The US seems extremely devoid of individual freedoms compared to most other countries.
However, you're right in other ways. For instance, walking around with an open can of beer, or drinking a beer in the park, can get you arrested in the US. In Japan, it's perfectly legal, and people do it all the time (drinking beer with a picnic in the park; they don't walk and drink though, but there's no law against it). There's many other ways that individual freedoms are infringed in the US and aren't here, like how you can use your property. If you want to open a small cafe in your house, for instance, you can do it here.
On one hand, I really don't want this to sound like a conspiracy theory.
On the other hand, it is well know that in the Us, the Media is tightly controlled by private interests, with a clear agenda, on both sides. Nothing controversial about this. So I don't think many wide trends like this just "happen" without the people at the top noticing...
Furthermore, there are obvious, very strong incentives for the people with power to tighten the control of the population as much as they can, for all sorts of vested interests as well as because that's literally what it means to "govern".
This has been true as long as mass media as existed, and way before that throughout history.
So my honest question is. How likely is it that the distortion about "kidnap and murder of children" danger (which for an outsider, is an objective absurdity), was a planned and deliberate campaign?
Once you've worked in large organizations for a while, you realize that humanity most of the time is way too disorganized and gives too little of a shit for any kind of "conspiracy" to be that coherent.