American Psycho (2000) has a great bit that illustrates why virtue signalling is so distasteful.
In this part of the scene, the obscenely wealthy Wall Street execs compete to show who is the most concerned for the problems of the day (finishing with the main character's encouraging of "less materialism") in the middle of having a night out at the elite venues of NYC and engaging in extravagant spending to feed their own unbridled hedonism.
The characters are portrayed as morally repugnant and utterly degenerate so we see how fake their concern is, and how virtue signalling amounts to little more than individuals making specific noises intended to present a veneer of conformity to generally accepted social values while giving themselves a pass to act in avaricious, contradictory ways.
![](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/rjRPcQH2Dyw/maxresdefault.jpg)