I’d Like for Well-Respected Members of the Debate Community to Stop Tweeting Doctored Screenshots, False Allegations of Fascism, Pedophilia, and Racism, and to Stop Making Fun of the Way That I Look
Article used to be called, “The Debate Community Replied to Me”—changed after reading this title.
Lots of debaters have gotten very mad at my most recent article. In it, they have, to a significant degree, proven the points that I made in the article. They’ve made unsubstantiated allegations, dismissed the criticisms and instead of arguing against my thesis have tried desperately to convince everyone I’m of a lower social class than them and bad to associate with rather than actually saying anything substantive. Several people have posted a picture of my face and stated or implied that I’m ugly — I call the community toxic and the collective response is “SHUT UP YOU UGLY RACIST, SEXIST, BIGOTTED, HOMOPHOBIC, TRANSPHOBIC, FASCIST.” If I had, in the article, spent my time attacking the physical appearance of anyone who was black, for example, or transgender, they’d have used this as evidence of my racism or transphobia. Well, this isn’t news — the normal terms of engagement don’t apply to the woke; they can be jettisoned in favor of insulting and bullying pariahs who dare to challenge their idiotic norms.
Most of it has just involved insulting me, so I won’t respond to that — here are some examples. The insults have been sub-par, even by the standards of insults. Clever insults can be delightful — these, however, are far from clever.
Worth noting that these tweets go like 40 likes from other debaters before the person went private.
Now, one might expect that — given that being a fascist is a pretty significant thing — one would present actual evidence before calling me a fascist. They’d be dead wrong. Apparently a fascist is one of those things like a communist in the McCarthy era — you don’t actually need evidence. It’s just a vibes thing. And that’s perhaps being unfair to McCarthy.
These words have lost their meaning. They are just like the insults I quoted, not meant to convey anything beyond the fact that the speaker doesn’t like me very much.
Also, apparently the people that don’t ignore me but instead respond snarkily are anti-black and colonialist and just trying to compensate.
I don’t like them either Taj, but this seems a little extreme.
Notably, the claim that the people replying negatively to me, rather than ignoring or trying to deplatform me, are racist, is one too obvious to need justification. If you disagree with Taj about this, you’re almost certainly anti-black and also colonial — at least, in your subjectivities — whatever the hell that means.
The shut up because X genre of response
To answer these people’s questions, I like talking about interesting things on my blog and outrageous things. The debate community is both interesting and outrageous. I also spend relatively little time talking about it compared to other things. Also, given that I have a 44 part series arguing for utilitarianism, it’s pretty odd to claim that the debate community is my singular obsession — I barely talk about it.
The idea that I did debate only for a very brief period of time is similarly asinine. Debate was what I spent almost all of my high-school free time doing. But, of course, if you challenge the mainstream debate orthodoxy, they assume you’re some rube from the middle of Louisiana who went to one tournament ever.
This person claims that my objections are all wrong, but conveniently I’m not worth engaging with because I’m too dogmatic. This is silly for a few reasons. For one, the primary reason to debate people is to change the minds of other people, rather than to change the mind of the person that you’re arguing with. For another, this telling of events is totally inaccurate — this person’s objection to capitalism was that it allows rich people to be rich while others are poor; they had no objection to capitalism plus a universal basic income. For a third, I’ve changed my mind on lots of things including foreign policy, physicalism about consciousness, whether there are good arguments for god, Newcombe’s problem, etc. Thus, the claim I’m dogmatic and don’t change my mind is false.
One thing that I remembered since the first draft of this — I had a lengthy back and forth with this person about anti-natalism; they’re an anti-natalist, I’m not. TLDR, they bit the bullet on maybe the craziest thing ever. Specifically, they accepted that, if you could either bring about a child that would live a great life and have a small chance of bringing about another child that would live a great life or certainly bring about a child that would experience as much suffering per second as was experienced during the entirety of the holocaust, you should choose the second option. In fact, they characterized it as eugenics to think that it’s better if future people live great lives rather than being in unimaginable agony all the time.
So yeah, this person really dunked on me in our previous engagement in which they said that having two children is worse than doing something that would predictably cause more suffering than the holocaust.
They also made egregious errors in the other serious discussion that we had over text. Thus, every part of their claim is wrong — we have debated previously, and in our previous engagements, they were revealed to be totally wrong. Of course, when one’s game is pandering to their ingroup, telling a nice convenient narrative about destroying the infidel with facts is something worthwhile — too bad it has the problem of being scandalously false.
