JD Vance and Vice Signaling
Abandon your values for power and profit
Elon Musk’s DOGE department has been in the news recently, especially for how DOGE is employing extremely young staffers in seemingly high-level positions. Many of them are in the 19-25 age range, and last week there was a big fight about publicly naming them, as Wired did in a recent article. Are they serious public officials in important positions that should be reported on? Are they innocent lil guys, just smol beans who must be protected? Is one of them known by the online handle ‘BigBalls’?1
This was a merry little social media war, but it turns out there was a pretty good reason the public might want to know their names! One of them - and you will be shocked this was true of a Zoomer Republican - turns out to be a racist freak. Marko Elez, one of DOGE’s new wunderkinds, had an anonymous social media account with posts like “Normalize Indian hate”, “I was racist before it was cool”, and “You could not pay me to marry outside my ethnicity”. He also advocated for repealing the Civil Rights Act and for what he called a ‘eugenicist immigration policy’.
Marko resigned in shame after only a few weeks on the job.
This isn’t a surprise. Ultimately, we all believe in cancel culture at least a little bit. You might get mad if people try to cancel a comedian for one or two edgy jokes, but if the people in charge of important government agencies are spouting Nazi propaganda without any shame you’d probably be ok ‘cancelling’ that guy out of his important government job. And this is pretty close to that scenario! Nobody’s brain-dead enough to think that the guy who says “Racism is cool” should be in charge of critical government functions that impact hundreds of millions of people.
The twist, of course, is that JD Vance did exactly that:
JD Vance, whose wife is Indian and whose children are half-Indian, wants Marko Elez back in his job. And Elon has now promised to bring him back. I try to give Vance even the most marginal amount of credit - he wouldn’t stand up for naked, pure racism aimed at his own children - but he’s disappointed me once again. It’s not like these were posts from when Marko was 14 years old, and Marko’s learned so much since then. The posts are from a few months ago! There’s been no apology! And Vance wants him back in the job where he gets extralegal access to sensitive government systems that impact hundreds of millions of people.
I could just stop here with this post. We could laugh at JD Vance, point out the insanity, catalog all the dunks people posted on social media. It would be an easy post to write. But there’s something deeper going on here. We used to worry, as part of The Discourse, about people who were ‘virtue signaling’. Now virtue signaling is out of style. Instead, we’re doing vice signaling.
Virtue signaling, the theory goes, is when you post about all the good things you believe in order to look good to your ideological allies. It’s saying certain things or doing certain actions not because you’re sincere but because you think it makes you look good. You want to signal how virtuous you are.
This is fine up to a point - if you’re donating big sums of money to malaria nets, you’re still saving lives even if your only motivation is to look like a good person. Nobody cares about the form of virtue signaling that’s accompanied by real action:
Virtue signaling is much more annoying when it’s purely posting about how good a person you are, how outraged you are about Current Thing, while doing nothing substantial in the real world. Folks tend to dislike that type of virtue signaling.
But what Vance is doing is different. He’s not signaling how good of a person he is. He’s signaling, in a strange way, how bad of a person he is. He’s signaling that he’s ok with racists who explicitly think his children are race-mixed abominations. He’s not doing this to signal virtue. He’s doing it signal vice.
What’s the point of vice signaling? Vance isn’t trying to explicitly say “I am a bad person”. Not really. What he’s trying to signal is loyalty to the team. He will degrade himself for the team. He will abandon moral virtue for the team. He’ll throw his family under the bus. He will support self-evidently evil, stupid things all to show loyalty to the tribe.
It’s easy to support the Trumpist movement when you’re saying things like “I think we should stop funding non-binary dance therapy”. Nobody’s going to fight you over that. Some people who normally disagree with you might even agree. But because it’s easy, you don’t get any real credit with the movement for saying that.
What gets you real credit is supporting the movement when it’s hard. When members of your group have done something heinous and you stand by them anyways. When you vocally support the really evil stuff, you get real credit for supporting the team no matter what. This is vice-signaling: Proving your loyalty by abandoning your principles. Showing that you will sideline any moral virtue and accept any vice if it means standing by your tribe.
Virtue signaling is saying “Look at this good thing I said - I’m a good person and you should support me.” Vice signaling is “Look at this evil and deranged thing I backed you up on - I’m unshakably loyal and you should support me.” Whenever something particularly cruel happened during Trump’s first term, liberals were fond of saying “The cruelty is the point”. Here, it’s not cruelty just for cruelty’s sake. It’s cruelty as a signal, cruelty as proof you have abandoned any previous moral commitments and are all-in for Team Trump.
You can see echoes of this everywhere. You can see it when conservative senators who used to promote foreign aid and ask for more of it are now leading DOGE’s destruction of USAID. You see it when Republicans who were once horrified by January 6th and its implications now think it’s no longer a big deal.
You might be tempted to write this off as simple hypocrisy. And it is hypocrisy, but it’s a specific kind of hypocrisy that’s worth noticing and paying attention to. You can find this happening on both political extremes, but it happens more on the political right. It’s a special feature of Trumpism. Loyalty to the movement comes before anything - and especially loyalty to Trump himself.
