Federal officials love censoring people. To be fair, every government does and has since man has walked the Earth.

That’s why the Founders wrote the First Amendment, and it is no accident that it came first in the Bill of Rights, followed closely by the right to keep and bear arms. There is no freedom at all if there is no freedom to think and speak as one will.

Only July 4th–obviously not a date chosen by accident–District Court Judge Terry Doughty slapped a restraining order on the government prohibiting its collusion with social media companies to censor Americans’ speech. The injunction stemmed from a lawsuit by Missouri and Louisiana demanding that the federal government stop pressuring social media companies to shut Americans up on issues.

The Biden Administration is deeply upset that they are losing one of the key tools they have to impose a false consensus. They already functionally control most of the MSM and social media is one of the few places that alternative viewpoints can be propagated. With the 2024 election right around the corner, the government is concerned that not everybody will be forced to hail Joe Biden as a loving father and savior of American democracy.

Having appealed the injunction to the Fifth Circuit, the Justice Department’s Civil Division attorney Daniel Tenny faced a hostile audience. The panel of judges appeared appropriately skeptical of Tenny’s contention that the case was meritless, moot, and brought by ineligible plaintiffs. Worse for him, Tenny got what amounts to a tongue-lashing from the panel.

'Strong-arming:' Appeals court judges compare Biden social media pressure to mafia | Just The News https://t.co/H1c3ot6pyM

— John Solomon (@jsolomonReports) August 11, 2023

How bad was the tongue-lashing? A judge compared the government’s actions to a mafia protection racket, with unsubtle threats of harm to the companies should they fail to comply with the demands of government officials.

Federal officials appeared to practice “fairly unsubtle strong-arming” and make “not-so-veiled threats” in the vein of “this is a really nice social media platform you’ve got there, would be a shame if something happened to it,” Willett said.

Tenny, upon hearing what the judges appeared to be interpreting as coercive pressure, tried to soft pedal the severity of that pressure. “The government is generically going to be angry” when companies resist taking action, but the communications show officials and companies alternating between “friendly” and “testy” conversations, not specific orders to comply “or else.”

Judge Elrod didn’t seem particularly convinced, telling Tenny that “Or else” isn’t required when the government and companies have a “very close working relationship” that resembles a supervisor addressing a subordinate. The “irate messages” actually show high-ranking officials badgering counterparts about why they hadn’t taken action against specific accounts as requested, Judge Elrod said: “It’s like ‘jump and how high.'”

One of the keys to the strength of the case against the government is that there is a treasure trove of actual communications in a paper trail, making clear that there weren’t abstract discussions about what is true or false, what should be amplified or not, or anything high level like that.

Rather the government demanded specific claims, specific accounts, and even specific true statements be de-amplified or outright banned in order to further their narrative. Democratic governance runs on debate, and that was exactly what the government did not want.

The lack of ambiguity is powerful, proving that the government’s claim that they had a public interest in ensuring that citizens were given only the best information during a crisis was false. While even that government interest seems weak sauce compared to the First Amendment, it is also demonstrably not what the government was interested in.

They simply wanted a particular narrative put forward as a consensus position, and lashed out at any dissent. Threatening a company if they didn’t shut somebody up is hardly the act of a purely public-spirited civil servant.

Attorney John Sauer, representing the State of Louisiana, asked the judges what they would think of a senior White House staffer contacting Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other booksellers to participate in a “book-burning program” focused on authors who criticize the administration, with the companies only giving in after months of escalating White House rhetoric.

That’s exactly what the White House did to compel platforms to remove and throttle the “most persuasive speakers” critical of its policies, such as former New York Times drug industry reporter Alex Berenson and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Sauer said.

It is famously true that reading the tea leaves is an often unsuccessful strategy for predicting the outcome of judicial decisions. Judges can ask hostile questions to probe the strength of an argument rather than to signal their disagreement with it.

On the other hand, when a judge compares you to a mafioso it doesn’t bode well for your case.

The evidence that the feds were directly threatening the companies with consequences for failure to comply is indisputable. Again and again, the messaging out of Washington was clear: antitrust or regulatory action was on the table for these companies. The “comply or else” message was crystal clear. Even were it not the actions would be illegal, but with so much evidence before the court that threats were used to enforce compliance there isn’t a lot of wiggle room that comes with debating abstractions.

There is no immunity for the government simply because they used private companies to do their bidding. There is both established precedent for this and a prima facia case to be made that being one step removed from an action doesn’t immunize the government from responsibility.

Should the states win their case it will be a victory for free speech, although it likely will be somewhat hollow. A lot of damage has been done already, and the result of this could simply be that the paper trails rather than the illegal actions will disappear. There are already whistleblowers coming forward with allegations that the FBI is ignoring the injunction.

Still, a victory would be progress, and there has been precious little progress in the fight for freedom lately.