Of course it is weird because the person doing the accusation of hypocrisy is actually against the virtuous act, and is thus for people not believing in the virtue.
It's a weird rhetorical trick that sounds sort of unhinged the more you hear it.
To put things into context, I hear/see the above issue orders of magnitude less often than people parroting right wing talking points, but in the cases where I think the accusation is well-founded, I don't think it's about hypocrisy at its root. I think it's about being disingenuous. Then again we may be using two words to mean the same thing.
Huh. I’m sure I was introduced to the idea with the exact opposite. It was described as the moral equivalent of Rolex watches: pointlessly expensive if considered as a timepiece, and ownership of a fake has negative consequences.
But I agree with the general point that most of the people who use the phrase — and all who use it as an insult — do so without self awareness. It’s pretty much universal in human behaviour.
I'll cop to not being completely au fait with current right-wing rhetoric, but I thought a core part of "virtue signalling" (insofar as it might actually exist beyond "position I disagree with", which your post suggests it might not) was that it was low-effort / low-cost. In other words, no action where the alternative is non-trivial monetary gain could be virtue signalling.
Between this and Bray's arrest for environment activism previously, I'd propose that this is not "virtue signalling" but simply being virtuous.