“Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist,” confesses someone now judging high school debates.
Her name is Lila Lavender, and she won the 2019 national high school debate championship. But now she has Authority.
“I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I’m judging.”
Start of a resignation letter?
Not on your life. Ms. Red — excuse me, Ms. Lavender added, “I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments.”
She exalts totalitarianism, instead, and the deaths of over one hundred million people and counting. And feels quite comfortable doing so … in this terrible, evil country … in which somehow she judges debate.
She’s not exactly an aberration. High school debate has regressed “from a competition that rewards evidence and reasoning,” champion debater and coach James Fishbeck writes in The Free Press,“to one that punishes students for what they say and how they say it.”
He points to a listing of judges run by the National Speech & Debate Association (NSDA), where many judges on their individual but public webpages acknowledge deciding winners and losers according to their own personal politics.
“A black student I coached,” he recalls, “was told by the debate judge that he would have won his round, if he hadn’t condemned Black Lives Matter.”
One judge posted instructions that “if you are white, don’t run arguments with impacts that primarily affect POC [people of color]. These arguments should belong to the communities they affect.”
Another judge said “Referring to immigrants as ‘illegals’” would automatically lose one the debate.
While the NSDA insists that “Judges should decide the round as it is debated, not based on their personal beliefs,” Fishbeck complains they do nothing about judges who publicize their punishment of students on a political basis.
But James Fishbeck did something. He formed a new debate league, Incubate Debate, which this year has already hosted 18 debate tournaments.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with PicFinder.ai and DALL-E2
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4 replies on “Destroying (& Saving) Debate”
The political left moves in a grand termite conspiracy to capture each and every institution that it might. So I wonder how (if at all) Incubate Debate will not itself become yet another such institution. In-so-far as institutional charters are often ignored, we know that they can be ignored. If non-leftists simply decamp and construct new institutions, then they repeatedly invest in infrastructure that will later be taken from them.
Then what are non-leftists supposed to do? Just go home? Maybe the institutions like Incubate Debate will eventually be taken from them, but the fight must go on. Those judges (or referees?) who have boasted that they judge debaters based on their positions should be disqualified and removed. If NSDA won’t do that then those who want honest debates need to go elsewhere.
Pat,
If we keep doing what we’ve been doing, then we’ll keep getting what we’ve been getting.
The appropriate response to that point is not to pretend that anyone who speaks that truth has called for surrender, but to get allies to recognize the problem so that one or more of them might help to solve it, to try yourself to develop a better approach, and if you feel successful then to argue for it.
A good start, now what about true schools of the parents choice.