I suppose we wouldn't know whether an audience for those ideas exists today because they would be blacklisted, deplatformed, or deamplified by consolidated authorities.

There was a quote last year during the "Twitter files" hearing, something like, "it is axiomatic that the government cannot do indirectly what it is prohibited from doing directly".

Perhaps ironically, I had a difficult time using Google to find the exact wording of the quote or its source. The only verbatim result was from a NYPost article about the hearing.