The most immediate warning is a new Florida law that gives the state’s chief of domestic security, with the approval of the governor and Cabinet, power to designate organizations as domestic or foreign terrorist groups.

A designation can trigger dissolution of a corporation, loss of public funding and benefits, penalties for defined forms of material support, and serious consequences for students and campus groups accused of promoting a named group.

A companion law allows information connected with the designation process to be withheld on security grounds. Whatever one thinks of the first organizations targeted, the precedent should trouble everyone. Today it may be a group you despise. Tomorrow it may be yours.

The dynamic recalls machinery once used by Southern states to intimidate civil rights organizations by treating dissent and association as threats to public order. In its landmark 1958 ruling in NAACP v. Alabama, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized how compelled disclosure of an organization’s membership could expose its members to economic reprisal, hostility, and coercion.