Look, I’m a media critic myself. I think there’s a big problem with progressive groupthink and bias in the mainstream media ecosystem. But the comparison to Russia—where independent media critical of the regime have been reduced to increasingly tiny and beleaguered islands of dissent; where the government frequently blocks undesirable websites; where posting satirical memes can get you arrested or placed on a list of “extremists” that leads to a variety of restrictions (for instance, on the amount of money you can withdraw from your bank account in a month); where journalists have been jailed for covering or even mentioning unauthorized protests—is both ludicrous and offensive. In Russia, posting the wrong link can do more than get your Twitter account deactivated, as happened to the New York Post in the aftermath of the laptop story; it can get you locked up.

Let’s leave aside for now Ahmari’s cavalier dismissal of arrests and assassinations (hey, everyone “condemns it plainly,” so what’s the big deal?). It’s hard to believe that Ahmari is completely clueless about the highly sophisticated system of information control in Russia, where the state works closely with a wide array of ostensibly private individuals and entities, employing not only outright coercion but disinformation and smears to destroy critics—whether via “investigative” exposés on government-controlled TV channels such as NTV or “fake news” planted on the Internet. More likely, he just doesn’t allow such facts to get in the way of his narrative.

There was a time when mocking the notion of American freedom and arguing that we just have more hypocritical and sophisticated repression than places like Russia was a province of the left. Now, such arguments—still a hodgepodge of false equivalencies, bad-faith analogies, and stunningly ignorant assertions—have become an area of agreement between large segments of the left and the right. The effect is still the same: to whitewash repression abroad in order to score political points at home.