In the not-so-distant-past, a dictator purging academics would be clearly and universally acknowledged as bad.
Somehow it's now twisted around to claim that critics of _supporters_ of a regime are actually the real "oppressors".
Interesting times.
Honestly, I'm not so sure that's true. That's still a consensus view for people without a stake in what's happening, and it never has been clear and universal for those close to the topic. (Who, as here, generally accept the principle but reject the accuracy of both 'dictator' and 'purge'.)
It's not hard to find people, even in the US, who in their own time excused (or praised) each of fascist crackdowns on historians, Soviet enforcement of Lysenkoism, Pinochet's 'disappearing' of artists, Maoist 'reeducation', or even the Khmer Rouge's outright mass murder of educated people. Mostly, those purges have only been near-universally reviled in hindsight.
And indeed, in the US there were things like the Madison Square pro-nazi rally in 1939. And just as there were pro-democracy denunciations of Pinochet that Nixon et co ignored, so too today there is denunciation of appalling autocratic behavior that will be ignored and will need to be watered down to justify to the public. Perhaps in the past too there were arguments of the form "thousands of political firings do not constitute a purge because the New York Times is X"
I am accustomed to solution oriented discussions on these topics. So while interesting from an anthropological point of view, defense and praise of autocratic behavior is a breaking distraction from finding solutions.