PragerU founder Dennis Prager and comedian/podcast host Adam Carolla team up for “No Safe Spaces,” a documentary covering the hot topic of political correctness and how it has infected everything from politics to educational institutions to the entertainment industry. From getting speakers banned to harassing public officials, this “woke” crowd is targeting anyone that disagrees with them, and this documentary highlights some of the most egregious examples of bad actors trying to stop free speech.
Prager and Carolla travel the nation, documenting high-profile moments of protest against Conservative speakers. This includes a 2017 speech given by Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro at UC Berkeley, which was violently protested by far-left students and outside Antifa activists who were bent on stopping anyone who supposedly “offended” them from engaging in freedom of speech.
The film shines a spotlight on these incidents and does a good job of exposing the bad actors who are trying to do an end-run around of the First Amendment in order to block people they do not like from simply stating their opinion. There is no debate allowed by these hecklers, who only want to stamp out — sometimes literally — the beliefs of others.
The film is well-developed, and moves at an easy pace, interviewing newsmakers, celebrities, authors, educators, and many others who have experienced backlash over their refusal to kowtow to the politically correct. Some of the unforgettable footage burns in your memory. For example, a group of far-left students hold a meeting with one university’s faculty. When one teacher refuses to pander to their whims, the students take over and overreact.
The most sobering aspect of the film are the personal testimonies of Prager and Carolla. Often, documentary filmmakers are simply observers, but these two have themselves been targeted by the PC crowd. Carolla’s irreverent comedy and Prager’s stand for traditional values have made them both targets of the Left who, at one time, tried to silence them or deplatform them over their views.
Of course, the mainstream media have tried to dismiss “No Safe Spaces.” Writing for the AV Club, critic Vadim Rizov opines, “This isn’t an argument for free speech, it’s just paranoid whining, complete with a roundtable of comics sympathetically agreeing how sad and scary this all is, plus images of the Statue of Liberty with tape over its mouth.”
This, of course, is echoed by its “rotten” status on film rating aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes. This has done nothing to stop audiences, where it has a stunning 100 percent rating at the time of this review.
Fox News reports that at its first showing in Phoenix, Arizona, on October 25th, “No Safe Spaces” proved a box office success, producing the “second-highest ever box office gross for a documentary playing on just one screen, according to the movie’s producers.” Heading into week two of its release, the momentum does not seem to be slowing down, with a distribution expansion planned.
Despite the mainstream media’s sabotage attempts, “No Safe Spaces” is going to reach more Americans who are fed up with the pandering to college students, Antifa mobs, and woke thinkers who are making conversation, debate, and free speech harder and harder in American life.
Check out the trailer below:
This article has been revised for clarity.