I woke up to Eric Swalwell, the self-appointed conscience of cable news, fending off sexual misconduct allegations. And I thought of my cousin Vito.

Vito works construction. Maybe you already think you know him. Hard hat, lunch pail, leaning on a girder catcalling every woman who walks past the site. There may be rebar to install. Concrete to pour. And yet, somehow, in the cultural imagination, the modern construction worker has nothing better to do than wolf whistle at strangers…

Vito is none of that.

Vito is one of the most moral men I know. Not in a performive way. He curses like a sailor. Loves to gamble. And has a hilariously offensive sense of humor, to boot. Yet he’s the sort of guy who shows up at three in the morning if you call him. Great father, awesome cousin. Put simply: he’s good when nobody’s watching. Not interested in being seen as good. Simply busy being it.

Eric Swalwell is the inverse of that, the Anti-Vito.

That’s because the worst men do not look like villains anymore. In an 80s action movie you knew the bad guy on sight. Black leather, sneer, cigarette, terrible posture. Now you turn on cable news and the bad guy is wearing a quarter-zip and a lapel pin and using the word “allyship” without flinching.

He has the haircut.

The vocabulary.

The correct positions on the correct issues. He has signaled, loudly and constantly, that he is one of “the good ones.” And it’s all one big bullshit disguise.

Call him the Nice Guy Narcissist.

This isn’t political. Not a left thing or a right thing. This guy crosses the aisle. There is a megachurch version of him in a polo shirt talking about servant leadership while running his marriage into the ground, and there is a Brooklyn version of him in wire frames talking about consent while DMing interns. Same piece of shit, different dressing. The uniform may change, but the disguise stays the same.

I have a framework I teach called the Nice Guy Contract. A guy silently believes that if he is kind enough, agreeable enough, deferential enough, he is owed the girl. Niceness as currency. The Nice Guy Narcissist runs the political version of that contract. He believes that because he wore the ribbon, posted the black square, used the right language, and publicly condemned the right villains, the culture owes him the assumption of safety. The contract is no longer with one woman. It’s with the entire audience.

When reality breaks the contract, the man underneath turns out to be exactly what he spent a decade calling other men. Often worse.

These guys never developed any actual social fluency. They never built warmth, ease, or the kind of internal steadiness that makes a man comfortable to be around. They took a shortcut. They built an identity around trying to be better than other men.

They substituted moral positioning for charm and judgment for presence. Ever meet a guy who can’t flirt with a woman for shit but can lecture you about toxic masculinity for an hour? That’s not a coincidence. One is the substitute for the other. Can’t be interesting? You can at least be correct!

And correctness is cheaper than character.

I’ve met a hundred of these guys in my lifetime. The “I respect women” guy. The guy who wants you to know he’s a feminist. The guy who would call out his roommate for a borderline joke at the party and then go be weirder and pushier with a girl behind closed doors an hour later. He did not become better than the men he condemned. He’s just a creep wearing a nice guy mask.

The men who actually protect women are not posting about it. They are not wearing the ribbon. They are not running for the moral mayor of the group chat. They are out in the world doing the damn thing. Vito does not have a take on misogyny. He’s simply good to his wife. And that’s the whole difference.

Good men don’t broadcast their goodness. Counterfeit creeps never stop.

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