*BADA-BING* The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals utterly smoked the Biden Administration’s Thought Police in a hearing yesterday over whether the injunction against government collusion to suppress conservative speech on social media should be lifted.

JustTheNews reports that:

“Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod declared in court that the Biden administration’s efforts to persuade social media companies to remove, throttle and suppress purported misinformation on COVID-19, Hunter Biden’s laptop and elections reminded her of a mafia movie.”

Government lawyers did everything they could to soft-pedal the meetings White House officials had with social media executives, claiming that the meetings and emails were “merely requests” in the public interest. The three-judge panel wasn’t buying it. At all. Judge Don Willett blasted the DOJ lawyers for making that excuse:

“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.“

Golly, where have we heard that before?

The court did not issue a ruling immediately — appeals courts rarely do — but as The Good Professor says, “Read the Whole Thing.”

Most litigators will tell you to never bet on a ruling just from the questions and statements of judges in a hearing, but having won and lost my share of these, when you see this much blood on the floor, you get a good sense of where things are going.

Should this case continue in the same direction, conservative and independent publishers, bloggers and pundits are going to have a field day bringing cases against social media companies for acting as government surrogates.