President says broadcasters should lose licenses for criticizing him

What happened to the party of Free Speech absolutism?

Edit: for those claiming this isn't a free speech issue the President is using the FCC to go after people he doesn't like. He must be a special snowflake.

Their speech was never in jeopardy, they just didn’t like its consequences. And now that they have the upper hand they will try to actively impose the same restrictions which they accused others of placing on them.

Victimhood distorts reality and leads to outsized reprisals.

> Their speech was never in jeopardy, they just didn’t like its consequences.

Can't you say the same about the Jimmy Kimmel situation? He's not in jail, he's free to speak, his employer just didn't want to back him up on it.

All of the arguments used to excuse cancel culture ("right to speech not to a platform", "it's a company censoring you, not the government", "freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences") are now being leveraged by the right. Why did anyone think it would go any other way? Was the assumption that the left would own the cultural zeitgeist forever? This whole approach to politics was folly.

> Was the assumption that the left would own the cultural zeitgeist forever?

Yes, that was clearly the assumption. It's hard to blame them; that had been the case for 50+ years, and the early 2020s suggested that they had the system licked and would be fully in charge until their internal contradictions brought them down.