This is an interesting misconception, I had never considered one would think authoritarians can't be fairly elected. Is the thinking that the electorate would just never elect an authoritarian?
The term was 'authoritarian regime', which is generally used for autocratic leaders.
Although 'authoritarian' is also false - political freedoms for the general population are exactly where they were prior to the election, as I'm sure you are aware.
I guess I'm not nearly as sure of what others are aware of, so I'll just provide https://www.project2025.observer as a great resource for tracking actions of the current administration.
Project 2025 is a project from the Heritage foundation, there was a conspiracy during the election to say this was the platform of the Republican Party, the GOP platform is Agenda 47.
Dude, you really need to take the partisan blinders off.
They are actively, and extremely obviously, executing on the Project 2025 plan, which they wrote up for exactly this reason. This is primarily being driven by Russell Vought, whose plan this is, through his role at the head of the Office of Management and Budget. There was no "conspiracy" about this, there was only a candidate who brazenly lied about his connection to that plan.
Stop trying to gaslight us. We're not idiots, it won't work.
Yes there is, the idea that Project 2025 was the GOP platform is provably false. You can read Agenda 47 yourself on the GOP website. The false allegation relies on the fact that very few people will know to do that.
As you believe Vought is conspiring - you have stated this yourself, the only gaslighting is pretending you have not - and presumably that publishing Agenda 47 was also a conspiracy to hide a secret alternative platform, provide evidence of the conspiracy.
Look, if someone writes up "here's what our party's candidate is gonna do when we win the presidency", and then that party's candidate wins the presidency, hires the person who wrote that up to be the budgetary gatekeeper for the administration, and proceeds to do all the stuff that they wrote up, then that was the plan.
If the candidate said "that isn't the plan!", then they were just lying about that.
This isn't some wild coincidence. Vought isn't "conspiring", he's just straightforwardly executing what the plan was all along.
The Republican party and its candidate just lied about what the platform was. That happens, politicians and their parties lie.
But what I won't abide is people who lie to me about what is obviously happening in the present, which I can easily see with my own eyes. That is what you're doing here. It's just propaganda. It just makes you a liar.
To your first sentence, again, I really think you just have these definitional questions wrong. You seem to be using a vibes-based reading of "authoritarian regime" rather than a "what the words mean" based reading.
To your second paragraph: I'm not going to go into a bunch of examples of things the administration has done, though it would not be hard to do. I'll just reiterate that the thing this thread was originally about is the chilling effect that threats and intimidation has on people's speech. That is just an indirect way to infringe on the right to free expression.
