Wokeness is literally the end of real debate

Ed had this story in the headlines but I wanted to highlight it because it really confirms and idea I’ve been referencing for a long time: The woke don’t want to debate you, they want to dominate you and they demand that you comply.

Credit to James Lindsay who wrote about this back in 2020. But even before that I’d seen this aspect of the woke movement in operation. It was one of the noteworthy aspects of the 2017 takeover of Evergreen State College. The students were not shy about telling people who could speak and who could not. And even before that there were aspects of the Occupy movement in 2011 that were clearly aimed at demanding compliance rather than at persuasion. Here’s what I wrote about this back in 2017:

Going back to the Occupy movement, one of the popular chants was “Whose streets? Our streets!” Today that has been replaced with “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA” and of course “Shut it down.” In both cases, the goal is dominance and exclusion.

In August I wrote about a professor at Evergreen State College who, in the midst of the student takeover there, had students surround her and demand to know where she was going. When she tried to talk to them, they refused to engage in a conversation. “The only thing which they would accept was my obedience,” she later wrote of the experience. At the same exact time, white students were being told they were not allowed to speak at a student meeting in the campus library because they were white. Again, the goals are dominance and exclusion.

I even broke it down into a series of steps.

1. Demand for dominance/compliance (because of lack of safety/perceived threat).
2. Dominance exercised through the exclusion of perceived threat.
3. Non-compliance/questions trigger accusations, i.e. racism, sexism, etc. (the booby-trap).
4. Accusations become proof of lack of safety/threat.
5. Return to step 1 and repeat.

Today the Free Press published part two of a series about high school debate clubs. Like so many other aspects of our education system these clubs have been infiltrated by wokeness. It’s literally the end of debate in many cases.

Once upon a time, the National Speech & Debate Association, or NSDA, was the country’s premier debating organization, touching the lives of two million high school students across its nearly hundred-year history. Its famous alumni include Oprah Winfrey, and Supreme Court justices Neil Gorsuch and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The NSDA, formerly known as the National Forensics League, currently has 140,000 young debaters on its roster—but now, rather than teaching them to debate, it is teaching them to self-censor and conform their arguments to a new politically correct standard.

The NSDA has allowed hundreds of judges with explicit left-wing bias to infiltrate the organization. These judges proudly display their ideological leanings in statements—or “paradigms”—on a public database maintained by the NSDA called Tabroom, where they declare that debaters who argue in favor of capitalism, or Israel, or the police, will lose the rounds they’re judging.

That link above goes to a description for a trans judge named Lila Lavender who explains:

Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. I have realized as a result of this, I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when i’m judging – as thats both impossible and opportunism. If you have had me as a judge before, this explicit decision of mine does not change how you understand I evaluate rounds, with one specific exception: I will no longer evaluate and thus ever vote for rightest capitalistimperialist positions/arguments. Meaning, arguments/positions which defend the bourgeoisie’s class dictatorship (monopoly capitalism and thus imperialism), from a right-wing political form. I.e., the politics, ideology, and practice of the right-wing of the bourgeoisie.

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.

So the judges for these debates are now running the woke playbook. Anyone who wants to claim their opponent represents a threat to the safety of others can do so and may be able to score a win on that basis even while sidestepping the actual debate topic. For instance, in a championship tournament Matthew Adelstein was debating in favor of the federal government controlling water resources.

In his final round of the two-day tournament, Matthew was shocked to hear the opposing team levy a personal attack against him as their central argument. The opposing team argued: “This debate is more than just about the debate—it’s about protecting the individuals in the community from people who proliferate hatred and make this community unsafe.”

Then they pulled up a screenshot of a tweet from earlier that month, which Matthew had responded to.

The tweet read: “Name one thing that you, personally, feel is morally disgusting, but that you think, rationally, should be legal and accepted by society.” Matthew had replied: “Calling people racial or homophobic slurs.”

What Adelstein said in the tweet is a pretty basic free speech ideal, i.e. I disagree with you’re saying but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it. And yet, the judge in that case handed his opponents the win. The judge explained, “A debate space where racist or violent people are not allowed is preferable to one where they are.”

Naturally, one of the hot topics for these judges is trans issues. They literally warn debaters that debating these issues will lead to a loss.

At NSDA nationals, there were at least two dozen judges who warned students against “transphobia” in their paradigms. These ambiguous warnings instill fear in students about the arguments they can’t make. This fear drives self-censorship and eliminates certain viewpoints that need to be heard.

So the inevitable outcome of this is self-censorship by competitors. Just by leveling the threat, the judges have forced compliance on their particular issues. No actual debate will be allowed.

Fox News did a segment with the author of this series last month.

Where are all our free speech people?

At High School Debates, Debate Is No Longer Allowed

“At national tournaments, judges are making their stances clear: students who argue ‘capitalism can reduce poverty’ or ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’ will lose—no questions asked.”… pic.twitter.com/Khk1lLCUXs

— Moms for Liberty (@Moms4Liberty) May 28, 2023