Twitter announced on Monday of last week that it had accepted Elon Musk’s offer to buy the company for $54.20 per share, or $44B in total value. Because this was more than a fifty percent premium over the actual share price listed on the New York Stock Exchange, the Twitter board of directors ultimately had little choice but to accept the offer.

You see, board members have what the lawyers term a “fiduciary duty” to act in the best interests of their shareholders, so the alternative to accepting Musk’s deal was to face a horde of lawsuits from unhappy Twitter shareholders demanding to know why the board of directors was not acting in their best interests. That would have been a very good question, indeed, so the board ultimately agreed to sell the company, but not before it rejected Musk’s first offer, even though it was a good one, and then resorted to an anti-takeover practice called a “poison pill.”

And the company needed selling, because the board of directors as well as corporate management, not to mention the super-woke employees, were so heavily invested in far-left politics that apparently there was resistance to selling the company to Musk at any price. It was widely known that Twitter, like most other social media companies, had long favored the left in our national political dialogue- sanctioning, suspending, and even banning far more rightward leaning tweeters than leftward ones. Its two most notorious actions were the banning of Donald Trump, a sitting president, and the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, calling it Russian disinformation (which it most assuredly was not) in the immediate lead-up to the 2020 presidential election.

When the directors and the senior officers of a company reach the point where they are willing to betray the users of the service and even the owners (the shareholders) of the company, for their far left political ideology, it is surely time to get rid of the lot of them and move on. That is exactly what will likely happen as directors step down or reach the end of their terms, and corporate officers and employees who cannot accommodate themselves to the new owner’s policies quit or are invited to leave (which sounds nicer than being ‘terminated’).

So where does that leave Twitter and the world? There are strong clues, but nothing more:

Declaring that he wanted to make Twitter “better than ever,” Musk said in a statement, “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.” He had earlier in the month stated publicly that “Having tweets be mysteriously promoted and demoted, with no insight into what’s going on; having a black box algorithm promote some things and not other things, I think this can be quite dangerous.” Well said, Elon!

Let me be clear: We conservatives are not seeking favors from Twitter. This we have never done; rather, we simply seek a level playing field in our national discourse, which after all is the basic effect of having freedom of speech in the first place. That will be sufficient for our purposes, which is to win the political, economic, and cultural wars in which we are now engaged with the American left. Once we have that level playing field, the superiority of our ideals and the practicality of our ideas will carry us through to victory and thereby save the America we know and love.

Good luck with your new company, Elon, and never forget the reasons you gave us for buying it!

LOUIS GURVICH, Chairman
Republican Party of Louisiana