I've spent enough time on right-wing web sites to know that conservatives honestly and truly believe that they are the defenders of free speech, and that the "left" is an enemy of free speech. They aren't hypocrites, because that would imply that they are dishonest. They are in massive and deep denial.

According to conservatives, they are fighting against the elites and 'snowflakes' that are using 'cancel culture' to suppress free speech.
Yet right now a Republican state legislator in Texas has put together a list of 850 books he believed might make students feel uncomfortable — and then asked schools which of the titles are available to students.
In Florida, education officials have banned 54 math textbooks because the books taught “prohibited topics”.
These aren't grassroots movements. They are being funded by wealthy conservative elites. What is grassroots are the progressive groups that are fighting this censorship campaign.

This is just one of countless examples of reality being very different.
However, conservatives aren't focused on this censorship because they have absolutely no problem justifying banning books. In the very same breath they'll tell you, without a trace of irony, that they're "free speech absolutists".
Which brings us to billionaire Elon Musk buying Twitter and the liberal freak-out.

The hypocrisy of America’s self-appointed culture-protectors this week is breathtaking. They really seem not to realize that what they’ve been seeking for years isn’t an end to speech abuses, but a monopoly on them. They see Musk as a traitor to his class, threatening to upend what they see as a natural order that in recent years placed bluenose squads in deserved roles as vanguards and truth-arbiters. Whether or not Musk ever upends anything is a different question...
I spent a good part of the last four years warning that asking unaccountable billionaires to meddle more in speech would result in exactly such a table-turning episode, in which the political mainstream’s cocky censor squad would wake up one day to find the wrong tycoon in charge, at which point they would cry foul and howl suddenly about the evils of oligarchy. For failing to cheer their vision of enlightened censorship, colleagues denounced me as a reactionary pervert in the employ of (pick one) Trump/Assad/Putin. So it’s hard to do anything but chuckle at their anguish this week.

Matt Taibbi couldn't be more right, but conservatives couldn't be more wrong.
First of all, right-wingers see everyone to their left as "leftists", despite the obvious fact that to get to the left from the right you have to go through the center-right and the center. It's in those places that you will find those "leftists" that right-wingers hate.
What the Elitist Guardians Of The Culture want more than anything is to defend the status quo. If you know any actual, real leftist you would know that they are sickened by the status quo and are willing to do almost anything to destroy the status quo and the power of the ruling elites. People who defend the status quo are wealthy elites, who often wind up in the center-left of the culture and the center-right on economic issues.

Once again right-wingers have allied themselves with one of the most powerful elitist in the world - Musk. The same one who wrote: “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”
That's their hero. That's their defender of freedom.

You don’t get to be a billionaire, much less a billionaire with massively influential media ownership, unless you collaborate with existing power structures. Musk has certainly been collaborating with the oligarchic empire very nicely up until this point, and it’s a safe bet that his purchase would not be happening if the empire felt its narrative control machine was in any way threatened by it.

Believing Elon Musk is going to save Twitter is as naive as believing Joe Biden was going to save America. Arguing over which oligarchs should control the media is as silly and undignified as arguing over which oligarch-owned politicians should run the government.

Billionaires coming to the rescue only happens in movies and comic books. You’re as likely to be saved by Elon Musk as you are by Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark...How many times are people going to fall for this “a billionaire is about to stick it to the man and save us all” schtick?

I believe that where the rubber meets the road is when it comes to warmongering.
Many of these 'liberals' have indeed been slandering anyone on the right that has opposed America's imperialism abroad as being in league with Putin. That's ridiculous.
However, I'm old enough to remember 2002.

he Bush administration set the tone early after the September 11 attacks, equating dissent and criticism with supporting terrorism. It was, after all, led by the same man who had earlier responded to online mockery by declaring “there ought to be limits to freedom.”

Bush soon delivered the world something of an ultimatum: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” As his government rounded up more than 1,000 largely Middle Eastern immigrants and moved to use military tribunals to try foreign terrorist suspects, Attorney General John Ashcroft warned liberals not to “scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty,” for it would “only aid terrorists.” Press Secretary Ari Fleischer — now a Fox News talking head who can’t seem to decide whether or not he should stop pretending to oppose Trump — told Americans they “need to watch what they say, watch what they do.”

