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The First Amendment is a well-known bulwark against a government that might use its regulatory powers to silence speech based on the viewpoint of the speaker. The government speech doctrine extended those protections to the government itself, allowing the government to adopt its own viewpoint when it speaks on its own behalf. The result of the Court’s decision to extend First Amendment protections to the government is that the government can use the First Amendment as a shield when it uses viewpoint discriminatory regulation to coerce speakers into silence. The theorists and judges who created the government speech doctrine have argued that the democratic process and the other provisions of the Constitution would be strong enough to stop the government from abusing its speech powers. This Note, however, identifies a gaping hole in their doctrinal framework where low-visibility government speech meets the ambiguity of the coercion-persuasion line. At that critical point, neither the First Amendment, nor the other provisions of the Constitution, nor the democratic process can stop the leviathan’s inclination to silence dissent.