And There It Is

A few days ago I wrote this:

To at least some degree, the vaccine mandate fits the shape of an identity-focused purge, leaving behind a more homogenous political machine in a giant city government….

It looks to me like the emerging purges of military, police, fire, and medical organizations — and, alongside those, of airlines and other private corporations — are a calculated, conscious, deliberate maneuver to produce greater political homogenization of institutions.

Now comes the Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. with a column in which be celebrates the purging of NYPD officers who decline COVID vaccines — because “it seems reasonable to suspect a high correlation between refusal to obey vaccine mandates and susceptibility to the right-wing extremism.”

Further:

“As was made clear by the fact that sworn officers took part in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the ranks of law enforcement have been infiltrated by radicalized cells of these so-called conservatives. Anything that roots them out is something for which Americans should be grateful, and if they are willing to self-identify, to, in effect, hold up their hands and be counted, so much the better.”

So yes: It’s an ideological purge dressed up as a public health measure. The point is to render government institutions politically reliable — to align the police, military, and so on with the Wokesters, and make government a loyal party-centered institution.

We have seen this political maneuver many times. It’s not a mystery what it means, or how it works, or where it leads. People who work at purging enemies and consolidating power are not terribly difficult to understand.