“Look let’s be honest,” Kamala Harris tweeted in 2019, “@realDonaldTrump ‘s Twitter account should be suspended.” And President Donald Trump was suspended from Twitter, too, as he became another in a long line of deplatformed conservatives. We know as well, with the Twitter files’ release in 2022 and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s 2024 admission that the Biden administration pressured his website to censor users, that the Democrats had been zealously trampling the First Amendment. With ABC’s preempting of Jimmy Kimmel Live! indefinitely under Federal Communications Commission (FCC) pressure, however, the Democrats’ tune has changed.

Now, they warn, the Constitution and freedom of speech are imperiled.

Oh, it’s not that they aren’t standing on principle. It’s that their principle is that it’s only bad when it happens to them.

As many know, Kimmel has joined other leftists who’ve recently lost jobs after making inappropriate remarks about Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Translation: Those who happily wielded the cancel-culture cudgel for years are now being bludgeoned with it themselves.

Of course, and as I wrote recently, all civilizations have their social codes, enforced with attendant social pressure. Yet at issue here is, in part, government pressure. And the left-wing hypocrisy is intense with respect to both phenomena.

Making note of this Friday was USA Today columnist Nicole Russell. “There has been backlash over Disney and ABC’s decision to cancel Kimmel,” she writes. “Actors Ben Stiller and Jamie Lee Curtis are upset. Other comedians have responded with support.”

Russell states that she is disturbed about Kimmel’s nixing being partially driven by pressure from FCC chairman Brendan Carr. Nonetheless, she notes, the Left’s cancel-culture “amnesia” is striking.

“It is a game they created with rules they made up,” Russell points out. “Now they hate that it’s being applied to them.”

She then emphasizes that Kimmel does have free-speech rights. The comment that caused him problems, however, was not just some garden-variety joke, she adds. Rather, he stated on a show that aired Monday:

We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.

Kimmel should’ve known better, of course. It is an established fact that the assassin, Tyler Robinson, is a left-winger whose actions were driven by leftist imperatives. This gets at what troubled Carr. Kimmel was misleading people regarding “the most significant political assassination we’ve seen in a long time,” he explained to CNBC.

This said, deceitful speech does enjoy First Amendment protection. Heck, politicians lie all the time. As Russell states, too, people should’ve allowed market pressure to determine Kimmel’s fate.

And maybe it did. Kimmel’s ratings have declined notably in recent years, and the show is likely losing money. So it’s entirely possible ABC wanted to cancel it, anyway, and that the Kirk comments were merely a handy pretext.

Whatever the case, examples of people being canceled for refusing to bow at wokeness’ left-wing altar abound. As Russell writes:

Gina Carano was fired from Disney and Lucasfilm’s “The Mandalorian,” on which she enjoyed a leading role, after she posted a story on social media comparing the current political climate to Nazi Germany.

… A lot of regular Americans have experienced cancel culture, too, just for holding traditional conservative views. Peter Vlaming was a French teacher at West Point High School in Virginia who got fired in 2018 for not using a transgender student’s preferred pronouns. He sued the school board, and they … settled the case.

Then, remember Rosanne Barr? She also was fired by ABC, in 2018 (under pressure from Barack and Michelle Obama, Barr claims). Google axed employee James Damore in 2017 after he questioned “diversity” policies. The same year, Professor Bret Weinstein followed suit in opposing diversity schemes and was bullied out of Evergreen State College. Nobel laureate scientist Tim Hunt was nixed by University College London in 2015 for making an innocent joke. Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich was compelled to resign in 2014 after supporting a (traditional) marriage proposition. And in 2005, Larry Summers was dislodged from Harvard’s presidency after theorizing that men had a unique proclivity for science. The preceding is just a short list, too.

What’s more, Barack Obama, who recently had the temerity to criticize Trump for targeting enemies, became notorious for weaponizing the federal government. Notably, his administration used the IRS to damage conservative tax-exempt groups.

Then there was the aforementioned pressure the Biden administration put on social-media platforms to censor traditionalists. As I put it at the time, the feds were literally “doing an end run around the First Amendment,” using “the tech companies as proxies to censor speech.”

As already stated, an assertion that any and every “cancel culture” is in principle wrong is itself wrong. Oh, it may be wrong in the particular. But, again, every society has its social codes and uses scorn and ostracism to enforce them. It would be nice, though, if we all could unite in the proposition that our government shouldn’t play speech enforcer.

Instead, leftists are pretending as if conservatives somehow originated cancel culture and government’s role in it. Why? Well, some people have very short memories (and often very convenient ones). Many, leftists in particular, also live in a self-created bubble of rationalization. When they scorned and ostracized people, “it was different — they deserved it.” This is much the same as Tyler Robinson believing Charlie Kirk deserved it.

And all this rationalization, and overt lies as well, is apparent in (ex)mainstream media efforts to convince Americans that MAGA is the real cancel-culture threat. “You’d better elect Democrats,” is the message — “or we’ll lose our freedoms.”

The good news is that the new media, such as The New American, are now preeminent. Consequently, the tongue-stifling social pressure is increasingly being used against the liars, not the Truth-tellers. And if anyone should complain, remember this one: “Freedom of speech does not mean freedom of reach”? Which ideologists made that a common, smug retort some years ago, hmm?

Hint: It’s the same people who are now losing reach.