According to NoSafeSpaces.com: “No Safe Spaces follows Adam Carolla and Dennis Prager as they explore the challenges to the First Amendment and freedom of thought faced in America today.”
Unfortunately, the polariz-ing nature of the reviews largely fall along partisan political lines, with con-servatives praising the film and liberals criticizing it. This partisan result could have likely been minimized if the film communicated a more bipartisan tone. To further complicate things, the film does not provide a clear thesis of what it is trying to promote. Rather, it seems to jump around from topic to topic, some of which are not even tangentially related to each other…
One major problem with the film is that it does not have a well-defined theme. Even the title illustrates this point. While much of the film could be summarized as “a warning of current free-speech suppression trends,” safe spaces are only tangentially related to free speech suppression. The creation of safe spaces on college campuses as a place for students to be protected from speech they perceive as offensive may be a bad idea,5 but it does not violate the First Amendment.
At one point in the film, Carolla lectures on the dangers of a welfare state. Elsewhere, there is an entire segment on how “white privilege” is not an ac-curate term. No attempt was made to relate these two issues with the other topics in the film…
The film does not contain in-depth discussions of nuanced First Amendment issues, which is to be expected by a popular-level documentary. But even some basic free-speech principles are presented in a highly misleading manner. At one point, free speech is described as people being able to say “whatever they want” without restrictions… Public and private censor-ship is conflated throughout the film…
There is even an anecdote provided where after a kid says something “stupid,” his friends tell him to “shut up,” to which the kid responds, “Hey, it’s a free country, man. There’s freedom of speech here.” Prager considers this anecdote and responds, “He’s right!” But this is incorrect. Freedom of speech does not protect someone from having his friends tell him to “shut up…
The film could have embodied a more bipartisan tone by presenting examples of people being censored for their liberal views, instead of focusing almost primarily on the censorship of conservative views.
