Elon Musk must really love free speech. And the Democrats must really hate him for it. Otherwise, there’s no logical explanation for the way they’re targeting him.

Last week, Joe Biden’s Federal Communications Commission revoked an $886 million subsidy to Musk’s satellite-based SpaceX Starlink Internet service. The subsidy was meant to bring high-speed broadband to rural areas, where the cost of running cable is prohibitive. The decision can only be seen as vindictive, since it wasn’t accompanied by a granting of the subsidy to a better, more suitable provider.

Thus, rural Americans are left hanging. No broadband for you, rubes.

As the New York Post reports, “The five-member FCC, led by Democrat-appointed chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, affirmed that decision on Tuesday, finding that Starlink had ‘failed to demonstrate that it could deliver the promised service.’”

We know what you’re thinking: $886 million is chump change to Musk. And it is. But a billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon we’re talking about real money. And besides, it’s the principle of the thing.

How so? Taxpayer money for broadband Internet is not exactly a constitutional expenditure, but let’s take a step back and remember how naked was the directive from Joe Biden to his regulatory henchmen around a year ago, when it became clear that Musk intended to turn Twitter (now X) into the free-speech menace that the Left had feared. When asked at a rare presser what was likely a prepared question about Musk’s international business relationships, Biden responded, “I think that Elon Musk’s cooperation and/or technical relationships with other countries is worthy of being looked at.” When another reporter asked how that might be done, Biden answered, “There’s a lot of ways.”

Sure enough, there are a lot of ways for a banana-republican administration like this one to debilitate its enemies. In a scathing indictment of his agency’s hyper-partisan targeting, Republican FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr took to Musk’s X platform and let ‘er rip: “Last year, after Elon Musk acquired Twitter, President Biden gave federal agencies the green light to go after him. And they have. Today, the FCC adds itself to the growing list of federal agencies engaging in the regulatory harassment of Elon Musk. I dissent.”

About those agencies that have their sights set on Musk, Carr names some names: “The DOJ, FAA, FTC, NLRB, SDNY, & FWS have all taken action. The FCC now joins them.”

As for Chairwoman Rosenworcel’s claim that Starlink “failed to demonstrate that it could deliver the promised service,” it was pure rubbish. What the FCC did was demand that Starlink prove that its capabilities would be sufficient not just now but a decade from now. As Carr noted, “The FCC did not require — and has never required — any other award winner to show that it met its service obligation years ahead of time.”

Christopher Cardaci, head of legal at SpaceX, wrote in a letter to the FCC, “Starlink is arguably the only viable option to immediately connect many of the Americans who live and work in the rural and remote areas of the country where high-speed, low-latency internet has been unreliable, unaffordable, or completely unavailable, the very people RDOF was supposed to connect.”

Musk isn’t a natural Republican, not by any stretch. He’s more a classical liberal who’s been chased out of the Democrat Party. If a specific date can be ascribed to this break, we’d say it’s May 18, 2022. On that date, Musk tweeted this: “In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party. But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican. Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold.”

Talk about your crystal-ball predictions.

For a presidential administration to target a private citizen and an individual businessman is vile enough all by itself. But what the Biden administration gets here is a twofer: Not only are they able to punish Musk for his free-speech advocacy and his political views, they can also punish a cohort of voters who are overwhelmingly conservative: rural Americans. By denying them the same quality of Internet service the rest of us enjoy, the Biden administration is sentencing our rural brothers and sisters to second-class citizenship.

This is scummy, gangsterish stuff.