Bingo. They're not trying to understand the case or offer an opinion about it. The term "virtue signalling" refers to a similar category of speech, ie., signal

Bingo. They're not trying to understand the case or offer an opinion about it. The term "virtue signalling" refers to a similar category of speech, ie., signalling (vs communicating). You can distinguish communication from signalling by the introduction of a hypothetical premise: suppose "The Issue" (eg., SBT) was discovered not to relate to "Identity" (eg., Left/Right, etc.), then would you/the-speaker still care? If not, then what you're actually concerned about is the impact of this issue on your ingroup/outgroup game, not the issue itself. Here, most either want to distance their identity from SBT, or associate it with their enemies.