"Some of our liberal friends have been dismissing our warnings about the politics of personal vilification emerging on the left, but here is a case study."

The Monday issue of the Wall Street Journal featured an editorial called "Blacklisted at Mozilla," which used the Orwellian thought police uprising that pushed Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich out of office to warn about campaign finance disclosure laws.

After providing some of the details of the case and pointing out that Mr. Eich never exhibited any personal bias at Mozilla, the WSJ highlighted that the hypocrisy of the former CEO being targeted over an opinion held by President Obama as recently as 2012 and by Hillary Clinton last year.

The "new poltical censors," the piece argues, apparently gave the Democrats a pass because of assumptions that they were concealing their "real conviction" until "it became politically advantageous to express them." Eich, however, was held to a different standard, being "drummed out of Silicon Valley for having the courage to stick to his."

But as important as is the story of one man pushed out of his office for ideological discrimination, the op-ed argues that the Eich story has far-reaching implications. It is a warning about campaign financial disclosure laws, which in California, revealed Mr. Eich's donation to a political issue:

Mr. Eich's treatment is another reason to rethink our views on campaign-finance disclosure laws. Years ago we supported reform that would deregulate campaign donation laws in return for immediate online disclosure.

But Justice Clarence Thomas made us think with his concurring opinion in 2010 in Citizens United that dissented on disclosure. "I cannot endorse a view of the First Amendment that subjects citizens of this Nation to death threats, ruined careers, damaged or defaced property, or pre-emptive and threatening warning letters as the price for engaging in 'core political speech,' the 'primary object of First Amendment protection,'" he wrote.

Justice Thomas knows how Southern racists tried to subpoena NAACP membership lists for intimidation purposes in the Jim Crow era. The Supreme Court ruled this was a violation of the First Amendment right of association. In our current age of growing liberal intolerance, Justice Thomas's warning takes on renewed meaning