No, no, the problem was that you communicated your point (maybe not the one you meant to) too strongly.

Someone might claim to base what they do on reason not because they're trying to establish themselves as an authority but because they actually base what they do on reason and people keep not understanding that and instead talking about self-interest or oppression or bias or whatever.

So you really can't just look for who is claiming to base things on reason and decide that this indicates the deepest of ulterior motives. It might be poorly expressed not-garbage at all, it might be kinda overstated but be also pretty reason-based (e.g. CDC recommendations--they usually talk up their authority a lot rather than just going "OMG this is SO COOL--let us tell you about our vaccine data!"), it might be deeply flawed but still have a strong strain of thoughtfulness to it (e.g. a lot of Christian apologetics), and it might be BS from start to finish with an extra helping of lies on the side.

Regarding "we believe in science" vs. "facts don't care about your feelings", I agree that the statements aren't really analogous. Of the two, "we believe in science" is by far the more sinister. FDCAYF is just a statement that one is a jerk who wants you to think they care about facts. But WBIS subverts the very thing it claims to support.

Regarding dog whistles--yes, they absolutely exist just like performativity does. (In the putting-on-an-act sense, not the Judith Butler philosophical sense.) The point of the maneuver isn't to introduce something fantastical. It's to use a claim of bad faith to avoid having to deal with someone else's argument, or make one of one's own. "Dog whistle" absolutely gets used that way.

In both cases, the claim is that something is not as it seems, which mounts an in-principle challenge to the idea that there should be clear evidence. But this just gives the speaker a license to make stuff up. If they can't document why something is performative instead of authentic, or is a dog-whistle instead of being authentic, we only very clearly learn something about their beliefs (and/or their desires for what we should believe).

I think I wasn't quite clear enough about my comments about communities.

The point is that there's a combo attack involving community membership that is used to avoid supporting one's arguments: charge that someone is part of a disgraced community (if they were, you wouldn't have to listen to them) and as evidence point to a dog whistle or use a Kafka trap when they deny it or claim that their apparent allegiance to a different community is performative and they actually are part of the disgraced community, etc..

This is especially effective because although the dog-whistle itself (or whatever) might not alone seem justification for ignoring everything the person says, knowing that it shows that they're in the basket of deplorables is (felt to be) sufficient justification.