GLEICHSCHALTUNG: New California Laws Will Create ‘Ideological Purity Test’ for Police by Banning Ties to ‘Hate’ and ‘Bias,’ Critics Say.

Newsom on Sept. 30 signed AB 655, which bars Californians who previously had been members of a “hate group” or involved in “hate group activity” (in the past seven years) from police service. It remains unclear when the law will go into effect.

The governor also signed AB 2229, which requires applicants to be screened for “bias” before they can join a police force force. The “bias” requirement had been enacted previously in 2020, but mistakenly was stricken from the law in 2021, according to a legislative analysis. According to the law’s text, it went into effect immediately upon signing.

Although AB 655 uses a strict definition for the term “hate group” tied directly to “genocide,” critics note that the new law also requires agencies to investigate “a complaint made by the public that alleges, as specified, that a peace officer engaged in membership in a hate group, participation in any hate group activity, or advocacy of public expressions of hate.”

Safer just to keep your mouth shut about everything if you ever want any government work — which is the whole point.

VIRGINIA POSTREL: Purity, Sorcery, and Cancel Culture. “The quest for purity informs cancel culture. It pushes partisans to ever-greater extremes, even when those positions are politically self-defeating. It turns historical heroes /into villains and closes nuclear power plants in the face of climate change. It makes the ideal the enemy of the improved, the perfect the exterminator of the better. If we want to understand our cultural moment, we need to think seriously about purity. . . . Purity is about identifying and eliminating contaminants—anomalies that are sources of danger. The danger may be physical, spiritual, cultural, or moral. To purify is to purge whatever is out of place. It establishes what belongs by banishing what does not. ‘The quest for purity is pursued by rejection,’ writes anthropologist Mary Douglas in her landmark 1966 book Purity and Danger. . . . The 21st-century American version of sorcery allegations are charges of racism, sexism, harassment, and similar offenses. Many examples of ‘cancel culture’ occur in enclaves—fan groups, for instance, or loose professional associations. In 2020, the online knitting community was torn apart by what British journalist Gavin Haynes dubbed a ‘purity spiral,’ in which people who thought of themselves as kind-hearted liberals were suddenly ostracized and boycotted for alleged white supremacy.”

I don’t care for puritanism in any form.

GOOD ADVICE: Republicans: Stop Fighting Among Yourselves.

Parties that lose tend to go on purity crusades, which is exactly the wrong thing — especially in this case, where the loss, such as it was, was extraordinarily narrow.

ROGER KIMBALL: The Purity Spiral Turns, as Courage Goes Missing. It’s amazing how almost uniformly awful and pathetic the people in charge of our universities, corporations, and press are.

ROGER KIMBALL: The Purity Spiral Turns, as Courage Goes Missing.

The journalist Gavin Haynes has a great phrase for a familiar and disturbing phenomenon: the purity spiral.

“A purity spiral occurs,” he writes,  “when a community becomes fixated on implementing a single value that has no upper limit, and no single agreed interpretation. The result is a moral feeding frenzy.”

Students of history will know all about this species of perverted gustatory over-indulgence. The French Revolution is one locus classicus.

In that macabre carnival, the more extreme Montagnards consumed the (somewhat) moderate Girondists before turning to consume themselves. No citoyen, not even Robespierre himself, could be sufficiently virtuous to satisfy the inexorable demands of revolutionary zeal.

Mao’s cultural revolution provides another classic example. In the late 1960s, the Red Guards took to the street to identify and destroy anyone and anything involved with traditional Chinese culture. The result was an orgy of destruction and murder on an industrial scale.

Read the whole thing.

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.

Read the whole thing.

CHINA SYNDROME: More popular heartburn medications recalled due to impurity.

VICTORY GIRLS: Purity Tests, Fascism And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

MR. PRESIDENT, WE MUST NOT ALLOW A WINE CAVE GAP! Wine caves and ‘purity tests:’ Warren and Buttigieg clash over billionaire donors:

Warren, 70, had earlier attacked Buttigieg for holding fundraisers in “a wine cave full of crystals” and suggested he was trying to buy the election in “smoke-filled rooms.”

“The mayor just recently had a fundraiser that was held in a wine cave, full of crystals and served $900-a-bottle wine,” said Warren. “He had promised that every fundraiser he would do would be open-door, but this one was closed-door. We made the decision many years ago that rich people in smoke-filled rooms* would not pick the next president of the United States. Billionaires in wine caves should pick the next president of the United States.”

“I do not sell access to my time,” the Massachusetts senator responded.

Related: Elizabeth Warren reveals she earned $2 million from 30 years of private legal work as she feuds with Pete Buttigieg over financial transparency.

More: Ouch! Elizabeth Warren’s look after Pete Buttigieg’s comment about ‘issuing purity test you yourself can’t pass’ is heap big awkward.

And speaking of wine caves: Gavin Newsom Defends ‘Wine Cave:’ ‘Used By Democrats All Across the Country.’

* Politicians are still making “smoke-filled rooms” analogies in 2019? Though as Jonah Goldberg noted in November, “There’s no doubt mistakes were made by those party fat cats and fixers, but those smoke-filled rooms also gave us Lincoln, Coolidge, the Roosevelts, Eisenhower, Truman, Kennedy, et al. I don’t love all of those guys, but it’s not obvious to me primaries would have given us better. And you can hardly argue that they weren’t democratically elected. (We can talk about JFK’s election shenanigans another time.)”