With those ominous words, Fleischer was responding to the first of many tiresome culture war scandals that helped define the Bush years, a quite literal cancel culture in which apoplectic conservatives, triggered by jokes or simply mild criticisms of their president, melted down.

When Democrat Tom Daschle said he was “saddened that this president failed so miserably at diplomacy,” a religious right group took out newspaper ads comparing Daschle to Saddam Hussein.
Does that sound vaguely familiar? If you're on the right you've almost certainly forgotten this. It probably doesn't ring any bells at all.
Do you remember when Fox anchor Brit Hume said that journalistic neutrality was no longer “an appropriate concept” in a “conflict between the United States and murdering barbarians.”?
So-called liberal MSNBC fired the host of their most popular show because he didn't endorse a Republican-led war, and was replaced by Michael Savage.

PHIL DONAHUE: At that time, half the political voice in this nation was silenced, really. And I believe most people at that time opposed this war. Most people did. What are we—why—how come over there? And yet, every metropolitan—every major metropolitan newspaper in this country supported the invasion of Iraq. Think about that for a minute. Every major metropolitan—this is what you can do with the politics of fear, that Bush took this whole nation and the whole media establishment by the ear and led it right into the sword. Amazing, in the land of free speech, free press.

Do you remember when liberal Hollywood booed Michael Moore at the Oscars for attacking Bush for “sending us to war for fictitious reasons.”?
Susan Sarandon, before she became the object of liberal hatred, was the focus of right-wing cancel culture. Being right not only didn't save you, it made it worse. No one on the right ever had to pay for being wrong on this war.

"We believe your very public criticism of President Bush at this important -- and sensitive -- time in our nation's history helps undermine the U.S. position, which ultimately could put our troops in even more danger. As an institution, we stand behind our President and our troops in this conflict."

Just two years later, when people began to realize just how spectacular of a failure this war was going to be, we had an election scandal. It wasn't a real election scandal, but the media treated it like it was.

But that won't silence the Swifties. Because their real beef with him is not about what he did in Vietnam. It's about what he did when he came home.

On April 22, 1971, Kerry went before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to indict the American war effort in Vietnam for horrendous war crimes. These were "not isolated incidents," he testified, "but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."
He offered no evidence.

The Kerry of 1971 was 100% correct, and the right-wing a-hole who wrote this had to be living in a rock to not be aware of the evidence of our war crimes in Vietnam. But it's worth quoting this article because he admits that Kerry's real crime was opposing a war based on lies and having the courage to speak out against it.

Ten years later that "liberal media" was beating the war drums again.

In total, 205 guests appeared on the programs studied to talk about US military options in Iraq and Syria, but, just 6 of those guests voiced any type of opposition to US military involvement.
On the major Sunday news shows, 89 guests were on to talk about war. Of those 89, only one, The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, could be considered an antiwar guest.

The anti-war left had been censored, attacked, slandered and sidelined, but most of all, canceled, just like the right-wing demanded.
Two years after that, CATO asked the question "The Demise of Anti‐​War Liberals?" They implied that the left never actually opposed war. They only opposed wars that Republicans started. A decade of right-wing and establishment efforts to crush anyone who actually opposes wars was forgotten. The ongoing blacklisting and censorship of any and all leftists that opposed wars never got noticed.

Finally, America's disastrous foreign policy of the last 20 years has gotten so extreme and egregious that people on the right have finally noticed. They are finally seeing the lies and waste of all these wars.
But because their memories are so short, they honestly think that they've discovered something that was hidden until recently. They look at the "liberal media" and correctly see warmongers, but mistakenly think that the "liberal media" is "the left", and not the long-time enemy of The Left that they've always been.
They see a couple conservatives getting banned on Twitter and think that this is somehow critical to the battle over free speech. While at the same time they show no interest in the financial war against left-wing media outlets that are critical of America's wars.