Conservative columnist Dennis Prager and media personality Adam Carolla are making a movie to expose the grievance culture, illiberal attitude toward free speech and “safe spaces” that have undermined the intellectual foundations of universities.
Set to be released in mid-2018, “No Safe Spaces” will follow the unlikely duo to colleges across the country, where they will interview students, professors, pundits and those personally affected by the illiberalism running rampant in academia to get to the heart of what ails U.S. campuses.
Mr. Prager, the nationally syndicated radio host of “The Dennis Prager Show,” said the purpose of the feature-length film is to document the “decline of the university as an intellectually serious place.”
“The infantilization of students is seemingly their goal,” Mr. Prager told The Washington Times. “With safe spaces, students can retreat to Play-Doh, stuffed animals and movies of frolicking kittens if something disturbs them at the campus intellectually.”
He said the film is “very needed, because only a small part of America knows what’s really going on.”
Mr. Carolla, a comedian who hosts the popular “The Adam Carolla Show” podcast, and Mr. Prager already have spoken together at several campuses — including at California State University, Northridge last year, where they initially had been disinvited before getting their lawyers involved.
They plan to screen the movie on a tour through America’s universities upon its release.
An Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign launched to finance the project has raised more than $200,000 in less than two weeks.
The film also will highlight the drastically different backgrounds that Mr. Prager and Mr. Carolla have come from to arrive at their similar worldviews.
“We’re very much kindred spirits, even though our backgrounds are almost different planets,” Mr. Prager said. “I come from a religious, Jewish family from New York, and he comes from an atheist, Italian family from Southern California. He was a laborer; I was always in the intellectual world.”
What the comedian and the intellectual have in common is “common sense,” Mr. Prager said — and that’s exactly what academia lacks.
“There’s no common sense on our campuses,” he said. “When I was a student, we were told that men and women are basically the same. That’s anti-common sense. The person who says that has an ideology that trumps reality. To me, that’s the definition of leftism: ideology trumping reality.”
Conservatives venturing to speak on college campuses have received mixed receptions from their student interlocutors. Earlier this year, the prospect of a lecture by former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos caused students at the University of California, Berkeley to riot and set the campus on fire.
Mr. Prager said he wants to bring the film directly to students in order to “change minds.”
“That’s my intent,” he said. “I shock the guys, these students on the left, because they have been told conservatives are less intelligent than they, less intellectual than they, less moral than they, and then I show up and am apparently not less intellectual or less moral. And, even, perish the thought, nice. So I love going to college campuses, but I have a very different aim than some.”
’No Safe Spaces’: Carolla, Prager take on coddled students in new film
• Bradford Richardson can be reached at brichardson@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.