Free speech has consequences. What you say can get you praised or ridiculed, embraced or shunned. Sometimes it can change the world. But should it get you fired?

Many Americans say yes. A Cato Institute survey conducted during the 2020 campaign found that 50% of self-identified liberals believed that voting for Donald Trump was grounds for dismissal, while 36% of conservatives thought a vote for Joe Biden was a firing offense. These percentages may increase, since young people agree with this kind of censorship the most.

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Free speech has consequences. What you say can get you praised or ridiculed, embraced or shunned. Sometimes it can change the world. But should it get you fired?

Many Americans say yes. A Cato Institute survey conducted during the 2020 campaign found that 50% of self-identified liberals believed that voting for Donald Trump was grounds for dismissal, while 36% of conservatives thought a vote for Joe Biden was a firing offense. These percentages may increase, since young people agree with this kind of censorship the most.

One-third of Americans worry about losing their jobs because of their political opinions. As a result, self-censorship is rampant: 42% of liberals, 64% of moderates and 77% of conservatives report they keep their opinions to themselves for fear of retaliation at work, Cato found. If what you say can deprive you of your livelihood, the right to free expression is useless to all but the tiny subset of the independently wealthy who don’t need to work and don’t mind sitting at home.

The fear of retaliation is well-founded. We are increasingly subject to being “canceled” for expressing our opinions, not only on the job but on our own time in venues unrelated to our occupations.

Since the majority of speech-related firings are executed by private employers, the First Amendment offers no remedy. When citizens must watch what they say off the clock for fear of getting canned, notice—and action—should be taken by a society that values the right to speak one’s mind so greatly that it is enshrined in its Constitution.

What meaningful difference is there between an authoritarian state, where saying the wrong thing can get you arrested, and a regime of economic censorship, in which the consequence of unpopular expression results in unemployment, potentially followed by eviction and destitution?

As a left-leaning editorial cartoonist and writer, I have been fired, dropped and canceled over thoughts I conveyed through pictures and prose. Once I was fired by a magazine for whom I drew cartoons about romantic relationships because the publisher was angry about one of my political cartoons, which ran elsewhere. Getting the ax that way felt unfair. But at least there was a tangential connection, since both features were cartoons.

It is disturbing to see widespread acceptance of censorship of speech and conduct that takes place outside the workplace in an unrelated context and venue. Victims have included Democrats as well as Republicans, though the right seems to be targeted more these days. Self-appointed online sleuths identified attendees of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., and contacted their employers, requesting that they be fired. The digital vigilantes successfully de-employed a cook at a hot-dog stand in Berkeley, Calif., and an employee of a tile contractor in Pittsburgh.

Similar doxxing campaigns targeted pro-Trump participants in the Jan. 6 March to Save America rally, which disintegrated into a riot inside the Capitol. Many workers who didn’t riot lost their jobs. Libby Andrews was dismissed by her Chicago real-estate firm even though she didn’t enter the Capitol. Her offense, apparently, was demonstrating for Mr. Trump.

Now the collective Anonymous has hacked into the web-hosting company Epik and released a data dump revealing the identities of hundreds of right-wing extremists, including white nationalists and anti-Semites. The Washington Post reports that Joshua Alayon, a Florida realtor (what is it about realtors?) lost his job after the hacked Epik data revealed that he had appeared to have once purchased the internet domains RacismInc.com, WhitesEncyclopedia.com, ChristiansAgainstIsrael.com and TheHolocaustIsFake.com. Mr. Alayon’s boss explained that he didn’t “want to be involved with anyone with thoughts or motives like that.”

It’s easy to see where the erstwhile employer is coming from. He worries that customers might think that employment amounts to an endorsement of his employee’s apparently racist views. The path of least resistance is to cut ties.

But we need to weigh the social and political consequences of firing people over their opinions, no matter how extreme or unpopular, when those opinions are expressed outside the workplace. There’s also something particularly frightening about a case like Mr. Alayon’s, in which his alleged allegiance to far-right political causes was exposed by an illegal data breach after he attempted to keep them secret by hiring a company that marketed itself as a secure repository for his information. This guy took pains not to embarrass his employer.

While I sympathize with business owners who hope for frictionless relations between their workers and their clients, the desire to avoid conflict must take a back seat to free political debate, which is essential to democracy. A nation can’t have wide-ranging discussions unless it is open to all views. When two-thirds of self-identified moderates are scared to express their views in public for fear of losing their jobs, America has ceased to be a free society.

Mr. Rall is a political cartoonist, columnist and author, most recently, of “The Stringer.”

Main Street: Ten years ago secular crusaders began their attempt to silence Jack Phillips for refusing to bake a cake for a same sex marriage. Today their intolerance continues over a cake celebrating gender transition. Image: Alliance Defending Freedom The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition