If the progressive left doesn’t find your values to be as moral as theirs, you are not allowed to express them. You are not allowed what is guaranteed through the first amendment…the freedom to say and express yourself however you want. Now while many will try to claim that this is paranoid whining, the latest article from the Washington Post which was published in the same week of this film’s release only further confirms what the true endgame is, the eradication of rights. Many progressives argue that the idea of free speech is dangerous because it creates an atmosphere that puts others in danger. They argue that “hate speech” should be regulated separately from free speech and that the government should not allow hate speech to create the next Charlottesville incident.
The problem is, there is no such thing as hate speech. It’s not a legally recognized term, and it’s not even a term that can be concretely defined by the same people who argue we should ban it. Progressives can’t define hate speech, but know it needs to be banned or else the Nazis could take over again…so they say. What progressives fundamentally disagree with is the reality that the government was never created to regulate the rights of its citizens but defend them. The freedom of speech was created so that the rights of the people could never be controlled by the state or any other entity in conjunction with them. However, that has not been the case on publicly funded and run college campuses for quite some time and that is where No Safe Spaces come in.
Adam Carolla and Dennis Prager team up to expose how our nation’s education system has been hijacked by ideologues who wish to snuff out anything that is an enemy to progressivism. Conservatives, liberals, libertarians, and others tell their stories of how they ended up on the wrong side of the progressive monster that has gone unchecked on college campuses for decades. Colleges which were once viewed as the beacon of free speech has now become the battleground against it. The deterioration of our education system gives a scary outlook of our future as these adults will not only become our neighbors but soon our lawmakers. 50% of young adults have negative views about protecting speech through the first amendment, meaning that half of our nation’s next generation is more comfortable with throwing away our rights than protecting it.
The filmmakers being noted conservatives means the critic response will be largely negative but take their complaints as yet another reason why rights are essential to be protected because they won’t do so. Take Vadim Rizov for instance, who took exception to a scene where Prager, who he calls a “belligerent white man” is talking to a group of black students from Clark Atlanta and challenging them on why they feel oppressed. Rizov’s anger at this scene perfectly displays the problem that progressives have with free speech. Because in their minds, Prager should have just shut up and listened and shouldn’t have challenged the feelings of the students. Missing the fact that the whole point of free speech and debate is to have your ideas heard AND challenged, which is what happened in the film.
Another point that progressives attempt to make is that free speech is not being attacked because people like Ben Shapiro and Dennis Prager were allowed to speak at the end of the film. The problem with this argument is that you then have to ignore everything that progressives did to prevent them from speaking in the first place. It’s the equivalent of someone firebombing your picnic and then two weeks later, after you have passed every legal challenge to have your picnic rescheduled and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in security to prevent those people from firebombing you again, the firebombers then say “Well, you still had your picnic didn’t you?” In their mindset, their failure to ultimately shut you down (not for a lack of trying) is proof that the 1st amendment isn’t under attack…brilliant logic isn’t it?
Joyce Slaton of Common Sense Media perfectly displays the fascist mindset of the people who calls themselves anti-fascism. She says and I quote:
“That First Amendment that Prager and Carolla seem to admire so much says nothing about the offense. It promises that Congress will make no law abridging free speech — not that speaking your mind won’t earn you blowback.”
This ideology is displayed perfectly in the film, if you say anything that they deem to be offensive, they will come after you. “blowback” is guaranteed. These are the same people who claim to fight the fearmongering of the right and the ideology that birthed Hitler, but offend them and there will be severe consequences.
You can argue that progressive values are just as important in nation discussion and discourse as conservative or libertarian ones. However, you won’t see armies of masked right-wingers shutting down LBGT speakers on college campuses under the guise of ‘by any means necessary’. No Safe Spaces proves without a shadow of a doubt that the most dangerous people in America are not liberals and they are not conservatives, they are those who consider themselves enemies of freedom and liberty.
4/5
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