The term “virtue signaling” has become a part of everyday vocabulary in America. It’s what we say about people who proclaim their political allegiances in a boastful way for the purpose of being complimented. They want to hear how moral they are, how giving they are, how very-much-better-and-kinder they are than other people.
That matters. For such people, it’s not only that they want to be told they are good, kind, and giving. They want to be told that they are more of these things than anyone else. Narcissism, excessive self-regard, disguises itself as humility. It works on a lot of people because it uses the “reversal” pattern: their behavior seems to be generous, and seems to be kind, so how could it be selfish or wicked?
This is also how the “big lie” principle infamously articulated by Joseph Goebbels works: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” But why does it work? What is it that makes people believe it? It’s that most people are basically, fundamentally decent. They don’t often lie or misrepresent themselves in a serious way. So, they don’t believe that there are other humans who do these things. If Jane says she really cares, that must mean she really cares, and it would be churlish to think she’s actually pitiless and self-centered.
Thus, the great number of genuinely pitiless and self-centered people among us go undetected for a long time, or by a large number of people. So it is with the white leftist virtue-signaler. You’ve all seen examples of superannuated baby boomers trying to continue to live in their glory days of youth when they were “fighting for civil rights” or “working for women’s liberation.” Kamala Harris’ speech at the famous Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama, the site of a storied civil rights march that ended in police beating black protesters in 1965, is a good example. For Harris and other leftists, they need to maintain the illusion that they “care”, and also that nothing has changed for the better.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow shows how absurd this pandering to blacks is when she affects to be disturbed by the firing of black colleague Joy Reid (an unrepentant black racist). Maddow claims there’s something sinister about firing a “woman of color,” all the while pretending that MSNBC didn’t hire three more people of color to replace Reid.
On the everyday level, countless Democrat white women have been competing for praise and adulation by positioning themselves as the most tender, caring saviors of black people. It’s a kind of masochistic narcissism. They claim to be “taking a knee” and “humbling” themselves to “fight racism,” but they’re actually preening and posing hoping to be told how special and good they are.
Take this embarrassing display dug up by the X/Twitter account “Defiant Ls”.
The white woman in the video overlays text telling the viewer what she allegedly does “when black women are speaking.” She then puts tape over her mouth and showily takes notes in a spiral notebook. See how GOOD she is?
Fewer and fewer people are buying these maudlin set pieces. Take a look at the online reaction.
