This isn't a whataboutism equivalency. It is a statement that one needs to first be honest about ones own shortcomings before disparaging another.
> absolutist surveillance state
I'm pretty sure that neither Google nor the rest of the world is thrilled about NSA warrantless mass surveillance programs.
> is currently participating in genocide, has institutionally striven to sustain an ethnostate
State supported ethnic cleansing of Native Americans in the 19th century. State supported subjugation and murder of African Americans in... well, improving, but still counting.
> exercises extrajudicial imprisonment and execution...
Extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention, and torture in third party countries and at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
> ... against vast swaths of the population to preserve political power
20th century voting rights struggles, in which African Americans were systemically disenfranchised with the goal of preserving white political and economic power.
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I'm a proud American, support the use of the US military on the global stage as a force for increasing moral good in the world, and consider the Chinese model of authoritarianism incompatible with the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness owed to every human. I believe the US holds individual freedom and equality before the law as much higher ideals, and delivers on them more often and fully, than China does.
But there's a reason Martin Luther King Jr. talks about "self purification" as one of the three prerequisite steps before direct action, and it's because easy hatred corrupts true justice.
Enumerating the ways in which your opponent looks like you, and the ways in which you've fallen short of your own ideals, isn't an argument for inaction, but a clarification and sharpening of action. 1960s racial injustice in the United States provided an embarrassing talking point while the US lectured the USSR on individual freedom. Using the evil that another does as justification for righteousness requires first accepting the evil that one has done.