Amidst all the shocks of the 2024 presidential race, who expected Hillary Clinton to ride in like Joan of Arc to rescue truth — or at least to call for the crushing of government critics?

On Monday, Hillary declared on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC talk show that the federal government should criminally prosecute Americans who share “propaganda” — which she made no effort to define.

Hillary has long been one of America’s foremost censorship advocates. In 2022, she wailed that “tech platforms have amplified disinformation and extremism with no accountability” and endorsed European Union legislation to obliterate free speech.

But as we’ve seen, “disinformation” is often simply the lag time between the government pronouncing something a falsehood and the government getting debunked.

That awkward fact didn’t deter Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, now the Democratic vice presidential nominee, from declaring, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.”

Who knew the North Star State’s version of the First Amendment has a loophole bigger than Duluth?

After The New York Post shot down Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board in 2022, Biden appointed Kamala Harris as chief of a White House task force to protect “women and LGBTQI+ political leaders . . . and journalists” from vigorous criticism on the Internet (or as the administration preferred to call it, from “online harassment and abuse”).

The Harris-Biden censorship schemes have been denounced by federal courts and by Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), chair of the House Cybersecurity Subcommittee, sent the White House a letter last week noting that the administration had repeatedly “advertised its willingness to manipulate the content of social media sites.”

Mace called for the cessation of federal censorship that might taint the 2024 election and requested copies of all official “communications with social media companies . . . concerning the concealment or suppression of information on their sites.”

The odds of the White House complying with that request are on par with the New York Giants winning the Super Bowl this season.

Meanwhile, Hillary’s own career is that of a political elitist out to righteously blindfold all Americans but herself.

When she was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, Clinton exempted herself from federal records requirements and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), setting up a private server in her New York mansion to illegally handle her official email.

The State Department ignored 17 FOIA requests for her emails and said it would need 75 years to release the messages of her top aides in response to a GOP lawsuit.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation shrugged it off when Hillary’s aides used a program called BleachBit to destroy 30,000 of her emails that a congressional committee had subpoenaed. Federal Judge Royce Lamberth labeled the Clinton email cover-up “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.”

Pirouetting as a champion of candor is a novel role for the former senator. Shortly before the 2016 election, a Gallup poll found that only 33% of voters believed Hillary was honest and trustworthy, and only 35% trusted Donald Trump. The Clinton-Trump tag team made “post-truth” the Oxford English Dictionary’s 2016 word of the year.

Hillary believes the lesson of George Orwell’s “1984” is that good citizens should shut up and grovel: In her 2017 memoir, she claimed that the book warned of the dangers posed by critics of the establishment who “sow mistrust toward exactly the people we need to rely on: our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence.” Does she imagine Orwell dedicated his novel to Stalin?

And now, to sanctify censorship of Trump and his supporters, Hillary is yet again invoking the Russian peril.

This despite the 316-page report released last year by Special Counsel John Durham, who confirmed that in mid-2016, as she suffered a public shellacking over her email scandal, Clinton “approved a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to tie Trump to Russia as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” President Barack Obama was briefed on the Clinton proposal “to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.” FBI officials relied on the “Clinton Plan” to target the Trump campaign — even though no FBI personnel took “any action to vet the Clinton Plan intelligence,” the Durham report noted.

Hillary’s scams were even too much for federal scorekeepers: The Federal Election Commission in 2022 levied a $113,000 fine on her 2016 campaign and the Democratic National Committee for their deceptive FEC filings that covered up their role in manufacturing the Steele dossier, which spurred the FBI’s illegal surveillance of Trump campaign officials.

Is the charge of “disinformation” becoming simply another stick that rulers can use to flog uppity citizens? But if politicians have no obligation to disclose how they use their power, and can persecute citizens who expose their abuses, how in Hades can American freedom survive?

James Bovard’s latest book is “Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty.”