Gather 'round good folks, for a tale so absurd it could only spring from the soggy ruins of modern academia—a veritable Noah's Ark of woke lunacy, except this time the flood's not water, it's tears.Edward Dutton regales us with the saga of a study so spicy it got yanked from the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology faster than you can say "trigger warning." The crime? Proving woke folks are a tad unhinged—mentally unstable, mutation-riddled, anxiety-soaked wrecks—and doing it with such cold, hard data that the woke brigade couldn't handle the mirror being held up. Academia's drowning in a new Noahian deluge, and this retraction's the ark sinking with all hands on deck.
Our heroes, Dutton and Emil Kirkegaard, armed with a "Woke Scale" and a Finnish sample of 4,978 souls, set out to test if conservatives really do have the mental health edge. Spoiler: they do, with a correlation of -0.41 between wokeness and sanity, and a juicy 0.36 between wokeness and anxiety. The woke, it turns out, are a jittery bunch, and the more a Finnish party's policies lean Left into wokeville, the nuttier its voters get. Peer reviewers loved it, asked for more juice in the discussion—enter the genetic angle, complete with mutational load and old-dad sperm—and off it went, sailing to the journal's website, where it became the ninth most-viewed article ever. A hit! Cue the confetti!
But oh no, here comes the woke flood, a tidal wave of hurt feelings crashing over the ivory tower. Post-publication, the pitchforks came out—well, more like soggy tissues and angry tweets. "Concerns were raised," the publisher (Wiley and Sons) whimpered, and suddenly it's a "post-publication peer review"—a phrase as scientific as a horoscope. The verdict? "Major errors!" they cried, but it's a laughable fib. The "errors"? Calling woke folks "mentally unstable" (accurate), hinting at "white supremacy" in some vague citation (unclear), and a minor coding quibble about 32 items versus 26. Kirkegaard reran the numbers, and—oops—the anxiety link just got stronger (0.37). The real sin? The discussion dared suggest genetics over nurture, and that's a no-no when the woke dogma says all ills are society's fault.
It's a riot: one reviewer's so lazy they let AI write their critique (caught by a sleuth at undetectable.ai), while the others clutch pearls over "normative bias"—translation: "You hurt our feefees!" Academia's not just drowning; it's doing the backstroke in this woke deluge, gleefully tossing out truth because it stings the narcissists. Dutton nails it: the woke, high on their own mutational load, can't stand the spotlight—they rage, they retract, they prove the study right by freaking out. It's like Noah forgot the animals and just loaded up the boat with drama queens, then scuttled it because the giraffes complained about the view.
So here we are, watching academia sink under waves of self-inflicted absurdity. A top-nine article, peer-reviewed to death, gets the axe not for science, but for sentiment. The flood's rising, and the woke are paddling the lifeboats—straight into irrelevance. That's academia for you!
"It's quite incredible how brazenly anti-scientific Woke academia — that is to say, basically, academia — is. It's got to the point of being comical. A study proving that Woke people are mentally unstable has been retracted by a major psychology journal because Woke people, being mentally unstable, were upset by it and felt that it used judgemental language about them; that is scientifically neutral language such as "mentally unstable" and "high mutational load."
Last summer, the Danish independent scientist Emil Kirkegaard and I had a study proving that Woke people are more mentally unstable than controls accepted in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology. The rather technical piece, entitled "Do Conservatives Really Have an Advantage in Mental Health? An Examination of Measurement Invariance" was accepted after two rounds of double-blind review, in which the manuscript in reviewed by anonymous experts. In the period between acceptance — when it was placed on the journal's website — and formal publication, it quickly became the ninth most viewed article in the journal's history.
This was a problem for Woke activists, naturally, because they tend to be Narcissistic and the study confronted them with what they are and did so very directly. It examined an earlier study which had applied a "Woke Scale" — a series of questions to discern levels of Wokeness — to 4,978 Finnish adults. Kirkegaard and I wanted to discover whether this scale displayed "measurement bias." For example, one question was: "If white people have on average a higher level of income than black people, it is because of racism." The original author correlated how you answered with your answers to questions about mental health. The problem is that measures of mental health may work differently on those of high or low levels of Wokeness. In other words, the fact of being anti-Woke, for example, may impact how you answer a question about mental health, meaning that the scale is not "measurement invariant." We found that the scale was measurement invariant. It was genuinely measuring what was going on. The correlation between Wokeness and mental health was -0.41 and the relationship between Wokeness and anxiety was 0.36. Drawing upon the earlier author's data, we also found that voters for a give Finnish political party become more mentally ill, in a linear fashion, the more Woke that party's policies are.
