The End of High School Debate (as We Know it)

Today's censorious debate judges are powerful mandarins. These Young Foucaultians use the debate room as a no-escape panopticon in which to "discipline and punish" political wrong-speech.

A jeremiad by champion debater turned urban debate coach James Fishback caught the debate world’s attention this week. Its headline alone speaks to the core problem in the nation writ large: At High School Debates, Debate Is No Longer Allowed.

Fishback’s courageous piece alerted me that my feature documentary Crotty’s Kids––about my speech and debate coach tenure at the pioneering Eagle Academy for Young Men in the South Bronx––needs a little more unpacking. 

You see, the unspoken takeaway from my 2003-2009 coaching odyssey––first at New York’s elite Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, and then Eagle––was that the only reliable support for an ambitious urban debate program was the Soros-funded Urban Debate League (UDL). The UDL hosted the tournaments, summer camps, mid-year refreshers, young hip coaches, travel, judging and food, and pre-bought “evidence.” I fiercely believed that my Eagle debaters did not need the “help” of the Marxist separatist UDL. Crotty’s Kids could beat any team from any district. But due to a lack of funds to pay assistant coaches and judges, let alone a robust alumni network to foot the bill, I caved.

In the Faustian exchange for the UDL’s precious resources, I had to shut up and watch as progressive UDL judges and coaches indoctrinated my bright, fun, and engaging young charges on how to deconstruct America, its “white supremacist” founding, and its “hegemonic” and “imperialist” expansion––with requisite quotes from Derrida, Foucault, and Zizek.  The prime feature, or bug, of their pedagogy, was the all-encompassing “kritik,” which by design short-circuited discussion of the granular policy resolution at hand and pushed debaters into fascinating but rarefied ontological debates over whether resolution terms were inherently racist, sexist, or otherwise oppressive––with supporting quotes from the likes of “Queer Theorist” Judith Butler. Kritiks argued that competitive debate entrenched racist norms around logic, grit, reasoning, competition, and self-advancement at the expense of liberating “the oppressed.”  In the meta world of the UDL, evidence-based , policy-focused debate was no longer a refuge from an increasingly illiterate and ahistorical mass culture. Personal story now trumped facts. The subjective replaced the objective. Genuine debate had become the enemy.

The UDL taught my exclusively black and Hispanic debaters that they were victims and that the purpose of debate was to fight the white supremacist (read: capitalist) power structures within the debate round. Debate was Trotsky’s permanent revolution by other means. Words and tropes that justified the oppressor’s colonialist mindset must be deconstructed, fought, and excised.

As a free speech, free thought, global canon kind of guy (Northwestern undergrad, master’s from St. John’s College, “the great books school,” registered independent), I am open to all kinds of arguments. So, I tolerated some kritiks because they got my debaters reading challenging material from the likes of Gramsci, Heidegger, Marx, and Nietzsche, and because some kritiks were fun and imaginative. As Lincoln-Douglas debate’s focus on philosophy merged with policy debate’s and public forum debate’s focus on real-world issues, I naively figured we’d arrive at a happy Hegelian synthesis.

In the end, kritiks and esoteric discussions of topicality won out, and understanding of how the real world operated fell out of favor.  As a result, I felt we were no longer training debaters how to run the world, but how to destroy it.

It appears things have only gotten worse from there. The subsequent triumph of the judicial paradigm disclosure eviscerated by Fishback has transformed today’s debate judges into all-powerful mandarins. These Young Foucaultians use the debate room as a no-escape panopticon in which to “discipline and punish” a vulnerable young cohort into self-policing “wrong-speech.” To illustrate the point, Fishback quoted several judges’ “paradigms.” One from Lila Lavender, 2019 national debate champion, read in part: “Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. . .. I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I’m judging. . .. I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments. . .. Examples of arguments of this nature are as follows: fascism good, capitalism good, imperialist war good, neoliberalism good, defenses of US or otherwise bourgeois nationalism, Zionism or normalizing Israel, colonialism good, US white fascist policing good, etc.” 

The paradigm of censorious judge Shubham Gupta’s reads: “If you are discussing immigrants in a round and describe the person as ‘illegal,’ I will immediately stop the round, give you the loss with low speaks”—low speaker points— “give you a stern lecture, and then talk to your coach. . .. I will not have you making the debate space unsafe.” 

