Review of No Safe Spaces (2019) by Sinuousgrace — 11 Dec 2019

I thought this was a decent entry in the growing list of documentaries about Western values such as free speech. There were similarities between this and “Fight of Our lives: Defeating the Ideological War Against the West” (available on Prime).

It meandered a bit in the beginning, kind of wading into its main thrust rather than viscerally grabbing the audience by the ears. There wasn't a critical urgency about what is really happening until about midway through the film, but it did well once hitting this stride.

Many of the people I listen to and/or read were featured, such as Greg Lukianoff, Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Heather Heying, Bret Weinstein, Sheryl Attkisson, Lindsay Shepherd, and others.

I would have liked to hear from more, such as James D'Amore (who is only briefly mentioned), Tim Pool, Andy Ngo, Bridget Phetasy, Joe Rogan, James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, or Jonathan Haidt, just to name a few.

It was very North American-centric, so luminaries such as Douglas Murray, Niall Ferguson, or Carl Benjamin (Sargon) were also omitted (although Mark Steyn appears in a clip from a television interview).

There are many aspects of the "Culture War" to be concerned about, and this film chose freedom of speech and expression on the campuses of American and Canadian universities, the majority of which are in various stages of becoming decidedly dogmatic and openly hostile to opinions that dissent from the rigid Altar of Wokeness, as its prime focus.

As somebody who has been reading, listening, studying, and talking about this for half a decade, there were exactly zero surprises in the content of this film for me. I'm intimately familiar with it all, and could expound upon each event chronicled in the film in great detail.

For example, 6 or 8 minutes are spent on the Evergreen State College debacle; for those who want to dive deeper, Mike Nayna and Benjamin Boyce have both produced hours-long multi-part documentaries on just this occurrence.

So, for anyone who is already keyed in to what has been going on, don't expect many new ideas or novel approaches or news you didn't know about from this film. Despite not learning a lot that was new, and having some areas I would have done differently or expanded on, I think this was a decently-packaged documentary that I was glad to support, and for those who aren't hyper-aware of all of this already it should serve as a well-balanced exploration of what is a worrisome and consequential trend.