It’s safe to assume that if Elon Musk had not bought Twitter (now X) in 2022 and made a commitment to protecting freedom of speech on that platform, President Donald Trump would not have won reelection in 2024. Overnight, Musk's $44 billion acquisition and transformation of the platform and its brand gave conservatives access to the public square once again. In so doing, he restored an influential platform that was able to expose the lies, corruption and hypocrisy of the left.
Right after Trump won in 2024, Fast Company quoted Wales-based “social media expert” Matt Navarra, who said, “Elon Musk’s X was the MAGA megaphone… The U.S. election exposed the Achilles heel of traditional media: that social media is the wildfire of influence shaping narratives faster than the old guard can fact-check to counter.”
Navarra’s claim was impossible to dispute. Prior to Musk’s takeover of X, the left systematically and duplicitously shut conservatives out of the public arena. More to the point, it's how the deep state was able to effectively silence conservatives before, during and after the rigged presidential election of 2020. And it’s how the deep state and its allies were able to remove a sitting president from public life during the last weeks of his first term. Remember this story from The Guardian from Oct. 14, 2020, prior to the election?
Facebook and Twitter took steps on Wednesday to limit the spread of a controversial New York Post article critical of Joe Biden, sparking outrage among conservatives and stoking debate over how social media platforms should tackle misinformation ahead of the US election.
In an unprecedented step against a major news publication, Twitter blocked users from posting links to the Post story or photos from the unconfirmed report. Users attempting to share the story were shown a notice saying: ‘We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful. Users clicking or retweeting a link already posted to Twitter are shown a warning the ‘link may be unsafe’.
Yes, the truth was unsafe, but for whom?
When the left deplatformed a sitting president
Then, of course, there was the deep state-engineered takedown of Trump in conjunction with the dubiously orchestrated riots of Jan. 6, 2021. Less than two days later, almost in unison, the entire digital ecosystem erased Trump from its collective platforms.
On January 8, the New York Times reported that Twitter “had permanently banned President Trump from its service ‘due to the risk of further incitement of violence,’ effectively cutting him off from his favorite megaphone for reaching the public and capping a series of actions by mainstream sites to limit his online reach."
Twitter said in a blog post that Mr. Trump’s personal @realDonaldTrump account, which has more than 88 million followers, would be shut down immediately. The company said two tweets that Mr. Trump had posted on Friday — one calling his supporters ‘patriots’ and another saying he would not go to the presidential inauguration on Jan. 20 — violated its rules against glorifying violence.
Trump’s response at the time was: “Twitter is not about FREE SPEECH... They are all about promoting a Radical Left platform where some of the most vicious people in the world are allowed to speak freely.”
He was right then, and we knew it then, and he’s been vindicated time and again since.
Just as dominoes are pre-arranged to fall in perfection, the left knocked Trump out of the public sphere with similar precision and synchronicity. Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Stripe, PayPal, Venmo, and even Shopify, for crying out loud, all took Trump down simultaneously, and so pervasively that reasonable people had to see how pre-planned it all had to be.
Add to this the left’s own betrayal of its constant retort when conservatives complained about the inherent bias of Twitter. “If you don’t like it, build your own,” they would say. Well, that’s exactly what conservatives did, but in January 2021, as Trump was being deplatformed everywhere else, conservatism’s increasingly popular answer to Twitter, Parler, was wiped off of both the Apple and Google app stores with the weakest of justifications. Then Amazon piled on.
In less than three days, social networking service Parler has gone from darling of the right wing to a has-been service that can no longer be accessed online. In response, the company is now suing its former Web host, Amazon, alleging the hosting giant intentionally colluded with rival social service Twitter to knock a competitor out of the market,” reported Ars Technica. “Amazon Web Services’ decision to cut Parler off ‘is apparently motivated by political animus,’ Parler writes in its suit (PDF). ‘It is also apparently designed to reduce competition in the microblogging services market to the benefit of Twitter.’
Keep in mind, as all of this was happening, these very same interests and platforms were shutting down any dissent on all things COVID-19, using the same playbook.
Some very sophisticated people on the left knew every conceivable chokepoint that could deny conservatives access to the public arena, and with absolute perfection, they used them to cut conservatives off from public discourse. Conservatives who complained about any of this were dismissed as conspiracy theorists. But as John Adams once said, “Facts are stubborn things.”
Musk buys Twitter
While all of this would eventually have come to light, it may not have been in our lifetimes. It took Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, giving him behind-the-scenes access to the records, to blow the lid off of all of this. The first story that came out of all of this was known as “The Twitter Files.”
