Funny Valentine is not a villain of appetite. He is the 23rd President of the United States, and the antagonist of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Steel Ball Run—whose new anime premiered on Netflix in March 2026 and has been airing weekly since 25 September 2026, dragging him back into the spotlight. He does not steal for wealth, does not kill for pleasure, does not scheme for a throne he already occupies. He does all of it—theft, murder, the cold sacrifice of his own loyal men—for one thing only: the United States. Give him a horror that benefits his country and he will commit it without a tremor; offer him a virtue that costs his country an inch and he will refuse it without regret. He is sincere, and that is what unsettles. Wielding the Stand D4C and hunting the Holy Corpse Parts across a continent, Valentine is not a hypocrite dressing greed in a flag—he means every word of the flag. For the techniques of neutralization, he is the perfect case: the man who has built, out of patriotism, a machine that turns every crime into a duty before he ever commits it.
// The theoryHow guilt is switched off before the crime, not after
In 1957 the criminologists Gresham Sykes and David Matza proposed an idea that overturned a comfortable assumption. Most offenders, they argued, are not people with a wholly deviant morality who reject society's values; they are people who share those values and yet break them—and to do so, they must first neutralize the guilt that their own conscience would otherwise raise. The techniques of neutralization are the rationalizations that perform this silencing. Denial of responsibility: it wasn't really my doing, I was pushed by forces beyond me. Denial of injury: no one was truly harmed, it doesn't count. Denial of the victim: they had it coming, they were no innocent. Condemnation of the condemners: those who judge me are hypocrites, worse than I am. And the most powerful of the five, the appeal to higher loyalties: I did it not for myself but for something greater—my group, my family, my nation—a cause that outranks the law I broke. Matza later deepened this in Delinquency and Drift (1964): these are not post-hoc excuses invented once caught, but rationalizations available beforehand, which loosen the moral bond and let the person drift into the act with his conscience pre-emptively quieted.
This is the decisive nuance for Valentine, and the theory insists on it: neutralization works in advance. It is not the alibi a criminal reaches for after the fact; it is the mental permission he grants himself before, the loosening that makes the crime possible in the first place. And of all five techniques, Valentine is the undiluted embodiment of one: the appeal to higher loyalties. He does not deny the injury—he knows exactly whom he harms. He does not deny the victim—he grants they may be innocent. He simply holds that a loyalty higher than the law, the United States itself, absorbs and redeems the deed. His napkin parable (whoever takes the napkin first sets the rule everyone else must follow) is not an observation, it is a neutralizer—it converts a race of thefts and murders into a patriotic duty, and hands him permission to win it by any means before he has lifted a finger.
The appeal to higher loyalties: when the cause outranks the law
Of the five techniques Sykes and Matza named, the appeal to higher loyalties is the one that most cleanly explains crimes committed not against society's values but, apparently, on their behalf. The offender does not reject loyalty, duty, sacrifice (he embraces them); he simply binds them to a smaller circle than the law does. The mafioso who kills for the family, the militant who bombs for the cause, the official who lies for the state: each silences guilt not by denying the deed but by subordinating it to an allegiance he ranks above the rule he breaks. Sykes and Matza saw the danger precisely here—that this technique feels like virtue. It borrows the vocabulary of the highest human goods—loyalty, patriotism, love of one's people—and turns them into the solvent for the worst human acts. Valentine is this mechanism raised to the level of a governing philosophy. His patriotism is not a pretext; it is genuine, and that is what makes it the perfect neutralizer. He does not need to convince himself the murder is not a murder—he needs only to believe the nation outranks the corpse, and belief comes to him effortlessly. The higher loyalty does not hide the crime from him. It authorizes it.
// The subjectThe patriot who would trade any life for his country
What makes Valentine so chilling is the absence of the usual villain's flaws. He is not cruel for cruelty's sake, not vain, not consumed by hatred. He loves his wife, honors his men, keeps his word where he can—and would sacrifice all of it in an instant if the nation required the price. When he sends loyal subordinates to their deaths, he does not enjoy it; he grieves it, and does it anyway, because the arithmetic of the country always wins. This is the appeal to higher loyalties in its most total form: not a technique reached for in a moment of temptation, but the fixed axis around which his entire conscience turns. Every crime he commits is pre-authorized by a single conviction—that any act, however monstrous, becomes justified the instant it serves the United States. Chasing the Holy Corpse Parts, deploying D4C across parallel worlds, eliminating Johnny and Gyro because they stand between his country and the power he means to secure for it, Valentine never once experiences himself as a criminal. He experiences himself as a patriot doing the hard, necessary, unglamorous work that lesser men are too squeamish to do. The neutralizer is so complete that guilt never even forms—it is disarmed at the source, by a loyalty he holds sincerely and absolutely.
