The logs of a group chat run by young leaders in the GOP were leaked and published by Politico earlier this week. In addition to using slurs against pretty much every marginalized group, here are some of the things the people who will run the party in the next few decades said to each other when they thought no one was listening:

“Everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”

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“Great. I love Hitler.”

“Stay in the closet fa***t”

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“This girl is fully ret**ded”

“Sex? It was rape.” “Epic.”

“You’re giving nationals to [sic] much credit and expecting the Jew to be honest.”

It reminds me of a quote from a “top banker” who talked to The Financial Times this past January, just after Donald Trump’s inauguration.

“I feel liberated,” the banker told the paper. “We can say ‘ret**d’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled… it’s a new dawn.”

Well, I don’t want that banker to feel liberated. I don’t want to read about idiot Republicans in real positions of power – there were state party leaders and lawmakers in that group chat – using slurs and joking about the Holocaust. I don’t want to have a president posting sombrero memes to mock workers who are getting furloughed, and I don’t think that the White House should be joking about feeding immigrants to alligators.

And the people who call this out shouldn’t be mocked as humorless scolds. Because they’re right: It isn’t something people in power should be doing. Being right – in the moral sense – should count for something.

It’s easy to mock “virtue-signaling,” the idea that people express opinions that they think will show everyone else that they have a conscience and good morals. I get it, a lot of that stuff is performative and cringeworthy. And it can be hurtful when someone claims to believe in certain values but fails to live up to them.

But it’s a lot better than the “vice-signaling” we’re getting now. It’s equally performative, but now the point is to show others just how little conscience one has and how OK a person is with not having any morals. The goal is to erode people’s idea of what moral behavior is, to make it uncool to want to do good things that help others, and to protect one’s ego from criticism. “You don’t think I’m doing the right thing? Well, actually, it’s opposite day now, and it’s good to be bad! Take that, librul!”

Now pointing out that a policy is intentionally cruel and pointless will get you dozens of responses on X saying that you don’t get the joke, that immigrants (or trans people, or people of color, or…) have no rights or even an expectation of human treatment, that the cruel policy in question is justified, actually, because of some conspiracy or made-up problem, so it’s OK to throw morals out the window.

And it is a performance. Take, for example, this interaction from last month, where someone told J.D. Vance that bombing boats with people in them without due process “is called a war crime.”

His response? “I don’t give a s**t what you call it.” As many people pointed out, MAGA would have lost its mind if Kamala Harris had spoken the same way about anything, much less death, but also… why did he need to swear there? I’m sincerely asking, since it was a choice he made to use that word, and therefore it carries some meaning.

My guess is that he wanted to show how edgy he was, how little he cares about social norms. That’s a form of strength that he’s showing off: He’s stronger because he doesn’t care about morality, and so his opponents have to convince him that killing is a war crime, that committing war crimes is immoral, and that being moral is something he should care about. The word “s**t” there is supposed to be dismissive; he’s dismissing the plea to morality by aggressively rejecting the idea.

Now, take that interaction and multiply it by a million, and that’s what many parts of social media feel like right now. “Oh, you’re worried about immigrant children being separated from their families? Only pencil-necked nerds care about immigrants.”

Or, “You think that my hatred of trans people and antisemitic conspiracy theories makes me a Nazi? Well, I’m going to do a Nazi salute at the president’s inauguration to show you how much I delight in you thinking I’m a Nazi.”

What they’re doing – the GOP leaders in the chat group, J.D. Vance, Elon Musk, the banker in the Financial Times, the president, the White House communications department, and everyone else bragging about how bad they are – is morally exhausting, and that’s the point.

They want the rest of us – the “normies,” as people from the darker recesses of the internet refer to people who don’t subscribe to their toxic worldview – to give up, to believe that we can’t convince them to care about anyone but themselves, to think that trying to be better versions of ourselves is a waste of time, uncool, and pointless. Their behavior is supposed to demotivate.

At least when people were virtue signaling, whether we lived up to those virtues or not, we didn’t have to argue that being a Nazi is bad, actually.

So let’s bring back virtue signaling and earnestness and moral standards. Some behavior is deplorable, and there’s no shame in calling it out. Vice-signaling is just as artificial, just as performative, but a whole lot more destructive to society.

And that’s the choice, by the way: one type of signaling or the other. “Saying virtuous things and following through 100% of the time” is not an option on the menu. No person is morally upright enough to have their actions always align with their ideals. But failing while trying to be a good person is better for the soul than giving up and laughing at how evil one can be.

As 17th-century French writer François de La Rochefoucauld put it: “Hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue.” Even if we fail to live up to our standards, there’s still something to be said about having standards at all.

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