They may have been right, but it was for entirely the wrong reason ...
Holmes used the supposedly "unprotected speech" of "falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic" (his exact words) as an analogy for the supposedly "unprotected speech" of speaking out against the military draft during World War One. This is a terrible and utterly bogus analogy. because the former (dangerously disrupting a place of public commerce) has nothing to do with "speech" (except perhaps incidentally[1]), while the latter (openly criticizing government policy) has everything to do with it.
[1] "Falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic" should not be tolerated. But causing a panic in a theater by falsely triggering a fire alarm without ever uttering a word should not be tolerated, either - and for exactly the same reasons, no more and no less. The fact that a verbal element is incidentally involved in the "shouting" scenario is irrelevant to the substance of the question. The issue of "speech" ("protected" or otherwise) simply does not enter into the matter.
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