(Classical allusion in headline.)

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Bill Maher Calls BDS: Bullsh*t Purity Test–Rep. Talib Calls For Boycott Of Maher.

TAMARA KEEL: “Purity spirals and public draggings are nothing new, the internet just lets them be done faster and more efficiently.”

BEGUN THE 2020 PROGRESSIVE PURITY CONTEST HAS: The MSN-DNC Unsheathes the Long Knives for Tulsi Gabbard.

AND THEIR STUNNING LACK OF SELF AWARENESS WILL NOT HELP THEM SCRAMBLE FROM THE BRINK:  Purity Spirals Into Evil.

ROGER KIMBALL: Why Kevin Williamson Matters. I think the response to the Left’s purity campaign is to denormalize the institutions they control. Harvard, The Atlantic, etc. need to be treated not as mainstream cultural institutions, but as centers of leftist agitprop pure and simple. Because that’s what they’ve decided to be, and there’s no reason to treat them with the respect an actual mainstream cultural institution enjoys.

OH GOODIE: The 2020 Democratic Purity Olympics Are Already Under Way.

Wouldn’t you know it, on the very delicious-to-watch week that Republicans start jumping off the leaky Trump frigate, some Democrats began testing attacks on one of their own, possible 2020 presidential contender Kamala Harris. The charge, leveled by a few folks on the left, including one member of the Democratic Party Unity Commission (!), is the usual one: that Harris is a corporate stooge in the mold of you-know-who and if the Democrats are even thinking about nominating her, the dis-unity commission will get to work sabotaging her.

I hold no particular brief for Harris, who’s been a senator for all of seven months. Frankly, to me, this presidential talk seems awfully premature. Yes, Barack Obama had served briefly; he was elected to the Senate in 2006 and started running for president the next year, whereas Harris would have three years under her belt. But Obama had electrified the political world with that convention speech back in 2004, and that night he showed obvious presidential potential. Harris asked some good questions in two Senate hearings, but I’m a little mystified as to why that gets her on presidential lists. She was shortlisted by some people before she was even elected.

She’s telegenic, a female of color, and sufficiently progressive — or is sufficient not sufficient enough for some Democrats?

As David Dayen pointed out in the New Republic in early 2016 as her Senate run was getting off the ground, she has a history of being overly cautious (uh, just like you-know-who), especially with regard to her decision not to prosecute Steve Mnuchin’s bank for foreclosure violations. The California attorney general’s office had found ample evidence of possible wrongdoing, but Harris declined to pursue the matter and hasn’t said why.

So she should say why, if she runs for president, and people can judge whether her response is adequate. That’s part of the scrutiny.

But these attacks have the feel of something else. They have the feel of a group of people, most or all of them Bernie Sanders supporters, itching to refight 2016 and demand a level of purity that lo and behold only one candidate can possibly attain.

Corn, popped.

PURITY SPIRAL: Professor Weinstein’s sin: He stepped outside the progressive bubble and spoke to Tucker Carlson.

I love how threats to defund Evergreen State count as “violence.” Plus: “There’s a certain irony in the fact that a faculty heavily engaged in social criticism of all kinds was unable to criticize even the worst behavior when it took place among their own little corner of society. Instead, they attacked the one person who dared to step outside the campus bubble and say what was obvious to everyone else: Something was badly amiss at Evergreen College.”

And: “Professor Weinstein didn’t embarrass the students, they embarrassed themselves. People left, right and center saw the videos and found the protester’s behavior unacceptable.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Are The Social Sciences Undergoing A Purity Spiral?

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Rise of the alt-right: How mainstream conservatives’ obsession with purity fueled a new right-wing radicalism.

It’s great to see Matt, who helped create NewsBusters, writing in Salon; but it’s akin to Ross Douthat being the token conservative at the New York Times. One conservative pundit is nowhere near enough to offset the institutional leftism. Speaking of which, Salon itself should take a good look in the mirror for playing a role in creating the alt-right: the Website went hard racialist left around the time Obama took office, (not to mention simply hard left) and rarely took their thumb off the scale, to the point where then-Salon editor at large Joan Walsh (whose pigment looks about as pale as mine) wrote a book in 2012 with plenty of approving blurbs from her fellow elite leftists titled What’s the Matter with White People?

Immediately after the election, John Podhoretz tweeted, “Liberals spent 40 years disaggregating U.S., until finally the largest cohort in the country chose to vote as though it were an ethnic group.” Back in 2008, Jonah Goldberg received plenty of brickbats from the left for writing that “The White Man is the Jew of Liberal Fascism,” but Salon seemed to ensconce that notion on page one of their style-guide for writers and accelerated the left’s ongoing war against white males exponentially. Apparently they weren’t expecting much in the way of repercussions.

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN: White Progressives Are The New Racial Purity Police.

Woodrow Wilson, call your office.

JON GABRIEL: Politics And Purity-For-Profit.

THE NEW MCCARTHYISM: Academic-purity group backed by Greenpeace and AFT urges activists to “expose and undermine” professors and campus research centers that work against “progressive values.”

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED AGAINST BARACK OBAMA, WE’D HAVE POLITICIANS OBSESSED WITH ETHNIC PURITY. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! “A Brooklyn city councilwoman wants to know why ‘blocs’ of Asians are living in two Fort Greene housing projects — and suggested it would be ‘beneficial’ to assign housing by ethnic group.”