Talk:purity spiral

I am pretty sure this phrase was in use before 2018. 2601:648:8202:350:0:0:0:738F 02:12, 21 May 2022 (UTC)Reply

Some attestations (from duckduckgo search):

[1] "Purity spirals into evil", August 2018
[2] How knitting fell into a purity spiral, January 2020, Unherd. Several other sources claim this article is the origin of the phrase, which it obviously isn't.
[3] Urban dictionary entry, January 2020
[4] Virtue signaling and purity spiraling, December 2017
[5] The Purity Spiral, January 2020, cites Unherd (knitting) article above
[6] Quillette, July 2017
[7] Brian Menegus, Gizmodo, May 2017
[8] Critical poem, 2022
[9] Gavin Haynes (author of Unherd article), The Telegraph, February 2020
(non-use) "Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution", 2007 book by Ruth Scurr, shows up in Google Books search for purity spiral but doesn't actually contain the phrase. Probably a semantic similarity match through vector search.
There are lots of Google Books attestations in post-2019 political books, indicating that the phrase has gotten a fair amount of traction in the past few years. 2601:648:8202:350:0:0:0:738F 03:23, 21 May 2022 (UTC)Reply
[10] April 2018, screen shot of weird racist website thespurityspiral.com, indicating that site has been around at least that long. I came across the site earlier but didn't include it in list because I didn't see a date on it. Site is awful and if you have to look at it, you might want to use a VPN. 2601:648:8202:350:0:0:0:738F 13:33, 23 May 2022 (UTC)Reply
[11] December 2016, Salon.com, "rise of the alt-right", Matthew Sheffield. "...the American right has been caught in a purity spiral — a form of vicious circle in which successive elites compete among each other over who is the “true conservative.” 2601:648:8202:350:0:0:0:738F 13:38, 23 May 2022 (UTC)Reply