When free speech champion Elon Musk proposed to buy and then bought Twitter last year, critics reacted with equal parts of fear and revulsion. After all, he was threatening the Left’s media monopoly.

Musk himself had second thoughts, though, when he discovered how much spam was in the system, but he eventually agreed to make the deal to avoid a costly and lengthy court battle — a battle that he’d likely have lost.

It’s good for all of us that he followed through, even if it wasn’t good financially for Musk: The company is now valued at about half of the $44 billion he paid for it.

As soon as the deal was done, the man who calls himself a free speech absolutist didn’t waste any time. Immediately, Musk “began cleaning house, with at least four top Twitter executives — including the chief executive and chief financial officer — getting fired on Thursday,” reported The New York Times on October 27. “Mr. Musk had arrived at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters on Wednesday and met with engineers and ad executives.”

That was only the beginning of Musk’s effort to rebuild a platform that had become a weapon of the Left — a weapon to control the national discourse and create a false reality. No wonder Musk’s purchase struck fear in the hearts and minds of technocrats and those within the Democrat Party who’d come to rely on it as a propaganda machine. They tried to convince Americans that Musk’s brand of Twitter would be a threat to democracy and free speech, all while doing everything they could to undermine both.

We should have known that the Left’s temper tantrum was based on fear of being exposed. But the fact that they were pushing Democrat talking points while silencing conservatives wasn’t the biggest worry they had. In a recent interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Musk revealed something even darker and more sinister — something we were often told was nothing more than an Alex Jones conspiracy theory. The government had access not only to every user’s public Twitter posts but also to their private direct messages. Think about that.

“Twitter is both a social media company and a crime scene,” said Musk himself back in December. And how right he was.

Fox News reports, “In what has been described as one of the most 'jaw-dropping’ moments of the two-part conversation, Musk accused his predecessors at Twitter of allowing U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies to read users’ direct messages on the platform, calling it among the most ‘absurd’ discoveries he made since purchasing the company for $44 billion.”

This collusion between Big Tech and Big Government is indeed Orwellian. But should it surprise us? As our own Nate Jackson wrote last December: “Democrats have deployed their own agents at the FBI, Twitter, Facebook, and the Leftmedia to spread misinformation and disinformation, to suppress true information, and to win elections by any means necessary. The last two presidential elections (and arguably two midterms) have been corrupted by this cadre of nefarious players.”

Specifically, Twitter worked hand in hand with the government to influence the 2020 presidential election and pull the curtain over the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. As the New York Post writes: “Musk also sought to expose the company’s previous management for its ties to government agencies, which demanded that certain content be flagged and even banned. Several journalists said to have been sympathetic to Musk released a series of internal documents known as the ‘Twitter Files,’ which revealed the extent to which the social media site’s prior regime suppressed the spread of content such as The Post’s reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop.”

At least one Democrat is so outraged by this truth-telling that she’s threatening Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi with jail time. Stacey Plaskett, a Democrat representing the Virgin Islands, sent a letter to Taibbi claiming he gave misleading information in recent testimony before Congress.

And let’s not forget that Joe Biden’s IRS sent agents to Taibbi’s home while he was exposing the pre-Musk Twitter. Or was it mere coincidence that these agents showed up on his doorstep on the very morning of his congressional testimony?

Fortunately, Musk says he’s working on adding a feature to Twitter that would encrypt a user’s direct messages and stave off government surveillance of private conversations. That’s a good start, but it’s only Twitter. What about the rest of Big Tech?

There’s no doubt that Elon Musk, owner of SpaceX and Tesla, loves the attention he’s getting as the head of Twitter. And some of his ideas are a bit unusual. Yet he’s performed a valuable service to the American people by exposing our government’s insidious actions and throwing a lifeline to those of us who still believe in free speech.

As of early 2017, the slogan of The Washington Post is now “Democracy dies in darkness.” That’s what Democrats have been doing all along: keeping us in the dark, killing “democracy,” and hoping no one would notice. Thanks to Musk, the truth is finally seeing the light of day again.