A tweet from the executive of a conservative news publication that threatened to send unionizing workers “back to the salt mines” did not violate labor laws, a federal appeals court said Friday morning. 

The majority opinion from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit points to a lack of evidence to back up the National Labor Relations Board’s attempt to hold The Federalist’s Ben Domenech to task for the tweet. Employees thought it was a joke, but that didn’t stop the NLRB’s New York region from issuing an unfair labor practice against the company, stating the tweet “threatened employees with reprisals and implicitly threatened employees with loss of their jobs if they formed or supported a union.”