The peer-reviewers asked us to expand our "Discussion" section, to look in more depth at why this might be the case. We presented the theory that it might be significantly for genetic reasons, and presented data to back up these claims: We are evolved to be group-oriented, but Darwinian selection pressures have collapsed since the Industrial Revolution, and so a significant component of the Woke are high in mutational load. This is congruent with their being, on average, both mentally and physically unhealthy, and they display various specific markers of mutation. For example, they tend to have older fathers, and older fathers have more de novo mutations on their sperm. It should be stressed that we only included these issues because the peer-reviewers asked us to. They then reviewed what we had done and recommended publication.
However, on 21st February we were informed by the publisher of the journal (published by Wiley and Sons) that "concerns had been raised" and this study had led to a "post-publication peer-review" — despite the fact that peer-review in science is supposed to be sacrosanct — with the conclusion that there were "major errors" in the article and that they must retract it.
This was a total lie. The new reviews constituted, at best, a series of minor criticisms that — were our article not about Wokeness — would have been addressed in a response piece to which we would have been allowed a right of reply. Their main issues were, in essence, what they called "normatively biased language" and, for one of the reviewers, being unethical by citing "white supremacy advocacy," though it was unclear which of our purely academic citations fell into this category. Kirkegaard wrote about what happened on his blog "Emil Kirkegaard Things," and a commenter noted, "Second reviewer clearly used AI. I pasted the "Conflation of Religiosity and Spirituality" section into https://undetectable.ai/ and they said it was 1% human." So much for ethics! The reviewers also noted a problem with the Wokeness items coding, because we used 32 items, but the scale only has 26 items. However, this reflected issues with the study that we were drawing upon.
Nevertheless, we re-did the analysis in light of this very minor concern and the correlation between anxiety and Wokeness simply increased from 0.36 to 0.37. In essence, they didn't like the discussion section and this was because it averred that Woke people had a tendency to be mentally ill for genetic reasons and conservatives had a tendency to be the opposite. They claimed it was biased because environmental considerations weren't explored, but this is never normally a reason to retract a study. Moreover, our study drew upon studies to justify why the environmental view is less parsimonious than the genetic one. Studies that looked at purely environmental explanations do not get retracted, even though they are empirically wrong, and nor do those that portray conservatives in a negative light.
Ironically, then, the forced retraction of our study substantiated completely what it argued: Woke people are mentally unstable, on average. They cope with this be adopting a Narcissistic false self, so that they can feel superior — we literally said this in the Discussion and the new reviewers criticised us for doing so. If you question their false self, such as by proving how mentally ill and high in mutational load they are, they react with Narcissistic Rage and try to destroy you.
Narcissism strongly correlates with Machiavellianism. Having a piece like this in a mainstream psychology journal means they feel you have power over them. They also assume that you're motivated by power, rather than truth, because that's true of them. So, the piece must be retracted; you must be symbolically disempowered . . .
But, of course, this completely proves our point and has no bearing on the accuracy — the truth — of the study. Woke Academia is so frightened of the truth that they will retract, on spurious grounds, a major journal's ninth most read article of all time, one whose results are not in doubt. And why have they retracted it? Because it's hurt their feelings. And they feel negative feelings very strongly, just as the article proved.
Academia's drowning in this woke deluge, and it's a hoot if it weren't so grim. They're too busy polishing their DEI badges to notice the water's up to their necks. The pipe burst years ago—probably when they started calling integration "colonialism"—and now they're flailing, insisting it's all fine while the furniture floats by. The UK's liberal tolerance, once a quaint charm, is now a soggy liability, letting parallel societies sprout like mould in a damp flat. It's not a saga of conquest; it's a farce of self-sabotage, with academia scribbling footnotes as the stage collapses. Curtains up on national suicide—hope you brought your lifeboat!