The Death of Debate—and a Reason for Hope

I had been working on a documentary about the crisis in American debate for two years when the shot rang out in Utah. In the middle of an interview for this project—talking about free speech, persuasion, and how our culture is losing the ability to disagree—Charlie Kirk was murdered during a campus event at Utah Valley University. I recall staring at my laptop screen in total disbelief, as footage circulated on social media of students fleeing, Charlie being carried away, and an endless loop of the bloody closeup most of us wish we could unsee.

For a moment, everything we’d been investigating suddenly came into full focus. What had started as a project about high school debate and intellectual decay was now tragically immediate. It couldn’t wait. Blood had been spilled.

Charlie Kirk wasn’t a politician. He had certainly had major influence, but he had zero authority over anyone. He wasn’t wielding power—he was wielding arguments. He stood in a public space, doing something as old as Western civilization itself, and tried to persuade people with words rather than force. And yet his killing was treated by millions of people online and some in the media not as a pure tragedy, but as some kind of justice, because Charlie’s speech hurt some people’s feelings.

The core question of this entire project crystallized:

How did America reach a point where peaceful debate can lead to deadly violence that’s then openly celebrated?

Finding that answer meant going back in time, not to 2024 or 2016, not even to the birth of social media. It meant going back thousands of years to the origins of debate itself.

How Debate Built the West

If you want to understand what’s happening in America today—why people fear ideas, why institutions stifle dissent, why disagreement feels dangerous—you have to start in ancient Greece.

Debate doesn’t appear out of nowhere. It’s not a product of nature as we understand it. It was invented, cultivated, and refined as a stunningly ambitious experiment: the idea that truth could emerge from argument rather than authority. If you think of the ancient world long enough, “might makes right” will likely come to mind.

Two rival traditions helped shape this experiment.

First was that of the Sophists—traveling orators and teachers who taught rhetoric as a competitive sport. For them, the goal wasn’t truth; it was victory. Persuasion was a performance, a skill, a way to make even a weak argument appear strong. They were the original spin doctors. If they existed today, they’d be running comms shops in D.C., practicing as defense attorneys, or coaching the next TikTok influencers. It was about swordplay with words and being the last one standing.

The second tradition belonged to Socrates, who regarded argument as a means of unveiling reality. His dialogues, recorded by Plato, were less about scoring points and more about questioning assumptions until knowledge emerged. Socrates believed speech was a tool for excavating truth. You dig and dig and dig.

For that, Socrates was executed. His death sentence was handed down officially for “corrupting the youth.” He had challenged the moral consensus of his time and paid for it with his life.

Plato later captured this dynamic in his famous Allegory of the Cave, where the person who sees reality clearly and tries to share it becomes the enemy of those who prefer comforting illusions. It’s not hard to see the modern parallels. When a society confuses consensus with truth, dissent looks awfully dangerous.

Debate traveled quickly from Athens to Rome, then later into the Enlightenment. The American Founding was built on it. John Adams, while defending British soldiers after the Boston Massacre, told the jury that “facts are stubborn things”—a statement of faith that truth should outrank tribal loyalty.

The Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers, public letters debating the Constitution, were a public argument about the future shape of the American nation. Debate didn’t just accompany American democracy. It built it. The systems we live in were built from scratch, not imposed by a benevolent ruler. We easily forget how radical that is, even today.

Political debate has never been gentle—our Founders were far more vicious than most people remember. Some of the things they said about one another in the published essays and open letters are jaw-dropping.

However, they still obeyed a basic assumption: free people must be free to argue, even fiercely, about what is true and what is best. That assumption held through the 1858 Lincoln–Douglas debates and into the televised presidential debates of the modern era.

But something changed in the last twenty years…

Researchers analyzing presidential debates have found steep declines in civility (listening and the willingness to engage an opponent’s argument). Identity is sacred to people, and when politics became a wellspring of identity, things got scary. Sacred things cannot be challenged.

By the time President Biden imploded on stage in the 2024 debate—arguably the most consequential televised debate in American history—the country was witnessing not just a political disaster, but rather the collapse of a civic tradition.

That moment was the culmination of a multi-decade decline, not just in politics, but throughout our media and educational institutions.

