From my experience Mike Lee has genuinely gone somewhat nuts and seems to believe the stupid things he says. He is more like Elon Musk where being terminally online has really poisoned him.
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.
Remember the girl who had worked really hard to be a cheerleader at the University of Tennessee, and it all went away because a jerk who went to her high school deployed a recorded bit of her rap-inspired use of a racial slur in celebrating her acquisition of a learner’s permit? Remember the lady who lost her job because she wore a Megyn Kelly-inspired blackface costume in order to lampoon Kelly? Those overreactions to relatively minor transgressions resulted in real human suffering and, honestly, empowered sadists who enjoy inflicting suffering. As someone said in a different context, the cruelty is the point.
So now we have a guy who said genuinely obnoxious things. They may reflect genuine moral turpitude on his part. And he didn’t say them when he was twelve. So maybe he should be canceled, if we just look at it in isolation. But maybe Vance is looking at it against the background of cancel culture and its excesses. If this guy gets reinstated and moves on with his life, if the shaming for past jokes or statements ceases to work, well, you won’t have people digging up stupid things people said when they were twelve. It’s about changing incentives.
If someone thinks being a cheerleader and controlling systems that influence hundreds of millions of people are comparable situations, I genuinely don't know how to have a productive conversation with that person.
"Proud, unrepentant racists should not oversee the nation's bureaucracy" is a really fucking low bar to clear, but somehow the modern conservative movement is failing to clear it. Folks have are so freaked out by canceled cheerleaders that they've lost the ability to see actual evil in the world? That's a profound moral failing.
Trump appointed these unknown people to extremely powerful positions and didn’t even bother with a simple background check. Your comparison to a cheerleader is brain dead.
"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."
Which, interestingly, was calling out this behaviour among woke progressives, indicating it's not a partisan phenomenon. Unquestioningly believing a completely implausible accusation of gang rape and expressing profound indifference towards the rights of those falsely accused is about as perfect a demonstration as "vice signalling" as you can get.
We used to have norms that you could fire people for public comments, only if they were particularly egregious and the person was particularly influential. Then you lot eroded the standards for egregiousness and influence to the point that random low level staff were being fired for saying trans women are not literally women.
In other words, you could not be trusted to use the ability to cancel in good faith. That’s why people like JD Vance think it needs to be removed entirely.
In 2014, the FAA added a biographical test with questions like “What is your favorite color?” And “What was your worst class in High School?” to their hiring process for air traffic controllers. The correct answers were leaked to a group of students who were racially preferred by the administration, and anyone not passing this one exam was pulled from the program no matter what their other qualifications were. Over a thousand qualified students were expelled from the program for being the wrong race for acceptance. Of course, this triggered a major lawsuit that has been stonewalled by multiple presidential administrations including Obama, Trump I, and Biden.
This explicitly racist process has created a shortage of air traffic controllers, worsened working conditions and made air travel less safe for millions of people and it is a scandal that has surfaced several times on social media but has not been picked up much by the usual people who would prefer to comb through social media posts rather than explicitly racist hiring practices for their stories.
Why is there more collective outrage and immediate action over a person’s social media feed than an explicitly racist practice that has actually put people’s lives at risks?
I truly hate what that guy wrote and what those ideas connect with but I know people like to be outrageous online for various reasons. Conservatives wanted New York Times writer, Sarah Jeong fired for very similar hateful online posts that were explicitly racist, yet most liberal pundits (rightfully in my view) defended her actions at the time.
When people felt that affiliation to the Communist party was a threat to this country they combed through people’s social affiliations and people’s lives and livelihoods were destroyed because they had made the mistake of being associated with Communism regardless of anything else they might have done. We have seen similar employment purges for gay people, especially in education, because people were concerned about their children being harmed.
In these cases, details in a person’s private life are used to fire them because of an assumed moral hazard rather than for anything they’ve actually done in their job. This is a bad practice with a bad history and I have seen no evidence that it eliminated the problem people were trying to eradicate at the time.
It was 2013, and it was ended in 2014, so everything else you wrote is wrong or irrelevant. A thing can be bad without being the singular cause for every other bad thing. People with disordered thought processes like yourself are rightfully called conspiracy theorists.
According to Tracing Woodgrains, who broke the story, the FAA announced the rule change on New Year's Eve, 2013 (https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-faas-hiring). Dismissing someone as a "conspiracy theorist" with a "disordered thought process" because the date they cited was off by one day is not very charitable. (And to be super-pedantic, per the ISO week convention, the 31st of December 2013 actually fell in the first week of 2014 (https://www.epochconverter.com/weeks/2014).)
