The National Debate Tournament as a Case Study of College Woke Debate Insanity

In which I, not for the first time, criticize wokeness in debate

I’m working on a new paper, it’s called “‘Till the Snither Loosens With (and Without) the Whither’: A Post-Heiddegarian Understanding in the Being of Witless and Competent (Mis)Handling of the Pan-limitless in Sub-Kantian Restrospectival Perspective.”, if anyone wants to read lmk

—Amos Wollen

When my article exposing the lunacy of "woke" culture in the debate community hit the internet, I was met with a cacophony of conflicting responses. Critics dismissed me as an alarmist, cherry-picking isolated incidents while they simultaneously praised these incidents as vital moral progress—a classic case of Orwellian doublethink.

To anyone who has spent time in the debate world, it's clear that my concerns are far from isolated. But for the skeptics, I'll dissect the arguments of the top 16 teams at the most prestigious college tournament, revealing the widespread and rampant absurdity. Bear in mind, this isn't a personal attack on the debaters—a few of whom I respect—but an illustration of just how pervasive these outrageous ideas have become. Brace yourself for the deep dive into the twisted world of debate, or skip ahead to the conclusion if you'd rather not wade through painstaking documentation of the madness.

The first-place team

The first-place team came from Wake Forest. You can see the arguments they read throughout the tournament here. One of the people on the winning team was Taijah Robinson, who claimed that I should be de-platformed for being a fascist¹ and that the people seriously engaging with me were just trying to cover up their own antiblackness. Even the top debaters toss around baseless accusations of fascism—evidence? Who needs it when you've got vibes? McCarthy would be proud. You know someone is a fascist when they disagree with you politically or criticize woke insanity.

This team never released on the wiki—a place where people publicly share their arguments after they read them—what they read in finals, so let’s just take a random round to see what they read—I choose round 1. In this round, they were negative against a team that argued for some proposal that would allegedly stop climate change from killing everyone. The affirmative team argues for some plan, the negative argues against it. In debate, claiming that climate change will kill everyone and that we should do something about it is a right-of-center position, outrageously.

Tags are summaries of what one’s evidence says—here are the tags for the “evidence” that they read.

The end is already here – ecological catastrophe is a structuring condition of Black life that cannot be disimbricated from the enduring social life of the plantation. Reliance on better science, or more empirics, or more data, or extinction as a predictive tool, only reproduces cruel mathematics and fatal liberalisms that make Black life into ecological excess and refigure European Man as the core of environmental politics

Translation: the other team claims that their proposal will prevent ecological catastrophe, but what black people already experience is basically ecological catastrophe, so preventing ecological catastrophe isn’t good at all. Thus (I say thus as if the second part of the sentence follows logically from the first, which it of course does not) data, math, and empirical evidence are racist and reproduce “cruel mathematics”—which is sadly not a euphemism for calculus—as well as liberalism which “make[s] Black life into ecological excess” (I have no idea what that means) and focus excessively on what Europeans are doing about the environment. I’ll put in a footnote² GPT4’s summary of their statement.

This is an insane level of woke ideological capture. Imagine a person actually saying that mouthful of bullshit when you propose a carbon tax or some other environmental policy. That would be bizarre and evidence of wokeism-induced brain rot. And this is the team that won the most competitive national tournament, and when they read this insanity, publicly, in a room full of serious adults, no one bats an eye or laughs. No one points out—ever—that the emperor has no clothes.

Also, and this is a side point, but what the fuck does disimbricated mean? It’s not a word! If you google disimbricated, nothing comes up. And it’s not like disimbricated is not technically a word but we all know what it means—does anyone know what disimbricated means? Is disimbricated slang? If you make up a word, at least define it, so people know what the hell you’re talking about. Why in the world would one ever use a nonword like disimbricated? What purpose could it possibly serve beyond confusing people and making oneself seem sophisticated?

Climate change is not anthropocentric and isn’t just the extinction of humanity—climate change is a product of white culture and means the extinction of minorities—but rather their neutral representations of climate make warming inevitable

???

The juridico-economic is cohered through its faux inclusion of Blackness, rendered fungible and casted “personhood” to provide coherence. Governance WOULD not and COULD NOT redress anti-blackness.

