The Right has given the Left a hard time about their virtue signaling and it could be argued that the Left has overdone it at times. But to counteract with “vice signaling”, like what Kristi Noem, strutting her vice for Trump, the biggest vice signaler of all, by bragging about killing a puppy is just vile.
Right wingers often rain contempt on what they call virtue signaling, a performative kind of sanctimony epitomized by the “In This House” yard signs that once dotted progressive neighborhoods. Partly in response, they’ve developed what’s sometimes called vice signaling, the defiant embrace of cruelty and disdain for social norms. Think of “rolling coal,” the practice of modifying diesel engines to make them belch dark exhaust in an effort to trigger environmentalists, or the way George Santos’s promiscuous falsehoods endeared him to hard-core MAGA acolytes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/opinion/kristi-noem-vice-signaling-maga.html