BOB MCMANUS: Wild Blue Yonder: A general’s overwrought response to a race hoax at the Air Force Academy was off-base. “It was a textbook social-justice-movement moment—judgment first, facts afterward—insofar as Silveria had no clue who had scrawled the slur, no apparent interest in finding out, and no hesitation in spreading responsibility for it as widely as possible. And when the ‘hate crime’ turned out to have been a hoax—the perp was a black student enrolled in an academy-preparatory program and one of five alleged ‘targets’ of the slur—that didn’t slow down the academy’s virtue-signaling. . . . Personal responsibility, accountability, and loyalty are laudable attributes in civilian life. In the military, they are the stuff of life and death. The service academies have personal honor codes—observed in the breach, in this case—precisely to promote trust in the ranks and confidence at the command level. That’s how wars are won—or, unhappily, sometimes lost. Silveria trashed this principle without the faintest notion of who had done what. And when an investigation revealed the truth, he showed no contrition—if anything, he doubled down. This wasn’t strictly partisan politicking, but the general deliberately inserted his institution into an ugly national political controversy.”

Virtue-signaling is what you do when you’re short of actual virtue.