Author and radio show host Dennis Prager has been doing interviews for the upcoming national release of the documentary No Safe Spaces [1] that he produced with Adam Corolla.
Prager recently visited Martha MacCallum for a chat about the film where he discussed his concerns about the threat to free speech in this country today that starts with what young people are taught. As he remarked, “The university has substituted indoctrination for education.”
The Left fears unrestricted speech from conservatives and moderates, so it has trained a victim class of overly sensitive liberal young people by posing any disagreement as an attack on their superior values and probably racist in some way.
Unfortunately the demand for politically correct speech doesn’t stop at the campus; instead the silly and distracting rules of the left have permeated our society up and down.
The Fox News segment begins with part of the movie trailer, then gets to the interview at around 1:35 in the video following:
MARTHA MacCALLUM: Dennis Prager joins me now. Radio host of the Dennis Prager Show. Dennis, great to see you. Thank you for being on tonight.
DENNIS PRAGER: Great to be with you. Thank you.
MacCALLUM: So, I mean, just watching that trailer. And I watched, you know, pieces of the film today. It is so disturbing that we’ve gotten to a point where you can’t have these discussions on college campuses, which is exactly the place that you should be having them. When Art Laffer gets shut down — you know, the designer of the Laffer curve and the Reagan economy — you just have to wonder, what is so deeply upsetting and controversial about Art Laffer?
PRAGER: What’s deeply upsetting is that the man is not on the Left. That is all it takes. It’s unprecedented in American history that there is a such a large percentage of young people — or, of that matter, old people — who believe the First Amendment needs to be changed. And those are the polls. About 50 percent of millennials believe that the First Amendment should be modified to ban hate speech. But of course, the whole point of free speech is that what you consider hate speech is irrelevant. What I consider hate speech is irrelevant.
When I was a kid, Nazis — real Nazis — what I mean “real” is not people who were called Nazi by the Left because they don’t agree with them. I’ve been called “Nazi,” and I’ve devoted my life to Judaism and to the Jewish people, and write a Torah commentary, and built a synagogue. And I’ve been called a Nazi. Google has an email that declares Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and Prager U — my website, Prager University — Nazis.
But real Nazis wanted to march in Skokie, Illinois, where there were Holocaust survivors, because they’re such cruel human beings, these Nazis. Jewish groups and liberal groups all said, “Of course. In America, even real Nazis can march in a Jewish neighborhood.” That’s America.
It’s changed, and that’s the first time in American history that this is the case. And it started at the university. That’s what this film is about.
MacCALLUM: You say that it’s dangerous to send your kids to American universities.
PRAGER: That it’s what to send your kid to university?
MacCALLUM: That it’s dangerous.
PRAGER: What was the word? Oh, “dangerous.” Well, I have a very good motto on this. Sending your child to college is playing Russian roulette with their values. And I mean it. I’m not happy about it. I love the life of the mind.
I went to Columbia. I love intellectual work. I read and I write. But the university has substituted indoctrination for education.
MacCALLUM: What do you think — you know, we talk about triggers a lot, right? Triggers that send people into safe spaces. But what do you think triggered this? You know, when you try to sort of trace back the anthropology of how we got here, where do you think it begins?
PRAGER: Well, my theory is that there is a huge distinction — a gulf — between liberal and left. Liberals and conservatives agree on far more than liberals and leftists do. But liberals don’t want to acknowledge this because they’re afraid to. But this emanates from the Left. The Left, from Lenin to the present-day university anywhere on earth has never countenanced free speech. So, wherever it gains power — and there’s nowhere it has more power than at the university — it suppresses free speech because it can’t deal with free speech. We might actually prevail if we’re allowed to speak.
MacCALLUM: Yeah. I mean, if you — you know, if you are — if you feel strongly enough about your arguments, you should never be afraid to have someone present the other side because you shouldn’t worry that they’re going to able to poke holes in it because you feel so strongly about what you believe.
I want to ask you about something that happened today. Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito wrote an opinion that he was defending — National Review went after a climate scientist named Michael Mann for his hockey stick theory. And National Review said, essentially, that the methodology that he used was debunked, in their opinion, in their analysis. And they tried to get that overturned, and the Supreme Court said they’re not going to hear that case. And Alito wrote a very passionate defense of freedom of speech on this. What are your thoughts on that?
PRAGER: It’s depressing to think that, if this did go to the Supreme Court, it wouldn’t be 9-0, as I said I have no issue — I mean, obviously, I don’t agree on everything liberals believe, but they’re my allies. And liberals need to understand, we are your allies on free speech. That’s why there are so many liberals in our documentary because this is a unity between us. This is a very serious thing that is happening. If so many young people think, “Oh, well, what I think is hate speech, that should be banned” — 2,000 demonstrators against Ann Coulter speaking at Berkeley last week? I mean, my God. They can have the furthest radical leftist show up and we don’t do that.
MacCALLUM: Yeah. Dennis Prager. “No Safe Spaces” is the film. I recommend everybody watch it. Thank you very much.
PRAGER: December 6th, goes national. Nosafespaces.com [3].