With every passing day, Elon Musk gives leftists another reason to loathe him.

Whether he’s rattling their playpen at Twitter or -- gasp -- announcing that Democratic insanity has driven him to voting Republican, the mega-billionaire has spent most of 2022 attracting conservative support and drawing increasingly strident attacks from liberals.

And he’s responding by hitting liberals where they live, with words that put him into full hero-mode for Americans who care about their country.

In the most recent ambush against the CEO of electric car manufacturer Tesla, as well as the pioneering aerospace company SpaceX, a “friend” of a former SpaceX employee went public with a sexual harassment allegation against Musk stemming from an alleged incident aboard a company plane in 2016.

Musk not only answered the charge aggressively -- challenging the accuser to back up the story with descriptive details not available to the public -- he treated the whole affair with the kind of contemptuous humor that makes a mockery of the accusers.

Finally, we get to use Elongate as scandal name. It’s kinda perfect. 🤣 https://t.co/qSNH7lsn72

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 20, 2022

But on a more dramatic note, Musk published a Twitter post late Thursday that opened by tearing away the curtain that covers up so many ad hominem leftist attacks in a sham of righteous indignation and ended with 16-words that should warm the heart of any conservative who’s lived through the past few years of increasingly totalitarian control by the barons of social media.

“The attacks against me should be viewed through a political lens – this is their standard (despicable) playbook,” Musk wrote, “but nothing will deter me from fighting for a good future and your right to free speech”

The attacks against me should be viewed through a political lens – this is their standard (despicable) playbook – but nothing will deter me from fighting for a good future and your right to free speech

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 20, 2022

If it had been coming from a career politician on the right, a Ted Cruz, say, or Mitch McConnell, the first part would have felt pro forma, as reflexive and questionably credible as an office figure enmeshed in a scandal suddenly deciding to spend more time with the family.

But Musk is different. Until about five minutes ago, he was a hero of the left, mouthing all the correct pieties about “climate change” and making electric vehicles so trendy that cynically leftist celebrities like Stephen Colbert bragged about having them.

He even did a cameo on the “The Big Bang Theory,” the long-running CBS hit sitcom with a penchant for left-wing politics.

When a former hero of the left starts complaining that attacks need to be viewed through a “political lens,” any intellectually honest person has to take notice.

Liberals have been using personal attacks for political purposes for decades; it’s a mainstay of their promotion strategies. And while it might have reached a nadir of character assassination during the confirmation hearings for now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh (a national disgrace that will remain a blot on the current era of the Democratic Party for as long as there’s a United States), it hasn’t disappeared.

The only way to fight it is to meet it head on. Kavanaugh did, when he finally could do so, in an epic moment that became a turning point in the country's history. Musk is it doing now.

Truth is the best defense against a false allegation -- and when truth is delivered quickly and forcefully, it’s at its most potent.

But more importantly, the second half of Musk’s tweets showed just why liberals are now so obsessed with smearing him.

The statement is an unabashed endorsement of free speech -- the God-given right that the Founders thought was so important, they enshrined it in the very First Amendment to the Constitution that changed the world.

Conservatives believe that, too. Liberals used to believe it until it got politically convenient not to. (Liberal “principles” are malleable things.)

There was a time not so long ago in American politics where Musk’s words would have been almost unremarkable, when every decent American understood that “free speech” is part of the national DNA.

[firefly_poll]

But thanks to the stridently leftward drift of the Democratic Party in recent years, along with the embarrassing, obscene enabling behavior of the mainstream media that has made it possible, what Musk is saying comes across as a bracing blast of bravery amid the current bedlam.

Standing up for free speech shouldn’t make for a hero in the country created by giants like James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. It should be taken as a matter of course.

But if there’s a more telling sign of how far the traitorous insanity of the American left has gone, it would be tough to find.

And if liberals loath Musk more with every passing day, it’s all too easy to see why.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.