Liberals have for years presented “studies” purporting to show that some kind of mental or character defect, or just plain ignorance and stupidity, explain conservative ideology. Now a professor at a Cambridge University constituent college has presented a different theory: A parasite that can cause severe mental disorders and behavioral problems may explain why people voted for President Trump and Brexit.
The academic, an evolutionary zoologist at England’s Trinity Hall named Dr. Robert Asher, implicates the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, long known to affect cats. “A few years ago, though, researchers realized that it affected humans as well,” notes commentator Andrea Widburg.
“In healthy people, toxoplasmosis feels like a bad flue [sic]. In people with weakened immune systems, it can cause seizures and lung problems,” she explains. “Pregnant women can also transfer it to the fetus, which often leads to stillbirths or miscarriages. If the fetuses survive, they can have serious, lifelong health problems such as seizures or liver and spleen damage.”
So the parasite is nothing to sneeze at (even if it does cause sneezing). This is especially so because Asher is correct about toxoplasmosis’ association with mental issues, as the online site “frontiers in Psychiatry” points out (as presented by Widburg):
Infection by the parasite Toxoplasma, which affects about 33% of world population, is associated with an increased risk of several mental health disorders, the most strongly with schizophrenia. [snip] The typical symptom associated with toxoplasmosis was anxiety, and the typical toxoplasmosis-associated disorders were autism (OR = 4.78), schizophrenia (OR = 3.33), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (OR = 2.50), obsessive compulsive disorder (OR = 1.86), antisocial personality disorder (OR = 1.63), learning disabilities (OR = 1.59), and anxiety disorder (OR = 1.48). Toxoplasmosis could play a substantial role in the etiopathogenesis of mental health disorders and its association with schizophrenia is the second strongest association, after autism.
But speaking of infecting minds brings us to Asher’s presentation, which took place during a student-involved Zoom meeting at the current school year’s start. Involving multiple academics explaining what courses are available to undergraduates at Cambridge, Asher’s segment begins at 17:45. He really gets going at 20:00, however, when he addresses “how much of animal behaviour (including our own) has its base in biology?”
The professor claims his course is unique because it explores not just animal behavior but also man’s. He also says, titillatingly, that his course is “controversial,” providing as an example the assertion “that there are gender differences among humans.” Wow!
No matter how high Trinity Hall tuition, it’s worth it to learn what man has observed for countless thousands of years and every little human observes after about two years. (Note: As is common, Asher misuses the term “gender,” which should be reserved for grammar. The quality of being male or female is “sex.”)
But if that doesn’t convince you of Professor Asher’s intellectual heft — and his having contributed to the Huffington Post doesn’t, either — know that his diagnosis of conservatism’s pathology came next. To wit:
I would personally argue that one of the problems facing humanity is, is related to, um, you know, the influence of toxoplasma in, ah, cat owners, for example. One could argue why did Brexit happen or why did people in the United States elected Donald Trump? I suspect that it has very much to do with the mind-altering parasite called toxoplasma. And if you were interested in something like that, then taking a course like Evolutionary and Behavior would help you understand this truly nefarious problem. I don’t think anyone really realizes just how bad that particular problem is .
“Nefarious,” huh? Now, given that leftists are the entitlement set, far be it from me to question their acquaintance with parasites. But the professor’s cat theory has a little problem, and it’s not just that we’ve never heard of a feline voting for Trump. (Get ready; you’ll love this.)
It’s that all indications are that most cat owners are liberals!
Psychology Today reported on the leftist pro-cat bias in 2013, writing that “liberals seem to have much more affection for their feline companions at 69% as opposed to the conservative[,] where less than half say that they like or love felines (44%).”
Business Insider also reported on this phenomenon in 2013, telling us that nine “of the top ten states for dog ownership voted for Mitt Romney in the 2012 election” while “four out of the top five feline-friendly states voted for the President [Obama].”
Psychology Today also points out that when asked which animal would make a better president, conservatives favored dogs 48 to 10 percent while liberals chose cats 28 to 26 percent. Both groups, however, agreed that either creature would be more lucid than Joe Biden.
(Full disclosure: I made up the last line.)
Note also that 58 percent of cat owners are women, according to 2017 market research; this is relevant because women are generally more liberal than are men. Consider voting patterns:
- Percentage-wise, women favored Biden over Trump in the past election 57-42 while men broke for trump 53-45.
- In the 2018 midterms, men chose Republicans 51-47 while women favored Democrats 59-40.
So let’s now analyze this logically (yes, I know logic is “white, male and linear,” but bear with me):
If Professor Asher’s theory is that cat owners are more likely to contract toxoplasmosis and that toxoplasmosis can cause mental issues militating in favor of bad politics, and if liberals are more likely to be cat owners, then…
Can you, professor, finish that logical progression?
Note also that, as Widburg points out, leftists actually “self-identify as more mentally ill than conservatives.” Not only that, we can glean from Psychology Today’s report that even liberals’ dogs more often have mental problems (it is said that dogs and their owners become alike).
That is to say, liberals are more likely to have canines that misbehave — i.e., “bark and jump up on people every time they enter your house.”
(So, not surprisingly, liberals discipline their dogs as they do their kids, who also, I learned during my many years working with children, tend to bark and jump up on you.)
This said, I don’t believe leftists’ dysfunctional politics is caused by a mind-altering parasitic infection. And while mind-altering drugs are likely a greater factor, the main one is philosophical/spiritual orientation: Leftists’ embrace of moral-relativism/nihilism causes dislocation from Truth — from what’s morally real — leading to conclusions that are unreal. The “eye altering alters all,” as William Blake put it.
Of course, people who mistake unreality for reality can truly fancy reality-based people as mentally unfit. But whether real perception or mere ploy, labeling conservatives psychologically ill is convenient: Instead of losing political debate because of intellectual vacuity, you can just “cancel” the debate by dismissing the “unwoke” as nuts.
Heck, if you have enough power, you can even commit political opponents to mental institutions — just as the Cold War-era Marxists did.
