Oh, very clever--he who attacks "truth, facts, and reason" couldn't possibly have the actual most ulterior motives, could they?
Oh good heavens no, they're obviously pure as the driven snow, because they're revealing the dastardly motives behind the others, showing us that those guys are off their rockers, and...and...wait....
Do you maybe want to try a less self-refuting version of this argument, perchance?
Anyway, if we witness the fight between "we believe in science" and "facts don't care about your feelings", it's pretty clear that people with strong opinions tend to want reason on their side.
And if we witness the fight between "perfomative" and "dog-whistle"+"gaslighting", again, it's pretty clear that people with strong opinions want to cast aspersions.
The question, in light of this, is how do you sift actual information and well-grounded arguments from convenient lies, partial truths, and self-serving rationalizations?
It is pretty clearly not by cheerleading for one side and only seeing the splinter in thy neighbor's eye.
Rather, if you hear a buzzword: performative, dog-whistle, or whatever else, the thing to do is start asking questions about the arguments and evidence presented. Can you think of a counterargument? Are there claims that require evidence? If yes, is the evidence provided? What would counterevidence look like, and can we tell if any exists? If some exists, is it enough to undermine the original argument? If undermined, can the argument be recovered by appealing to something else? And so on.
It's quite correct that claims of perforrmativity often serve as ad hominem attacks--but it's not so clear that one can dismiss such arguments from "certain communities" without careful thought. Firstly, even if used in an entirely specious way by some community, the premise was that you don't actually know who is whom because they're pretending that they're not conservative; and secondly, even if performativity is often used as a smear, it doesn't follow that it is so universally used that way that one needn't even consider whether the claim might actually be correct.