The verbosity is one of the things that makes it so hard to win some of these debate rounds. If you take the fact that some braindead person with a Ph.D. saying “The juridico-economic is cohered through its faux inclusion of Blackness,” meaning that the affs policy is wrong to be a sufficient warrant to believe that unintelligible claim, well then it is rather difficult to argue against because it’s unclear what’s being said or why it’s true. It’s like debating against someone making fallacious arguments in French—even if the arguments are totally wrong, if you have no idea what they’re saying, it is very hard to reply to them. And because judges accept this nonsense uncritically, people often win rounds based on these arguments.

The plan’s mechanism of settler recognition as redress guarantees antiblackness.  It’s empirical – assimilation through US governance produces internalized antiblackness and settler colonialism in Native communities – the oppressed become the oppressor as they method act out US race projects.

Translation: whenever the government does anything this guarantees antiblackness. The evidence for this: an assertion that it’s empirical. The “empirical evidence” for the claim that all policy is racist is that there are some policies that are bad for black people. This is like claiming that all people are named Bob based on the fact that some people are named Bob, claiming that “it’s empirical.”

The 1AC’s investment in a politics of cleanliness and evocation of dirty rivers and beaches as predicated on the color line and racial capitalism, which reproduces militarized gentrification – even the aff impacts about climate change are the result of centuries-long racial terror and expropriation and waste-dumping enacted at a global scale. Every utilitarian impact they go for is subtended by the invisiblized, exhausted and expropriated bodies of poor women of color. The aff will consider the “dead zones” of an algae bloom because they risk everyone’s lives but not the ongoing zones of exhaustion and expropriation that constitute women of color ecologies around the world.

Translation: trying to clean up rivers is racist because when they try to eradicate dirty rivers, that’s really trying to eradicate black people. Also, apparently, caring about dead zones killing everyone is racist, because focusing on killing everyone does not involve only caring about the deaths of women of color—and if you care about everyone dying, not just black women, that is racist.

There is, of course, more nonsense that this team specifically read, but for this to be thorough without being excessively long, I will have to be brief.

The fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth-place teams

Another team from wake was in the top 8. Here’s what they read in doubles—to take one example.

The 1ACs attempt to extend the social contract is a death sentence for trans-life – the law, rights, and duties presume a position of consent and agency that is universally shared, erasing the mundane denial of trans personhood before the law. This condemns trans people to a scopic economy that pathologizes their survival

The 1ac is the first affirmative speech. The affirmative proposed some policy to stop pollution or something—probably it involved giving rights to nature. Apparently, this is a “death sentence for trans-life” because all laws are bad for trans people.

Also, what the fuck does scopic mean? Google defines it as “in adjectives corresponding to nouns ending in -scope,” but that does not describe the economy. So what does it mean? Debaters seem incapable of using real words—defying Orwell with every convoluted word choice.

The aff’s drive to maintain “biodiversity” treats species as “stocks” of “natural capital” for financial speculation – this perpetuates extractive logics that drive extinction while accelerating forced breeding programs that turn conservation.

Why? This baffling trend of making unsubstantiated claims is all too common, and then if you don’t meticulously debunk the 5,000 words they’ve quoted from a random low-level professor, their asinine claims are assumed true.

There is, of course, more, but I think the point has been established. So this means that, of the top 8 teams, two of them read totally loony woke arguments.

8-16th place teams

One top-16 team was from Iowa. Here’s what they read in doubles—just to give a sense. Remember, this is when they’re negative arguing about a topic that is about giving rights or duties to nature, AI, or non-human animals. So in this round, they’re supposed to be arguing against giving rights or duties to nature, AI, or non-human animals. Do they? Well…

The performance of the 1AC binds it to an intimate public where the possibility for belonging cloaks an ulterior motive based on redeeming the university and politics as a space for resistance to militarism. Any risk of a link means there’s no chance the aff solves since it remains trapped in a cycle of politics-as-usual.

The production of capitalist futurity comes at the direct expense of trans people because attachment to the white nuclear cishet family as the foundational unit of society results in constant abjection. Cis-heteronormative family structures produce constant abjection for trans people who fail the task of reproducing market-ready citizens. This structure works through an omnipresent set of techniques that govern people’s genders based on social and economic contracts. These agreements sure up the transmission of property and set the boundaries of acceptable subjectivities. From calls to “eradicate transgenderism”, to gatekeeping our healthcare, to the debate community telling us we’re not a first round, and the Michigan camp telling me I’m a “problem and confusion” to girls in a women’s restroom, this violence is sustained through the rights-bearing patriarch and a debate community that refuses to ever give a shit about trans people.