These people all insinuate that I’m very bad at debate. There were a few others that implied I was bad at debate. I won’t spend too much time on these claims — I was top 22 at the most competitive national tournament and top 4 at the state tournament. But it’s interesting the way that debaters attempt to delegitimize all critics that are right of them — it’s totally inconceivable that anyone who spent time in debate and was good would have such fundamental disagreements with the bizarre identitarianism that is rampant in debate. It reminds me of the shock that liberals often have at professors being Trump supporters — they think that someone educated like them couldn’t adopt the opposite view. They falsely believe no one who spent any time in the ivory tower would bother criticizing it, despite its insanity. Also, even if I sucked at debate, that would be totally irrelevant for my claims.
Additionally, even if I were bad at debate, if my claims are true, and it’s very difficult to win without making insane leftist arguments, then the fact that I did poorly at debate would be reflective of facts about the community. Notably, in the tournament where I went 2-5, which was the most competitive national tournament, I lost one round based on my opponents arguing that I was a bad person, based on two out of context screenshots, and should lose for this, and despite my opponents having no adequate response to my defense of the out of context screenshot they dredged up, the judge was unwilling to evaluate my response because the things I said sounded dicey out of context and the judge had severe woke brain rot. One of the reasons I spent less time senior year on debate was because it was so crazy and woke.
This objection claims that outrageous things only happen on twitter and the other things are settled. None of the things I listed were huge incidents in themselves — the claim was merely that they’re indicative of other things that are big issues. Note, these tweets amassed vast numbers of likes — these are popular sentiments in the debate community.
One of my critics doctored screenshots to make me look bad
Background — I had this conversation roughly two years ago. This was when I was a young naive effective altruist — I basically thought that if you just explained the idea to people, they’d see the light and become effective altruists. Thus, when someone posted on social media about having donated to some charity helping native people, albeit less effectively than ea charities do, I asked her why not donate to ea organizations instead? We had a chat in which she apparently concluded I was a horrible racist. And my message does look bizarre as it is — currently it’s just her saying that she doesn’t know what EA is and me saying that she doesn’t care about poor kids dying of malaria.
Conveniently, this was edited since the original message. Fortunately, I have the original message — I took a screenshot of it. The message that was omitted was her saying, between the message of explaining what malaria was and me saying that she didn’t care about kids dying of malaria (that was supposed to be followed by a question mark, fwiw), “I don’t really care about children tbh.”
This is staggering dishonesty. Her telling of events makes it look like, merely because she’s not an effective altruist, me accusing her of not caring about kids. In reality, before I asked to clarify if she really didn’t care much about kids dying of malaria, she had said, in response to my pointing out that she could save lots of kids lives, she said that she doesn’t care about kids. Apparently the original didn’t look damning enough, so there had to be an edited transcript to make me look maximally terrible. Despite the fact that I apologized for this roughly a year and a half ago, my actions were so beyond the pale that it’s permissible to misrepresent them over a year later, and to doctor the original message history.
Here, the person who wrote the substack about me — we’ll come to that article in a moment — is arguing with a communist about the most effective containment strategy for me. My article is so dangerous that it needs to be contained effectively — but there’s a dispute about whether calling me a racist pedophile is more productive than ignoring me. Interesting problems these people have. It’s also apparently very upsetting to be reminded that I exist, because my opinions are so outrageous! These people must be so oppressed, such poor victims — having to be reminded of the existence of someone who vehemently disagrees with them. The outrage!!
My tweet was the infamous THAT tweet. This person is apparently very worried that the 2000 or so people that read my article would start violently attacking people at debate tournaments. Just lunacy — political violence is rare, and reading that there are people that disagree with one somewhere out there does not drive people to violence very often, particularly not the types of people who read substacks in which I mostly defend utilitarianism.
Insane race baiting
Jessica left this reply to my article.
In response, I pointed out that this was totally unrelated to everything said in the article — no parts of the article were about who is being treated as the most important person in the room.
She replied
I replied
She replied
This is… ridiculous. The reason I claimed it was condescending is because it is condescending to ask if a person would like to be educated on a contested topic. It would be condescending if, when you said you thought the minimum wage should be higher, someone said “if you want to be educated on why it should be lower, lmk.” Also, saying “yes, I would like to be educated” clearly implies that you’re in the wrong — so that’s not an adequate response. Thus, one must here challenge the framing of the question. But apparently, it’s very racist to call someone condescending if they’re being condescending, as long as they’re a black woman.
