This article flows from my previous discussion on the parlous state of free speech today. In that blog, I noted that we must move beyond the “anything goes” caricature of liberty. To be clear: defending speech is not a call for anarchy. As the Swedish model I cited reminds us, a robust democracy defines its boundaries explicitly—protecting the citizen from the state’s whim, not the other way around.
However, the recent backlash to this position reveals a disturbing trend among the professional class and the legal establishment. They have reached for an old, rusted weapon: the “Fire in a Crowded Theater” analogy to express their misinterpretation of, and fears with, the public right to free speech. In this article, I would like to deconstruct this myth and expose how it is being used to domesticate dissent.
The “5 PM” Delusion
Our political leaders have recently popularized a comfortable new doctrine of protest. It is what I call the “5 PM Philosophy”. It suggests that a “good” protest is one where citizens gather peacefully, express their views until the end of the business day, and then go home so as not to “inconvenience” the flow of commerce or the commute of the comfortable. I consider protests to be an important and essential form of free speech.
“This notion of a ‘good’ protest is not the practice of a democratic right; it is a scheduled performance.”
And yet, in the aftermath of the so-called “Freedom Convoy” protest in Ottawa some years ago, then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau repeated this notion of what constitutes a good protest. History teaches us that the very purpose of protest is transformation. From Mahatma Gandhi’s “Quit India” movement to Nelson Mandela’s defiance of Apartheid; from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s disruptive marches to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament—these movements did not succeed by being convenient. They succeeded because they created friction.
A Case Study in Transformation: The Indian Farmers’ Protest
The Arsonist’s Alarm: In 2021, the state constructed multi-layered concrete barricades and embedded nails in the road to block the Indian Farmers’ Protest. By physicalizing the metaphor of a ‘threat to order,’ the state creates the emergency it purports to manage, treating democratic assembly as a fire to be contained rather than a voice to be heard.
Perhaps one of the most significant protests in recent memory is the Indian Farmers’ movement of 2020–2021. This was not a 5 PM performance. Hundreds of thousands of protesters camped on the outskirts of New Delhi for over a year. They occupied space and disrupted the “normalcy” of the capital to demand their survival.
The cost was immense—an estimated 750 protesters lost their lives. Yet, they remained, and in the end, the government repealed the farm laws. This is what transformative protest looks like: it is persistent, it is uncomfortable, and it is effective.
The Irony of the State Response
To the Indian government’s credit, Prime Minister Modi did not declare a state of emergency. In contrast, after a few days of the “Freedom Convoy” occupation of the area in the vicinity of the Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government invoked the Emergencies Act on February 14, 2022—a move that the Federal Court of Appeal was to rule constituted an unconstitutional overreach.
The Boundary of Dissent: Disruption vs. Violence
To be absolutely clear, the concept of protest as a crucial act of free speech that I am advocating does not include the use of violence. Violence is a distinct category. While resort to arms is recognized in international law as legitimate in certain conditions, such as national liberation struggles, to me, it is not a legitimate part of the democratic exercise of free speech. There may, of course, be exceptional circumstances, such as self-defence against provocation or protection from use of excessive force by law enforcement.
What I am defending is the use of speech, bodies, and peaceful though potentially disruptive actions. The right to assemble, to sit in, to march, and to occupy space is the right to make one’s grievance unavoidable. It is a fundamental difference: one seeks to transform society through the moral and physical weight of collective presence, while the other seeks to destroy. My argument is for a democracy that is loud and inconvenient, not one that is violent.
Turning the “Fire” on its Head
The legal establishment loves to quote US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s 1919 warning against “falsely shouting fire in a theater”.
But look closer at who is actually doing the shouting today.
For decades, the marginalized have been screaming “Fire!” as their communities burn. Yet now, it is the state itself—and its oppressive policing arm—that is shouting “Fire!”. By labeling traffic jams as “sieges,” the state justifies reaching for the tools needed to silence justice. We see this in real-time with the London Metropolitan Police’s actions against pro-Palestine protesters, while police agencies closer to home, including the Toronto Police Service and the RCMP, create “protest-free zones” and treat peaceful assembly as a public safety hazard. What they really do is to expand their use of surveillance technologies and to criminalize people with a social conscience and a message for their governments whom they see as callous, uncaring and unrepresentative.
The Price of a Free Society
To those who argue that protest resources “divert funds” or that “mob-like” behavior at a mall is “unreasonable,” I offer a reminder: Inconvenience is the tax we pay for living in a free society.
There is a fundamental difference between an inconvenience and an injustice. A delayed subway is an inconvenience. The use of “safety” by the state as a legal patina to erase the right to dissent—while supporting, perpetuating, or ignoring a grave humanitarian crisis—is an injustice.
Yet today, the state, throughout the liberal democratic world, is busy sounding the alarm to justify its own overreach. It’s time we stopped falling for the panic and started looking at the real arsonists.
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A Closing Note:
This post is part of my ongoing exploration into the “Illiberal Turn”—a study of how liberal democratic states are increasingly relying on executive coercion and administrative policing in place of genuine political dialogue and consultation. These reflections will form a core part of my forthcoming manuscript, The Illiberal Turn: The Rise of the Executive State and the End of Political Negotiation.
Alok Mukherjee, The Way I See It 
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