Elon Musk is always saying interesting things, but this we found to be especially so: “$44 billion was not the cost of Twitter. It was the cost of free speech.”

Whatever eccentricities and human frailties the man has, his commitment to the cause of free speech isn’t one of them. Let’s face it: It’s become increasingly apparent that Musk didn’t buy Twitter to expand his financial fortune. Nor did he buy it just to slap a fancy X on it. He bought it because he understood that free speech is fundamental to a free and prosperous society, and he saw it slipping away. And we can be increasingly thankful for Musk’s commitment to the marketplace of ideas as we get closer to the 2024 election because, if the events of 2020 taught us anything, it’s that election season is censorship season for Big Tech and Big Government.

Evidence of this reality — that the Left will soon begin to collude to suppress your speech — can be seen in a recent and ominous development: the suspension of Chaya Raichik’s Facebook page.

Raichik’s Facebook page is better known as “Libs of TikTok,” and she was notified Saturday that it had been suspended. Lucky for Raichik, though, she also has a “Libs of TikTok” X page. She used that X page to post a screenshot of the email she’d received from the Facebook censors: “The page Libs of Tik Tok has been suspended for going against our Community Standards. You cannot visit the Page and you won’t be able to add new people to work on the Page.”

Since its inception in November 2020, Raichik’s “Libs of TikTok” franchise has become hugely influential. As independent journalist Bari Weiss notes, it now has more than 1.4 million followers, and it was suspended six times in 2022 alone — typically for a week, and typically for a violation of Facebook’s dubious “hateful conduct” policy. Which is rich, because all Raichik tends to do is repost material from, yes, liberals on TikTok.

Presiding over this suspension is a monstrous entity we might call The Censorship Industrial Complex, which is shorthand for the aforementioned alliance between Big Tech and Big Government to censor speech that they or their Democrat Party brethren find inconvenient or objectionable. It’s an alliance that’s alive and well in certain states but is butting up against resistance in certain other states.

Indeed, we can readily identify these states as either censorship states or free-speech states — or, to keep it simple, as blue states and red states. Constitutional law professor and free-speech advocate Jonathan Turley did just that, in fact, in a recent column. He writes:

For years, we have discussed the alarming shift in the Democratic party on free speech with candidates running on pledges to censor opposing views and politicians supporting blacklisting and censorship on social media. Many citizens oppose such efforts to restrict their rights under the First Amendment, but are unaware of the work of their representatives to limit free speech. Now, a filing in the Supreme Court supporting censorship efforts by the Biden Administration has supplied a handy list of the anti-free speech states for citizens.

The court filing that Turley mentions was made by California Attorney General Rob Bonta. Simply put, it’s an amicus brief meant to persuade the Supreme Court to reverse a decision by the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Missouri v. Biden barring the federal government from colluding with social media platforms to censor speech — an activity in clear violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment.

Our Nate Jackson wrote about that momentous Fifth Circuit decision back in July — a 155-page throat punch of a decision authored by Judge Terry Doughty that fittingly came down on Independence Day. As Doughty wrote:

If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history. In their attempts to suppress alleged disinformation, the Federal Government, and particularly the Defendants named here, are alleged to have blatantly ignored the First Amendment’s right to free speech.

Think about that: “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” Now think about the efforts of California AG Bonta to overturn Doughty’s decision, and think about all the other speech-suppressing states that have signed on to his effort, which is euphemistically described as a fight against “harmful content” and “misleading information” by a noble partnership between the state and social media companies.

Here we need to stress that if you trust the state to partner with Big Tech to protect you from harmful speech, you’re either a sucker or a Democrat.

Thus signing on to Bonta’s brief and thereby joining California as censorship states are Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, and the District of Columbia.

If you look closely at the above-listed states, you might detect a pattern: Each of them is being governed by a Democrat.

Next time you think about red states and blue states, you might think about them in a new way: free-speech states and censorship states.