Free speech! they cried. But I don’t think that term means what they think it means.

Free speech, as set out in our First Amendment, simply means that you’re free to say stupid and offensive and inconvenient and controversial and truthful things without fear of government sanction.

For example, you’re free to say that Hunter Biden’s laptop is real, and that you don’t believe Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square, and that the government shouldn’t be allowed to force an experimental vaccine on the citizenry, and that Affirmative Action is simply a euphemism for racial discrimination, and that sex is biological science, and that abortion is murder. You’re free to say each of those things without fear of the government coming after you. In theory.

The First Amendment, though, doesn’t say anything about private sanction — such as when a citizen sues a corporation for publishing falsehoods about him. Or when a broadcast network pink-slips an employee who uses his platform for political purposes and continues to chase away his employer’s audience while flushing millions of dollars down the toilet.

Nor does “free speech” mean that the American taxpayer must fund certain kinds of speech — such as that of a longtime left-leaning institution that continues to tailor its programming to coastal elites while sneering at those of us in flyover country.

And yet those on the Left can’t seem to get these distinctions through their thick skulls. Indeed, they’ve been near-hysterical about last week’s cashiering of Stephen Colbert, the inveterate Trump-hater and longtime host of CBS’s “The Late Show,” and about the Republican-controlled Congress having finally, after years of bluster, defunded NPR and PBS.

As to the former, the unfunny Colbert is incensed about the $16 million settlement that his employer paid to Donald Trump, calling it “a big fat bribe.” Yet he and his minions don’t seem to be bothered by the fact that his stupid show loses more than twice that amount — $40 million! — every year. Ultimately, it was mathematics and balance sheets that put an end to Stephen Colbert’s gravy train — not some phony right-wing censorship.

As to the latter, NPR CEO Katherine Maher claims that rural Americans need PBS and NPR because they often have no other possible source for news and information. “Broadband service is not universal,” she says, “and heck, even cell phone service is not universal. There’s a real understanding of the need there as well as for emergency alerting, in which public media plays an extraordinarily important role.”

Hmm … when last I checked, Kerr County, Texas, was a rural community. And yet NPR’s Texas affiliate waited 19 hours before alerting its audience to the calamitous flooding that cost more than 120 people their lives. Instead of warning those rural folks, NPR was running ads to tell its listeners to call Congress to demand that it fund NPR. But as the watchdogs at the Media Research Center rightly charged, “Claiming people need NPR & PBS for local alerts is a lie!”

As Hot Air’s David Strom sardonically put it: “The joke is getting old, but it is still worth repeating: George Orwell’s 1984 was not intended to be an instruction manual. But somehow it is. Freedom is slavery, illegals are ‘law-abiding,’ riots are ‘mostly peaceful,’ censorship is truth-preserving, and the state should run the media.”

Or, as my colleague Nate Jackson put it in our editorial shop this morning, “Suppress our speech and make us pay for theirs. Brilliant strategy. And nice work if you can get it.”