I attended a screening of the documentary No Safe Spaces at the Lincoln Square Cinemark last week that was sponsored by the Discovery Institute and Washington Policy Center. The documentary primarily focuses on Adam Carolla and Dennis Prager. Carolla currently hosts the world’s most popular podcast, The Adam Carolla Show, and Prager is a longtime conservative talk show host who founded Prager University, one of the largest online hubs for conservative content.

The documentary is based on the protection of free speech, more specifically conservative free speech, on college campuses across the US. Without opposing opinions being freely shared, Carolla and Prager fear that academic environments will become echo chambers of leftist and progressive views. To demonstrate the issue, the documentary shows various instances of conservative views being rejected.

At UC Berkeley, Isabella Chow, an elected student senator, was pushed to resign after choosing to abstain from a vote on a bill that would have supported LGBTQ students on campus. She gave a short speech to explain her vote, which referenced ideals in the bill going against what she thought to be “good, right, and true.” Chow was immediately met with backlash from the student body who proceeded to call for her resignation. Chow did not resign and served her full term as a student senator. Another example of this comes from Wilfred Laurier University. Lindsay Shepherd, a self-described leftist teaching assistant, was reprimanded by a council of school administrators for showing a video to her students that depicted Jordan Peterson, a psychologist and professor from the University of Toronto, debating the validity of the identity of trans individuals. The problem with the video, according to the administration, was not the video itself, but the fact that Shepherd acted as a neutral party and treated both arguments as valid. The administrative council felt that Shepherd should have taught her students that Peterson’s argument was insensitive, harmful, and not to be copied. Shepherd responded by saying that all opinions should be open for debate on college campuses and the students should be able to form their own opinions on what is right and wrong.

While the ideological focus of the documentary is one sided, the overarching theme is sound. Having one’s entire life be a safe space with no conflicting opinions is harmful and should be avoided. No speaker, student, or teacher’s assistant should be silenced at a college campus for sharing a different way of doing things. Nowadays, in American politics, centrism is often treated by many as a bad thing when it should be celebrated. Having the ability to reasonably hear the opinions of the opposition is incredibly important and should be the basis of any democratic society.

Mark Parrish is a high school intern for WPC.