Incidentally, per the linked article, the first hiring wave under the new rubric was in February 2014, so you're wrong on that count anyway.
And AGAIN per the linked article, "In 2016, after years of work from Fischer, Reilly, Brigida, Shapiro, LoBiondo, and others, Congress passed an act overturning the use of the biographical assessment when hiring and requiring the FAA to provide opportunities for affected individuals to reapply." So the policy was cancelled two years after you said it was.
I know who in this thread is guilty of a "disordered thought process", and it isn't fillups44.
To get overly analytical about a jokey comment - what's wild to me is that people don't see "not being racist" as a qualification. Not saying your quip in particular, but I've had conversations on twitter where people told me "They should be able to have any belief as long as it doesn't hinder their ability to do their job"
Technical ability is not what really matters at high levels of government! I don't care if he's a cracked coder if he doesn't have wisdom and moral clarity about basic things like 'treat people equally'. He's not flipping a burger, he's controlling complex systems that impact hundreds of millions of people! There's no way to do that in a fair and upstanding way if you're racist!
During the pandemic, the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended that elderly people be deprioritised for Covid vaccines, under the explicit reasoning that a greater proportion of elderly people are white (https://archive.is/mV1jl). They did this in spite of knowing that being elderly was the greatest risk factor for dying of Covid, and that this policy would result in a greater number of deaths than if elderly people were prioritised to receive vaccines ahead of younger people irrespective of ethnicity (as was the case in most countries).
How many people died prematurely as a direct result of this policy, all because they had the misfortune to be born the wrong skin colour?
If you think that being racist is a disqualifying factor for serving as a high-ranking government employee, you should be loudly condemning the people who drew up this policy. Have any of *them* lost their jobs as a result of recommending this policy?
It's a very strange moral standard indeed: if you draw up a public policy which is *explicitly, knowingly designed* to condemn thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of people to a preventable death purely because of the colour of their skin, that doesn't disqualify you from holding a high-ranking position in a government body; but if you tweet that you aren't personally interested in marrying someone of another race, you deserve to lose your job immediately and never be employed by the federal government again.
I think this is an effective steelman of Vance's position: "if we've collectively decided that racist woke people shouldn't lose their jobs because of their racist opinions, then racist conservative people shouldn't either, including racist conservative people who hold opinions which are offensive to me personally. What's good for the goose is good for the gander."
The fact that he wrote an entire article loudly condemning Republicans for vice signalling, insisting that right-wing politics is "dominated" by the phenomenon, without once even suggesting that individuals on the other side of the aisle might be guilty of the same tendency in the opposite direction.
The fact that he repeatedly asserted in said article that being racist makes one unfit to hold public office, and yet 100% of the people he mentions that he thinks are implicated by such a policy are Republicans.
The fact that he asserted that '"Proud, unrepentant racists should not oversee the nation's bureaucracy" is a really fucking low bar to clear, but somehow the modern conservative movement is failing to clear it.' while failing to mention that the modern progressive movement is ALSO failing to clear it.
At a certain point it becomes clear that Vance never really had any moral conviction other than whatever gets him more power and authority. He doesn't care about morality and doesn't even seem to care about debasing himself in increasingly shameful ways. The fact that he wouldn't even stand up for his children reveals how much substance there is to him
I’d like to share this piece with you that I wrote—it’s about how Elon Musk has quietly taken control of America’s financial infrastructure, using the Treasury’s payment system to consolidate unprecedented power. It breaks down how he’s reshaping economic control, deciding who gets to participate in the system, and how the government has already lost control.
Would love to hear your thoughts when you have a minute.
Absolutely fantastic piece. Grappling with what JD Vance has become has been a real struggle for me. On several levels I just don’t get it. But your piece helps illuminate how this really works psychologically.
One work of art I keep thinking about is Eugene Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros.” That’s exactly what this feels like.
Senator Mike Lee’s Twitter feed is a great example of vice signaling in action.
From my experience Mike Lee has genuinely gone somewhat nuts and seems to believe the stupid things he says. He is more like Elon Musk where being terminally online has really poisoned him.
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.
I made a similar point before the election, though much more crassly: https://www.ymeskhout.com/p/party-of-cucks
Great post!
Remember the girl who had worked really hard to be a cheerleader at the University of Tennessee, and it all went away because a jerk who went to her high school deployed a recorded bit of her rap-inspired use of a racial slur in celebrating her acquisition of a learner’s permit? Remember the lady who lost her job because she wore a Megyn Kelly-inspired blackface costume in order to lampoon Kelly? Those overreactions to relatively minor transgressions resulted in real human suffering and, honestly, empowered sadists who enjoy inflicting suffering. As someone said in a different context, the cruelty is the point.
