Elon Musk has now settled in as the new owner of Twitter and his rule has delivered a renewed respect for free speech. While there have been some bumps in the road, the differences between what you can say now and what would get you banned under the old regime are night and day.

It seems almost unbelievable to reflect back on, but there was a time when saying a man can’t become a woman would earn you an account suspension and demand, in the best case, that you delete the tweet in question. And who could forget the bans that resulted from making truthful statements about COVID-19 vaccine efficacy and mask-wearing?

But while such an environment of openness and respect for various viewpoints doesn’t offend normal people, it sends the far-left into an apoplectic rage. They lost one of their most valued ways to influence political opinion via underhanded censorship and algorithmic promotion, and their response has been to organize an advertiser boycott of Twitter in order to punish Elon Musk for his radical embrace of free speech.

Until this point, though, it’s been a bit of a mystery who is behind the campaign. Well, now we know. According to the Free Beacon, it is none other than notorious left-wing bagman Pierre Omidyar.

The left-wing billionaire and media donor Pierre Omidyar is behind the dark-money group that has kept its donors secret for nearly a year and is leading a corporate boycott campaign against Twitter owner Elon Musk.

Omidyar, the eBay founder and financial backer of the Intercept and ProPublica, donated $509,500 to Accountable Tech in 2021 and 2022, according to a recently updated list of grants disclosed by Omidyar’s foundation. Omidyar also gave $2 million to at least six other organizations that targeted Musk, criticizing him in letters and op-eds as “uniquely ill-suited for the job of running a social media platform” and warning that he would turn Twitter into a “free-for-all of hate and harassment.”

The only thing that would have been less shocking about this is if it had turned out to be George Soros. Omidyar is a particularly insidious character, long known for pushing dark money schemes to punish Americans for enjoying basic freedoms. You may remember that he’s the billionaire who helped bankroll The Bulwark, an off-shoot of the now-defunct The Weekly Standard that has devolved into an outright Democrat mouthpiece (and one particularly obsessed with attacking Ron DeSantis lately).

I can’t help but notice the language Omidyar uses in his rebukes of Musk, and it’s disturbing. When did the American public outsource its decision-making on who is “uniquely ill-suited” to running a social media company to a left-wing billionaire? Last I checked, Musk bought the company fair and square, and it’s really tyrannical to try to destroy it through underhanded advertiser boycotts cooked up in some shadowy backroom.

Unfortunately, this is what anyone who crosses far-left orthodoxy has to deal with these days. Musk isn’t a conservative. He’s quite liberal in some ways. But even he is marked for destruction because he would dare treat conservatives like human beings whose opinions should be allowed into the public square. It’s a sad scene.