Current STEM researcher who also happened to have met a few academics on the right side of the political spectrum… I am very qualified to speak about this I hope. I’ll try to use as unbiased language as possible

First of all, you are correct. It is generally true that most academics are left-leaning (obligatory not all, but you get the point)

In general, higher education attainment is associated with being left-leaning: academia is known to have extreme levels of education attainment (many jobs require a PhD). On top of it, academic jobs reward intellectual curiosity, do not tend to pay super well, tend to heavily rely on governmental funding… all of these are traditionally more associated with the political left or left-leaning. Still, there very much are right-leaning academics, they just don’t tend to scream around a lot about it

There are notable exceptions however. Economics is quite famous for being politically balanced, although what economics treat as left/right-leaning might be a bit different from the general public. If I remember, business schools (yes there are business professors!) tend to be more right-leaning. This is a smaller field and a bit more anecdotal, but quite a few prominent meta-science researchers are right-wing nutjobs: the “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” guy and the NIH director Bhattacharya guy are both COVID deniers

There are also fringe scientists as some others have mentioned, but most people within their fields don’t consider fringe scientists as part of the academia so to speak

Right-wingers care about money and power, the smart ones go into business

Oh, they’re there. Sadly.

I don’t remember the charges he did time for other than them vaguely being about ‘corruption’.

That’s because they were bogus charges, they were only meant to remove him from the election. In short he was accused of money laundering and corruption, because they claimed that he received bribes through renovations on an apartment (that he didn’t owned nor lived in), and in short he was arrested before being judged, he served a couple of years in jail having been denied his abeas corpus while the prosecutor charging him gave speeches saying things like “we might not have proof, but we have convictions”. Eventually the judge that prosecuted Lula was given a position as the ministry of security in the government he help elect by taking Lula from the election, and a panel of supreme judges ruled he had had no actual evidence to convict Lula and overthrew the conviction.

He had close ties with Christina Kirchner, which is well known to have had people killed for investigating her,

Yeah, that’s one of the other ones I know enough to say they’re very well put on that list.

and i remember something about him and her wanting to make some kind of latin american alliance thing which I consider a terrifying idea.

It’s called Mercosur, it’s a very good idea that predates both Lula and Kirchner, it was formally declared in 85 by Sarney and Alfonsín. Lula has been a very strong advocate for a more united Mercosur, wanting it to be similar to the EU, this has nothing to do with left or right wing, Paraguay is a member and Lula has kept good relationships with Peña despite him being right wing, at the same time the Mercosur suspended Venezuela after the election fraud and Lula has criticized Maduro because of his authoritarian regime.

There were also stuff about political persecution of the bolsonaro nutjob proteters but I’ll take that with a big pinch of salt.

Yeah, they’re calling political persecution to the fact that violent radical protestors enticed by social media who invaded the house of government and destroyed property in an attempt to overthrow the results of an election were given the option to go through an education course and abstain from social media or serve prison sentences, and they chose prison sentences, so now they’re in jail (surprised Pikachu face). Some documents also showed that it was part of a plan from Bolsonaro to create confusion while Lula was assassinated, and his answer to that was “it doesn’t matter that we planned it and had it all scheduled, the assassin didn’t actually do it so we can’t be judged for planning something that didn’t happened”

At Uni i sometimes wished for a rightwing person just to debate things. Everyone agreed on most issues,so there we’re rarely spicy debates.

Being an academic means being open minded because when researching something, the outcome may be different from what you expected. In such cases do you concede that your initial theory was wrong or do you stubbornly continue to believe that you were right and keep trying to prove yourself correct?

You can find stats showing that support for the Conservatives falls in Canada as education rises. So depending on region and definition, it’s not just you.

That being said, that doesn’t mean there are zero. Jordan Peterson as a famous example.

I know a right wing guy who has a PhD, speaks 5 different languages and is an immigrant. He says that you can tell which immigrants are terrorists by just looking at them and everyone who looks like that should be arrested.

I know another right wing guy who has a PhD in Informatics and owns 20 houses in Amsterdam. He doesn’t see the problem. People can just move somewhere else.

Both of them don’t just have PhDs, they work as academics, one in Berlin the other in Amsterdam.

They exist, but the problem is reality has a liberal bias and academics tend to follow the evidence.

Go to any school of economics, comp sci faculty, school of business and dare i say biology and you’ll find a lot of em. They tend to be less vocal. Historians too.

You’d have to be fucking stupid to be right wing and generally academically inclined individuals are not stupid, so…

There’s probably a small bunch that claim to be right wing because they have a lot of money and greed eclipses intelligence.

“Academics” is huge…

Theres fewer and fewer, but some avenues of academics a person wouldnt be swayed left/right solely by their knowledge and subject matter expertise that makes them an academic.

Off the top of my head, only economists have a right wing slant. But that’s because the wealthy bought off the neoliberals to deregulate everything, and everyone agreed that the only people who knew about the economy, were the ones who said Regeanomics was a step in the right direction.

Everyone else was just called wrong and haven’t had a real chance to try on smaller scales that it works.

Mamdani is a great example of someone who just does the easy obvious thing, the difference is him and his administration are actually trying. Doing it in a city with the GDP of most countries, is huge because it’s an obvious example of it working.

Depends on country and context.

Where I live the higher your education the more likely you are to vote right. It’s mostly about what income you have.

It really depends on the field. They are more common the “hard” sciences like physics, mathematics, engineering, chemistry, etc. STEM basically.

They also exist in the social sciences like history and athropology but are farrrrr less common

Nope they’re all moron’s hence well look around fuckin moron’s need to hang