My experience is that they're interested in politics somewhat orthogonal to the mainstream discourse.

Anecdotally, several of the smartest people I knew as a grad student at Stanford are now working for an international nonprofit seeking to reduce bigotry, working in politics focused on privacy, working on encrypted communications, and working as faculty at another top tier university focused on accessibility and ml fairness.

Not many of the excellent programmers I know went to grad school. It's probably self-selected for people interested in social issues.