I believe part of the issue of why liberals seem perfectly fine with this censorship apparatus is because the Democratic Party has changed to encompass the “managerial class” as it adopted neoliberal economic policies over the past 35+ years.

Instead of the working class and poor that used to be the Democrat’s constituency, it’s socially liberal managers in tech companies, banks, and other corporations that make up many of its supporters. Having worked my whole adult life in large corporations, some of the things you learn to survive and excel is to “story tell”, “control the narrative”, and self-censor. If you don’t, you won’t make it far in the corporate world.

In many ways it’s not that different from the deference given to kings and princes that Matt mentions; if you apply the same logic to dealing with directors, VPs, etc., you start to understand that self-censorship is key to avoiding scrutiny and exuding power. You also can’t rely on the scientific method or evidence; at the end of the day, if the boss says it’s not true, it’s only detrimental to your career if you disagree.

As corporations have merged and gotten bigger, and thus more people work in large corporations, I believe more people are trained in surviving in self-censoring situations, and thus tolerant of them. And this would explain why corporate leaders and Democratic politicians are tolerant of it - it’s a survival instinct they learned in an ever more corporatized society where we’re not citizens, we’re human capital.