I wrote an article about two years ago on virtue signaling, and how the left uses it to brainwash people. This article is going to build on that one, so if you have not yet read that prior article in its entirety, I encourage you to do so.
In a nutshell, the left sells political positions not on merit, but on virtue. Once someone buys into the notion that a position is, or is not, virtuous, then being a ‘good person’ comes from agreeing with the right positions, making it impossible to separate one’s self-identity from the political positions one holds. Once someone’s sense of virtue becomes tied to their political positions, they will defend those political positions as if their lives depend on it, as not doing so would, to them, make them lack virtue. Conversely, anyone who opposes their political positions becomes, by definition, evil.
The left also believes that power is more important than policy. Saul Alinsky went as far as to say that laws, rules, and standards, only exist to the degree that they can be used as weapons against the political right.
The left also believes in identity politics and social justice, such that who does something is more important than what is done.
When you mix these three things together, some of the other things the left does starts to make sense. We know, for example, how the Clintons avoided being held accountable for anything they did – they formed the Clinton Foundation, and through it they implicated rich and powerful people around the world in the same kinds of corrupt activities they themselves were guilty of. We know how Jeffery Epstein avoided prosecution for so long – he implicated as many rich and powerful people as possible in his crimes, such that taking him down meant taking down all of those other people. Epstein eventually went to jail anyway, but he was suicided before anyone else could be implicated, allowing all of the people he could have implicated to get away.
It also helps that we live in a country where someone has to be proven guilty of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt, before they can be punished. People as powerful as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barrack Obama, and Joe Biden, have innumerable ways of hiding behind reasonable doubt.
The real question is not how these kinds of people get away with corrupt and criminal activities in terms of jailtime, but in terms of public opinion. How does so much of the public ignore all of the evidence of everything they have done?
That takes us right back to virtue signaling.
We now know that not only did Joe Biden withhold a billion dollars in aid to Ukraine until a prosecutor investigating a company his son sat on the board of was fired, but that there were no allegations of corruption against that prosecutor, and in fact that the prosecutor had the full confidence of the President of Ukraine. We know this because calls between Biden and the leadership of Ukraine have become public, and because Joe Biden bragged publicly about having done this.
Trump was impeached for thinking about withholding aid to Ukraine as leverage to get Ukraine to look into what Joe Biden did.
How does the left impeach Trump for potentially doing what Biden bragged about doing, all while supporting Biden? That’s easy. Joe Biden believes in virtuous political positions, and as a result Joe Biden has virtue. Donald Trump does not believe in those political positions, so Donald Trump is a horrific human being. The purpose of the law is not to be followed, but to be used as a weapon against the political right, and Trump is on the political right. As a consequence, we should hold Trump as accountable as humanly possible, and should twist the law however necessary to find a way in which Trump broke it, while at the same time giving Joe Biden a free pass.
We on the right look at such things, and we have a tendency to scratch our heads and wonder how such blatant double-standards are possible. The answer is that the left does not care what Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Barrack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or anyone else did. To the left, Democrats are good people, so whatever they do is forgiven, and Republicans are evil creatures who should be utterly and totally destroyed, whether they did something wrong or not.
We now know that the Obama Administration broke laws to spy on the Trump transition team, to unmask Lt General Michael Flynn, and to do as much damage to the Trump Administration as humanly possible, before Trump took office. We on the right watch the political left excuse that behavior, and we have a tendency to wonder what gives.
What gives is that Obama is a virtuous human being and Trump is an evil degenerate. If Obama had to break laws to try and save the country from Trump, cool – the only bad thing is that Obama’s spying did not uncover anything that could then be used to remove Trump from office. In other words, Obama might have broken innumerable laws, but he did so for a good reason – he was going after Donald Trump. And who cares about laws anyway. It’s good vs evil that matters, and Trump is evil.
The beauty of virtue signaling is that it allows everything to be turned into a simple binary question of good vs evil.
Kavanaugh = bad, so the accusations against him had to be believed verbatim no matter how weak they were. Biden = good, so no allegation can ever possibly have credibility. The minimum wage = good, so we should always raise it no matter how much it harms our inner cities. Milton Friedman’s negative income tax is evil, so we can never even discuss it, no matter how much it might help people were it implemented.
Voter fraud? Nobody on the left cares, as long as the political right doesn’t get in on the act.
And best of all, as asinine as all of this might sound to us on the right, once you buy into virtue signaling, suddenly it makes perfect sense.
Now mix in postmodernism, where facts are subjective, and suddenly you can throw out any facts you don’t like. The recorded calls between Biden and the leadership of Ukraine? Fake. Tara Reade? Fake. If you don’t like a fact, you just ignore it as if it does not exist, and then call the people who refuse to let those evil facts the Trumpster fires they are.
How do you debate such people? You don’t. Good luck even getting them to start a debate. If you are lucky, they’ll throw some talking points at you, and then start to insult you once you refute them. More likely, they’ll just insult you out of the gate. Today’s political left does not care to debate you, because you are evil and unworthy of wasting time on.
The political right will get theirs after the election. The right wants to put children in cages? We’ll put THEM in cages, even if the children in cages thing never actually happened.
Understand that if you are on the political right, the logical extension of modern leftist thought includes a gulag system.
And they won’t shed a tear when you are gone.
