Carolla: Woke Students ‘Out of S*** to Complain About’
Adam Carolla isn’t a journalist, but he knows how the media works in 2017.
“The news agencies and the press have people they like and people they don’t like,” the podcaster says. “A lot of it is based on the perception of your politics, your gender and your sexual proclivities … they have their darlings, and they have the ones not as high up on that list.”
It’s one reason he thinks his impassioned defense of free speech at a congressional hearing last week got so little media attention. Carolla, in production on a film detailing the assault on free speech across campuses nationwide, shared his initial findings alongside Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro.
“I don’t say I have a target on my back, but they’re not fans of mine,” he says of modern news reporters.
He cites his 2015 crowdfunding campaign for “Road Hard,” his second indie comedy. The campaign scored well north of $1 million by going outside the Hollywood system.
Media outlets mostly yawned. Meanwhile, those same outlets doted on Zach Braff and Kristen Bell achieving similar success with their crowdfunding efforts.
“Our people even contacted Entertainment Weekly [magazine]. ‘How come you’re not doing a story about Adam Carolla raising all this money?’” he recalls.
Their response? “We’re not interested.”
Carolla hopes audiences will be interested in what he and Dennis Prager uncover in their new film, “No Safe Spaces.”
The movie, set for an early 2018 release, finds the duo visiting college campuses to learn why “politically incorrect” thoughts yield protests, cancellations and even violence. Said thoughts usually come from conservative speakers.
He doesn’t have high hopes that his congressional debut will help improve the situation, though.
“I don’t think it was helpful,” he says. “No one’s opinion changed.” Part of the problem? The Beltway insiders’ curious obsessions.
FAST FACT: Middlebury College professor Allison Stranger got injured during a protest against a right-leaning guest earlier this year. She was attempting to escort the speaker out of the campus when protesters attacked.
During the hearing the group heard from a black woman who became her college’s student body president despite the campus’s racial breakdown. The school in question had a 6 percent black population, Carolla notes.
Rather than celebrate her success and how it spoke to an inclusive culture, the politicians zeroed in on one ugly incident. A racist dolt left a banana with a noose around it on campus.
“We’ve decided that’s all we want to focus on, rather than the bigger story that thousands of people voted this black female to be their leader,” he says. It’s how the political game works in 2017, and it leaves the comic deflated.
RELATED: Carolla Explains Hollywood’s Silence on Free Speech Fight
Even the very subject behind “No Safe Spaces” irritates Carolla. Today’s college students live in a “rarefied air” others would kill to enjoy.
“The group with arguably the least problems on the planet are the ones most up in arms about their problems,” he says of these woke students who protest ideas they don’t like. “Is it their problem, or are they out of s*** to complain about?”
If you’re on one side of the campus, and Shapiro is sharing conservative views on the other, “that’s not your problem,” he says.