No. 15-3047 17 earlier? The internal email exchanges of both Visa and MasterCard support our doubts on this point; recall for example the use of the term “blackmail” in the exchange between Visa employees. Unwittingly the judge was suggesting a formula for permitting unauthorized, unregulated, foolproof, lawless government coercion. The formula consists of coupling threats with denunciations of the activity that the official wants stamped out, for the target of the denunciation will be reluctant to acknowledge that he is submitting to threats but will instead ascribe his abandonment of the activity to his having discovered that it offends his moral principles. The judge was giving official coercion a free pass because it came clothed in what in the absence of any threatening language would have been a permissible attempt at mere persuasion. See, e.g., Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, supra, 372 U.S. at 66– 67; American Civil Liberties Union v. City of Pittsburgh, 586 F. Supp. 417, 421–23 (W.D. Pa. 1984). The judge was further mistaken when he said that “the Sheriff’s own First Amendment rights are at stake in this case and the Court must therefore also consider the risk that erroneously entering an injunction would chill Dart’s own right to speak out on issues of public concern. Sheriff Dart has a First Amendment right to publicly criticize the credit card companies for any connection to illegal activity, as long as he stops short of threats” (emphasis added). But the judge himself, in the passages we quoted earlier, had been emphatic that Dart had not stopped short of threats. Those threats were not protected by the First Amendment; they were violations of the First Amendment.