The Trump administration is openly coercing media organizations into suppressing speech that it does not like.

On Monday night, late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel (irresponsibly) seemed to suggest that Charlie Kirk’s killer had conservative sympathies, before making several unrelated jokes at Donald Trump’s expense.

Two days later, FCC chair Brendan Carr warned broadcasters that if they continued to disseminate Kimmel’s program, the government might fine them or revoke their licenses. Within hours, ABC had indefinitely suspended Kimmel.

This has posed a dilemma to many conservative commentators. On the one hand, right-wing pundits spent much of the past decade decrying the left’s censoriousness and insisting on the vital importance of free speech. On the other hand, they tend to think that Jimmy Kimmel is bad and that Donald Trump is good.

To their credit, some conservatives have registered their objections to Trump’s embrace of state sanctions on speech. But others have chosen to rationalize the administration’s behavior.

As they tell it, the Biden administration perpetrated more severe and illegitimate attacks on the First Amendment than Trump ever has. Liberal complaints about Kimmel’s suspension are therefore hypocritical and hyperbolic.

It is worth noting that this claim would not justify the Trump administration’s behavior, even if it were true. An attack on free speech does not need to be historically severe or unprecedented to be worthy of condemnation.

In any case, the right’s apologia for Trump’s FCC isn’t merely irrelevant but false. The president has now trammeled free speech rights far more blatantly and profoundly than his predecessor.

Why the right believes that liberals are getting a taste of their own medicine

Right-wing defenses of the Trump FCC tend to center on one fundamental grievance: During the COVID pandemic, the Biden administration pressured social media companies to deplatform conservative critiques of public health policy. Republicans believe that this was a violation of the First Amendment. And they therefore see hypocrisy in liberal protestations against Kimmel’s suspension: If the left truly opposed government suppression of speech, it would have stood up for anti-vaxxers in 2021.

What’s more, in the view of

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