Accepting the Liberatum Cultural Honor at Camden Town Hall in London, novelist Salman Rushdie warned that free expression in the United States is under sustained pressure from the Trump administration, which he accused of championing free speech abroad while working to suppress it at home. His remarks matter because Rushdie, long a global figurehead for free expression after the fatwa prompted by "The Satanic Verses," framed current American developments as part of a wider historical pattern of censorship.

Rushdie pointed in particular to the removal of thousands of book titles from American school libraries — including "Huckleberry Finn" and Toni Morrison's "Beloved" — describing it as a conscious effort to erase the history of slavery, while noting that groups such as the ACLU and PEN America are winning legal challenges. Speaking in the building where he once worked on community relations and wrote "Midnight's Children," he reflected on his career and censorship's long history, observing that persecutors of books often have not read them. He summed up his stance by saying the burden of proof must always lie on the censor, with the default being that everybody talks.