WALL STREET JOURNAL: Speech and Sedition in 2021.

Most Americans learn in school about flagship political excesses in U.S. history like Joe McCarthy’s 1950s inquisitions, the post-World War I Red Scare and the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Yet a recent Washington Post opinion piece purports to explain “what the 1798 Sedition Act got right.”

The law banned a wide range of political speech and publication. It was passed by the ruling Federalists to suppress the rival Democratic-Republicans, whom they saw as seditious. The Post piece argues that though their solution was “flawed,” the Federalists had reason to worry about “unregulated freedom of the press.”

We highlight this as one example among many of the emerging appetite for viewpoint suppression among journalists, intellectuals and Democrats in the wake of the Trump Presidency. They increasingly see domestic enemies wherever they look, and are devising ways to use levers of power to restrict, regulate and boycott opposition. It’s an extraordinary and ominous turn in a democracy. . . .

Much of American journalism, which was supposed to revert to its historic role as a check on those in power after Donald Trump left town, is now devoted to shutting down the commercial lifeline of other media. Think of the precedent for the next populist Republican President who might declare pro-choice publications “deadly.”

The trend arrives when one party runs nearly all of Washington and has the loud support of virtually every elite cultural institution and many of the largest corporations. Social-media firms increasingly respond to government pressure in content decisions. With progressives filling out the administrative state, expect politicians and regulators to find new ways to put their thumb on the scale.

There are already calls for the Federal Communications Commission to revive the Fairness Doctrine that enforced speech rules when there were three dominant TV networks. It died in the 1980s. The Axios website complained that “the U.S. government has done next to nothing to regulate misinformation on large tech platforms,” and the founder of the liberal fact-checker Politifact floated “regulations and new laws” to marginalize right-wing media.

It’s clear that their only real objection to McCarthyism was that McCarthy was on the other side.

Related: When Resistance Became Sedition and Sedition Became Resistance.