‘No Safe Spaces’ Is An Egregious, Tiresome White Male Tantrum (FILM REVIEW)

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I’ll readily admit, when I saw the words ‘Adam Carolla’ and ‘documentary’ in the same subject line, I jumped at the chance to see what kind of nonpartisan storytelling one could expect from the long-running poster boy for white male mediocrity. And boy, did it not disappoint.

As one might ascertain from the title, No Safe Spaces is a documentary in the loosest possible sense of the word, fabricating a moral and cultural crisis out of the issue of conservative speech not being allowed on certain college campuses. Spearheaded by Carolla with conservative Dennis Prager at his side, the two take turns mansplaining each and every pearl clutched between their pale, white knuckles.

What’s most telling about No Safe Spaces is how utterly predictable it is. I saw Carolla along with Dr. Drew during a live edition of Love Line back in ’97 or ’98, and for some godawful reason, Carolla’s story about going into the carpet cleaning business out of high school is burned into my brain. Naturally, that story comes up here, only this time as some kind of obliteration of his ‘supposed’ white privilege. Likewise, it’s peppered with South Park clips, cherry-picked C-SPAN footage, and devastating testimony from the likes of Jordan Peterson, Charlie Kirk, and Ben Shapiro. Yay.

Oh, there’s also some random anecdote about kids having to wear bike helmets, just in case you were worried you wouldn’t be able to hit all the squares on your ‘Old Man Yells At Cloud’ BINGO card.

As a documentary, No Safe Spaces fails spectacularly by not including any opposing viewpoint. It not only ignores it, but dismisses it entirely as tepid, unfound, and entirely unworthy of serious consideration. Or it manipulates its audience with stock footage of everyone from armed guards to Antifa with VERY DRAMATIC MUSIC. Alternately, it does manage to rope in a few talking points and some isolated anecdotes lobbed by liberals. While it tokenizes their political outlook, it shamelessly coopts their amiable opinions as a kind of ideological black friend.

Interestingly, the doc (again, using that term loosely) does point out that this apparently worrisome anti-conservative shift came about around 2015. What’s never explored, or even mentioned, is that this is the same year that Trump’s campaign (and later presidency) began its slow infection of the GOP on a whole, crystalizing the racism and xenophobia that’s woven into American society and thrusting it back to the forefront. Instead, opts for archived footage of professional hate-monger Ann Coulter hiding out in an airport as a means to gain some kind of sympathy.

Big swing and a miss, there.

Bafflingly, yet again predictably, for all the contemptuous disdain that’s lobbed on by this indulgent piece of shit, Carolla and Prager go out of their way to victimize themselves and their demographic’s outsized electorate influence at every possible turn. Never in this motherfucker’s 100-minute runtime do either Carolla or Prager seriously engage in any kind of opposing viewpoint. Instead, it sandtraps itself with talking heads that further entrenches their own infantile, self-aggrendizing, and laughably outdated outlook on the world.

No Safe Spaces is now playing in select theaters.