The response to the race riots has been defined by two competing forms of denialism. There’s the denialism of the Very Online right, desperate to downplay, make excuses for or flat-out ignore the racism on display, online and off, in those dark days after Southport. Then there’s the denialism of the authoritarian establishment, desperate to pretend that there is no threat to freedom of speech, even as the British state goes about telling people to ‘Think before they post’, cracking down hard on ‘online violence’ (whatever that is) and throwing the book at people for bigoted or untrue things they have said on the internet.

Both are a pox. And if we want to stand up for free speech and defeat the racial politics that has emerged in our midst, they both need to be exposed and discredited.

There has already been a good deal of fisking of the former. Not least in these pages. (If you haven’t already read Inaya Folarin Iman’s takedown of the white-identitarian pseuds who are suddenly all over the right-wing chattersphere, you’re in for a real treat.)

So let’s focus our attention here on the establishment, the censorship deniers – the smug, gaslighting, midwit elites who are calling for censorship one minute and saying ‘no one is being censored here, you idiot’ the next. After all, while hard-right poseurs have become an unpleasant feature of online public discussion, the great and good’s ability to silence public discussion is infinitely more dangerous.

The government’s depressingly predictable pursuit of censorship after the riots has made the UK both a cautionary tale and a transatlantic laughing stock. The backlash has been led by Elon Musk, owner of X, Big Tech’s only relatively pro-free-speech platform, whose sometimes tongue-in-cheek interventions have been a little lost on Britain’s humourless illiberal liberals.