One wonders, of what is being said, both what it means and what it has to do with giving rights to AI and nature.

We defend an infrapolitical ethics of care where trans people vest a duty to repair among ourselves. you all as judges have a duty to reckon with the way this space always disavows trans life, rage incites rebellion against cis-heteronormative orders but requires a community whose interdependence makes it possible to break the foundations of society.

Infrapolitical is also not a word, in case anyone was wondering. Thus, the made-up word counter is at three from a cursory investigation of a few of the top 16 teams in the country. They propose an alternative to the affirmative that is totally unintelligible. Does anyone have a vivid mental image of “an infrapolitical ethics of care where trans people vest a duty to repair among ourselves?”

There’s also rather strange capitalization going on—"you” should be capitalized, given that it is the beginning of a sentence. Their evidence says that trans rage is good—so they just say “fucking” a lot (while being trans). For example

Familial structures and this fucking community always promises a false narrative of inclusion - Every time the aff speaks up to tell us we only need to act the right way to gain the benefits of policy or liberal democracy, remember this curse locks in alienation of trans people

…

(Strange capitalization alert part 2—every should not be capitalized).

Their utterances, of course, have nothing to do with the topic and everything to do with vomiting out verbose jargon because if the other team doesn’t answer a claim it’s assumed true, even if there’s no reason to believe it and it’s incoherent nonsense.

Also, I’m pretty sure one of the members of this team took to Twitter to call me fascist or something—I don’t really remember the details. A lot of people did when I criticized the debate community. I also think one of them took to Twitter to call me ugly—hard to remember though.

One other team in the top 16 was from Texas. They also read totally braindead nonsense. Take what they read in round 7 as an example.

Their project of converting resources into national security maintains is a strategy of racialized governance via digitalized corporatization that has exceeded sovereignty and become a Leviathan built on speed and acceleration into a dystopic future that marks populations deemed unworthy for death

“Treason to Whiteness is loyalty to humanity.” The alternative is to reject the 1AC by de-centering and de-mythologizing Whiteness in favor of a politics of hermeneutic suspicion – that’s key to any ethical research project – even if they win analyzing Great Powers is important, the alternative is a pre-requisite to the plan

They also attacked Bostrom and claimed that Longtermism—which the other team advocated for—is racist and eugenicist.

Citing long termism is racist and you should lose – specifically, Bostrom used the N-word, endorses eugenics and black people are biologically inferior

For a thorough dissection of the attacks on Bostrom, see my article. They additionally claim

Bostrom just said the quiet part out loud – longtermism is eugenics

They cited a Torres article for this…—I’ve consistently explained why Torres is totally wrong.

Another top-16 team was from Harvard. They also read totally deranged positions.

Not disclosing “new” to black debaters is a voter:

1 – Black rigor – no pre-round prep kills black clash, reduces racial accountability by incenting low quality research that avoids scrutiny.

2 – Black as superhuman – making black debaters go thru extra hoops to get to square one mirrors racial disparities in education.

Securitization DA- The affirmatives refusal to disclose is a performative act of securitization that forecloses effective negation of whiteness by hiding your strategy expecting me to be unprepared

Reject the team – overcorrect against normative gut-check because we must interrogate if those norms are antiblack.

Background—after people read a case, they’ll generally post it on the wiki. However, if they’ve never read a case before, it will not be disclosed—in other words, if you read a case you’ve never read before, the other team will not know beforehand what case you’re reading. Thus, here the team was arguing that it is wrong to read a case one hasn’t read before—but only against black people (the Harvard team was black). Apparently this “mirrors racial disparities in education.” It also securitizes—which is what happens when one treats another as a threat. Unclear why it does any of those things.

One strange phenomenon that is rampant in debate is exemplified here—people will just add the word black in front of words to make them seem better. Clash is when both teams advance lots of arguments that interact with each other. Why talk about black clash rather than just clash? Does the color of the skin of the people arguing matter to the value of clash? Of course not—it’s utter insanity! And yet this stuff is rampant. Why talk about “black rigor” rather than just rigor?

Next, Harvard gave a counterplan.