So now we have a guy who said genuinely obnoxious things. They may reflect genuine moral turpitude on his part. And he didn’t say them when he was twelve. So maybe he should be canceled, if we just look at it in isolation. But maybe Vance is looking at it against the background of cancel culture and its excesses. If this guy gets reinstated and moves on with his life, if the shaming for past jokes or statements ceases to work, well, you won’t have people digging up stupid things people said when they were twelve. It’s about changing incentives.
If someone thinks being a cheerleader and controlling systems that influence hundreds of millions of people are comparable situations, I genuinely don't know how to have a productive conversation with that person.
"Proud, unrepentant racists should not oversee the nation's bureaucracy" is a really fucking low bar to clear, but somehow the modern conservative movement is failing to clear it. Folks have are so freaked out by canceled cheerleaders that they've lost the ability to see actual evil in the world? That's a profound moral failing.
This!!!!
Trump appointed these unknown people to extremely powerful positions and didn’t even bother with a simple background check. Your comparison to a cheerleader is brain dead.
Such a fine example of whataboutism.
"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."
reminds me a lot of this piece: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
Which, interestingly, was calling out this behaviour among woke progressives, indicating it's not a partisan phenomenon. Unquestioningly believing a completely implausible accusation of gang rape and expressing profound indifference towards the rights of those falsely accused is about as perfect a demonstration as "vice signalling" as you can get.
We used to have norms that you could fire people for public comments, only if they were particularly egregious and the person was particularly influential. Then you lot eroded the standards for egregiousness and influence to the point that random low level staff were being fired for saying trans women are not literally women.
In other words, you could not be trusted to use the ability to cancel in good faith. That’s why people like JD Vance think it needs to be removed entirely.
In 2014, the FAA added a biographical test with questions like “What is your favorite color?” And “What was your worst class in High School?” to their hiring process for air traffic controllers. The correct answers were leaked to a group of students who were racially preferred by the administration, and anyone not passing this one exam was pulled from the program no matter what their other qualifications were. Over a thousand qualified students were expelled from the program for being the wrong race for acceptance. Of course, this triggered a major lawsuit that has been stonewalled by multiple presidential administrations including Obama, Trump I, and Biden.
This explicitly racist process has created a shortage of air traffic controllers, worsened working conditions and made air travel less safe for millions of people and it is a scandal that has surfaced several times on social media but has not been picked up much by the usual people who would prefer to comb through social media posts rather than explicitly racist hiring practices for their stories.
Why is there more collective outrage and immediate action over a person’s social media feed than an explicitly racist practice that has actually put people’s lives at risks?
I truly hate what that guy wrote and what those ideas connect with but I know people like to be outrageous online for various reasons. Conservatives wanted New York Times writer, Sarah Jeong fired for very similar hateful online posts that were explicitly racist, yet most liberal pundits (rightfully in my view) defended her actions at the time.
When people felt that affiliation to the Communist party was a threat to this country they combed through people’s social affiliations and people’s lives and livelihoods were destroyed because they had made the mistake of being associated with Communism regardless of anything else they might have done. We have seen similar employment purges for gay people, especially in education, because people were concerned about their children being harmed.
In these cases, details in a person’s private life are used to fire them because of an assumed moral hazard rather than for anything they’ve actually done in their job. This is a bad practice with a bad history and I have seen no evidence that it eliminated the problem people were trying to eradicate at the time.
> In 2014
It was 2013, and it was ended in 2014, so everything else you wrote is wrong or irrelevant. A thing can be bad without being the singular cause for every other bad thing. People with disordered thought processes like yourself are rightfully called conspiracy theorists.
According to Tracing Woodgrains, who broke the story, the FAA announced the rule change on New Year's Eve, 2013 (https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-faas-hiring). Dismissing someone as a "conspiracy theorist" with a "disordered thought process" because the date they cited was off by one day is not very charitable. (And to be super-pedantic, per the ISO week convention, the 31st of December 2013 actually fell in the first week of 2014 (https://www.epochconverter.com/weeks/2014).)
Incidentally, per the linked article, the first hiring wave under the new rubric was in February 2014, so you're wrong on that count anyway.
And AGAIN per the linked article, "In 2016, after years of work from Fischer, Reilly, Brigida, Shapiro, LoBiondo, and others, Congress passed an act overturning the use of the biographical assessment when hiring and requiring the FAA to provide opportunities for affected individuals to reapply." So the policy was cancelled two years after you said it was.
