An Irreligious Culture of Virtue Signaling Without Virtue - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
An Irreligious Culture of Virtue Signaling Without Virtue
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In traditional cultures, elders feel a duty to introduce the young to an education in virtue. In nontraditional modern cultures, adults feel no such duty. They expose children to vice — look at all the moral rot in public schools across the country in which teachers, among other practices, dispense condoms to students and encourage them to mutilate themselves in the name of “gender identity” — and they routinely replace virtuous education with virtue-signaling propaganda.

The graduates of this sham education know nothing about the Ten Commandments — public school principals live in dread fear of ACLU lawsuits against even the slightest educational nods to theism — but these students know much about environmentalism, feminism, gender politics, racial politics, and the sexual revolution. The worst sins, according to this warped education, do not entail violating the teachings of Christianity but contradicting the supposedly proper attitudes the ruling class expects the citizenry to hold. No public school principal would dare condemn a high schooler for getting an abortion or engaging in premarital sex, but many principals wouldn’t hesitate to condemn students for donning Trump-related attire or participating in high-profile conservative marches and protests.

For decades, America’s “adults” have denigrated the teachings of traditional morality and religion, and now the costs of that heedless repudiation are coming due.

Out of this godless culture of virtue signaling without virtue, which pervades high schools and colleges, has come an astonishing generation of snots and miscreants, long on progressive conceits but short on basic decency. The creepy Sam Bankman-Fried is a poster boy for this culture. He is the crooked founder of FTX, a now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange that he formed in his 20s. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bankman-Fried practiced virtue signaling but not virtue. It emerged recently that he secretly shuffled billions of dollars from his customers to his trading firm.

Before bilking his clients at FTX, Bankman-Fried spent time in Berkeley, California, working at an outfit called the “Centre for Effective Altruism.” He was its development director. There and at MIT he apparently learned that the key to success in liberal America is not ethics but projecting views and attitudes pleasing to the elite. As CEO of FTX, he made sure to give huge donations to the Democratic Party — he was President Joe Biden’s second-largest donor during the 2020 race — and grant interviews to the press in which he mused about the importance of fighting “climate change” and promoting “social justice.” Naturally, his empty conception of social justice didn’t stop him from ripping off investors. Even as he stole from them, he bragged that he planned to give hundreds of millions to liberal pols and “charity.”

He identified as “vegan” and lived in a swinging multimillionaire penthouse in the Bahamas with a host of louche roommates. When not playing demented video games and wallowing in degeneracy, they fretted over racism and sexism. Bankman-Fried has admitted that this posturing was a charade. He called it “this dumb game we woke Westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and everyone likes us.”

America’s irreligious culture of virtue signaling without virtue teaches millions of young people to play that dumb game while losing their souls. The Democrats, by the way, enjoyed the patronage of these deformed kids at the polls. The 18-29 demographic voted for the Democrats in substantial numbers. They rewarded Biden and the Democrats for pushing an agenda of killing unborn children and mutilating confused teens.

A child of progressive parents and a product of progressive education, Bankman-Fried learned nothing about the tenets of traditional morality and religion, such as the prohibition, “Thou shall not steal.” He learned instead about “wokeness,” which instructs the young to respect “nature” and “animal rights” while urging them to degrade human nature and violate the human rights of the unborn.

Americans of any thoughtfulness should find this woke culture horrifying. It is producing psychopaths and entitled degenerates at an alarming clip. Until modern education and culture returns to real virtue and drops delusional virtue signaling, this crisis can only grow. Frauds in the mold of Bankman-Fried will multiply and wreak havoc on the lives of ordinary Americans. Think again if you think their evil won’t corrupt your communities. The Black Lives Matter riots, which sprung from the same vice masquerading as virtue signaling that shaped Bankman-Fried, foreshadow this freakish future.

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, says the Bible. That essentially sums up the imperatives of wokeness. For decades, America’s “adults” — an arrogant elite and ruling class committed to moral relativism and a secularized public life — have denigrated the teachings of traditional morality and religion, and now the costs of that heedless repudiation are coming due. We are reaping the bitter harvest of rejecting God and his commandments. A generation of young people trained on vice, not virtue, and on PC attitudes, not rudimentary moral duty, has given rise to Biden’s America, an increasingly nihilistic country that its Founding Fathers, were they alive today, would regret having founded.

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George Neumayr
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George Neumayr, a senior editor at The American Spectator, is author most recently of The Biden Deception: Moderate, Opportunist, or the Democrats' Crypto-Socialist?
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