The intensity of conservatives’ obsession with being ‘canceled’ continues to surprise me. The latest news out of Florida provides a fresh example.

Florida is on track to be the first state in the nation to punish social media companies that ban politicians like former President Donald Trump under a bill approved Thursday by the state’s Republican-led Legislature.

I don’t dispute that social media present some interesting legal and ethical questions related to political speech. I’m not going to attempt to tackle all those questions here. I’m more interested in what appears to be a full-blown panic about conservative speech being silenced or judged too toxic for public consumption.

It’s not just politicians who have their accounts canceled. And it’s not just about being denied a platform to share your views. People routinely lose their jobs, including CEO’s, for saying conservative things. Mind you, I’m not talking about opposition to abortion or support for lower taxes and regulation. It’s usually some kind of intolerant or hateful speech.

Politicians are more likely to get banned for sharing obvious and willfully malicious disinformation that pertains either to public health or the integrity of our elections. Liberal politicians aren’t immune to these repercussions, but they tend not to commit this type of offense.

Likewise, liberal citizens are less prone to saying hateful things. But that’s just a matter of percentages. What’s weird is how conservatives consider these guardrails on acceptable social media speech to be targeted at them alone, when they really apply to everyone.

I’ll allow that majority groups get less protection, and that men are less protected than women. You can get away with saying things about straight white men that would get you banned if you said them about gays or blacks or Latinos. Charges of anti-Semitism come quicker and are treated more seriously than charges of anti-Christian speech. This is partly about the majority’s inherent power to oppress, so it’s a bit less of a double standard than it might appear, but I understand why it irks conservatives.

One thing that’s obvious though is that there’s no movement on the left to protect those who’ve suffered consequences for saying hateful things about heterosexuals, white men or Christians. This isn’t because such instances are comparatively rare, but because being a dick isn’t a core value of the left that demands protection.

Again, I’m not trying to arbitrate the limits of free speech or discuss what lines social media companies can draw. If you want to argue that speech should be tolerated on these platforms regardless of its content, you can have that argument elsewhere.

I’m just nothing the difference in how this debate is treated by the two sides. Conservatives see deplatforming as a threat to their very existence, whereas liberals view it much more on a case by case basis.

In fact, of Republican politicians weren’t constantly trying to out-dick each other in their efforts to appeal to their party base, they wouldn’t see the need to create laws that protect their right to be the biggest possible dicks.