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well, concluding that we had fo-

cused on the far-right utterances of

the “Unite the Right” rally.

This was crushing. The “Unite

the Right” gathering would unques-

tionably be massive and dangerous;

the counterprotests would be far

smaller and easier to handle. And if

we had tried to move them despite

their modest size, we would have

undermined the very content-neu-

tral rationale enabling us to move

the original rally.

The rest is history. We were cor-

rect: The militia rally couldn’t be

safely held in downtown Charlottes-

ville. Despite the presence of more

than 1,000 state and local police, a

flawed security plan allowed the vi-

olent mingling of protesters and

counterprotesters. There was so

much violence that the police dis-

banded the rally before it started.

Afterward, a young neo-Nazi drove

into a crowd of counterprotesters,

killing one and injuring dozens.

None of this would have hap-

pened if we had won in court and

relocated the rally. Things need to

change.

After Charlottesville, Fred

Schauer of the University of Vir-

ginia School of Law suggested that

First Amendment case law be up-

dated as a result. The Supreme

Court used to assume that the “ex-

pense of providing protection” was

“prone to be exaggerated by state

and local officials eager to prevent

the speech in the first place,” he

wrote, but now, “such suspicions

rest on a flimsier basis”—precisely

because of the staggering difficulty

cities like Charlottesville face in

handling today’s chaotic conflicts.

Indeed, the Supreme Court of Vir-

ginia recently upheld a lower court’s

opinion allowing Gov. Ralph

Northam’s emergency declaration

prohibiting firearms from the Capitol

Grounds during a massive pro-gun-

rights demonstration, on the grounds

that the governor could act “for the

adequate promotion and coordina-

tion of state and local emergency ac-

tivities relating to the safety and

welfare” of the public. This wouldn’t

have happened before Charlottesville.

Courts should abjure inflexible,

abstract rules for an examination of

the evidence underlying local offi-

cials’ concerns, allowing reasoned

judgments by neutral experts of is-

sues like the cost of designing ade-

quate security plans. Courts should

look deeper than the blunt “credible

threat” test to pragmatically consider

the context, implicit intent and the

likelihood of statements and other

public conduct inciting violent con-

flict and crime.

With white nationalists chanting

“Jews will not replace us” in the

streets of Charlottesville and far-left

demonstrators vandalizing college

campuses in response to speakers

they don’t like, we need First Amend-

ment rules that return to common

sense, not high-minded ideas that

seem sound on paper but fail to keep

us safe and free in practice.

Mr. Signer was the mayor of

Charlottesville, Va., in 2016-18.

His new book is “Cry Havoc:

Charlottesville and American De-

mocracy Under Siege,” recently

published by PublicAffairs.

A Virginia state police officer and

white nationalists, Charlottesville,

Aug. 12, 2017.

had a dark side as well. As the

story goes, Pan loved to take af-

ternoon naps in a cave or forest

grove, and if someone acciden-

tally disturbed his sleep, he

would let out a terrifying

scream. Greeks who heard

frightening sounds in secluded

spots blamed Pan’s fury and

spoke of being struck by “pan-

ikon deima,” or “panic fear.”

When “panic” entered Eng-

lish around 1600, it followed

the Greek style, used as an ad-

jective linked to Pan, particu-

larly in phrases like “panic

fear,” “panic dread,” or “panic

terror” to describe a wild, irra-

tional feeling of anxiety. Soon,

“panic” could stand on its own

as a noun denoting that wild

“UNFORTUNATELY,you’re go-

ing to see more deaths,” Sur-

geon General Dr. Jerome Adams

said on CNN last Sunday,

speaking about the spread of

the novel coronavirus in the

U.S. “But that doesn’t mean we

should panic.”

Easier said than done.

“Panic” has increasingly fit the

mood of many Americans, both

in terms of

the develop-

ing public

health crisis

and the fi-

nancial jit-

ters that

have followed. Just look at re-

cent Wall Street Journal head-

lines: “Amazon Battles Counter-

feit Masks, $400 Hand Sanitizer

Amid Virus Panic.” “How to

Keep Calm as Coronavirus Fears

Turn Into Market Panic.”

[Panic]

WORD ON

THE STREET

BEN

ZIMMER

In the U.S., sudden financial

crises were typically labeled

“panics,” from the Panic of 1792,

when the expansion of credit

precipitated runs on banks, to

the Panic of 1907, which trig-

gered a recession and justified

the creation of the Federal Re-

serve. Beyond the realm of fi-

nance, the 20th century brought

new senses of panic felt by indi-

viduals, in the psychiatric terms

“panic attack” (a sudden onset

of acute and disabling anxiety)

and “panic disorder” (character-

ized by recurrent panic attacks).

In a 1948 article detailing the

jargon of jet pilots, the maga-

zine Popular Science explained

that if a pilot “gets in a tight

spot and doesn’t know what to

do,” he “pushes the panic but-

ton for two minutes of disorga-

nized confusion.” Since then,

“the panic button” has become

a figure of speech for any emer-

gency measures, as when CNN

reported earlier this month that

the Federal Reserve “just hit

the coronavirus panic button”

by slashing interest rates.

Given the global state of anx-

iety over the virus and its cas-

cading effects, we can expect

the proverbial panic button to

be pressed many more times. JAMES YANG

The World

Health Organ-

ization on

Wednesday

declared the global coronavirus

outbreak a “pandemic.” But

while there is a surface similar-

ity between the two words,

“pandemic” has no etymological

connection to “panic.”

“Pandemic,” as I explored last

week, combines the Greek prefix

“pan-” meaning “all” with the

root “demos” meaning “people,”

to describe a global contagion.