Debaters traditionally want to win by deploying cogent arguments rooted in empirically strong evidence. But they naturally adapt their arguments to the judge’s paradigm, however draconian, to “get the ballot.” As Fishback notes, if a judge declares in his “preferences”––seen online via Tabroom.com or disclosed in person before the start of a round––that an argument against the terrorist violence of BLM or affirmative action will cost you the ballot, you don’t make those arguments. If a judge says that any defense of Trump or Israel or Christian values or Republicans or the Western canon or capitalism will cost you, you don’t make those arguments either, damn the consequences for free speech. Trump, after all, is “Hitler” in today’s left-wing parlance, pro-life Christians are terrorists, and Israel is an apartheid state, so debaters are taught that any means can be used to silence such “fascists.”  

As I witnessed during my coaching foray, success in debate often determines entrance into America’s ruling elite. Today’s debate judges are now the advance revolutionary guard of gatekeepers working to overthrow the patriarchal, cis-gendered, capitalist world order. They coach debaters how to virtue signal their adoption of left-wing rhetorical tropes, to not only win the debate, but to secure entrance into progressive-dominated colleges and universities, think tanks, big tech corporations, nonprofits, political campaigns, the Administrative State, and elective office––admittance into which requires self-abnegating figurative and literal kneeling before the extortionate, unconstitutional Church of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (CDEI).  Students who engage in the requisite self-policing can expect favorable reviews from judges, coaches, and teachers when it comes to scholarships, recommendation letters, and other honors.

This partisan grooming has not only narrowed the range of allowable arguments but turned top debaters into cynics who mock America, its values, and customs. Some of the arrogant young white entitled kids I coached at one top NYC school wouldn’t even stand for the national anthem. This was long before such stunts became a de rigueur leftist trope.  

I touched upon this nihilistic moral decay in my documentary short Master Debaters. The nascent trend I identified has only grown apace. Per Fishback, debaters are now taught that genuinely free speech is reserved for persons of color, while whites are asked to performatively renounce their constitutional rights, er “privilege,” in the debate round.

Foreseeing this coming war on free speech and America back in 2008, and not wanting myself or “Crotty’s Kids” to be beholden to UDL groupthink, I tried to form my own debate league. But I was stymied in that attempt by the UDL and the public schools who were in bed together. The “soft bigotry of low expectations” won, and eventually, despite its success, the Eagle speech and debate team faded into oblivion. Those who played the Soros-funded UDL grievance game advanced.

No surprise that one sees the left-wing tyrannical trends that started in my era of middle school, high school, and college debate coaching migrating into society at large.  Case in point: the 2016, 2018, and 2020 elections and the ensuing rioting and vandalism that accompanied the 2020 Summer of Insurrection and the Alinsky-esque Spartacus Youth League win-at-all-costs Democratic approach to elections. “The Steele Dossier? The Russia-collusion coax? FISA court abuse? Meh, just part of the game.” The game learned in today’s debate rounds.

Case two: during my tenure on and off Capitol Hill from 2016-2022, I routinely saw policy discussions funneled through a divisive racialist lens, as microscopic distinctions of “identity” trumped what united us as one America. Words were now violence. Violence was now speech. Looting was reparations. Any white male staff member over 50 was the enemy unless you figured out a way to be sweet and cuddly before the spoiled entitled Millennial Lord of the Flies twenty-something tyrants who would collectively eviscerate any elder who corrected them, let alone failed to extol their greatness, specialness, and righteous demands for “work-life balance” at the expense of getting the job done with rigor and excellence.

As a Nebraska state debate champion and two-time qualifier for high school debate nationals, I still believe that what happens in a debate room is a microcosm of what will happen in society and government.  So, if we don’t like the values we see in our streets, government, and corporations, then we need to start reforming middle school and high school debate.

To halt the trend towards censorious tyranny writ large, we need to return policy and public forum debate to first principles: self-driven primary source research, strong evidence-based claims, a granular understanding of public policy and the resolution at hand, deep clash, genuine persuasion, and concision. We need a reverse shot clock, mandating slower speaking speeds that a regular human can grasp, while no longer privileging self-appointed high priests of dehumanizing high-speed “spreading.” We need to open the debate world up again so that the values of the glory years of high school debate, the 1960s and 1970s, can reinvigorate a republic that sorely needs it.