Over the last decade, it’s become clearer than ever that the left is the villain in American life—not just to conservatives, but to regular people as well. Yet some on the right still can’t resist claiming the mantle of villain for themselves.

This rather self-evident observation was pointed out last week by an unlikely spectator, none other than left’s very own bad boy, Hasan Piker. In a gushing profile for GQ, Piker took shots at his fellow streamers, from declared right-wingers like Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate to other more apolitical voices in the so-called manosphere.

“I call it ‘vice signaling,’ Piker explained. “These guys, whether they’re real villains or not, are presenting themselves as bad people, and people like it.”

Indirectly, Piker makes a good point. Those on the right who defiantly present as “bad” are, in fact, vice-signaling—and it comes with a certain satisfaction that’s often hard to resist. But in so doing, they render themselves impotent: Far from subverting liberal morality, they only end up reinforcing the moral scaffolding of the very liberal order they hope to overthrow.

For the typical American, it’s pretty clear who the “bad guys” are. Most people don’t support child sex changes or boys in the girls’ locker rooms. They don’t want their tax dollars wasted in pointless foreign wars or their domestic prosperity sacrificed to the pursuit of Green utopia. CNN’s lone flamethrower Scott Jennings put it more concisely by pointing out that Donald Trump is running an “80/20 presidency” on all the hot button issues, while Democrats consistently clamor to join the losing side in opposing him.

Yet some on the right still can’t resist self-styling as the bad guy. Figures like Fuentes and Tate are the most obvious and extreme examples here, which is likely why Piker chose to highlight them. Tate, who calls himself a misogynist, must understand the loaded nature of the term — yet he embraces it anyway to highlight the “reality” of being “sexist.” Fuentes rails against Jews and blacks to show his disdain for the liberal multicultural order, all while embracing the cartoonish racism most reviled within it.

“Yes, I know it’s bad,” both seem to imply by using the left’s own language and moral dichotomy, “but the truth is a nasty pill to swallow.”

It’s not worth dwelling too much on figures like Fuentes and Tate, who, for the political right, serve as little more than clownish curiosities. The bigger problem is that it’s too easy to feel a sense of Schadenfreude acting similarly in our own lives.

I admit I sometimes enjoy watching my liberal friends squirm. Can you blame me?

For nearly a decade, the left has called for deplatforming, debanking, and effectively de-personing the right altogether, lording over us with their simplistic morality while having little notion of what or how the right actually thinks. It’s quite fun to feel their sense of palpable fear, horror, and revulsion as one casually drops a heretofore unheard tidbit—on, say, crime statistics or sex differences—in the most biting way possible. And while I’m fairly mild-mannered for a “right-wing provocateur,” I’ve seen countless friends revel in twisting the knife far more than I myself do.

These kinds of interactions matter more than anything a handful of streamers have to say, no matter how large their audience may be. It’s easy for members of the media to forget that their pronouncements do not shape the lives of most people. Instead, people mostly look for moral validation within their own little communities of family, friends, and colleagues. If you keep insisting you’re the bad guy, eventually they’ll believe you—and perhaps vote accordingly.

Instead of asserting how “sexism” is actually a good thing, hold to the principle that there are fundamental differences between the sexes and that it is villainous to ignore them. Instead of saying “racism” is the way of the world, reject the idiocy of blank slate-ism while pointing out the disastrous harm it’s caused over the past half-century. And instead of endlessly poking at your liberal friends, give them a little space to admit you might just have a point: we are in fact the good guys, the only ones keeping America out of the grips of full-on leftist villainy.

It’s easy to say “I’m a jerk but I’m right,” but you won’t win much sympathy from anyone who doesn’t already agree. It’s much harder to insist on one’s own goodness—and that the other guy is both bad and wrong to boot. Yet by asserting villainy, the right reinforces not only the left’s right to rule but its entire raison d’etre in the Trump era: to keep the bad guys out of power. The powers that be assert their goodness while insisting the right is bad; why would an apolitical person come off the sidelines to resist those powers if the people he’d be standing with are the first to agree how bad they are?

It’s important to break down the left’s taboos, but it’s still possible to do this without indulging in negative self-framing for shock value; a good sense of humor and some solid principles are all it really takes to break through. But from the highest-ranking politicians to the average conservative voter, it falls on all of us to insist upon being the good guy—if for no other reason than it’s true.