Content/trigger warnings can have a worthy purpose. As can so-called safe spaces. The issue is chiefly with the weaponization of these things to close down or pathologize opposing positions.
Giving people advance warning about emotionally difficult material is a decent thing to do and gives them the chance to absent themselves from or brace themselves for the conversation.
Safe spaces, though often infantilizing in practice, in principle could offer people a site of security to which they can retreat from conflict, enabling them to participate in debate without feeling like cornered animals. We all need safe spaces of some description.
Sadly, the point of safe spaces and trigger warnings more typically seems to be a weaponization of heightened sensitivity, which encourages performative victimhood and impotence and the unhealthy reordering of our public discourse around (escalating) weakness.
