Once upon a time, during the reign of Old Twitter, if you were a Muslim head of state and you called for the destruction of the “malignant cancerous tumor” otherwise known as Israel, Jack Dorsey’s minions would’ve yawned in your general direction.

Heck, they wouldn’t even have called out the dimwitted redundancy of using both “malignant” and “cancerous” in your hate-filled characterization of the Jewish state.

Likewise, if you tweeted your belief that “Muslims have a right to be angry and to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past,” those pusillanimous paragons of leftist virtue would’ve simply rolled their eyes at your intemperate rhetoric.

But if you were the American president, the Leader of the Free World, and you used the term “great American Patriots” to describe the 75 million citizens who’d just voted for you in a hotly contested election — well, if you’d done that, you’d have gotten the proverbial death penalty.

Sure enough, Donald Trump did get the death penalty, while Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei did not. In the latest dump of Elon Musk’s Twitter Files, we learn that Trump was suspended from the platform on January 8, 2021, for the following tweet: “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”

Vijaya Gadde, then Twitter’s head of legal, policy, and trust, joined other rabble-rousers at the Big Tech giant to determine Trump’s proclamation was “glorification of violence” because, they argued, he had effectively dubbed the Capitol rioters “American Patriots.”

Talk about a bad-faith interpretation. How can the term “American Patriots” be made to refer to anything other than the number 75 million that preceded it?

How to account for the soft bigotry of low expectations that the pre-Musk Twitter censorship board ascribed to Khamenei after his anti-Israel screed? Here’s how a Twitter flack tried to justify its decision to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament: “We have an approach to world leaders that … direct interactions with fellow public figures, comments on political issues of the day, or foreign policy saber-rattling on military and economic issues are generally not in violation of our Twitter rules.”

If calling for the destruction of a sovereign nation or attempting to justify the murder of a well-defined people is mere “saber-rattling,” then merely uttering the words “American Patriots” must be the equivalent of sitting at a desk with a letter opener nearby.

Upon reviewing Twitter’s internal deliberations, it’s not surprising to learn that Trump had far more detractors within the company than he did defenders. But one such defender is certainly worth noting — not so for what she said the day before Trump’s ban but why she said it: “Maybe because I am from China, I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation.”

Indeed, who better to instruct a bunch of young, ignorant, uber-entitled American leftists than someone who’s seen and experienced the tyrannical terminus of leftism up close and personal?

That’s it in a nutshell: Old Twitter did its rotten best to “destroy the public conversation.” And we have Elon Musk to thank for exposing this speech-suppressing mindset.

Looking back, we here in our humble shop feel fortunate to have made it out alive. After all, the word “Patriot” is the essence of our name and our brand. Not that we’ve ever relied upon Twitter to get our message out, but we’ve maintained a modest presence on the platform for years, as has our publisher, Mark Alexander.

Still, when the word “Patriot” becomes an excuse for silencing one’s political opponents — to say nothing of a sitting American president — we as a nation have entered into very troubled waters.