Oh, for heaven's sake. Bad journalism, sure. Sneaky insertion of bias, sure. But "tyranny"? "Power to chill all speech"? Come on. You've got some decent points in your post; why ruin them with excess hyperbole?
The First Amendment guarantees free speech not to protect people's right to say, "Gee, isn't it a nice day."
The Left's anti-First Amendment crusade has already driven Christmas manger scenes from our public places, and religious expression of any kind from our schools. The schools are force-feeding the radical homosexual agenda to children — even those whose parents' religious teachings run counter to that agenda. Our rights to private association have been and continue to be under assault (as in the Boy Scouts case and now the Augusta National case). "Hate crime" legislation seeks to criminalize thought. There are so many examples of the Left's assault on the First Amendment, that it would take a very long time to list them all. Yet, as we've seen many times and most prominently with Bill Clinton, members of the Left are virtually immune from the kind of media and Leftist group-driven approbation directed at the rest of us. It's ironic that the Left has learned to use public shame as a weapon to promote and advance many things that once were considered shameful.
If all of this is not the very definition of tyranny, I don't know what is.