Imagine what the response would have been if, in response to the first tweet, I had asked if she wanted to be educated on why my article was not racist. I’d have been accused of talking down to black women — of treating them as lesser. But when something comparable is said to me, calling it condescending is evidence of horrific racism. Also, is there even a stereotype that black women are…condescending? I have not heard that one before, and no one else with whom I spoke about this had either.
This has…nothing to do with anything in the article. This person wrote a bizarre, alternative narrative according to which I was complaining about taking a screenshot of my article — when I was claiming that it’s condescending to ask if a person would like to be educated on a disputed topic — and also demanding that people of color make me feel less racist. This is such a bizarre distortion of facts, it’s hard to know how one came to it. It’s insane levels of delusion, sort of like when Chat GPT hallucinates events or studies that it then cites—just utter lunacy.
But avoiding sloppy reasoning is seen as a vice in these circles. Even if what you say is as far from the truth as the Earth is from the Bootes void, as long as in your fictitious narrative something racist has happened, debaters lap it up.
Being a conservative on social issues just means you hate minorities apparently
Or so claims one of my critics.
Also, this is supposedly violent. So if you just think conservative thoughts on social issues, you have committed violence. I’m, of course, not a conserative, but this idea that being politically conservative is violent is an absurd one.
And presumably violence is allowed to stop violence, right? Therefore, by insane moon logic, it’s okay to be violent to conservatives based merely on their beliefs.
Someone weirdo wrote a substack replying to me
This is the article. The title is “Mask Off Matty.” It is a bizarre orgy of lies, character attacks, and bullshit. It’s also relatively poorly written, resembling a high-school Freshman trying their best to write a hit-piece. Apparently, I unmasked that I’m a vicious racist, or something. This article is crazy in a multitude of ways. One of the more amusing facts about this article is that I have, to the best of my knowledge, never met the author, who goes by Herschel Walker’s secret son. Thus, they made an entire substack to respond to an article by me — a person they’ve never met nor had interactions with. They also thought that it was of vital importance to in that article call me ugly, a racist, and a pedophile. This is not normal well-adjusted human behavior. I have, for example, never thought it important to scour the archives, digging up all the dirt I can find on random people I’ve never met, before bizarrely accusing them of pedophilia and racism.
I’ll go through it line by line, explaining the numerous lies, falsehoods, and mischaracterizations. Nearly all of the article involves lying about my views in some way and presenting out-of-context screenshots to make my views seem outlandish. This is a particularly odd response to a focused critique of the debate community; generally, if one is replying to a specific article, they will not dredge up a dozen out-of-context statements to make the author look like a racist pedophile. But, apparently, the author of this substack has nothing significant to say in response to my criticisms, so they must resort to pitiful personal attacks without a scintilla of honesty.
[Redacted] has recently published a rambling complaint about the state of the debate community, making a number of mischaracterizations that I can only interpret as a weird sexual dance related to his clear kink for humiliation.
Off to a good start.
God’s slimiest soldier is mad, apparently, that people don’t like him.
This is obviously false — if I were mad about that why would I write articles that intentionally piss lots of people off in the debate community. The author has either not read my original article, or places zero value on the truth, if that’s his summary of my article.
Matthew began his article, as many great philosophical authors do, by making a list of people who have wronged him. He jumps right into his ethnography of the debate community by posting screenshots of some tweets he didn’t like, and describing how horribly bullied a racist was in the replies, as he bravely fought for Redacted’s moral truth.
REDACTED, I know you love to search through people disagreeing with you to find crumbs of your own victimization — I’ll make it easy for you — you’re a stupid fucking idiot.
This is genuinely delusional. At no point in the article did I portray myself as a victim. Instead, I criticized things I thought were bad. The author of this substack had a narrative in mind, and ignored flagrantly the fact that it didn’t fit the facts. Apparently the narrative of “White people whining about how oppressed they are” is so compelling that, even when one isn’t doing that, it’s worth falsely claiming they are. Never let the facts ruin a good narrative. This may also have been an excuse to insult me — either way, there isn’t a shred of me “searching through people disagreeing with me to find crumbs of my own victimization.” As I’ve said, this didn’t negatively affect me much — it just irritated me. I’m not some grand victim.
People say things for reasons. Can you think of anything that might make white people seem a little untrustworthy? Anything?
Well, the tweet that I linked was before the beef with Michael Moreno. If I remember correctly, the catalyzing incident for this was that the person who made the tweet publicly criticized effective altruism — I asked why, and made arguments for why effective altruism was good. This caused them to denounce white people.
