What is really absolutely bananas is to continue to believe that United States has true freedom of speech. There are so many limitations and exceptions that the USA scores worse than Europe where they don't have such a thing enshrined in their constitution (in so far as they have a constitution to begin with):

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/freedom-of-expression-ind...

Of course, you could be pedantic and say 'but freedom of expression isn't freedom of speech' but that would be precisely the kind of thing that continues to perpetrate the myth. A theoretical freedom on some narrow issue does not do much in competition with a much broader actual freedom. And that's the 2024 version, your guess about what the 2025 edition of that index looks like, I'm thinking not nearly as good for the USA. Blackmailing universities for starters.