If you don’t like Elon Musk buying Twitter, either have a large dump in your pants, you’re the unwitting puppet of leftist censorship, or you work for a mainstream media company whose business model now relies on the suppression of free speech on social media along party lines.

Twitter is nothing short of the international discourse between everyone about everything, and its fate is intrinsically linked to ours.

Should we fail to accomplish a symmetry between our constitution and Twitter, the platform’s detriment to our collective-sensemaking will be the undoing of our democracy. Twitter has become our country’s town square and must guarantee us the speech rights that allow it to be a thriving marketplace of ideas.

Critics aren’t comfortable with the idea of an eccentric billionaire having sole possession of a major media platform. They felt better about Twitter when it was in the hands of shareholders Blackrock, Vanguard and the prince of Saudi Arabia.

Call me crazy but I’d rather have the billionaire that revolutionized the electric car market and invented reusable rockets run Twitter than the Saudi Prince billionaire presiding over a country that beheads journalists.

The same critics protesting Musk’s right to purchase Twitter were silent when Amazon CEO and real-life Lex Luthor, Jeff Bezos, bought The Washington Post. You’ll be shocked to learn The Post has been critical of Musk’s purchase.

Twitter’s censorship has distorted the way we see important issues. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, authorities arrived at a series of consensuses without evidence: the virus didn’t come from a lab, we don’t need masks, there aren’t any treatment options.

All three of those assertions were wrong, but to argue that at the time made yourself fair game for getting suspended from Twitter for violating its “Covid-19 misinformation policy.”

That policy just says if you disagree with anything the CDC or WHO says, you’re spreading misinformation. It was all too easy for Twitter to ban dissidents without justification and shout “trust the science!”

Nevermind the fact that the science absolutely was not settled. Even then, the way to settle the matter was to logically hash out all arguments, which Twitter prevented by suppressing half the discussion.

Should anyone care if Twitter suspends some asshole holding a fish in his profile picture for saying Covid came from a lab? Probably not.

Should anyone care if Twitter suspends the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology without justification for being critical of the vaccine’s efficacy? Absolutely.

Dr. Robert Malone invented the technology Pfizer and Moderna used to create their vaccines and Twitter suspended him for his opinion, as if Twitter is in a better position to judge what’s true about the vaccine than the man who invented it.

Examples of Twitter’s censorship goes beyond Covid.

They suppressed the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election. If the son of a presidential candidate was emailing the Chinese Communist Party hinting that his father’s influence may be for sale, that’s something the American people deserve to know about before they get to the ballot box.

I don’t know if Musk is the savior of digital discourse, but he’s better than the present situation. It’s disappointing that things had to get this bad for an intervention. It’s even more disappointing that the intervention came in the form of a billionaire taking on free speech protection as his pet project.

In a better world, the public would have fought back, our government would have kept big tech from encroaching upon our constitutional rights.

Instead, all our institutions failed to protect us; they sat on their hands and watched our country slip into insanity until the personal interest of the world’s richest man aligned with the common good.

Being the damsel in distress isn’t a good way to solve our problems. We can’t sit idly by as the oceans rise and forests burn until a multi-billionaire wakes up and decides he feels like stopping climate change that day.

The cause Musk claims to champion is a valiant one, but the underlying ethos behind his support is the same as that of any powerful person. People in power will work to consolidate that power.

While the world’s ruling class elite buy up all the resources and accrue influence, we’ll continue to drunkenly stumble about mumbling the ineptitudes of our institutions, ever wondering if there’s a connection between the two.