The outcome is not the same: allegedly repressive liberal administrations, internet businesses, and tv networks allowed openly authoritarian media to continually build momentum for a decade until that media delivered an authoritarian regime willing to actively dismantle the open system that allowed it to come to power. Contrast that with less than one year of the authoritarian regime, where the full force of the government apparatus is being used to crush political opponents by: defunding educational institutions, ending international soft-power programs, militarizing cities, threatening to de-license broadcasters, and classifying rights-based activist organizations as terrorists.

The liberal era was marked largely by criticism without consequence, where "deplatforming" was a social phenomenon that meant hopping to one of many other open networks, not the dogged federal punishment of institutions and individuals promoting inconvenient narratives. I'll join you in criticizing the liberal order any day, but it's beyond bad-faith to pretend the current administration is just more of the same.

> where "deplatforming" was a social phenomenon that meant hopping to one of many other open networks, not the dogged federal punishment of institutions and individuals promoting inconvenient narratives.

This is manifestly untrue. The government directly prosecuted people for their social media postings and ordered Facebook and Twitter to censor people, among many, many other acts.

> The liberal era was marked largely by criticism without consequence,

You are able to believe this because the government and the chattering classes were so efficient in their control of the narrative that their abuses were institutionalized as the norms: people that were punished were so bad we didn't question the idea they were extremists or Nazis, and even when the government clearly overreacted, the reaction was largely tepid because complaining too loudly would seem to empower the wrong people. Now that populists have reacted, we're all shocked. That's on us to be responsive democratically, or these things will continue to happen.