My Competitive Debate Cancellation Story

When I was cancelled for antisemitism and transphobia and was Tweeted about by Vivek Ramaswamy

I did competitive debate all throughout high school. But now, I am regarded in debate as a uniquely sinister figure—my friends who remain in the activity tell me that I’m seen as a mix of Hitler, Ted Bundy, and, I was going to say Mao, but debaters actually tend to like him. So maybe Mitt Romney. When a debate tournament happened at my college, and I was casually walking through, a loose friend of mine—in high school at the time—was told to “stay away from that guy,” (me), as if I was planning to take his wallet or detonate a bomb.

In fact, purportedly there is only one figure more reviled in high school debate than me. That guy is Michael Moreno, and he is hated because he recorded a video of a coach arguing that space is not real, but is instead a projection of white fantasy. What a monster! The coach also claimed, in response to the point that black astronauts can verify that space is real because they’ve been there, that he could verify that space wasn’t real because he hadn’t been there. He likewise denied the existence of Paris!

The story of how I came to be canceled is very funny and quite insane at every level. Some background about policy debate—the kind I did—is that it’s a completely insane left-wing echo-chamber. For debate, it is a century of 2020. Some common features of debate:

• Instead of arguing for the topic, debaters say that it’s problematic to expect them to argue for the topic, and instead perform some unrelated speech act, like reading a poem about being Latina. This is the strategy of about a third of teams.

• One of the most common responses to the above is claiming that it somehow undermines anti-capitalist revolutions.

• Debaters often argue that the way black people are treated in America is indistinguishable from slavery, and if anything, perhaps somewhat worse.

• They also argue we should give back all the land in America to indigenous people. They then claim that it’s problematic to ask where the 350 million people currently living in America would go.

• The second most competitive national tournament was won in 2025 by a team claiming that pretending to be magic mermaids is a good strategy for black liberation. Their last speech began “hoodoo voodoo power, the power by which my magic come, has made this living one of true bliss…we have defended in the face of mythmaking that the exchange of flesh is good and key for the mermaid—fucking conceded.” Five of the seven judges voted for them.

• One highly-cited article written by a debate coach argued that trying to figure out what the words in the topic mean is racist because, “Correctness is an appeal to logic that is unbound by its history, creators, or usage – logic that grounds itself in so-called “universality.” Though this may come as a shock, there are non-binary conceptions of truth and falsity.” The article also claimed that Jake Nebel, a philosopher and former debater who has written about debate “does not take seriously the notion that meaning can be oppressive and illusory.”

• In the second most competitive 2013 tournament final round, the winning team asked during one of their speeches, “what happens when my dick keeps getting hard, because I’m looking at a fat ass on this man? How the fuck am I supposed to rationalize that?…this is always how the blackness and the queerness of our advocacy always get pushed aside. We become the bullshit, we become the zones of sacrifice…why is it that I look like a fucking linebacker, rather than just a big bitch?” Really asking the important questions! I’ve wondered about some of this myself!

Note: these examples aren’t at all atypical or cherrypicked. Stuff like this happens all the time, and basically everyone has many stories of similar stuff happening to them. With that bit of context, on to the story itself.

My story begins, as most mishaps do, with Twitter. This was back in the days when you could see which Tweets people had liked. A debate coach friend was accused of being transphobic because he had liked some Tweets that others claimed were transphobic. Some of these were edgy jokes. One asked at what temperature the gender fluid became gender solid (wow, this guy is basically Eichmann). For context, the guy had liked tens of thousands of Tweets and had no memory of liking most of the Tweets in question.

Lots of people were arguing the coach was a scumbag and should be cancelled. Some proposed he lose his job. Someone wrote a long article claiming that he and the program he worked for were extremely terrible. Here’s a representative chunk:

“But [author name redacted]! Aren’t we all entitled to our opinion, and shouldn’t we accept dialogue about these issues?”

No. Fuck your opinions.

Debate has tainted the thoughts of this vague sense of community, where at the end of the day even though we say we won’t tolerate transphobia, we will always tolerate it as long as it is someone’s friend who has some “good” in them.

Your friend saying transphobic shit is not “making mistakes.” They aren’t just “ignorant” and need to be shown the light of equity through “good faith discussion”.

They aren’t “unaware” of what they are doing. Or just being contrarian because that’s just who they are. Or was actually just being ironic and doesn’t really think these things. Or is deep down a really really good person.

They don’t repeatedly get to do bad things and get to think they are just making mistakes that don’t reflect who they really are on the “inside.”They are a bad person. And so are you.

Very measured! Other highlights from the article included the author being so tired y’all.

I’m tired of watching people defend other people.

I’m tired of you helping your friend to soften the blow of their comments.

I’m tired of having to endure your weird takes about the maleness I inherit according to you.

I’m tired of hearing you explain how your debate partner just wanted to defend their friend in a twitter thread.

I didn’t really agree with the post. So I took to writing a comment about why it was wrong.¹ The comment ended up longer than the article itself. If anything, it was too mild and concessionary. I did not come down strongly enough against individuals involved in deeply ignoble behavior. In short, the comment argued that a guy shouldn’t be permanently tarred for liking some Tweets that others found offensive.

The author of the article then took to Twitter to declare:

Apparently I was really “probing,” my point! I was such a singularly wicked figure that I should have stopped debating entirely (I was in high school at the time, the people in question were mostly in college). Then, once the Twitter mob started hounding me, others came out of the woodwork to find further faults with my character. Amazing how once there was social credit in attacking me, a bunch of people I barely knew seemed to have stories of my being very evil.