The Ideology That Kills Debate

The phrase that haunts this story I’m telling is one I kept hearing online and in the news: “speech is violence.” Surely you’ve heard it too.

This is a simple and destructive idea, a worldview born from critical theory, grievance studies, and postmodern thought that reject objectivity altogether. This “intellectual” movement undermines our basic understanding of reality itself and treats language as a tool of oppression.

If speech can harm like violence, then silencing someone becomes an act of protection. If certain identities must be shielded from discomfort, then entire categories of argument must be outlawed. The logic makes perfect sense once you accept the absurd premise that “speech is violence.” Censorship becomes a moral responsibility.

By boxing out certain forms of intellectual inquiry, this environment tends to breed increasingly strange—and untrue—ideas. That’s bound to happen when disagreement is off the table.

We’ve seen where this leads.

Consider the “Grievance Studies Affair,” when James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose successfully concocted and submitted totally fake academic papers about “fat bodybuilding,” “the conceptual penis,” and other such ridiculous topics. Supposedly “respected” academic journals accepted and published their work because their claims confirmed ideological orthodoxy, even though their “research” was a work of satire.

We saw it at Evergreen State College, where students mobbed professor Bret Weinstein for objecting to de facto racial segregation, shouting him down while administrators hid from the students. For a whole week, Evergreen experienced a brief cultural revolution in which the administration was effectively overthrown.

This is what played out during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The Red Guard punished millions for challenging the revolutionary consensus. Students beat their teachers. Kids reported their parents to the police. Old academics were most likely to die at the hands of the youth-led mob because they would not accept the new orthodoxy. This is a good example of what it looked like.

The pattern is always the same…

Righteous certainty → Suppression of dissent → Moral justification for force.

So, the question for me is… If this ideology is overtaking universities, what is it doing to the high school debate leagues that train our future leaders?

The answer arrived in the form of an article in The Free Press…

The State of Debate

In 2023, James Fishback, himself a former debater, published an article claiming that the National Speech & Debate Association (NSDA), the country’s largest high school debate organization, had been captured by far-left ideology. Judges were declaring they would not vote for arguments supporting capitalism, Israel, policing, or other “problematic” positions.

When I interviewed James, he described how one of his students lost a round for criticizing BLM, even though everyone but the judge agreed that he had won the debate. It shouldn’t matter, but, just to add to the absurdity, that student also happened to be black. Another student was told, “Better luck next time, Trumpy,” on a judge’s written ballot for the crime of… defending federalism.

Students were learning that certain arguments were off-limits, not because they were weak, but because they were unacceptable. To train students to defend ideas that leftists dislike would be to cause “harm.”

I wanted to know if it was true.

Fishback runs a rival league, Incubate Debate, so I approached his claims with skepticism. He had motives, and I knew how dangerous confirmation bias could be, especially when the story aligned with concerns I already had.

Still, the allegations were too serious to ignore.

When my team requested access to the NSDA National Tournament in Des Moines, Iowa, our media credential request was denied. They refused to speak with us on camera. Their reasoning was vague, but the meaning was clear: we were not welcome.

So we did what we could from a distance. We interviewed students and coaches outside the event in Des Moines and reviewed hundreds of Judge Paradigms (documents in which volunteer judges state how they will evaluate arguments) posted on Tabroom.com, a website run by the NSDA to manage tournaments. What we found was startling.

Many paradigms were standard and fair, but far too many followed a different pattern:

• “I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightist capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments.”

• “Disclosure theory is fine EXCEPT when you are debating a black person or you are one.”

• “Arguments that are racist, sexist, transphobic, homophobic, etc. will not be tolerated.”

• “If your argument needs a trigger warning, either ask before the round STARTS or don’t read it.”

These are, sadly, not fringe examples cherry-picked to make a point. Approximately a quarter of the paradigms we reviewed employed explicitly ideological language, typically associated with critical theory, DEI, or full-blown communism.

The impact on students was tangible.

One girl told us she could predict how judges would vote based purely on the political stickers on their laptops. She said that being nonpartisan was treated as conservative.

When we interviewed coaches, the picture got even worse.

