“Tankies” are people who actually understand how imperialism and hegemony work. They are able to look past their prejudices using material analysis to recognize who perpetrates imperialism vs those who are victimized by it and struggles against it. “Tankies” stand in support of the latter. Whereas People who use “tankies” as a pejorative (sometimes now called dronies) are those who have failed to sift out from the deluge of propaganda (that we are all saturated by) those specific lies that they want to believe in. They remain ignorant, usually willfully, because it is easier and oftentimes beneficial to them to believe that, for instance, the groups of people their government tells them are evil and “authoritarian” really are evil and “authoritarian.”
While it is ultimately a failure of understanding how the world actually works that the drony suffers from, it is often rooted in a failure of self reflection, the refusal to recognize their prejudices, biases, and the material reasons behind their wilful ignorance. So of course the dronies hate people who are willing to hold up a mirror and then look out and see the world as it is, because those people are a reminder and representation of all the things the dronies in their cowardice refuse to look at. Hence we get frothing know-nothings who think they’re leftists whinging and even raging about those terrible “tankies.”
They were very clearly not making any equivalency let alone a false equivalency. They were using an example that we all would agree on as a demonstration. This is a rhetorical device and a perfectly valid, frequently used one at that. But the fact that you and apparently a couple others are trying to make it out as if they were saying “r*** is the same thing as protesting” is disgusting and revealing of your own motives.