If, like me, you’re an absolutist about the right to free speech, not just the legal letter of it but the stubborn spirit of it (as in: bring on the people I hate the most and let them speak, speak…
“Cancel culture,” a phrase that’s been applied mostly to the post–#MeToo world of mass entertainment, is part of what these controversies are about: students using, and feeling, their power to dictate who can be allowed in the public square. We see footage of the protest against Milo Yiannopoulos’ Feb. 1, 2017, appearance at Berkeley, when a thousand students gathered in a force that turned violent . They succeeded in cancelling his speech.
I think Milo Yiannopoulos is despicable, but when the Berkeley imbroglio went down, I flashed back to my own college days, and my honest-to-God feeling is that if I had been a 20-year-old student, I would have crawled across that broken glass to see Milo Yiannopoulos speak. Why? Because in 2017, as a 32-year-old editor at Breitbart News, he represented an aspect of the consciousness that elected Donald Trump president.
“No Safe Spaces” makes the case for why it’s actually healthy, if not essential, to be exposed to ideas you disagree with and even violently don’t like; it toughens the muscles, preparing you for the rigors of the world. Directed with engrossing multimedia verve by Justin Folk, the film mixes in witty satirical cartoons, like a superhero parody called “Social Justice Warriors,” and it mounts a compelling argument against the self-perpetuating psychology of victim culture.
But anyone who watches “Real Time With Bill Maher” has heard all this before. The most head-turning point made by “No Safe Spaces” is that today’s anti-free-speech radicals, who on many college campuses dominate the discourse, are going to be tomorrow’s leaders. The university has, in a sense, been a Petri dish for the winnowing down of the First Amendment. Unless this idea is fought against, it’s likely to spread far beyond the cloister of academia.
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