Media Mock Carolla, Prager for Free Speech Doc
You’d think freedom of speech would be one topic liberals and conservatives could agree on in these fractured times.
Not even close. Welcome to 2017.
Adam Carolla and Dennis Prager are making a documentary about the attacks on free speeches on college campuses nationwide. The high-profile cases revealing these assaults are too numerous to count at this point.
Google “berkeley” “protests” and “fire” for a primer.
So the podcast king and syndicated talker are hitting the road for “No Safe Spaces.” They’ll engage with today’s college students while underlining how academia is crushing free expression. All the while a camera crew will document their trek.
A new IndieGogo campaign is looking to raise $500,000 to fund the film. An investor has pledged to match that figure with an equal amount to complete the project.
If children are the future … these college students are the leaders of tomorrow. And their inability to accept differing arguments is frightening. And that’s not counting those drooling to commit violence to ensure other views aren’t heard.
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That’s not how several mainstream news outlets are reporting on “No Safe Spaces.” Take Vulture.com, which starts in a dismissive fashion:
The widely documented protests against conservative and right-leaning guest speakers at universities and the escalating violence revolving around the free speech debate on campus is getting rehashed in yet another hot take by podcast personality and comedian Adam Carolla.
From there, the short article takes the side of California State University, Northridge which alleged a potential Carolla/Prager event was shut down last year for “logistical reasons.”
So, in case the name of the documentary or the Indiegogo campaign video mocking elite universities wasn’t proof enough, these guys aren’t exactly coming to the phenomena from a place without bias.
Bias? For free speech?
And would Vulture cry foul if it was Michael Moore, the king of biased documentaries, attempting a similar project?
That was far more kind than the increasingly liberal A.V. Club’s “hot take” on “No Safe Spaces.” Here’s the snarky headline:
Adam Carolla needs your money to really stick it to those damn “safe spaces”
From there the condescension drips off the computer screen.
Adam Carolla has joined the ranks of the numerous comedians—mostly male, mostly white—defending America’s college campuses from the hated “snowflakes” that flurry all over them these days, ruining higher education with their constant demands for their personhood to be acknowledged or treated with respect.
The site calls the coloring book giveaway “transphobic” and compares Carolla and Prager to “drunk, angry uncles.” Here’s guessing Prager would incinerate that reporter in a debate on any issue.
When you don’t have the facts on your side, though, name-calling is the next best thing.
And then there’s Mary Sue. The site melted down over an attempt to save free speech for a new generation.
Comedians Adam Carolla and Dennis Prager have launched an Indiegogo to fund their “No Safe Spaces” tour, which is just as tone-deaf and unnecessary as its name would suggest.
Unnecessary? People are burning college campuses, sending professors to the hospital and treating conservatives on campus worse than Holocaust denying tyrants?
And Mary Sue says “No Safe Spaces” is unnecessary?
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Too many liberals see any attack on conservatives as justified in today’s toxic culture. And, if it means trashing the First Amendment in the process, so be it.
Is it too cynical to suggest some liberals will try to stop the film from reaching audiences?
Mary Sue isn’t done yet, though.
Carolla then criticizes student protests against certain speakers as an assault on “free speech,” as if he doesn’t realize that protests are in themselves a form of free speech. (It’s almost like he’s ill-informed!)
Speaking of ill-informed, is the writer wholly unaware of the violence marking so many attacks on free speech? The destruction? The fires? The injured folk?
Maybe those safe spaces lack WiFi.
It’s easy to single out reporters so enmeshed in their ideology they can’t rally around free speech issues. It’s important all the same.
They aren’t alone, though.
When was the last time Stephen Colbert mocked campus snowflakes who cower at views they don’t already hold? Has “Saturday Night Live” done any skits lampooning those who target free expression? How many politicians on the Left have rallied to defend free speech?
Sen. Bernie Sanders did … but so far he’s the exception that proves the rule.
Sounds like Carolla and Prager could have a sequel on their hands if they’re game.
The champions of communism, socialism and fascism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty for anyone not pledged to the cult Liberalism. They call themselves Democrats, yet they yearn for a dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent in every way imaginable.. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden yet the results are simply more unsustainable debt that will eventually enslave our progeny. They plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office, every man but one a subordinate clerk in a giant bureau. Modern ctrl-left Progressive Liberalism is a serious and dangerous mental disorder.
The left does not want free speech. That is all you need to know. The right would do it, too, but we don’t have the power.
I don’t disagree. Any state/organization/whatever that devolves into one party rule becomes a cesspool of groupthink and irrationality. Up to and including violence.
The Ivory Tower needs at allow for discussion of ideas that the other 85% or so (more?) of society follows.
I used to be a regular reader of The AV Club, but over the past couple years the tone of the writing there has been so snarky and hyper-partisan that I gave up on it.
Same here. Actually, a problem I have with many review sites regardless of political position is an overall tendency towards snarkiness, as if the only possible reaction to something you disagree with or are unfamiliar with is ridicule and contempt.
I am coming to the conclusion that we should close the universities for a few years and start over. At a minimum, we should defund every -studies program (gender, women’s, race based) permanently because they are all seditious and a clear danger to liberty
There is always method to the madness of the Progs. They don’t do these fascists things for no reason. There is ALWAYS a reason. And shutting down free speech is simply their way of keeping students from being exposed to conservatives ideas, or ideas that refute the insanity of the Prog ideas (e.g., the minimum/living wage). Progs are very very dangerous and represent a serious threat to our liberties and country. They need to be defeated.
Any site that calls Dennis Prager a comedian is signalling that it is safely ignored. Ignorance of pop culture is no excuse in the day of Google.
Lefties just can’t afford for the truth to get out but it is anyway. Keep digging lefties and we will add to the 1,100 seats that have been lost to Democrats on your hero Odumbo’s watch.
“Safe space” is a concoction intent on getting an institution (university / government) to provide SOME ideologies with a place where they can enforce opinions to the exclusion of others.
To say that criticizing this infantilism is an assault on free speech is to support a silencing of free speech and free thought. The giveaway to who the silencing paranoiacs is, is the shame terminology of calling them “angry uncles”, “transphobes”, etc.
Looking forward to this!