“Panic,” meanwhile, owes its

roots to Pan, the Greek god of

nature, associated in the public

imagination with wild merry-

making, not cowering in fear.

While the half-man, half-goat

figure of Pan was often depicted

as playing music on pipes (also

known as “pan flutes”) and ami-

ably cavorting with nymphs, he

sensation, especially when

fear spreads uncontrolla-

bly among a large

group. In 1708,

Anthony Ash-

ley Cooper,

the Earl of

Shaftesbury,

wrote that

“popular Fury

may be call’d

Panick, when

the Rage of the

People, as we

have sometimes

known, has put them beyond

themselves.”

The word came in handy in

18th-century England, as stock-

market speculation led to a se-

ries of financial panics. Joseph

Harris, in his 1757 “Essay Upon

Money and Coins,” warned that

debasing the standard of money

“would make a havoc alike of all

property, and create universal

panics and distrusts, not easily

to be afterwards repaired.” The

economist David Ricardo wrote

in 1817 about what happens

“when a general panic seizes the

country, and when every one is

desirous of possessing the pre-

cious metals as the most conve-

nient mode of realizing or con-

cealing his property.”

That Wave of

Anxiety Is Named

After a Partying

Greek God

anti-Semitic preacher stoking a

group of protesters to violence. In

the majority opinion, Justice William

Douglas ruled that speech could be

stopped only if it was “likely to pro-

duce a clear and present danger of a

serious substantive evil that rises far

above public inconvenience.”

In a powerful dissent, however,

Justice Robert Jackson warned that

if the court didn’t “temper its doctri-

naire logic with a little practical wis-

dom,” it could turn the Bill of Rights

“into a suicide pact.” He added, “The

local court that tried Terminiello was

not indulging in theory.” The deci-

sion was not about “harmless or ab-

stract conditions” but “concrete be-

havior and specific consequences

disclosed by the evidence.”

Unfortunately, Jackson’s view

wasn’t available to Charlottesville’s

officials when white supremacists de-

scended on the city for a rally three

years ago. We were forced instead to

navigate a tortuous road to try to

keep the public safe while not violat-

ing First Amendment precedents.

After seeing the frenzy building

online among the far right and its

foes about a “Unite the Right” rally

to protest the city’s planned removal

of a statue of Confederate Gen. Rob-

ert E. Lee, I consulted with other

mayors and security experts. They

uniformly advised that we separate

the two groups, keeping some “green

space” between them. But downtown

Charlottesville has no such place. The

statue is nested in a warren of

streets and alleys.

I asked the city manager to look

into moving the rally to a safer lo-

cation. (In our “city manager” form

of government, the mayor has no

role in giving permits or policing

and can only cajole.) But without

proof of a “credible threat,” he felt

his hands were tied.

The far-right groups coming to

Charlottesville had been careful in

speaking about the rally. While they

had engaged in violent talk on plat-

forms like Twitter, they carefully re-

ferred only to self-defense. (They

specifically plotted violence on a se-

cret, password-protected platform,

but that would only come out later.)

The City Council hired the best

law firm we could find, spending

$30,000 in legal fees to try to relo-

cate the rally to a nearby park

where the groups could be safely

separated on two softball fields.

That meant we would need to per-

suade a court that the city’s interest

in public safety was greater than

the protesters’ interest in speaking

close to the statue of Lee.

So I entered an “Alice in Wonder-

land” world in which I was instructed

not to talk about the neo-Nazis in-

vading us or the expense and diffi-

culty of providing for the safety of

our citizens. Courts frown on a

“heckler’s veto,” whereby counter-

protesters’ threats to make events

unsafe leads to their cancellation. By

expressing concern about the rally’s

cost and safety, we might concede

that the city couldn’t handle the

counterprotests, effectively allowing

them to cancel the militia gathering.

I was actually advised to avoid

mentioning white nationalism en-

tirely, lest I suggest that the city was

concerned about the content of the

rally’s speech—another no-no in First

Amendment case law. Our lawyers

suggested that the most “content-

neutral” ground for moving the rally

would be crowd size: The white-na-

tionalist gathering would certainly

have far more than the 400 on its

permit application.

But the ACLU of Virginia sued us

anyway, arguing that the city had

been motivated by the content of

the speech at the rally, not the

safety of the public. On the rally’s

eve, we lost in federal court. The

decision faulted us for not moving

two competing far-left rallies as

‘I was

instructed

not to talk about

the neo-Nazis

invading us.’

A

s the mayor of Char-

lottesville, Va., during

the violent riots of Au-

gust 2017, I saw first-

hand how legal inter-

pretations of the First Amendment

are failing to keep pace with today’s

political disruptions. Our harrowing

experience shows that we need to re-

turn to a path that gives less weight

to abstract free-speech principles

and more to the pragmatic needs of

officials and residents on the ground.

The home city of Thomas Jeffer-

son treasures free speech. Char-

lottesville has long had a “Free

Speech Wall” steps away from our

city hall, with free chalk provided

for anyone to write any message, no

matter how offensive. On paper, we

would seem to be in lockstep with

American courts’ modern doctrine

of “free speech absolutism,” which

holds that without clear evidence of

inciting or planning an imminent

unlawful act (a “credible threat,” in

constitutional parlance), cities must

allow speech, no matter how incen-

diary.

Yet a dramatically different ap-

proach can be glimpsed in a famous

1949 Supreme Court decision, Termi-

niello v. City of Chicago, where the

court ruled 5-4 against Chicago’s at-

tempt to use a “breach of the peace”

MARK PETERSON/REDUX PICTURESordinance to shut down a notorious

BYMICHAELSIGNER

First Amendment case law now puts inflexible rules over real needs, writes the city’s former mayor.

How Free Speech Dogma

Failed Us in Charlottesville