They’re characters from books anthropomorphizing very unscrupulous archetypes.

My process is to look at outcomes and techniques. If techniques to further an ideological goal involve dishonesty and disingenuousness I then deduce that the purveyors of those ideologies are unscrupulous people. If outcomes are awful and especially if they try to hide those bad outcomes then I presume that they don’t care how what they want affects people. So for example, sex education and birth control among religious conservatives, you have both disingenuous discussion and bad outcomes. Or the countless young women who have ruined their lives by cutting their breasts off as teenage girls convinced they’re boys. Same markers.