During his early years in office, one of Barack Obama’s little tics was his reflexive use of the word “unprecedented.” Whether borne out of need or narcissism or simply subpar speechwriting, it seemed that darn near everything he did was unprecedented. Until nothing was. Clearly, that word didn’t mean what he thought it did.

But here’s something that really is unprecedented: the Left’s latest attack on the Right. For scope and scale and downright dirtiness, the Left has outdone itself — which is saying something.

The jumping off point, of course, was the censorship of a sitting president and the coordinated curb-stomping of a rival communication platform. But from there, things spun out of control. Having taken out President Donald Trump, they worked with dizzying speed — from Internet service providers to book publishers to hotel chains to insurance companies to global banks to professional sports leagues — to go full Thought Police on us.

How bad is it? The Republicans’ lone hope for sanity in the Senate, West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin, seems to have lost either his mind or his man card. Or both.

PBS’s Margaret Hoover asked him point-blank about the Democrats’ wave of deplatforming: “Parler … has been booted off of Apple, Amazon, and Google. The PGA has pulled its 2022 Championship from the Trump National Golf Course in New Jersey, and Simon & Schuster has dropped Josh Hawley’s book. Do you support all these examples of deplatforming?”

This was a softball — a beachball, really — a chance for Manchin, the guy whose state went for Trump by 39 points, to simply put his foot down and say that the cancel culture has gone too far. Alas, Manchin whiffed. “I do. I really do,” he said. “I think there’s a responsibility they all have … and thank goodness they’re pushing back now.”

Oooooh, thank goodness. Who knew that the weight of conservative words could, like sticks and stones, break progressive bones?

Not content to have sided with the censors, Manchin went into projection mode. “Maybe this will give my Republican colleagues some support that they can be free,” he said. “The truth will set you free. Maybe they can break the bonds, these chains that they have of captivity within the Republican ranks, that they’re afraid they’re going to be primaried or there’s going to be challenges or things that they have to deal with that they’d rather not.”

Huh? Here’s a West Virginian whose party is anti-fossil fuel, pro-Paris Climate Accords, pro-Iran nuke deal, pro-China, pro-BLM, pro-antifa, and pro-biological boys competing in sports against our daughters. And he says Republicans are afraid?

Most despicable of all, though, was Manchin’s seeming willingness to remove two of his Senate colleagues, Republicans Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, merely for having objected to the Senate’s certification of the Electoral College results.

As The Hill notes, “The third section of the 14th Amendment reads that no lawmaker holding office ‘shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.’”

“Insurrection or rebellion”? Yeah, let’s heal the nation by removing two senators for having questioned the legitimacy of an election marred by the Democrats’ bulk-mail ballot strategy.

Setting aside the senator from the Mountain State, more than a few Republicans have also gone soft. And in doing so, they’ve hung President Trump and Senators Cruz and Hawley, among others, out to dry. South Dakota Senator John Thune, for one, must’ve endeared himself to the cocktail crowd in DC, but I suspect he disgraced himself back home. His state went for Trump by 26 points, but that didn’t stop him from kicking his party’s standard-bearer on his way out the door. “The president,” Thune said, “got a lot of people very spun up, and I think he did a disservice to people across this country, including many in South Dakota that I’ve heard from who believe that the election was stolen. It was not.”

It was not, he said with conviction. But he didn’t offer any evidence to address the concerns of his constituents — no investigation into improprieties in Detroit or Milwaukee or Philly, no Senate hearings, nothing like that. But a November 11 New York Times headline said, “Election Officials Nationwide Find No Fraud,” so it must’ve been a legit election. Joe Biden must’ve gotten all 81 million of those votes on the up-and-up.

Censorship is the way of the coward and the tyrant, and the Democrats and their Big Tech enablers have plenty of both. Facebook’s former chief security officer, Alex Stamos, for one, is calling on the cable TV providers to cancel conservative networks Newsmax and One America News Network.

“We have to turn down the capability of these conservative influencers to reach these huge audiences,” said Stamos to the friendlies at CNN. “There are people on YouTube, for example, that have a larger audience than daytime CNN, and they are extremely radical and pushing extremely radical views. … We’re gonna have to figure out the OANN and Newsmax problem that these companies have freedom of speech, but I’m not sure we need Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, and such to be bringing them into tens of millions of homes.”

Where does all this end? Who knows? But too many on the Left think Big Tech hasn’t gone nearly far enough.