For the last couple weeks, The Free Press (Bari Weiss’s Substack empire), has been stirring the Competitive Debate pot with a post by James Fishback on May 25th, which basically said that judges for these competitions are being openly hostile along poltical tribal (or even racial) lines, outright refusing to hear or consider conservative arguments.
The story was so large that they later hosted a subscriber-only zoom talk with the author (paywalled, not sure if it has a recording), and Ted Cruz dedicated his May 31st podcast episode to the topic:
As a result of competitive debate’s resurgent relevance, I think it’d be fun for BARPOD to cover re-tread all the old ground. The rough outline would be Spreading → Ryan Wash and 4chan → Michael Moreno and Jordan Memerson → Ted Cruz and Bari Weiss.
1) Spreading is the “speak literally as fast as you can” style that I think of when I imagine competitive debate, characterized with barely-intelligible sentences interrupted with frequent loud gasps.
Part of the appeal of having BARPOD cover this topic is that there’s a lot of lip-smacking noises for Katie to savor. The reason I think discussion should start there is to establish that “Debate” is a game being played, and therefore the rules get gamed by people trying to win. It’s not about who’s right or wrong, it’s about scoring points, and (as far as I understand), if you make 10 arguments at hyperspeed and your opponent can’t talk fast enough to squeeze in 10 rebuttals, you get free points just for talking faster. The way people play the game gets warped in a way that is divorced from either persuasion or from real-world accuracy, because it’s just a game being played to win, which is an important baseline assumption to have for the rest of the episode.
As far as I know, I think each spoken sentence is a fragmented version of a paragraph or so of argument, and it “counts” as if you said the full written argument, which is one hell of a trick. Would be big, if true.
Also, I’m sure people were mad as hell when their competitors started “spreading”, and there was probably old-school drama when people realized "I’ve gotta talk in this horrific, unseemly way, or else I just lose every round” and they didn’t like it. They probably didn’t like the gamification of debate, argued about it, threatened to leave and make their own debate system, and generally just hated the new meta, and I’ve never dug into this stuff deep enough to know if they posted mad online about it for future drama-divers to cite later on. I assume, however, that this was a divisive shift in the game of debate that did not fall along racial or political lines, so I want to know just how mad people were as a baseline.
2 Back around 2014, 4chan got into a furor over some debate footage, and here’s a pretty good clip of what more or less was getting spread around:
I’m sure you can imagine what 4chan had to say about this.
Anyway, a few years later, Radiolab does and episode on Ryan Wash and his historic run in this style to victory: https://www.radiolab.org/podcast/debatable
This radiolab episode is well done in my opinion, or least central to the surrounding drama. If nothing else, I encourage you to skim its transcript. If I recall correctly, it also talks about some other background drama about unifying two different tournament circuits into one, which might be important somehow.
/u/EmotionsAreGay said that this episode “was one of the first times I became aware of how this ‘woke’ (or whatever you want to call it) thing is affecting the real world. Which, interestingly, went on to destroy the podcast radiolab itself, which used to be a great show. The episode is really interesting in part because they take a particular side of the issue, but also report the facts well enough that you are able to draw your own conclusions. They also get into the whole spreading thing there. It’s honestly wild.” (edited).
The /r/Radiolab reddit community was up in arms about it. The main March 12, 2016 post about it had top comments like https://www.reddit.com/r/Radiolab/comments/4a5ucw/debatable/
Only episode to ever make me angry…
This was easily the worst episode.
It was a puff piece for people who entered into debating and refused to debate. They establish that there's a problem with the debate system, and then focus on people who instead of trying to fix it, try to burn it down. If you think that the answer to the question 'should the USA invest in alternative energy?' is I'm a Queer Black man, then you shouldn't be judging a debate.”
The contemporaneous “extra discussion” post about it was similarly upset, lead with https://www.reddit.com/r/Radiolab/comments/4a3k0f/extra_discussion_debatable/
I found everything about this episode insufferable. Fascinating, entertaining, eye-opening... yes. But insufferable all the same. There was this constant, low-level irritation throughout, like a fly that keeps landing around the table while you're trying to eat a good meal.
By the end, when it was announced that their "nemesis" from Northwestern had lost, I could not help but conclude that an injustice had taken place. How could any team have realistically defeated them?
They actively set out to collect minority labels like an SJW Pokemon collector, then argued that everything they did at debate meant nothing because some people are marginalized. By virtue of being the most visible minority group, they claimed wins by default.
This episode made me angry. Really angry.
Debate is essentially a game. Players agree to follow a series of rules. While those rules might not be written down, they are a contract that members agree to implicitly by taking part. Refusing to follow the rules isn't clever. You want to play calvinball by constantly redefining the rules of the game? Fine. The door is over there.
It's juvenile. It's fucking pigeon-chess.
A much more recent post about the episode has many basking on fond memories of hating the episode: https://www.reddit.com/r/Radiolab/comments/ujp82j/episode_discussion_debatable/
3 Michael Moreno causes a stir when he joins Ryan Wash’s debate team (Wash is now a professor, or lecturer or something), secretly records many of their meetings, and posts criticism of this style of debate (and Wash specifically) to YouTube. These criticisms catch the eye of Jordan Peterson, launching Moreno into the IDW circuit.
According to Moreno, Wash’s actions spurned a widespread shift in the national meta, and now everyone is doing Kritic-style. You can’t get away from it, every debate is now about out-oppressioning your opponents, and Moreno wants to RETVRN to logic. Calls the whole thing open sophistry.
I cover some of the events in detail in various reddit posts (re-posted on substack), but the most important things are that
Jordan Peterson gets sucked in, which is just plain funny.
Moreno wants Wash fired, but doesn’t see this as a violation of “academic freedom”
Another debater and former Wash student, Tommy, makes videos responding to Moreno, including one where he calls Moreno a little bitch boy.
Giant barrels of ink are spilled all over Reddit
Moreno eventually tries to organize a different debate circuit, undoing the unification that took place in Wash’s time.
4 Current Bari Weiss stuff. The main thrust of the article is that judges now refuse to hear or accept conservative arguments or sources, and that some judges won’t accept certain arguments based on the speaker’s skin color, and that they’re open and explicit about it.
I have no idea what happened to Moreno’s “other debate circuit”, but whenever this stuff comes up, I find myself thinking to myself “oh yeah, I wonder what happened to that guy”. It’d be fun to have BARPOD or Benjamin Boyce (who did a couple of long interviews with Moreno back in the day) catch up with him and see if he’s given up on it, or if he somehow managed to at least get a single tournament organized. It’s tough to do that kind of thing, even if you manage to get a national 5 minutes of fame.
I also don’t know if there’s fallout beyond Ted Cruz (and there’s no way I’m listening to 45 minutes of Ted Cruz). Maybe something big is happening, and drama is stirring as a result of Bari Weiss’s coverage, or maybe it’s just another one of these periodic windows that us outsiders get.