The Constitution's First Amendment protects free speech for good reason.

If people can't say what they want, we don't have honest debate.

I was relieved when Donald Trump, campaigning for the presidency, said, "If we don't have free speech, then we just don't have a free country!"

Good for him. Free speech is crucial to freedom.

Democrats, by contrast, had been eagerly censoring. During Covid, they threatened social media companies, ordering them to censor the internet.

"They are directly speaking to millions!" complained Kamala Harris, "without any level of oversight, and that has to stop!"

Fortunately, once Trump was reelected, he told his staff: "Stop all government censorship."

Hooray!

But now that Trump's president, and getting lots of criticism from the media, he's started calling speech that he doesn't like "illegal."

"They'll take a great story, and they'll make it bad. I think that's really illegal, personally."

He also threatened TV stations: "They give me only bad publicity ... maybe their license should be taken away."

"There's free speech, and then there's hate speech," said his attorney general, Pam Bondi. "We will absolutely target you ... if you are targeting anyone with hate speech."

They will "target" people?

Trump's FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, joined in. When Jimmy Kimmel said nasty and incorrect things about Charlie Kirk's murder, Carr threatened ABC's TV licenses, saying, like a mafia boss, "We can do this the easy way or the hard way."

Yet months earlier, he'd tweeted: "Dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights."

And years earlier, he tweeted that the FCC does "not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the public interest."

He was right ... then.

But power tends to corrupt.

Once Carr was in power, he no longer supported the speech he'd recently promoted.

Fortunately, some Republicans pushed back.

Sen. Rand Paul: "Brendan Carr has got no business weighing in on this."

Sen. Ted Cruz: "I like Brendan Carr ... but what he said there is dangerous as hell."

It was.

Carr and Bondi later "clarified" their comments. Carr said his "easy way or hard way" comment was not a threat to pull licenses. Bondi said hate speech itself won't be prosecuted.

Good.

Bizarrely, Democrats suddenly became free speech advocates.

"Reject the government's attempt to weaponize this moment into an all-out assault on free speech," said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

But wait. When her party was in power, Ocasio-Cortez wanted government to "rein in our media environment so that you can't just spew disinformation!"

And "rein in" is exactly what Democrats tried to do, often succeeding.

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg complained that Biden administration officials "would call up our team and scream at them ... all these different agencies and branches of government basically just started investigating, coming after our company. It was brutal!"

Whoever is in power likes to use that power to shut the other side up.

In America, no government has the right to censor.

Politicians eager to shut the other side up should have paid attention to Charlie Kirk when, just a few months before he was killed, he said: "You should be allowed to say outrageous things! You should be allowed to say contrarian things. ... That is the bedrock of a liberal democracy."

Every Tuesday at JohnStossel.com, Stossel posts a new video about the battle between government and freedom. He is the author of "Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media."

Photo credit: Ben Mater at Unsplash