You will have to take my word on contents of these character attacks, because I no longer have screenshots. But the second accusation—after the obvious transphobia of my comment—was that I was antisemitic. I, Matthew Adelstein, who had a Bar Mitzvah and went to Jewish Sunday school! I מת’יו ג’קוב יהודה אליעזר גולדשטיין אדלשטיין, hated the Jews. What? (The better evidence that I’m antisemitic is that when I talk with Ari Shtein, I often refer to him as “Ari Eliezer Ben Yehuda Goldberg Davidson Goldstein Shtein which can be argued to be partly motivated by his Jewishness.”)

Why was I antisemitic? Well, if I remember correctly, someone else expressed the position that if someone was transphobic, their death wasn’t a big deal—or even a bad thing. I disagreed. I noted that most people in human history would be transphobic by modern standards, so this principle would imply that the holocaust was okay. This apparently meant I was an antisemite. Pointing out that someone else’s ridiculous moral view implies something antisemitic is antisemitic!

The third thing that I was accused of was the funniest. Someone else had read a case that wasn’t about the topic but instead was about the vital moral importance of queer rage. I had asked this guy questions in a discord call. Questions like “so what is the thing your case argues, and why do you think it is so?” Apparently, this makes me Hitler:

(Guys, if you unsubscribe, I’ll understand! I am truly sorry for the hurt I caused by asking very mild questions to someone about his debate case. Cx, for context, is cross examination).

When someone else defended me, my accuser clarified that “all due respect - your one experience does not in any way offset the experiences of the people he’s hurt. nor can they answer for his specific actions to those people.” It was weird because if you read the statements, you would think that the thing that was being claimed was that I’d committed sexual assault or something—but no, the thing I was accused of was asking a guy questions about his debate case that made him feel sad. And he closed with:

This bit was particularly funny because someone else responded to his Tweet with something like “OUTRAGEOUS: guy with autism fails to read the room,” (further analysis has disconfirmed the autism hypothesis) and he replied with:

Then, because this went against the woke social norms of the subculture, he had to issue a lengthy and groveling apology. Sadly, it’s no longer around but believe me, it was peak hilariousness. He still agreed that I was basically Hitler, but was very contrite at his ableist remarks directed at the modern Hitler.

So that was stage one of the debate cancellation. Fun stuff! At this point, I was a figure of some, but not overwhelming, infamy. I was controversial, but not near the most hated figure. That changed, however, when I wrote a piece called The Debate Community Is an Insane Cesspool of Madness and Vitriol. In it, I summarized some of the ways debate went off the deep end, including the Michael Moreno incident.

The response from debaters was very unhinged. One guy wrote a long article calling me racist and a pedophile. I’m not joking. His evidence was that I’d written about how non-offending pedophiles—those attracted to children but who don’t act on it—have it pretty rough in life. By this standard, I’m also a Malawian child with malaria, because I’ve written about them having it rough as well.

Someone else released a doctored version of our text message history, which made it look like I had just randomly, totally without provocation, claimed that she didn’t care about kids with malaria (the message she deleted was her, in response to my noting that you can save children’s lives for just a few thousand dollars, replying “I don’t really care about children tbh.” You can see why that might give the impression that she didn’t really care about children, tbh).

I was also told that my piece was “white fragility and tone deaf,” and instructed to “educate myself.” It was claimed that my article had made people “unsafe,” by someone—Twitter now deleted—going by “Bone Daddy/Bataillan Wench.” Really dealing with elite human capital here! It made people unsafe, apparently, to post public Tweets to my blog subscribers of, at that time, just a few hundred.

This was stage two of the cancellation. But stage three was where things really took off and I reached my present infamy. It began when James Fishback wrote an article about debate insanity. He noted, for instance, that judges sometimes openly declare themselves Marxist Leninist Maoists and vow never to vote for any team defending capitalism.

He wanted to do a part two where he talked about the experiences of particular debaters. I reached out to him and we started chatting. I mentioned that I’d lost the last debate round I’d ever been in because the other team argued that I was racist and should lose because I’d made a Tweet they didn’t like.

Now, in hindsight, I think the Tweet wasn’t put very well. Miller’s question was a bit weird. I was thinking more of the legal bit than the socially accepted bit—if something is morally disgusting, presumably it shouldn’t be socially accepted? It was for this reason that I deleted the Tweet. But obviously the thing I was advocating for was free speech, not going around calling black people the N-word! That is why I described it as morally disgusting.

This was really what vaporized my debate image. The general consensus was that consorting with the enemy—Fishback—was a very wicked thing to do. And the view I had expressed was beyond the pale. Lots of debaters took to the internet to call me various isms.

Oh and Vivek Tweeted about me.

During stage one of the cancellation, I actually found it really distressing. High school debaters were my people. It was sad that they were turning on me. I’d been pretty close with some of the people in the days before they decided to publicly throw me under the bus for minor social approval. I consider such behavior quite spineless.

By the final stage, I didn’t care at all. I had no respect for these people. And in general, my sense is that the less craven debaters had a high opinion of me. A number of them even subscribe to this blog. Some of my friends tell me, however, that before they met me, the story they heard about me was that I was basically a former debater turned Nazi. Pretty ridiculous. I’m not even a Republican! My main aim in blogging is to convince people to give money so that mostly black children don’t die of malaria!

This isn’t that dramatic of a cancellation. Outside of debate, it had approximately no effect on my life. In debate, however, I’ve been told by some of my friends that if they were caught consorting with me, this would torpedo their reputations so much that it would make it impossible for them to have competitive success on the college circuit. Censorious weirdos often lack outside power but have near monopolies over the dynamics in small, niche, insular communities, where they can shout down anyone who notes that the emperor has no clothes. Or that Paris exists.

1. You can still find the comment if you’re interested—I saved it in a google doc. Its real offense was being giga-cringe, for I was still much too mired in debate wokeness. You guys must know how much I love you that I’m willing to share a very cringe document I wrote in high school.