But there’s a bigger problem than that — it is obviously racist to dislike a group of people because of what one member has done. If you don’t like or trust people based on their skin color that’s quite objectionable racism. This is like replying to a black person objecting to racism by pointing out that there are black people that do bad things.
Would the author accept the same line of reasoning if applied to any other race of people? If an Indian person made an offensive article or joke or statement, would they defend people who “reserved their right not to trust nor engage with Indian people.” If Bull Conor had a negative experience with several black people, would they defend his reservation of his right not to “trust nor engage with black people.” Presumably not — were it applied to any other race, the flagrant racism would be obvious and obviously appalling.
Now, the author engages in a rapid-fire screed of out-of-context screenshots, none of which are objectionable, but some of which may sound objectionable sans context.
(I have no idea where the colonization stuff came in — but I’ll defend my view on sweatshops). The reason that people work in sweatshops is that their other options are worse. Thus, if you don’t purchase from sweatshops, people will turn to worse options, shown to be worse by the fact that sweatshops are preferred to them. I won’t go into too much detail — here’s a good article on the subject.
The preceding sentence was, when I explained that the against malaria foundation could save lives of children at low cost, “I don’t really care about children tbh.” So yes, this was totally reasonable. It was also intended to be followed by a question mark.
I’ve defended this view more here. To quote the article
Non-offending pedophiles are stigmatized, which increases risks of child sex abuse. This is unsurprising — I think we all know that most people would judge pedophiles, even if they were non-offending. To quote one study
Both studies revealed that nearly all reactions to people with pedophilia were more negative than those to the other groups, including social distance. Fourteen percent (Study 1) and 28 % (Study 2) of the participants agreed that people with pedophilia should better be dead, even if they never had committed criminal acts.
Thus, there is a large group of people subject to horrific mistreatment on the basis of attraction that is outside of their control.
It is very obvious that non-offending pedophiles shouldn’t be stigmatized. They have done nothing immoral. The fact that one finds some immoral act arousing does not make them deserving of death — a fact that between 14 and 28% of people seem not to realize. Some non-significant portion of males would find sex when there’s a power imbalance to be arousing — just as they would find sex when there’s not a power imbalance to be arousing. Sex when there’s a power imbalance is immoral. However, this does not make most males evil.
Non-offending pedophiles are perhaps the most stigmatized group. Very few people would hire one who they knew was a non-offending pedophile. And lots of people want to kill them. Yet they are ignored — those who argue against this repression are condemned for being pro-pedophile. If one has committed no crime, done no immoral act, they oughtn’t be harmed or killed. And yet society seems wholly unable to meet this minimal moral standard. As a result, non-offending pedophiles join the ranks of the forgotten trillions.
Next, my critic claims
Nothing at all? And while we’re on the topic! You have such a weird focus on pedophilia! I’m gonna be straight up — I was looking through your Twitter to find some examples of you being racist — there were a lot — somehow there were even more instances of you just going off on a weird rant about how pedophilia isn’t actually a bad thing! Like it’s insane — they just kept coming. Obviously there’s the one above. But then there’s this one:
This is not the best explanation of my actions. I’ve talked a bit about pedophilia, but I talked much more about future generations and farmed animals — presumably, I’m neither a future generation nor a farmed animal. I talk a lot about issues when people are being horrific to large groups of people for no good reason, as is true of pedophiles.
If I really were a pedophile, for one, this wouldn’t say anything about my character. Remember, pedophiles are just those attracted to kids — they haven’t done anything wrong per se. Now, if I were an offending pedophile, that would, of course, be bad, but I’m not — I’m not even a non-offending pedophile. But also, if I were a pedophile, would I really spend my time writing in their defense. If I was deeply terrified about people discovering my attraction to children, would I write multiple thousand word articles about it. No, of course not.
This is trivial. Some percent of the population would rape children if they had an attraction to children. Thus, given that one’s attraction is outside of their control, the pedophiles that don’t rape children will be more virtuous than average.
This was in response to someone claiming that the correct response to pedophiles was to just make them feel super disgusted with themselves. I don’t think this works, and I think that, while there are obviously disanalogies with gay people, they’re both similar in that disgust doesn’t get rid of one’s pedophilic attraction, any more than one’s homosexual attraction. Also, my repeated discussion of this was because someone asked me what I thought of a particular paper about computer-generated child porn.
