We can’t even keep up with all the scandals coming out of the Trump administration right now, so we’re going to take this time to discuss a phrase that you may have been trolled with: virtue signalling. It’s the idea of “you talk the talk but don’t walk the walk” rebooted for the alt right and others who need to disguise their trolling as intelligent discourse.
The climate debate is increasingly seeing accusations of virtue signalling. Last year, an Investor’s Business Daily editorial decried Leonardo DiCaprio’s climate change speech at the UN as empty virtue signalling, rather than an example of putting star power to good use. In a similar vein, the Paris Agreement, according to deniers, isn’t a laudable effort to get almost 200 different nations on the same page on the need to reduce emissions, but instead is just a virtue-signalling farce. (If it’s such a farce, why all the pressure for Trump to leave?)
This rhetorical tool allows the user to write off any argument or action to solve a problem as meaningless virtue signalling. WUWT labels most climate action and policies as meaningless virtue-signalling, from fossil fuel divestment to energy efficient light bulbs.
It’s clear to most reasonable people that efforts like divestment and energy efficiency are worth far more than their optics. But for those opposed, using the idea of virtue-signalling is a way to short-circuit a conversation in their favor. Accusing someone of doing something simply for attention is far easier than advancing the discourse in any real way.
It’s a little funny to note that many of the same people who bandy about the term as a way to discount and silence opinions they don’t like are also the same sorts of people who complain about conservatives having their freedom of speech restricted.
But this isn’t a laughing matter. Instead of dealing with an argument that makes them uncomfortable, trolls can just accuse anyone who exercises free speech in a way they don’t like of virtue signalling. After all, it’s much easier than presenting an actual argument for why the signaller is actually wrong or ineffective, particularly when your opinion runs counter to basic history or scientific consensus and theirs does not.
So keep an eye out for the term as a way to recognize and avoid the trolls who, by virtue of using it, have signaled they have no substantive points to make.
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