There's quite a lot of this kind of admiration for authoritarianism tucked away in nooks and crannies of the tech community. It survived mostly off the rationale that people should always be free to express their conscience, even in the case of extreme ideologies - which was rather common in spaces populated by "outsiders" a few decades back, of course.
I have to imagine that idea made its contribution to recent events, attracting the wrong sort of people and delaying a response.
It's all very much worth reconsidering from our new perspective.