There is something almost Dickensian about artists from small towns and big cities crowding into makeshift venues to speak against a creeping chill in public life. We have seen this story before, the quiet librarian afraid to stock a book, the young actor warned off a part, the local paper sued into caution, all while the powerful insist that no one is really being silenced. A coordinated roar from hundreds of stages breaks that comfortable lie in a way no think tank report ever could. If the protests also remember the warehouse worker, the nurse, the kid scrolling in a fearful household, they might yet turn this chapter into the start of a better serial. Otherwise the villains will simply wait for the curtain to fall and carry on as before. The point of a protest is not only to comfort the already outraged but to shame the comfortable into seeing what is in front of them. If Fall of Freedom keeps knocking on doors outside its own circle, it might yet earn its title.