Washington : The White House warned us it was going to crack down on left-wing activists. The US attorney-general told us she was coming after “hate speech”, and that employers were obliged to sack people who said objectionable things.

We just didn’t know the next victim would be Jimmy Kimmel .

The extraordinary decision of America’s ABC network to suspend Kimmel’s late-night comedy show – over genuinely milquetoast content on the assassination of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk – should be and is a wake-up call for all proponents of free expression in the United States and around the world.

It is a perfect distillation of the way Donald Trump deploys government power to vanquish his “critics” and steamroll organisations to bend to his will, even if the president himself did n

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