The 1AC should enter into prior, binding and genuine consultation with black indigenous femmes before reading and doing the affirmative

This says that, rather than do the other team’s proposal, we should ask black indigenous women—or femmes, as they’re called—whether we should do it and only do it if they say it’s a good idea. Unclear why this would be better—black indigenous women don’t automatically have special knowledge about vesting rights in nature and AI. Furthermore, they claim

Blackness is the embodiment of metaphysical nothingness and any attempt to liberate Black folk or make the world better that does not start with a theorization against the world itself will reproduce the antiblackness they try to resolve. Thus, the role of the ballot is to endorse the best strategy for rupturing metaphysics. The role of the judge is to evaluate the best Black scholarship produced to analyzed Black suffering

Apparently, trying to make things better is racist. Progress is racist! You can’t make this stuff up. The reason for this is that “blackness is the embodiment of metaphysical nothingness” a claim that is almost certainly not even false. What does it mean to say that something is the “embodiment of metaphysical nothingness?” Are there other examples of things that are widely recognized to be the embodiment of metaphysical nothingness? I’m dubious about this whole embodiment of metaphysical nothingness business.

Conclusion

Of the top 16 teams, 5 of them were reading crazy nonsense that involved stringing together polysyllabic words in rapid-fire fashion to make outlandish claims about the world. That’s just below 1 in 3 top debaters reading crazy nonsense—nonsense that says all government action and attempts at progress are racist, giving rights to nature would be transphobic, and that ecological catastrophe isn’t bad because it “is a structuring condition of Black life that cannot be disimbricated from the enduring social life of the plantation.”

This is not just a fringe minority of debaters. This pernicious and objectionable nonsense is being read by some of the “best” debaters in the country. Many of these positions claim, absurdly and offensively, that the quality of life of black people has not improved since slavery and that as a rule, laws cannot make the lives of black people better. You’re allowed to say that the Civil Rights Act wasn’t good for black people because America just became more racist since then, but if you ever say anything that could appear from 1,000 miles away to be even remotely conservative, then you’ll be burned for heresy. I’m reminded of Chomsky’s delightful quote:

Since no one has succeeded in showing me what I'm missing, we're left with the second option: I'm just incapable of understanding. I'm certainly willing to grant that it may be true, though I'm afraid I'll have to remain suspicious, for what seem good reasons. There are lots of things I don't understand -- say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. --- even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out.

Again, I've lived for 50 years in these worlds, have done a fair amount of work of my own in fields called "philosophy" and "science," as well as intellectual history, and have a fair amount of personal acquaintance with the intellectual culture in the sciences, humanities, social sciences, and the arts. That has left me with my own conclusions about intellectual life, which I won't spell out. But for others, I would simply suggest that you ask those who tell you about the wonders of "theory" and "philosophy" to justify their claims --- to do what people in physics, math, biology, linguistics, and other fields are happy to do when someone asks them, seriously, what are the principles of their theories, on what evidence are they based, what do they explain that wasn't already obvious, etc. These are fair requests for anyone to make. If they can't be met, then I'd suggest recourse to Hume's advice in similar circumstances: to the flames.

…

Take, say, Derrida. Let me begin by saying that I dislike making the kind of comments that follow without providing evidence, but I doubt that participants want a close analysis of de Saussure, say, in this forum, and I know that I'm not going to undertake it. I wouldn't say this if I hadn't been explicitly asked for my opinion --- and if asked to back it up, I'm going to respond that I don't think it merits the time to do so.

So take Derrida, one of the grand old men. I thought I ought to at least be able to understand his Grammatology, so tried to read it. I could make out some of it, for example, the critical analysis of classical texts that I knew very well and had written about years before. I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I've been familiar with since virtually childhood.

This is sort of how I feel about lots of what passes for serious scholarship in debate. When a person makes a claim like “Blackness is the embodiment of metaphysical nothingness,” it seems the correct response is

1. What the heck does that mean?

2. Are you making a statement of fact as you knew it, and where is the documentation to back up your claim?

Usually, it’s totally unclear why these people believe what they believe—no actual reasons are offered to support the beliefs. But when these people explain, in simple terms in English, why they believe the things they do, their reasons are always so braindead that it is shocking that anyone is convinced by them. Many years ago, I was having a conversation with someone who thought that the view according to which it was actually impossible for the life of black people to get better was plausible. The rationale was that there being racism embedded into the fabric of society that is so hidden, invisible, and pernicious that it prevents all progress is the best explanation of police shootings. This, for those of us familiar with inference to the best explanation, is obviously not the best explanation.