I defended this more in the earlier article that I linked. Non-offending pedophiles are clearly subject to intense stigma and discrimination. If the author of the substack had provided an argument against this then I could respond to it, but given that they didn’t, I’ll just quote Lewis “I do not know how to refute an incredulous stare.”
These are from months apart, dude. Months apart. You posted some of these in July, some in August, and some all the way in November! Why have you been on a months-long tirade of defending pedophilia on the internet?
All of this was the result of two twitter threads. Wait till you see how many I’ve made about animals.
I’m not asking why you think pedophiles aren’t weird — you have your fake justifications, but I think we all know that being attracted to kids is foregrounded in your mind for a very different reason, because none of your arguments justify why for such an effective altruist, such a long-termist, this is your pet issue. You obviously don’t think that discrimination against pedophiles poses a risk at the level of climate change — so why is it then that when I search your Twitter for tweets about such a catastrophic issue, there aren’t even half as many tweets as times you’ve defended pedophiles on your account?
I obviously don’t talk about issues proportional to their global importance. If I did, my blog would exclusively talk about longtermism. This is not my pet issue, it doesn’t even make the top 5. But apparently, this makes me a pedophile! It’s outrageous that this critic, who would no doubt be outraged when people accuse LGBTQ teachers of grooming, is accusing me of pedophilia based on articles that I’ve written.
The reason I talk about pedophilia more than, say, tax law, is that it’s a more interesting topic to me. I am not an expert on many complex empirical topics — the topic of pedophilia is more philosophical. The issues I write about are disproportionately ones that are controversial and have systematic exclusion from people’s moral circle. Pedophilia meets this. This explains why I talk about pedophilia more than climate change.
Now, to utterly own me, the author shows that I’ve talked about pedophilia more than climate change — see my above comment.
But you managed to write a whole article about pedophilia back in February, so😬😬😬😬😬😬
You can read the Kershnar article — it wasn’t about pedophilia, it was about what happened to a particular professor that seemed absurd. I stand by it completely. While I disagree with Kershnar a lot, it’s important to stand up for the free speech rights of those one disagrees with!
All of that aside, there are even more things that make Redacted’s recent article so insane — like his second point. Dude! This is literally just a tweet that you’re mad at! What!!! How do you think this is evidence of anything other than you being an annoying dipfuck to this guy? What are you talking about??? For such a scientific-minded man, who cares primarily about getting his facts straight — surely you know that a single tweet, no matter how much it hurt your feelings, is not at all evidence of a broader trend in the debate community! You know that, right??
You can read the second point — I think the point was pretty clear. It was a tweet that got a bunch of likes, for the record, and the catalyzing incident was absurd. It was also evidence of the debate community being vitriolic.
Now where is really gets wild is when this cool cat decides to defend Michael Moreno’s honor, years after the fact! I get that you’re a late bloomer, Matty — it’s why you still look like a toddler asking if I have games on my phone — but this is even late for you, it was years ago dude.
It turns out that one can talk about things that happened more than a year ago when describing broader trends in the community. Events don’t just disappear after a year passes.
It’s also weird that he’s making fun of the way that I look. I stuck to the points in my criticism of the debate community, but like half of the people attacking me have called me ugly. Why is this? Like, generally it’s seen as indecent to attack people based on what they look like.
But even ignoring how weird it is to dredge up a years-old conservative whine-fest about debate and pretend it's representative of the entire community — you’re such a stupid fucking idiot that I don’t even feel the need to respond to your literal copy-paste Michael Moreno rant. Look in the mirror, dude.
The fact that this stuff flies in debate — and that most debaters seem to think Michael is the unreasonable one — shows just how absurd the debate community is. This is one of the more interesting approaches — when I point out something outrageous, people point out that conservatives are also outraged by it, as if this means that we oughtn’t be. Nothing can outrage conservatives and actually be outrageous, apparently — conservatives are uniformly wrong in their outrage.
People should apply this defense to murder. When they murder someone, they should just describe it as a conservative whine-fest, as long as there are some conservative jurors.
I do want to address your part five, though — how fucking dare you describe Oklahoma’s legendary speeches like that — do you know who George Lee is at this point? A couple weeks ago he was the only person Jay Z followed on Twitter. He has a massive following, is a teacher, far more educated than you, and one of the best people in the community. And you choose to talk about him like that? How dare you dude. You get boners when you look at children for all I know. But you’ve still got the balls to talk like this.
The round involved both sides rapping and very little clash on important substantive arguments. It wasn’t even clear what was being talked disagreed about. You’re all free to watch the video and come to your own judgment.