I know who in this thread is guilty of a "disordered thought process", and it isn't fillups44.
DEI = all other things being equal, hire the most qualified person who is NOT a racist
To get overly analytical about a jokey comment - what's wild to me is that people don't see "not being racist" as a qualification. Not saying your quip in particular, but I've had conversations on twitter where people told me "They should be able to have any belief as long as it doesn't hinder their ability to do their job"
Technical ability is not what really matters at high levels of government! I don't care if he's a cracked coder if he doesn't have wisdom and moral clarity about basic things like 'treat people equally'. He's not flipping a burger, he's controlling complex systems that impact hundreds of millions of people! There's no way to do that in a fair and upstanding way if you're racist!
During the pandemic, the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended that elderly people be deprioritised for Covid vaccines, under the explicit reasoning that a greater proportion of elderly people are white (https://archive.is/mV1jl). They did this in spite of knowing that being elderly was the greatest risk factor for dying of Covid, and that this policy would result in a greater number of deaths than if elderly people were prioritised to receive vaccines ahead of younger people irrespective of ethnicity (as was the case in most countries).
How many people died prematurely as a direct result of this policy, all because they had the misfortune to be born the wrong skin colour?
If you think that being racist is a disqualifying factor for serving as a high-ranking government employee, you should be loudly condemning the people who drew up this policy. Have any of *them* lost their jobs as a result of recommending this policy?
It's a very strange moral standard indeed: if you draw up a public policy which is *explicitly, knowingly designed* to condemn thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of people to a preventable death purely because of the colour of their skin, that doesn't disqualify you from holding a high-ranking position in a government body; but if you tweet that you aren't personally interested in marrying someone of another race, you deserve to lose your job immediately and never be employed by the federal government again.
I think this is an effective steelman of Vance's position: "if we've collectively decided that racist woke people shouldn't lose their jobs because of their racist opinions, then racist conservative people shouldn't either, including racist conservative people who hold opinions which are offensive to me personally. What's good for the goose is good for the gander."
Granting your premise, bold of you to assume that Jeremiah approves of that. What made you think that?
And out of curiosity, do YOU think the CDC's vaccine rollout strategy was sensible or fair?
If what you said is true, then hell no!
It is. And that's reassuring to know.
The fact that he wrote an entire article loudly condemning Republicans for vice signalling, insisting that right-wing politics is "dominated" by the phenomenon, without once even suggesting that individuals on the other side of the aisle might be guilty of the same tendency in the opposite direction.
The fact that he repeatedly asserted in said article that being racist makes one unfit to hold public office, and yet 100% of the people he mentions that he thinks are implicated by such a policy are Republicans.
The fact that he unquestioningly recites progressive canards (such as the baseless assertion that Brian Sicknick was murdered by January 6th rioters; https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/the-unbearable-cynicism-of-trump) and doubles down on them when presented with countervailing evidence (https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/the-unbearable-cynicism-of-trump/comment/88093596).
The fact that he asserted that '"Proud, unrepentant racists should not oversee the nation's bureaucracy" is a really fucking low bar to clear, but somehow the modern conservative movement is failing to clear it.' while failing to mention that the modern progressive movement is ALSO failing to clear it.
At a certain point it becomes clear that Vance never really had any moral conviction other than whatever gets him more power and authority. He doesn't care about morality and doesn't even seem to care about debasing himself in increasingly shameful ways. The fact that he wouldn't even stand up for his children reveals how much substance there is to him
I could be wrong but demand for loyalty proof from the top and the “audience capture” from the bottom created this vice signaling stuff…
I’d like to share this piece with you that I wrote—it’s about how Elon Musk has quietly taken control of America’s financial infrastructure, using the Treasury’s payment system to consolidate unprecedented power. It breaks down how he’s reshaping economic control, deciding who gets to participate in the system, and how the government has already lost control.
Would love to hear your thoughts when you have a minute.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jasonegenberg/p/the-man-who-would-be-king-elon-musks? r=3nm35j&utm_medium=ios
Absolutely fantastic piece. Grappling with what JD Vance has become has been a real struggle for me. On several levels I just don’t get it. But your piece helps illuminate how this really works psychologically.
One work of art I keep thinking about is Eugene Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros.” That’s exactly what this feels like.
I’m reminded of Boyd’s Razor [0] in this scenario. How do we think it’s going to look for Vance in a few years?
[0] https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/principles-for-the-permaweird
One of your all time best articles.
I mean, sure. But this is obviously a bipartisan phenomenon and by no means unique to Trump or anyone in his orbit.