Here’s one explanation—some people shoot other people. Sometimes, police go overboard, given that some people are very violent. Why in the world would the best explanation be some mysterious unidentifiable—or at least, impossible to identify using plain English—force, that’s obscured by euphemisms about metaphysical nothingness, that makes all progress for black people impossible? (For a more thorough debunking of this notion, see here).

And this is what happens every single time. They have these lofty pronouncements, backed up by pages of evidence full of verbose jargon, but when you actually ask them why they think it’s true, it is so insanely idiotic that one has to have an IQ below room temperature to be remotely convinced by it. There will either be no reasons to support it, or the reasons will be totally incommensurate with the degree of the claim.

This is the type of faux radicalism that deBoer has been a staunch critic of.

woke politics are overwhelmingly concerned with the linguistic, the symbolic, and the emotional to the detriment of the material, the economic, and the real. Woke politics are famously obsessive about language, developing literal language policies that are endlessly long and exacting. Utterances are mined for potential offense with pitiless focus, such that statements that were entirely anodyne a few years ago become unspeakable today.

What I’m saying in this article isn’t right-wing. DeBoer is a leftist—so is Chomsky; deBoer’s been much harsher to these people than I have. My position on this is literally the same as Chomsky’s—it’s not some insane conservative screed. Claiming that the intellectual masturbation that goes on in the less respectable segments of humanities departments is pointless is a perfectly reasonable view—and one that should be adopted by anyone with half a brain. One need not support tax cuts and the Iraq war to think that maybe, just maybe, claiming that all policies are bad because blackness is rendered by whiteness as metaphysical nothingness is not the pinnacle of brilliant scholarship.

These are not the people advocating against horrifying foreign wars or advocating for treating animals better or unionizing or doing any goddamn thing that is even remotely productive. These are the people who sit in well-airconditioned rooms in humanities departments talking about structures while doing nothing about them—and then when people propose trying to do something about them, they have a laundry list of ways that doing so would be problematic. Actual activists do not say sentences like “The juridico-economic is cohered through its faux inclusion of Blackness, rendered fungible and casted “personhood” to provide coherence.” No real activist has ever used the conjunct juridico-economic—ever! Those sentences only come from the minute segment of the elite who get paid to generate gibberish that will tickle the fancy of other humanities departments who wouldn’t know what repression was if it hit them in the face.

There are many on the left who are smart and worth reading and listening to—Chomsky, Graeber, Mehdi Hassan, and many others. But the people who vomit out word salads about metaphysical nothingness and socio-juridical ways of being have nothing useful to say on any topic.

Of course, like Chomsky, I’m willing to grant that there could be some mysterious form of knowledge that these people have that I don’t—some type of knowledge that you need twelve-letter French words to understand. It’s possible that the secrets of the universe have been unlocked by English studies professors at low-ranking universities, who do nothing remotely productive, who cannot explain their ideas in concrete terms, and who are defended by the types of people who call me a fascist for objecting to the idea that people should lose debate rounds for reading evidence from conservative authors. Perhaps there is a mysterious insight of profound importance communicated by the phrase “ecological catastrophe is a structuring condition of Black life that cannot be disimbricated from the enduring social life of the plantation,” that just can’t be understood by low IQ rubes like me, John Searle, and Noam Chomsky.

But I wouldn’t bet on it.

1. Update: he said “word” in response to the claim that one should de-platform fascists—which was clearly directed at me. However, he claims that he didn’t know who I was, so he claims that he was just generally agreeing with the sentiment of de-platforming fascists. Strangely though, he claimed “a lot white peoples quote retweeting to “dismantle” ideologies just to feel better about themselves in regards of their own immoral, antiblack and colonial subjectivities,” which seems to be about me. This was specifically in the context of replying to a comment that said of the “goings on of debate twitter” that one should de-platform fascists. At that time, the goings-on of debate twitter was my original article. So either he was commenting about various people quote tweeting an article that he didn’t know about and calling them fascist, or he did, in fact, know who I was. He also subsequently deleted his claim.

2. “In plain English, this statement argues that ecological disasters are an inherent part of Black people's lives, which cannot be separated from the lasting impact of the plantation system. Relying on improved scientific knowledge, empirical evidence, or data to predict extinction only perpetuates harmful calculations and liberal ideologies. These approaches position Black lives as environmentally expendable and maintain the European Man as the central figure in environmental politics.”