If leftists weren’t afraid of losing the arguments, they wouldn’t feel that irrepressible need to censor us. But they are, so they do.

Big Tech, being the Left’s favorite speech suppressor, is their weapon of choice. They’ve censored regular folks on social media, they’ve censored leading newspapers, and they’ve censored a U.S. president. And now, if you’re engaged in wrongthink about the COVID-19 vaccine, they’re gunning for you.

As Politico reports, “Biden allied groups, including the Democratic National Committee, are also planning to engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages.”

You read that right: Joe Biden probably doesn’t know it, but he and his fellow Democrats are coming for your private text messages, your one-to-one communications. And if you’ve got some “misinformation” in there — misinformation like, oh, COVID-19 came from a virology lab leak in Wuhan, China, or Hydroxychloroquine may be a safe and effective therapeutic for certain coronavirus patients — well, our always-accurate, always-trustworthy, never-agenda-drive government bureaucrats are going to fix it for you.

Never fear. Anthony “Two Masks Are Better Than One” Fauci is from the government and he’s here to help. “The big misinterpretation that Fox News or whomever else is saying is that they are essentially envisioning a bunch of federal workers knocking on your door, telling you you’ve got to do something that you don’t want to do,” he said in a recent interview. “That’s absolutely not the case. It’s trusted messengers who are part of the community doing that — not government officials.”

Whew. It’s only “trusted messengers.” For a second there, we thought the Biden administration was planning to go “community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood and ofttimes, door to door — literally knocking on doors” to make sure folks got the jab.

We’re glad Tony Fauci cleared that up.

Leftists used to be in favor of free speech before they were against it. Their favorite free speech cliché, in fact, goes back more than a century: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

It’s remarkable, really, this devolution of a political party that at one time was a champion of free speech and individual liberty. And it gets us to wondering: What’s next? What’s the next usurpation? What’s the next encroachment they’ll make upon our civil rights?

On Monday night, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson had this to say:

Historians will assess it. They will likely record the early days of COVID-19 as a turning point in our society — an unprecedented assault on our most basic civil liberties, that somehow very few people seemed to notice when it first started happening. The usual stooges and think tank libertarians assured us at the time none of it was a big deal. Soulless multinational media monopolies censoring essential medical information? No problem. That’s how the free market works. Build your own Google if you don’t like it. Start your own NIH. And anyway, in private you can still say what you want. You’re still free. It’s not like this is North Korea. So calm down, conspiracy nut.

We don’t feel like conspiracy nuts. We feel like folks who are having something taken away, slowly but steadily.

There was a time in this country when folks were free. When we had a right to be wrong. When we had a right to communicate ideas and information that weren’t necessarily pre-approved by our government.

There was a time.