When is a high school debate not a debate?
When a debater tries to argue a side that doesn’t favor the left.
That doesn’t sound much like a debate does it? And yet it’s come to that, as the Gramscian march continues unabated. I’ll let this high schooler describe what happened to her:
When I was in high school we had adebate proposition “The government should regulate the internet to ban porn.” Now you have to be able to argue both sides and at the tournament I ended up having to argue the negative but my opponent was a girl and the judge was a woman. My argument was simply the impossibility of doing so (this was the 90s) because how the internet is really just computers connected by phone lines and they can’t monitor every phone (again, 90s). My opponent in cross said the internet does NOT operate through phone lines. In my next speech I said something like “My opponent doesn’t even know how the internet works.” Female judge chewed me out and called me a misogenist. LOL. I bet she didn’t know it used phone lines either.
The Gramscian march (unabated, utterly destructive, and yet insufficiently opposed) has corrupted everything in our culture, nor is debate (in high school or college) a recent example; fifteen years ago, Nicholas Stix wrote a fascinating essay entitled “Towson University: ‘Great Debaters’ Mau-mau Liberal Judges”, still well worth reading.
Towson U. “Great Debaters” Mau Mau Liberal Judges
https://vdare.com/articles/towson-u-great-debaters-mau-mau-liberal-judges
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“Evidence and logic are just so /white/.”
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“Some of the cheating judges’ explanations as to why they voted as they did, amount to racial loyalty oaths.”
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“It is indicative of academia’s racial corruption that Cooper and Love were not disqualified the first time they tried their scam last summer, and told in no uncertain terms that if they ever tried it again, they would be barred from all future tournaments.
“How long until a Hispanic team demands that it be permitted to debate in Spanish?
“But white men must follow the rules.”
This is a symptom of something much larger. As I wrote back in January:
The cognitive methods that have made Western societies thrive are under assault. Such benign things as asking students to get the right answer and to show their work are denounced as racism. Debate and discussion have become difficult as disagreement is often perceived as a threat. In law, the adversary system itself is under attack as lawyers are pressured not to represent unpopular clients…something that has long been the case in totalitarian nations and in areas dominated by mobs and by lynch law.
A vital part of the toolkit that has driven progress–social progress as well as technological progress–has been the open discussion enabled by the spirit of free speech. This is under severe attack, not least on university campuses.
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/68434.html
We have been seeing a few stories about the leftist capture of high school debate. LI recently featured a piece about a debater whose opponents showed a tweet he made on social media on an unrelated matter, and won the round. All of this is another example of the Gramscian long march. Whatever this now is, it is not debate. It’s essentially cheerleading combined with trash talking. Shout your woke bona fides loudly and emphatically and attack your opponent as insufficiently woke.