarianism. People high in RWA and SDO benefit (psychologically and materially) from a social hierarchy where there are more rights and privileges for those at the top.
However I feel like as a society, we have come to the conclusion that the benefits experienced by a small group of people higher on the social ladder should not outweigh the well being of all the people lower on the ladder rungs beneath them.
Do you have a good argument for why a system that gives fewer rights, acceptance or integration for out-groups has benefits that need to be followed on a society wide level? From what I can see, the main benefit is the psychological benefits people high in RWA and SDO feel from keeping the social hierarchy intact.
Thats like saying a corporation feeling motivated by a strong sense of desire to improve profits mean that their desire for quarterly profits makes it an objective good, irrelevant to the damage caused to the environment, labor force, etc by this philosophy.
I get what you’re saying, it’s just funny to read “liberals do not care about purity” when the more liberal party in the US is notorious for tearing itself apart with all kinds of purity tests between its various factions.
In one case it is a problem of outgroups trying “to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids,” and in the other ethical vegans refusing to form a block with environmental vegans.
That’s true. I guess when I meant purity I more meant purity along national, sexual, racial or religious lines.
The left can be very obsessed with purity when it comes to ideology.
I suspect it’s a combination of the American Right become ever-more conspiracy theory minded and ideologically utterly selfish and cruel. They are more likely to oppose vaccines because vaccines are portrayed as a social good that helps other people, which they consider evil and anathema. It reeks of the “sin of empathy”. And their conspiratorial mindset inclines them to justify rejecting vaccines with, well, a conspiracy theory.
That was one of my points above. For the left, purity mainly features as ideological purity (and if questions don’t specifically ask about that, it will be missed in surveys). That’s why left-wingers have moral panics about the alt-right recruiting their kids with online memes and Andrew Tate turning their sons into misogynists, while right-wingers have moral panics that blue-haired teachers with pride flags on the wall will convince their kids it’s good to be gay.
“Evil shadowy figures are corrupting your kids!” is quintessential purity foundation:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/opinion/sunday/white-supremacist-recruitment.html
Notorious for it, maybe, but that doesn’t mean it actually happens. There are plenty of pro-life democrats, pro-gun democrats, etc. in high elected offices. Can you find any pro-choice or anti-gun Republicans?
Pro-gun maybe, but pro-life views seem to be dying out among Democrats:
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/03/henry-cuellar-texas-2024-00109596
And on other issues it may be the other way around. Are there any elected Democrats who oppose same-sex marriage, for example?
The point is not that the Republicans are all in lock step about every issue, it’s that they still form a coalition behind the chosen candidate and vote for that person.
Does he have other theories about the defecation practices of genus ursus? What about the religious denomination affiliation of the pontifex of Rome?
The existence of these tendencies in all political constituencies, but particularly in the American voting populace, has always been clearly apparent. And yeah the fact Trump voters have these tendencies in spades is a “no sh_t Sherlock” finding if ever there was one.
IMO the shocking thing was that it always assumed that you couldn’t get elected on just authoritarian tendencies (and racism) alone. There was always obviously a significant minority of the American electorate who was going to enthusiastically support a fascist.
It was just assumed that the fascist in question would have to do a good job of appealing to the rest of the voting populace, at least make decent stab at “drapping themselves in the flag and carrying a Bible”. Trump has failed to do anything except pay lip service to patriotism or religion, that would only convince people who had already drunk the right wing authoritarian koolaid.
I agree. The US has always had a strong authoritarian undercurrent; but it was always presumed that anyone trying to take advantage of that would have to lean into the God-and-patriotism stereotypes and have a modicum of dignity and cunning. Trump doesn’t. Lots of people warned of the danger of fascism rising to power in the US, but the fascist they imagined was never a clown like Trump.
Trump is just such a parody of awfulness that if he was a fictional character he’d be mocked as a ridiculous political strawman that in the real world would never have any support from anyone. Yet in the actual real world, he’s taken over the Republican party and made it into a personality cult. Somehow.