No Safe Spaces skillfully, intelligently, and amusingly exposes the intellectual rot eating away at Free Speech in American higher education. Go see it!
I went to see Adam Carolla’s and Dennis Prager’s No Safe Spaces this afternoon and I had just one problem with the movie: At a huge multiplex in Knoxville, there were only eight people in the audience. It should have played to a packed house. And no, the large number of vacancies wasn’t because I was seeing the movie on a Sunday afternoon. I’d originally intended to see No Safe Spaces on a Saturday night — you know, a movie night — so I checked then to see if there were seats remaining and, indeed, there were seats available. Lots of them. On the theater’s seat-booking site, all but two seats were still empty on a Saturday night.
The truth is that every American ought to see this movie. The reality is that only conservatives who are already worried about the death of free speech in America will attend it. On the Left, they’re smugly happy with their increasing ability, both on campuses and in corporate America, to shout down and censor anything they don’t like. And in the vast middle, the Americans who need to start to care, people probably aren’t even aware that the movie is playing.
I wanted to tell my Little Bookworm, in her last year at an Obscenely Expensive (Hard Left) Liberal Arts College in the Midwest to go see the movie. I knew that, as she is maturing (and having problems with her excessively sensitive roommates), she might have made the effort to go. I didn’t bother telling her, though, when I discovered that the movie isn’t even playing in her college town, a place in which a message about free speech and open minds could do a lot of good.
Carolla and Prager are the two pillars anchoring the No Safe Spaces. Carolla presents himself as a working class yob and comic (and also America’s most popular podcaster) who has a visceral belief that we are destroying our youth by mentally coddling them and that the answer is free speech for them and for everyone. Prager is the Jewish intellectual, the college educated man who spent time in the Soviet Union during the heyday of its totalitarianism. Prager too is a free speech fanatic. Both men are agreed (rightly) that free speech — true free speech, not the European or Canadian simulacrums — is a uniquely American attribute and that its destruction is the first step on the road to totalitarianism. [Read more…]