You could argue for a more charitable reading of Vance’s statement. Maybe he’s not vice signaling. Maybe he’s just arguing for a different kind of virtue, the virtue of forgiveness. But come on. The dipshit involved has not even apologized. And frankly you’d be a sucker to believe him if he did.
Perhaps you think this is just own-the-libs nonsense, edgy takes for the sake of offending the left, prove how antiwoke you are by saying the worst things possible. That certainly happens from plenty of hot take artists, but it’s not what you expect from a sitting vice-president. And it’s not what’s happening here.
Or maybe you think Vance is simply used to liberals trying to cancel people unjustly, and he’s making an error in judgment that this case is as frivolous as previous cases. Once again, come on.
JD Vance, as his book and his stump speeches tell us over and over, graduated from Yale Law. He knows the difference between getting unjustly cancelled because you forgot a pronoun and our latest Gen Z mini-Hitler. And he knows the difference between trying to fire someone from their job at the widget factory and saying that someone shouldn’t be in charge of major government agencies. Vance is not an idiot.
Instead, Vance has decided he can accept Marko’s evil view points if it helps him accrue more power. He’s proven over and over that he’ll say whatever it takes to get power, and in the modern GOP that means vice signaling. It means reversing your views on Trump from calling him ‘unfit for office’ to becoming his loyal lap dog:
Vice signaling is especially prominent in the age of Trump, because Trump himself is devoid of morality and only cares that his underlings show strict loyalty to him personally. That’s one huge reason why we see it so often now. But the other reason is that so many Republicans have spoken out against Trump in the past, and have no way to get back in his good graces other than groveling at his feet. And the most effective form of groveling, the most effective way to really show how loyal you are, is vice signaling. Support the team even when they say monstrous things.
This is the tragedy of JD Vance and of modern conservatism writ large. JD Vance knows better. He said so himself when compared Trump to Hitler. He just decided he was willing to sell his integrity. That’s how you can find him posting about ordo amoris, the need to put love of your close family above all else, while defending racists who think his children are subhuman mulattos. Or go back to conservative commentator Patrick Ruffini’s tweets linked above:
Ruffini knew that he wouldn’t be able to stand up to Trump. He was begging Congress to impeach Trump so that conservatives won’t be tempted to forget how bad January 6th was. He knew he didn’t have the moral courage to resist future vice signaling, and he was right.
Virtue signaling is annoying. It’d be better if people did virtuous things in the real world rather than signaling virtue - but at least they’re aiming at virtue.
Vice signaling is a much more cynical and more depressing place to land. It’s the digital equivalent of a mob boss asking you to shoot someone to prove your loyalty to the team - and in Vance’s case, the someone is his mixed-race kids. The reason vice signaling works is that it’s hard to turn back. Once you’ve embraced heinous actions, you’re committed. And the danger with selling your soul this way is that when you eat the fruit of the poisoned tree, you might find out that you like the taste.
Right wing politics in 2025 is dominated by vice signaling, with commentators and elected officials falling all over themselves to support things they know are wrong. With Trump’s help and approval, they’ve created a world where loyalty to your political tribe is the overriding moral concern, and any evil or deranged act can be justified and defended on those terms. It’s a tragedy for the few remaining rational conservatives, a tragedy for the country, but most of all a tragedy for the people involved.
That would be Edward Coristine, and yes he is. He was also fired from his last job for leaking company secrets, and now has access to sensitive government databases.
And of the political far right and far left, only one camp has unified control of the federal government.
Senator Mike Lee’s Twitter feed is a great example of vice signaling in action.
The main problem with "Virtue Signalling" wasn't the hypocrisy, but that it was often used as an attack vector against those that didn't meet a standard. Boasting about giving to charity as an example is a harmless form of virtue signalling. Telling people how you'd never make a joke about AIDS on an airplane as a vector for attacking Justine Sacco was a more harmful method of Virtue Signalling. I am better than THAT person often turned into THAT person is a bad human being.
Vice signalling is an interesting concept, and coupled with a 1984 type of disbelieving the evidence of ones own eyes reinforces tribalism. I agree with your main thesis It not only signals to the tribe that you're one of them, but it also creates a distance between you and polite society. This is how cults work, and it's a common tool used by racists for recruitment.
I honestly believe that in order to hinder recruitment into racist groups, there has to be a way back into general society for people who wander. Too many times, the left takes transgressions and does the work of racist groups for them. They make it impossible for people to do anything except stay with the group and become more indoctrinated.
Abusive partners reduce access to friends, make you reliant on a single person. Racists trick you into questioning holocaust figures and outraged society then pushes you into having no choice but throw your hat in with the racists.
Liberalism and Free speech help to a degree. Stating that people can say what they want, that they can hold transgressive beliefs and still contribute to society (as long as it does no direct harm) allows us to hinder people from falling into that cult-like cycle. I wonder what I would consider "too far", and if in this case, the guy accused has passed that, but honestly I think what Vance is doing is probably better than leaving this chap in the hands of even more racist groups.