Our elites drop all pretenses of liberalism the moment they feel genuinely threatened.
See also: the time cops in Buffalo, New York casually smashed an old white guy’s head into the pavement in 2020 because he was in the vicinity of a protest critical of police violence.
I realize that “mask off” gets bandied about a lot but there’s always a substantive and observable shift in the way the state responds to critics of the status quo when elites feel genuinely threatened.