Part Six is also so fucking weird. You just made a fucked up joke and people got mad at you and you were like ACKSHUALLY I DONT BELIEVE IN GOD like okay dude. Congrats on being the one user of r/atheism past the age of 14 I guess. And then you start talking about broken windows policing? Okay racist. Can you do me a favor and link this in your replies from debaters section in the OG article though? I think that everyone deserves to see how great you are at defending pedos.
The point of part 6 was that a person publicly called me a fascist and then thought it was unreasonable to ask for evidence. The joke I made wasn’t especially funny and probably wasn’t worth making in hindsight. The point about broken windows policing is similarly absurd — while I’m not in favor of broken windows policing, supporting it does not make one racist, it just makes one wrong. If it dramatically reduced crime, it would be a good idea; it just doesn’t. Remember, this is an argument that I read in a debate round — one often reads arguments that they don’t actually believe.
My favorite thing about this article is that the author requests for me to link to it under responses to debaters, as if I’m seriously worried about people thinking I’m a pedophile based on the fact that I’ve defended changing attitudes towards non-offending pedophiles in ways that would demonstrably reduce rates of child sexual assault. As if I’m scared to hear some deranged person on the internet who made a substack specifically developed to mock me argue that I’m a pedophile, despite there being no evidence of this in the slightest. The author of the substack has delusions of grandeur if they think I’m worried about this article being widely known — in fact, I’d like the entire world to read it, as long as it linked to my substack.
This article is just bizarre. I feel like if this were the only document aliens had about us, they would think we are a very weird species. Our descendants will look back on this article and think “what in the world was the author thinking?” And no-one will know. In response to various targeted criticisms of the debate community, it is a series of personal attacks — allegedly generated by hours of scouring my tweets for anything that appeared objectionable out of context. When that failed, he just resorted to calling me ugly.
Ultimately, the response of debaters was lots of condescension and snark, but no substance. A lot attacked me personally, but none had much to say about the things I said in the article. This is common in the way that academic elites look down on those with the gall to criticize their idiocy.
It’s wild that a community called the debate community — that prides itself on being full of debaters, has no adequate response to any of my criticisms. Instead of arguing against the criticisms, they insult me repeatedly before making such ludicrously terrible counterarguments that one would have to be totally under the influence of confirmation bias to find them compelling at all. They’re the kinds of responses that might convince a Christian who loves Jesus that God exists, but they’re not the response that should convince anyone rational. None seemed even remotely able to provide a modicum of charitability or a reasonable response. The debate community is as intellectually bankrupt as I described in the last article.
I know you’re getting a lot of hate from the debate community but as a college debater I just want to say that more people agree with you than not. These screenshots are representative of a very vocal minority and should not be construed as the entirety of the debate community. I do applaud you for being rational, though — I know I would be seething if someone called me a fascist ugly pedophile, but you replied to each point calmly. I admire your logic!
I did a little bit of debate in college APDA circuit. I only went to a handful of tournaments, but I didn't notice anything crazy like this. I did remember hearing about them introducing the practice of having an "equity officer" at tournaments. I was told that if I heard, for example, a debater calling a female opponent "catty" during a round, I should report that to the officer. That seemed quite appropriate, but I could imagine the remit of the equity officer having potential to spread into restricting the substance of the debate as well, which could present difficulties.
That was ~ 7 years ago. I don't know how things have changed. I imagine they've gotten considerably more woke (not always a bad thing), but I highly doubt things have gotten anywhere near this crazy at the college level.
I know you’re getting a lot of hate from the debate community but as a college debater I just want to say that more people agree with you than not. These screenshots are representative of a very vocal minority and should not be construed as the entirety of the debate community. I do applaud you for being rational, though — I know I would be seething if someone called me a fascist ugly pedophile, but you replied to each point calmly. I admire your logic!
Wow this is truly insane!
I did a little bit of debate in college APDA circuit. I only went to a handful of tournaments, but I didn't notice anything crazy like this. I did remember hearing about them introducing the practice of having an "equity officer" at tournaments. I was told that if I heard, for example, a debater calling a female opponent "catty" during a round, I should report that to the officer. That seemed quite appropriate, but I could imagine the remit of the equity officer having potential to spread into restricting the substance of the debate as well, which could present difficulties.
That was ~ 7 years ago. I don't know how things have changed. I imagine they've gotten considerably more woke (not always a bad thing), but I highly doubt things have gotten anywhere near this crazy at the college level.