[lordgroff]

Those appratchicks are no better than Soviet appratchicks who had their own litmus tests of what was and was not acceptable. I'm not from Russia or the ex Soviet sphere but I did spend a large portion of childhood in a communist system in Eastern Europe and am still horrified that people don't seem to understand that this is exactly the kind of bullshit you had to deal with in that system.

No, you didn't get shot for dissent. No you didn't disappear. It was all much more bland and insidious than that, you were accused of a thought crime and that might kill your career. Conformity was the name of the game and I see increasing evidence that we're very much following this trajectory in North America. And it has that insidious quality too that you can't speak out against it because if you do you're clearly a racist/misogynist/homophobe/insert-bad-thing-hereist.

[the_third_wave]

They are probably hoping to become a new Nomenklatura [1], a category of people ... who h[o]ld various key administrative positions in the bureaucracy, running all spheres: government, industry, agriculture, education, etc., whose positions [a]re granted only with approval by the [modern equivalent of the communist party].

The nomenklatura formed a de facto elite of public powers in the former Eastern Bloc [comparable to] the Western establishment holding or controlling both private and public powers (for example, in media, finance, trade, industry, the state and institutions).

That is what they seem to be aiming for: cushy jobs for them and ideological purity for their organisations.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomenklatura