Jack Ma was essentially on house arrest for over a year after flying a little too close to the sun with his IPO plans. Peng Shuai was on house arrest for denouncing sexual abuse by a CCP member.
The psychological, widespread chilling effects of these high profile "vanishings" has absolutely no commonality with the Patriot act (bad as it is).
The US police are killing people all the time. In January police killed an environmentalist in January, Manuel Taran. The US kills and jails political prisoners all the time.
"The killings were part of a broader program of "targeted killing" by the United States outside the context of armed conflict and based on vague legal standards, a closed executive process, and evidence never presented to the courts. "
Your comment sounds awfully disingenuous. I seriously doubt you do not see the huge difference between implementing official policies of extrajudicial imprisonments and having a random person murder people for their own personal reasons.
What a dystopia China is where billionaires can’t get away with paying a fee in a legal for a few world.
The billionaires in China aren't punished for doing illegal shit. They are punished for going against The Party.
They probably get away with at least as much or more than US billionaires as long as they don't ever go against The Party.
Don't get the impression they are being held accountable for other stuff that The Party doesn't care about.
Going against the party and going against the law are often the same thing stated differently.
https://jeffhead.webs.com/liberty/liberty/bdycount.txt
(R) party is left to exist as a group of useful idiots who never pass any meaningful legislation that isn't immediately dismantled by (D) establishment within a few years.
https://www.dailysignal.com/wp-content/uploads/FBIP-SOCIAL-0...
if the rich controlled the government, don't you think they'd lower their taxes? or are we lucky to be ruled by the rich because they are so benevolent?
Let's say a certain billionare enters politics, and is not a party favorite, and against the bipartisan elite consensus. Say, they are, god forbid, populist, and against job outsourcing, wars, and such.
Media, who loved him for decades, can suddenly start covering his every action as if describing the leader of the Axis in WWII. Suddenly his associates might start to get investigated for things all sides in DC did since time immemorial with impunity. Experts might appear day and night on TV to give a psychological assessment of him. Some high standing people might openly advocate for his elimination. Government agencies might join the "good fight". Mere tech corporations might decide to ban his (the active President's) account.
Others might pay some hack to come up with a bogus document binder hack job, a dossier if you will, that will feature day and night on the news. And inversely, his opponent's son might be news gold, be involved in all kinds of shady dealings, and even lose a certain computing device, and they're not covered, lest their parent is harmed.
Or let's say another billionaire lacks the good taste to not antagonize the consensus of the elites and their lapdogs in the aspirational classes. Perhaps their glowing "let's all kiss the ass of the billionaire tech god" coverage changes overnight...
The "media" includes Fox News - and it is, in audience terms, the most mainstream of them. It had absolutely glowing coverage of Trump throughout its presidency and continues heavy coverage of Biden's son. The "media" includes the Falun-affiliated Epoch Times, which is still widely available and continues along the same lines. The "media" includes Twitter, which its owner directed to get his own tweets significantly more audience.
None of these people can even remotely claim to have been vanished by the government.
Nothing. As the very first line of the comment goes: "That's not the way things are done in the west. Lacking absolute rule, you need to achieve similar things with a little more subtlety".
When establishment power is privitazed, distributed, and can be yielded more finely, you don't need to vanish people to shut them up or shut them down.
See Clinton Body Count
Bob Marley - needle with oncogenic viruses implanted into shoe
MLK Jr. - FBI–King suicide letter
Seth Rich - You should remember this one easily
Stephen Paddock - his life history was deleted from databases (4chan archived lots of it before it vanished) and he was hit with a character assassination to deflect from what actually happened in Vegas (failed firearms sale to would-be murderers of the Saudi royal family staying upstairs)
That's just off the top of my head. Bill Oxley claimed to do in 17 people for Uncle Sam but the "legitimate news sites" which are totally not compromised by Operation Mockingbird conveniently discredit that theory.
Edit: your post kinda proves the point. You're evidently not afraid of posting stuff online that most people would consider crazy conspiracy BS ("Bill Oxley"?). In an actually oppressive regime, that shit would have landed you in jail already...