Funny Valentine
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// The flawA higher loyalty does not transfer the wrong
Here is the crack, and it is the whole point. The appeal to higher loyalties explains, with unsettling clarity, how Valentine mutes his guilt—but a loyalty, however high, does not launder the crime it is invoked to excuse. This is the sleight of hand the technique performs: it treats "for the nation" as if it were a justification, when it is only a rationalization. A justification would change the moral nature of the act; a rationalization merely changes how the actor feels about it. And Valentine's patriotism does exactly the second and nothing of the first. The theft is still a theft, the murder still a murder, the sacrificed ally still betrayed—the flag absorbs none of it. Sykes and Matza were explicit that neutralizations are not exemptions; they are the very devices by which people who know better proceed anyway. To say the deed serves a higher cause does not transfer the wrong from the hand that did it to the cause it was done for. Causes do not commit crimes; people do. The nation cannot be guilty of Valentine's murders, because the nation did not choose them—Valentine did, and dressed the choice in a loyalty that changes his conscience but not the corpse. "I did it for my country" is not the end of the moral question. It is where the moral question begins.
The most dangerous neutralizer wears the face of virtue
Valentine matters because he exposes the deadliest feature of the appeal to higher loyalties: it does not feel like a crime to the one committing it—it feels like duty. The other neutralizations require a kind of self-deception the offender can half-sense; this one requires only sincere devotion to something genuinely good. That is why it scales so terribly. Ordinary greed is limited by satiety, ordinary cruelty by exhaustion—but a man who commits atrocities out of love for his nation has no internal brake, because the very faculty that would stop him has been recruited into the crime. Sykes and Matza's warning, sharpened by Matza in Delinquency and Drift, is that we must judge the deed and not only the professed motive, because the noblest-sounding motive is precisely the one most easily turned into a license. A society that accepts "for the good of the nation" as a closing argument has handed every future Valentine a pre-signed pardon. The antidote is austere and unpopular: to hold that the higher loyalty, however sincerely felt, never transfers the wrong—that patriotism explains the patriot's crime and excuses none of it, and that the first question to ask of anyone who breaks the law for a great cause is not how deeply he believed, but whom he harmed.
Three key takeaways
- Funny Valentine embodies the techniques of neutralization (Sykes & Matza, 1957), and above all the appeal to higher loyalties: the 23rd President who will steal, murder and sacrifice his own men for the United States, sincerely convinced that any act becomes justified the moment it serves his nation. Patriotism is his master neutralizer.
- Neutralization works in advance, not after the fact: it is the mental permission Valentine grants himself before the crime, the loosening that makes it possible. The napkin parable, in which whoever takes the napkin first sets the rule for everyone, is not an observation but a device that turns a race of crimes into a patriotic duty before he lifts a finger.
- The flaw: a higher loyalty does not transfer the wrong. "For the nation" is a rationalization, not a justification—it changes how Valentine feels, not what he did. Causes do not commit crimes; people do. A crime for the country is still a crime.
Sources · further reading
- Sykes, G. M. & Matza, D. (1957). “Techniques of Neutralization: A Theory of Delinquency”. American Sociological Review, 22(6), 664–670.
- Matza, D. (1964). Delinquency and Drift. John Wiley & Sons.
- Maruna, S. & Copes, H. (2005). “What Have We Learned from Five Decades of Neutralization Research?”. Crime and Justice, 32, 221–320.
- Bandura, A. (1999). “Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities”. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193–209.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
What crimes does Funny Valentine commit, and what is his power?
The 23rd President of the United States orders killings, steals, betrays and sacrifices his closest allies to gather the parts of the Saint's Corpse. His power lets him move between parallel worlds and swap places with other versions of himself, which in practice makes him impossible to kill. What this file examines is not the list of offenses but how he justifies them: every one is committed “for the good of the nation”.
Who is Funny Valentine?
Funny Valentine (“el 23.º presidente”) is a villain from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. The 23rd President of the United States would steal, murder and sacrifice his closest allies without hesitation—if it served his nation.
Why does Funny Valentine become a villain?
Funny Valentine and the techniques of neutralization (Sykes & Matza): how a patriot pre-authorizes every crime by appealing to a higher loyalty. The man is not greedy—he has simply decided that his country outranks the law.
Which criminological theory explains Funny Valentine?
Funny Valentine's case is analysed through Neutralization. The techniques of neutralization (Gresham Sykes & David Matza, 1957) are the rationalizations offenders use to silence guilt before they act: denial of responsibility, of injury, of the victim, condemnation of the condemners and—above all—the appeal to higher loyalties, the claim that the deed serves a cause, a nation or a family that overrides the law. Funny Valentine, the antagonist of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Steel Ball Run, is the purest specimen of that last technique: a President who will trade any life for his country's advantage and believes the first to act secures it for the nation. Patriotism is his master neutralizer, the device that dissolves guilt in advance and reframes theft and murder as service. And the flaw is decisive: a higher loyalty does not transfer the wrong—a crime for the nation is still a crime.
