"Speech and Sedition in 2021: The progressive press decides that dissenters should be suppressed."
You may have guessed who wrote the headline before reaching its last, duplicitous word. Its opening paragraph proceeds to inform us that most of us learn our horrible history of censorship as schoolchildren — would that we did — through the dark illustrations of McCarthyism, the Red Scare and the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Dreadful times, indeed. "Yet a recent Washington Post opinion piece purports to explain 'what the 1798 Sedition Act got right,'" opines the Wall Street Journal's editorialists.
Then the dull knife: "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."
And that is a true Red Scare. The alleged, scalawagish suppressor featured by the Journal is one Katlyn Marie Carter, a history professor at Notre Dame. Her appetite for and advocacy of stifling free expression? She advocates no such thing; she has no such appetite.
The good professor does note that the 1790s American hope of "spread[ing] enlightenment" via "newly expanded print media" was soon molested by partisan garbage, much akin to the sewer of today's social media. Thus did actual suppressors advocate the criminalization of "false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States … with intent to defame the said government … or to bring [it] into contempt or disrepute."
In a show of almost comic understatement, Prof. Carter observes that "their notion of what constituted falsehoods at the time proved to be problematic." For instance one chap — an indicted member of the U.S. House — had written that the sitting president, John Adams, possessed an "unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp." (I once wrote an undergraduate paper on President Wilson's wartime revival of the Sedition Act, in which I noted the imprisonment of one poor fellow for merely uttering a less than favorable view of our military intervention. And he wasn't alone. Again, a dreadful, "problematic" time indeed.)
Quite contrary to the WSJ's editorial spin, Carter, in fact, points out what the 1798 Sedition Act got wrong, which was pretty much everything. Her proposed remedies to "false, scandalous and malicious writings" in the political sphere are but the reasoned and reasonable suggestions of schools teaching "critical thinking skills"; a return to "good civic participation," i.e., "responsibly consuming and sharing information" — just plain republicanism; and "editorial standards," which are wanting, it seems, at 1211 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY.
Other "journalists, intellectuals and Democrats" named by the Journal as frightful hawkers of unAmerican censorship — in an "extraordinary and ominous turn in a democracy" — have, in reality, only called for boycotts of advertisers and public pressure on reckless, profit-mongering outlets that huckster known falsehoods. And that's as American as Chevrolet.
I would agree with the Journal's editorial writers if they had condemned genuine censorship. I have no truck with those on the "woke" left who are so intellectually comatose that they labor to shut the mouths and minds of anyone they deem insufficiently enlightened. I and others could press for the same against them, but this is the rightly First-Amendment United States, where we allow fools to be fools.
Yet it isn't fools the Journal manipulatively attacks; it is those who simply long for honest debate.