On a side note, I’m surprised you are calling out the right wing for being anti virtue signaling. In my opinion, people who name themselves the Moral Majority are the biggest virtue signallers of them all.
On a side note, trying to put a label into one or two buckets is very short sighted.
Nicotine is addictive, last I checked a carcinogen in its own right (even if better for you than other cigarette additives), and there are reports that an entire generation is starting life addicted to it more than any previous generation. So if I think that's concerning, I am just trying to signal my virtue?
Can't be that I came to be concerned about either case for good reasons.
What I see a lot of on the internet lately is that people become unable to argue points like this and pull out the "virtue signalling" label when backed into a corner. Or like you I guess, you decide to mock "virtue signalling" without understanding how a person comes to these opinions in good faith.
It is a lazy ad hominem