Oh my bad, I guess I got a little overly defensive. I'm just so used to having to walk on eggshells whenever I discuss anything relevant to this topic without relying on a cookie-cutter script of what's an acceptable stance to take. Like I get it, people's nerves are high, but we have to preserve room for nuance and novel thought or else we become ineffective, not to mention a caricature of what we should be.

I also usually have a problem with the term virtue signaling, but in this context I would point out that I was using it to refer to "preaching to the choir" and contrasting it with the pragmatic approach of tailoring language to be more persuasive to outsiders/fence-sitters. So I wasn't using it as a blanket to try to invalidate taking a principled stance as a whole. Remember that I thought you were scolding me for something that I couldn't figure out why, which turns out was not the case anyway. So I was mistaken, and I wouldn't have mentioned virtue signaling had I not been.

But also, in my experience, it's not just the right-wing that uses the term. I've been accused of virtue signaling in leftist spaces where it's used almost interchangeably with "performativism."

Or in other words: "someone I don't like said something that I would otherwise generally agree with, so I have to hide an ad hominem attack under the cover of questioning their sincerity."