Research Reveals Leftist Thought Much Less Diverse Than Right

Join Malcolm and Simone as they delve into a new study on ideological networks titled 'Attitude Networks as Intergroup Realities.' The research uses network modeling to explore attitudes, identities, and relationships in polarized political contexts. Discover how the study highlights the clustering of beliefs on the left and the diversity of thought on the right. Malcolm and Simone discuss the implications of these findings for political discourse, internal debates, and policy stances. They also touch on the role of AI in the job market, the future of higher education, and the shifting perceptions of public figures like Asmongold. This episode is a deep dive into the evolving landscape of political and social ideologies.

Malcolm Collins: hello Simone. I am excited to be here with you today. Today we are gonna be looking at a new study called Attitude Networks as intergroup realities using network modeling to research attitude, identity, relationships in polarized political context. This has been going around right wing circles recently.

Ooh. And so to give an idea of what they found, go to I sent you an image.

Simone Collins: Okay. I am really bad at interpreting graphs, but what I feel like I'm looking at is, I don't know, it kind of looks like a, an asteroid. Okay. I'll,

Malcolm Collins: I'll explain trail. I'll explain to your woman brain. Yeah, please. I, I love that you're like actually coming at this as like full woman brain.

So what this is showing is with red being, the right and, and blue being the left uhhuh. And b being closer to voting behavior, red versus blue. Whoa. Okay. So, okay.

Simone Collins: Yeah. 'cause what we're really looking at is like a bunch of sort of interconnected dots and lines and on the left there's this tiny little blue spider web.

And then on, on the right there's this pretty large, more expansive spider web, but it's, it's much more, it's much more dispersed, whereas the, the, the blue spiderweb is very condensed. So you're saying the blue spiderweb is leftist voting patterns, whereas the red spiderweb is more conservative and centrist voting patterns.

Is that it,

Malcolm Collins: Well, not conservative and well conservative and centrist, but was, was a couple caveats here. One is, is it shows that the ideology of the left. Because this is looking at ideological perspectives has become incredibly tight. You are not allowed to have gaining perspectives. Wow. This is, this is the right perspective, this is a wrong perspective.

And if you have anything else, then you are kicked outta the circle. And you typically will not vote left. There is not a wide intellectual conversation happening on the left. On the right, it's the exact opposite. You have an incredible amount of diversity of thought.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Now the, the writers of the paper.

We're like, well, what this shows is that to be a right, it's more about like I'm a white Christian or something. So it's about identity and not individual policy positions. And I'm like, no. What it is, is what we've been saying from the beginning. The right right now is a collection of everyone who opposes the urban monocultural belief system which is a very wide degree of belief system.

Yeah. Basically

Simone Collins: like I'm just not cool with this one narrow definition of reality, which is kind of most reasonable people. Yes. So this isn't surprising.

Malcolm Collins: Well it, it shows how a lot of the new right people, you know, whether you're talking about like an Elon or like an Asma Gold or people like us are so solidly right-leaning now when historically, because another thing that changed about this when they were doing the studies and it was clear that this really concerned the researchers is, they're like the moderates now.

They're, they're like, there are no more moderates. The moderates were not split. The moderates almost holistically went right. Oh yeah. Is what they found. Yeah. And you see this in the chart, like if, if, if you are, if you were like anything two thirds from the far left, like, like, if you, if you sort of divided the chart into thirds the two thirds towards the right, even, you know, left of center.

Are now just solidly Republican and not I think what would surprise individuals like, like even the writers of this, not with like. Personal carve outs or caveats, they're just like, no, I'm like Republican now. As you know, you see with somebody like Asma Gold, who I think compared to us Asma Gold is I I'd say he's slightly left of center of, I was just putting his actual politics out there.

Yeah. Yeah, that seems right. Yeah. But he identifies as a Republican and no one online wouldn't identify him as a Republican. That's so funny.

Yeah.

And your, your average lefty, not only would they identify him as a Republican, they call him far right. But if you actually like listen to his political beliefs, he is left of center almost.

Certainly. Yeah. And I love when people say that like, we are not like real rightists and stuff like this. I'm like, we're actually, if you look at most of the mainstream Right, right wing issues. We are right of your average right wing voter these days. Yeah. I think there

Simone Collins: is a little bit of a dysmorphic perception as a well of what right wing stances are.

Yeah. Think extreme,

Malcolm Collins: right? Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Because, and that's the very vocal, right. Whereas everyone else is like heterodox or whatever. And they don't necessarily call themselves being like as they're on the right, but they are, they represent really reasonable people. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, if you're part of this diverse coalition, you know you're gonna want all these different names for it and everything like that, right?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And it's also why the left, they almost could have like picked up part of the right by s stirring all this stuff up with Trump and, and, and getting every single mainstream outlet to call him a fascist. And having some people be like, oh, like he tried to like, take over the government and stuff like that.

And I think with a lot of people, there was this moment where who, when they still believed in the media before they realized like, oh, these people are just lying. About everything. You know, they were like, well, I guess I just can't bring myself to be on this side anymore. And a lot of people did leave the right for a little bit then, and then they went to the left and they're like, these people are crazy.

Like they will not, they just constantly harass me. Even leftists have started to call blue sky, blue gold now. Really separate episode on what ended up happening to Blue Sky, blue Skyes, by the way, on a, a fairly rapid decline at this point. And there have been interesting many major articles from leftist news sources saying that either it's in trouble or that it's no longer a pleasant place to be.

Wow. And I, I, you know, you can see our episode capturing them the crystal, but I actually think that this is a bad thing for the right because I think that Trump sort of captured in a crystal when he.

Malcolm Collins: You know, sent them all to Blue Sky and people are like, we self deported. You didn't send us here.

And it's like, look, we don't care. We don't care what, whatever you, however you wanna interpret it. X has been a lot nicer since you guys have been away. Yeah. I

Simone Collins: wouldn't mind it though. We h