When Musk realized what he had, he provided access to independent journalists and allowed them to freely report on what they saw. One of those journalists was Matt Taibbi, who testified before Congress on March 9, 2023, where he said, “The original promise of the Internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally. A free internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information flow, its very existence a threat to anti-democratic forms of government everywhere.”
He then added, “What we found in the Files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role."
We saw the first hints in communications between Twitter executives about tweets before the 2020 election, where we read things like:
‘Hi team, can we get your opinion on this? This was flagged by DHS’
Or: ‘Please see attached report from the FBI for potential misinformation.’
This would be attached to excel spreadsheet with a long list of names, whose accounts were often suspended shortly after.
Later in 2023, the left’s censorship machine was at the center of Missouri v. Biden, a case that revealed how extensively the Biden administration was working to coerce Big Tech into censoring and deplatforming its enemies. While SCOTUS dismissed the case in 2024 for lack of standing, it did result in an agreement between the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) under President Trump and the other parties in the case, entering into a consent decree that permanently enjoined federal agencies from coercing social media platforms.
At the center of that case, as in the case of the Twitter Files, numerous revelations exposed the Biden administration's efforts to systematically censor and deplatform conservatives by coercing and directing Big Tech.
The 2024 X Platform roadmap
It’s too easy to forget all of this, and perhaps to take it all for granted. But once Musk bought Twitter and rebranded it to X, branding the platform as the place for free speech, everything changed. It wasn’t a change in the White House or in Congress or in the Senate. It wasn’t legislation, or even a court case. It was the world's richest man reaching into his pocket to buy just one social media platform, and dedicating it to free speech in ways that no other social media platform would dare to do at the time.
On Nov. 6, 2024, in a column for the Washington Examiner, Gabe Kaminsky contended that Musk’s ownership of X “was a bulwark this election against legacy media outlets and cable news channels that conservatives have long said do not represent most of the country.”
“Since his takeover, the platform has elevated Trump-allied influencers and seemingly provided a level of incalculable, free advertising for Republicans,” Kaminsky said.
“‘I think it’s a massive vindication for conservatives who are worried that George Soros and Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer can buy elections for the Democrats,’” Kaminsky quoted Ludwig, the director of policy research for the conservative Restoration of America advocacy group.
Ludwig reminded Kaminsky and Republicans that “Musk’s influence in 2024” shows that money is not everything, and that wealthy Republicans like Musk “are in a position not only to support candidates financially, but also work in strategic and creative ways to motivate voters.”
In 2026, Musk’s America PAC is playing an important role in providing much-needed financial support to key candidates. But Republicans’ not-so-secret weapon just may be Musk's X platform, if they decide to use it for maximum effect.
How to leverage the X platform right now
With one month to go before election day, and with early voting about to commence in many places, now is the time to break the glass, so to speak, and tap the power of the platform that changed the course of history in 2024. Because it’s the free speech platform, and because Democrats have a lot to hide, Republicans can and should be doing far more than posting about their campaigns, or whining about double standards and Democrat hypocrisy on X.
No one is better at the useless Republican X post than Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).
Remember when Democrats used airports, taxpayer-funded hotels, and even community recreation centers to house all the illegal aliens they brought into the country? Real America does.
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) September 25, 2026
His X posts are usually vanilla, telling you something you already know and usually agree with, but they do absolutely nothing to motivate the public or force accountability on corrupt leftists.
Someone who is much better at using the X platform to expose with left, to destroy Democrats on issues that matter, and to include an election-day call to action is Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Tex.).
Jon Ossoff fought for a government program that forgives ag loans - but it explicitly excludes white farmers. Flagrantly racist, anti-white discrimination is reprehensible. Ossoff should be nowhere near the Senate. Vote @MikeCollinsGA!
— Brandon Gill (@realBrandonGill) October 2, 2026
More of this, please. Republicans need to use X to expose Democrat corruption, double-standards, lies, fraud and abuse. They need to flood X with content no other platform or legacy media outlet have the guts or ideology to feature. They need to do it so strategically and so steadily that Democrat candidates are forced to respond.
One X account that does this pretty well, and is a good follow, is @DSA_Watch.
Detroit News: “[Abdul El-Sayed] has deleted social media posts that reportedly called into question his attitude about America in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.” https://t.co/sjICyl8wz1
— DSA Watch (@DSA_Watch) October 4, 2026
But this sort of thing shouldn’t be limited to accounts such as these. Republican campaigns and organizations have the capabilities and the money to put Democrats on the defensive through X. Now is the time for them to do it.
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