The US government has engaged in all the same tactics it criticizes foreign despotisms for, it's just fortunately for us the supreme court has stood firm for civil liberties. Before Gitlow v. New York the US allowed states to censor political speech and it was widely employed against dissidents of all stripes, including religious minorities like Mormons along with political radicals. The US actively censored political publications and speech, under the Espionage, Sedition and the Alien and Sedition acts, as well as enforced religious morality with the Comstock Laws by banning distribution of certain forms of literature through the US Postal Service and raiding the offices of seditious newspapers. The US government also broke up things like the International Workers' Order and various ethnic societies that were based on charitable work, health insurance and cultural production on the basis that they were connected with communists during the Second Red Scare. Not to mention the blacklists and so on. Combine that with the conglomeration of media into the hands of a few corporations and you get a pretty grim picture.

The US was by no means in practice worse than the East Bloc, which didn't have a conservative (with a small c) judicial system that resisted the stripping of civil liberties along with a much stronger coalition of leftists (including communists and socialists), small-d democrats, libertarians and liberals who for their own reasons all fought against the expansion of despotic governmental power here where in the East Bloc, after destalinization democrats, conservatives, anti-Leninist socialists and communists had to operate wholly outside the system or exclusively in organizations like the trade union Solidarity against their governments. but this wasn't for lack of trying by legislators and our ruling class.