The loophole in the US has always been the private sector. Most mass media is controlled by a handful of individuals who play along nicely with what the governm

The loophole in the US has always been the private sector. Most mass media is controlled by a handful of individuals who play along nicely with what the government wants, newspapers and newscasters might present themselves as independent entities focused an a particular geography or demographic, but the viewpoints presented flow down from above. People who don’t play along find themselves not successful in their industry over time. Intense rhetoric between Fox News and MSNBC over how much the wealthy should pay on their income can be an orchestrated distraction from the wealthy not paying any tax at all because they effectively have no income. Facebook and Google can do the dirty work of suppressing viewpoints while anti-trust investigations plod along at a snails pace or issue only token findings. So it’s not like the countries where the tank rolls up to your front door and the storm troopers escort you and your family to new careers in the rock salt mines, but there are a lot of controls in place to guide the conversation and they are mostly implemented via the private sector. You may have thought you saw a UFO but Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey will make sure people know that what you actually saw was Venus.