Briana Whatley is a high school student in Florida who loves speech and debate. She writes…
I love politics, but conversations about politics regularly include name-calling, shaming, and vitriol. That’s why I signed up to be on my high school’s debate team and join the National Speech and Debate Association. I wanted to converse respectfully with my peers about important domestic and international topics.
Unfortunately, high school debate is not what I thought it would be.
At the NSDA National Qualifier debate tournament in March, my judge warned me not to mention former President Donald Trump in a debate on President Joe Biden’s foreign policy record. The judge said that mentioning Trump was “inappropriate.” I was baffled. I had planned to argue that Biden’s foreign policy had fallen short in comparison to the previous administration — a perfectly valid approach, yet one I was not allowed to use, according to the judge. Put simply, I had to conform to her ideology if I wanted a chance to win.
Of course, my argument wasn’t “inappropriate.” It was based on facts and evidence: Trump’s presidency was enormously consequential, and Biden’s has paled in comparison. Trump convinced NATOFr members to increase their contributions, he was the first president in a generation not to start a new war, and perhaps most notably, he brokered the Abraham Accords. Those agreements established diplomatic recognition between various Muslim-majority states and Israel. I wasn’t allowed to say any of that. My preparation and research had gone to waste. I was censored and I lost.
Go here, scroll down and watch Briana’s moving, articulate video.
Briana Whatley is part of James Fishback’s investigative report on debate in American high schools or the lack thereof. He writes at Bari Weiss’ The Free Press:
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.
The young students are upstream from even college students and they are being softened up for the serious brainwashing once they enter a university. This has to be stopped and stopped forever. It is straight-up Marxist dogma.
Zachary Reshovsky is one of these judges. His paradigm tells students, “I will consider indictments of an opponent on the basis that they have done [or] said something racist, gendered, [or] -phobic in their personal behavior. The indictment, however, needs to be clearly documented (e.g. a screen shotted Facebook post, an accusation with references to multiple witnesses who can corroborate the incident) and the offending violation/action needs to fall into the category of commonly understood violations of norms of basic decency surrounding race/gender. . . ”
He continues by stating that “microaggressions will be considered” even if “they are more difficult to prove/document.”
What defines a microaggression? The answer is broad. The University of Minnesota offers a two-page sheet listing scores of examples, including the phrases “America is a melting pot,” “There is only one race, the human race,” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”
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