A few weeks ago, as his administration embarked on a purge of the US government that evoked the mass firings and inquisitions of the 1950s, the American vice-president, JD Vance, took time out to explain to Europeans that, in fact, they were the ones who had a problem with ideological diversity. “In Britain and across Europe,” he scolded them, “free speech, I fear, is in retreat.” 

The message was clear: no government should engage in “digital censorship”, police “hateful” communications or prohibit “so-called misinformation”. His friend, the world’s richest person Elon Musk, a self-described “free-speech absolutist”, now commands the world’s largest personal megaphone, whose algorithm appears to amplify his own speech over that of others. Jeff Bezos, another billionaire media baron, has banned the Washington Post from publishing any opinion pieces that contradict his own celebration of “personal liberties and free markets”.

Behind them all looms the current president, who recently declared that he had “stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America”. Meanwhile, his administration is attacking universities and scholarship, bullying news organisations and gutting the federal workforce, in order to suppress voices and ideas it dislikes — criticism of Israel, references to the climate crisis, support for trans rights, saying “the Gulf of Mexico” rather than “the Gulf of America”.