Ben Dodds, a coach from Oregon who has been part of the debate world since he was thirteen, was open about the fact that left-wing arguments succeed more often in debates, and gave a revealing explanation as to why that is:

“I think that [left-leaning] arguments are winning because they’re probably closer to right a lot of the time, not political right… correct.... Research wins.”

He didn’t say this triumphally like some partisan activist, but he did betray the biases baked into his worldview. Debate leans left because academia leans left, and debate is academia’s minor league—a perfect feedback loop. To quote the classic Stephen Colbert line, “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

Adam Jacobi, a board member of the NSDA, spoke thoughtfully about empathy, identity, and creating an inclusive environment for students. However, when the discussion turned to debates concerning gender identity, he acknowledged that certain issues are generally off the table:

“We tend to avoid directly addressing trans issues in debate because it forces the opposition to that to tell trans people they shouldn’t have rights…. And that’s going to hurt me with the judge ultimately, right? So that becomes a very difficult position to uphold.”

There are a couple of implications here. First, he’s collapsing the debates around gender identity to a matter of opposing “trans rights,” a phrase that itself is hotly contested by large portions of the American public. “Rights” to do what? The answer may be clear to Adam, but not to me. Second, he’s saying that entire categories of political disagreement are effectively unjudgeable—because the ideology of the adults overrides the purpose of the activity.

And then there was Chris Dickson, a straight-talking coach from East Texas who pulled no punches.

“A conservative kid can win—if they pretend they’re a liberal.”

Chris wasn’t being dramatic; he was describing the incentives as he had learned them. From his vantage point, debate had become a filter that favored one ideology and excluded another. Whether or not every judge is conscious of it or willing to admit it, his students are perfectly aware of which arguments, sources, and positions guarantee a loss.

Not every coach shared Chris’s frustration.

Not every judge paradigm was extreme.

Not every student felt the bias directly.

But over the course of our interviews, a pattern emerged:

Students were learning that certain ideas—the beliefs of tens of millions of Americans—were unsafe to speak aloud. And that is the death of debate.

Why High School Debate Matters

This isn’t just about making sure that the debate club is a fun and competitive environment for gifted teenagers. High school debate tends to produce our future elite… One-third of Congress. Half of the Supreme Court. Countless lawyers, journalists, policymakers, and business leaders. Students who join debate clubs tend to gravitate toward high-influence roles in society.

If organized debate is training students to self-censor—if it rewards conformity disguised as compassion—then we are cultivating a generation of “leaders” who will be allergic to disagreement and will uphold the existing intellectual monoculture. The greatest danger isn’t just left-leaning bias or DEI language, but rather the psychological and moral framework that now undergirds so much of academic life:

• Speech is violence

• Disagreement is trauma

• Argument is oppression

When debate accepts these premises, it abandons its entire purpose.

Debate exists because people disagree. In fact, it’s our best alternative to violence.

Debate forces you to articulate the argument you fear, the argument you hate, the argument you have never considered—rather than put up blinders and ignore your opposition.

Debate trains humility.

Debate teaches courage.

Without these things, the whole democratic project breaks down. You can’t self-govern. When talking things out is off the table, authoritarianism becomes the only logical option.

You train a child to ask for candy at the store rather than to take it. You train a young adult to persuade rather than coerce.

By the time we left Iowa, it was clear to me that the NSDA would not formally address these concerns. Whether through ideology, inertia, or simple institutional self-protection, they had chosen not to engage with us on anything.

So here’s the question…

If the NSDA is failing to uphold the core values of debate, is anyone out there doing high school debate the right way?

There was only one way to find out.

What Comes Next?

James Fishback invited me to participate as a judge at his own league’s national championship. I had investigated his criticisms of the NSDA and found that they held up to scrutiny, but accurately pointing out flaws doesn’t necessarily mean you have solutions. Maybe he was building a rival institution on sand.

After everything we saw in Des Moines—the ideologically-motivated judges, the self-censorship, the narrow Overton window inside the country’s most influential debate league—it was clear to me that a viable alternative was sorely needed.

If the NSDA represents the death of debate, what does debate look like when it’s alive?

To find out what I learned judging the 2024 Incubate Debate National Championship, watch the final episode of The Death of Debate right here.