On Wednesday, I wrote about how the Left's virtue signaling will ultimately lead to cultural suicide, and is, in a way, actual suicide, as no one will ultimately survive the restructuring that would come about if these people didn't have half of America there to stop them and their professed radicalism.
To quote myself:
It's self-aggrandizement floating atop the pain, suffering, and death of others. It's one of the most disgusting things the Democrats or the Western Left do, and they do it to such a degree that it actually endangers everyone around them. They do it to the sound of other leftists applauding each other as loudly as possible to drown out the sounds of screaming happening just down the street, where their "virtue" is in action.
Read: The Suicidality of Virtue Signaling
As I highlight in that quote, the backbone of virtue signaling is peer recognition.
Virtue signaling serves a lot of purposes. Seducing the ignorant is, of course, a large part of that. Making someone who doesn't know any better believe you have a moral high ground that you actually don't can make them put a bit of trust in you that you don't actually deserve. Pretending to be virtuous by using nebulous phrases and buzzwords is a time-honored tradition of the left, and too often the right.
But for the left, virtue signaling is a baked-in part of the culture. You must express virtues to be accepted. Failure to do so could result in you being sidelined at best, made an enemy at worst. It doesn't matter if you actually believe these things or not; you just have to be willing to profess them. A solid example of this in recent history is the left's profession that women's rights are holy, but this goes out the window the moment a man in a dress and makeup shows up.
You can see these examples in almost every facet of society and nearly every subculture.
Take, for instance, the video game "Bayonetta," a 2009 Japanese beat-em-up featuring a hyper-sexualized woman with long legs, large breasts, and wielding pistols in both hands as well as on both her boots. The game was intentionally over the top, with Bayonetta's moves being so stripper-esque that it was more comedic than it was sexy.
Still, the social justice-obsessed left and its intersectional feminist warriors endlessly dogged the game as sexist because of how blatantly it attempts to appeal to the male gaze. At one point, Mother Jones listed the character as a "fighting f*** toy."
But then an odd shift happened with the left. After 2014, sex-positive feminists and the LGBTQ+ activist community began to claim Bayonetta as a character that wasn't just a symbol of female empowerment, but a queer icon who can be lusted after on their terms. Suddenly, Bayonetta went from being an invitation of the male gaze to one of the female gaze, and this was somehow okay.
From then on, leftists began to love Bayonetta. The permission structure was now in place for them to enjoy the game.
Nothing about Bayonetta changed in the subsequent sequels that were released. The game still had that pole dancing hypersexual aesthetic that the left said it was absolutely disgusted by, but with the quick flip of a narrative, those principles could be discarded, and the thing that once disgusted them now pleased them. Again, nothing changed but the permission structure. These people likely loved Bayonetta's frenetic gameplay and campy style, but they couldn't just say that. There had to be an intellectual argument first made to support it being looked at as an...
... say it with me now...
Virtue.
As I said in my previous article, these virtue signals are a deadly game to play, and it's made more disgusting by the fact that the first people usually victimized by virtue signaling are the innocent. Namely, the poor, whom the left claims to champion but never actually does.
But this is how they speak to each other without speaking to each other. This is how they prove that they're of their "morally superior" stock. In truth, it's the signal that they're willing to lie to themselves and others to carry out the agenda and belong to the group.
It's an awful thing to do, but they aren't going to stop doing it anytime soon. If they did, then the modern left would cease to exist.
