THE ENFORCEMENT OF IDEOLOGICAL PURITY: how the topic of black-on-black crime is handled by the left.

[Lee Fang of The Intercept], of course, had a choice. He didn’t have to apologize. If he didn’t apologize, he wasn’t going to be executed or even sent to an actual Gulag – just a social one. He would have become persona non grata at every liberal media outlet in the US, and apparently he was not willing to do that. A conservative outlet might have hired him, but he wasn’t ready to cast his lot with a group he probably still considers The Enemy. So he apologized and kept his job.

But maybe, if he’s a true person of the left, his apology wasn’t just pragmatic. It may have been sincere. Like Winston Smith at the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and in Fang’s case without even the need for torture and major re-education, perhaps he was ready to sincerely admit the error of his ways. If that was the case, to me it’s even more frightening than if Fang had just sucked it up in order to keep his job. But if he was sincere, it’s a demonstration of how leftists manage to absorb new information and to integrate it into their pre-existing mental map of what’s acceptable and unacceptable. Depending on how far left Fang is, he might just decide that if all the other leftists say he’s guilty of thoughtcrime here, it must therefore be so.

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