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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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Just look at the most prominent recent examples: if you look at NT Times articles/their comment sections, you can see that the mainstream left's reaction to pro-Hamas protesters or the whole Claudine Gay affair

I think your examples of "the left policing their own" are not examples of that at all. Both of these are better understood as examples of the Israeli lobby policing US speech, not as examples of the mainstream left policing its own extremists.

Mapping the Palestine question as a typical intra-left issue and then generalising it to infer that the mainstream left is broadly reining in the extremists is a bad model. More convincing would be some prominent examples of BLM types or authoritarian covid-safetyists or mass immigrant activists, getting overruled by moderates. But I don't think you're gonna find 'em.