Spot on, and bears repeating. There is a large swath of the American public that gives no credibility to anything that isn't spoon fed to society from the popular culture. The people with blood on their hands include the MSM who refuse to tell the truth, and who delegitimize information that is critical of those whose ideology they support. You are also absolutely correct that many if not most of them would welcome a suppression of free speech if it favored them and suppressed their competition.
Its worse than that. They hear it and know it is true, they just have to have MSM tell them it is a big deal. If MSM doesn't jump on it it isn't important.
In a way, you cannot blame people for not believing something unless it is on the MSM. You naturally expect that if it is a really big important story, it will be featured on the MSM according to the importance that it merits. When Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese, it was all over the media and that was all that everyone talked about, people new that is was a ten story on a scale of one to ten. The newspapers of that day had front page stories of Pearl Harbor with huge headlines and large pictures covering the front pages, the story continued on page after page and it continued on the radio stations. But imagine if some of the newspapers covered it and others didn’t and some covered the story but without pictures and somewhere in the middle of the paper in a short column. This would be very confusing to the people, they wouldn’t know what to believe. That is what is happening to us right now, the media is so corrupt that people just cannot believe that they would go to the extremes that they do to get their agenda pushed through. If you try to tell them what is going on it sounds like you have your tin foil hat on. It is very frustrating but the truth cannot be buried forever.