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Interesting question. When I first go involved in left-wing politics in the early 1970s the left – with the admittedly important exception of the communists – generally championed free speech and figured prominently in campaigns against censorship.

A seminal event in the emergence of 1960s radicalism, in the US anyway, was the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. How different today, when Berkeley is one of the worst offenders when it comes to suppressing non-PC voices – recall the violent riot a couple of years ago when Milo Yiannopoulos was due to speak on campus. With the benefit of hindsight, I have a less favourable view of the FSM: I suspect the campaigners were fighting for their right to speak and organize freely, their ideological opponents not so much.

The change recently is the emergence of an ideological rationale for speech suppression – the rejection of the idea that argument and debate can counter error and promote truth; that some kinds of speech can be inherently ‘violent’ justifying counter-violence, and so on.

Herbert Marcuse, one of the key figures in the later Frankfurt School, has a lot to answer for. His awful 1965 essay Repressive Tolerance was highly influential in radical circles https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repressive-tolerance-fulltext.html

Marcuse looked forward to a future in which ‘liberating’ rather than ‘repressive’ tolerance would prevail, the meaning of the former which he clarified thus:

‘Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.’

Who would get to distinguish ‘liberating’ tolerance from the repressive variety in Marcuse’s nirvana? Why, appropriately trained, or rather indoctrinated, academics of course. This would naturally require some changes to what goes on in the educational sphere:

‘… the restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of discourse and behaviour.’