In all fairness, the rule that "the more loudly socially performative a person is, the worse their character" seems to apply to insider signalling actions of all social structures whose "membership" can yield personal upsides, not just those of organised religion.
The dead tell no tales!
That's what happenned inside the more-rightwing party in the US, and in the UK too (which also has a FPTP voting system hence is a similarly flawed "democracy").
If the Fascists can infiltrate the more-rightwing mainstream party, why can't the lefties do the same to the less-rightwing party?
That said, it's my impression that in both the US and UK, even the less-rightwing party is a lot closer to Fascism to begin with than it is to being left-of-center - Neoliberalism is all about removing the Power from the hands of voters and putting it in the hands of the Wealthy Elites by making what voters (supposedly) control in Democracy - the legislature and executive - be secondary to the Power of Money, or in other words, to make voters come second rather than first and hence the entire system less democratic.
(Also in the UK when the lefties did try and take control of the less-rightwing party, there was a massive campaign by the entirety of the Press, the more-rightwing party and even the until then faction in power inside the less-rightwing party to revert it, even involving Israeli-linked Jewish Organisations in Britain - as the campaign relied mostly in slandering the lefties and the elected leftwing party leader of being anti-semites - which succeeded and returned the Hard-Right Neoliberals to the leadership of that party - were they immediatelly started a purge of leftwingers - all of which is probably a pretty good predictor of how things would happen in the US if the leftwing tried to take over the Democrat Party by trusting the democratic nature of the voting system and other structures within that party and just electing a new leadership: in this era and in countries which Duopoly Performative Democracy systems, the power parties are not at all democratic and when push come to shove they will ditch the Theatre of Democracy they use to seem democratic and operate under the same Rules Of Power as all other authoritarians).
That would require them to represent the many rather than the few, which would mean ditching the kind of people who rose in the party for the last 4 decades because they could do exactly the opposite and be handsomely rewarded for it.
Mind you, that's a broader problem than just the Democrat Party in the US and affects most mainstream parties in Western Democracies.
Hey, let's be fair: it's gotta be pretty hard to try and balance their actual practice of maximizing what's good for themselves and only about 1% of the population, with trying to maintain the impression that they represent the interest of the broader electorate.
One has to at least appreciate the complexity of constantly maintaining a "Hey, look here!" ideological circus number running whilst they help a few pick the pockets of the rest.
There are Russians who are more tech savvy than you would expect, but in average they're just like the rest.
One would expect that in Russia, like everywhere, the kind of people hired to manage the IT infrastructure in most companies are not the "hacker elite" (unless the company gets one purely by luck)
The only shocking thing here is that a military manufacturer - which one would expect to try a bit harder to find the kind of systems manager that can harden their internal systems - seems to have not properly hardenned/segregated their systems.
Then again, maybe they're not totally incompetent and do have their mission critical stuff air-gapped and the damage done by the Ukranian hackers is less impactful than the headline implies. From the outside it's hard to tell.
It's not meant to be logic - after all, it's targetting kids, who are hardly likely to challenge it and actually think it through like you did - it's meant to train kids to be Nationalistic.
I'm from a country which was under a Fascist dictatorship until 50 years ago - Portugal - and even though the place was a total shithole (so poor that it got Food Aid), the regime was massivelly into pushing Nationalism.
The Far-Right are usually the ones who love Nationalism (there really are no greater flag-shaggers than the Fascist Far-Right) and Militarism.
So, at least for me, things such as a Pledge Of Alliegance in schools in the US always sounded like the kind of brainwashing of children done in Fascist countries - maybe not as far as an organised regime Youth movement (like the "Hitler Youth" or the Portuguese "Mocidade Portuguesa"), but certainly partly in that direction.
In the US, the brainwashing towards Fascist favorites like Nationalism starts when they're still children.
Alternativelly, some higher-up got pressure via some politician after talking to some lobbyist or golf-buddy, to "do something", and some lower-down who got the hot potato covered their ass by finding something they could do, all of which quite independently of any strategical considerations.
If one doesn't assume the Justice System aims be Just, a lot of things become easilly explained without the needed to find some kind of Master Strategy Beyond Our Comprehension to explain them.
Almost certainly there was some kind of pressure by somebody well connected on some higher up in the Italian Justice or Political Authorities of the
"Something Must Be Done!"
kind.
Followed by whomever was the last link in the shit chain coming from above, following the mental process of:
"This is Something we can do"
"We shall do This!"
It's pretty standard in the stuff which isn't their daily bread and butter that Justice Systems are driven by cronyism at the higher level and cover-my-ass at the lower level, especially in countries which have a culture of Cronyism.
(People are people, and even in Justice Systems they're no more impeccably honest and fair than elsewhere - in fact positions with power tend to attract people who are less honest and fair than average, IMHO).
Often this shit gets overturned when it gets to court or on at least appeal (generally the system gets less crooked as you go up, though I know of cases in other similar countries in Europe were only when it got the European Court Of Human Rights was the injustice corrected) and once the Press' (and the higher up's) attention has moved on, but that is a mentally and economically very costly fight for individuals to fight, which is why poor people almost invariably get shafted in such a system when they cross the wrong person or "don't know their place".
And they would give as much as shit about it as they give a shit about the story of Jesus kicking the money lenders out of the Temple or the parable about rich men entering Heaven and camels going through the eye of a needle.