‘Two things form the bedrock of any open society,” Salman Rushdie once noted, “freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don’t have those things, you don’t have a free country.”

Well, in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, “How Free Speech Dogma Failed Us in Charlottesville,” Michael Signer, the former mayor of Charlottesville, makes the argument that restricting speech is necessary for the rule of law.

The first problem with Signer’s case is the premise itself. Sorry, but we have no uniquely pressing need to “keep pace” with violent or threatening “political disruptions.” Americans live in era of relatively little political violence. A person doesn’t even have to go back to the brutality of the1860s and 1870s to understand this; they can just look back at the 1960s and 1970s, or maybe even the 1990s.

When a few hundred Nazis, in a nation of 350 million, get together and march down Main Street, that isn’t a particularly compelling reason to rethink our rights. In 1939, well after Hitler’s tyrannical intentions were known, 20,000 Nazi sympathizers filled up Madison Square Garden. There will always be extremists in America. Which is one reason why we must always do our best to safeguard natural rights.