We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Trashinsky,
culture editory here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts as well. Today I'm
on the road. I'm actually in Savannah, Georgia, beautiful city, but
was able thankfully to record a conversation with James Fishback. He is the founder
and executive director of Incubate Debate, also the author of a very viral essay
for our friends over at the Free Press. It's a fascinating conversation. It's
a lot of insight into not just gen Z, but the parents and the
teachers over in our school system that are grappling with some of these really deep
and serios problems. He also has some good news about the kids about to
us as they say, So, I hope you enjoyed this conversation with James
Fishback. Can you tell us a little bit about how you ended up founding
Incubating Debate sort of what led you to doing that, because I imagine there's
an interesting story behind it. There is a dovetails into the article. I
was a high school debater from two thousand and nine to twenty thirteen down in
South Florida. High school debate changed my life. I had a passion for
politics, for economics, for foreign affairs, but didn't really have a way
to channel that passion. And go into a tournament every week and reading Milton
Friedman and talking about trade deals and minimum wage laws and what was happening in
Russia. It just it excited me in a way that had never something I'd
never done before. So I had a great time in high school debate.
I left off to college when I graduated high school. I came back in
twenty seventeen and for two years I was a high school debate Ocean Underserved High
School in North Miami. And it was there, emily that I saw that
high school debate had just become a shell of its former self. It had
just been utterly hijacked by this left wing ideology that was intolerant, that attacked
free speech, and that the truest of ironies became anti debate. There were
certain things, certain arguments you couldn't say, you couldn't make. So when
about did you realize that that started to happen. When do you think it
hit the high school debate community, Because we always used to think of the
campus as very separate from what was happening in Cape through twelve, and at
a certain point that's just all started to bleed together. It's a great point.
I think there's probably two elements to how this happened. Two stages.
The first was likely the twenty sixteen election, which, as you know,
Emily unleashed this tribalism where it was us versus them mentality. If you said
anything positive or in fact, if you in any way defended the other side,
you were a fascist, you were a racist, you were homophopes,
so on. And then I think the other stage also came with the so
called racial reckoning of twenty twenty and this sort of diversity, acquity and inclusion
agenda, and that really creeped into high school debate. You're absolutely right.
This has been on the college campus for a long time. It's been in
corporate American increasingly. But to see a thirteen or a fourteen year old girl
in high school merely mentioned the word illegal immigrant, and then for the judge,
as I bring up in the article, for one judge to stand up
and say that's it, rounds over. You lose. I'm going to talk
to your coach. I'm going to give you a nice, stern, humiliating
lecture that's antithetical to debate and it's un American. So if you could probably
a lot of people saw your essay in the Free Press, but if you
could just explain to us a little bit about what you talked about in that
and then I'm going to ask you why you think it resonated, because I
saw that thing everywhere. But if you could just start a little bit with
what you conveyed in the essay, that would be fantastic. Absolutely. The
essay really focuses on what are called judge paradigms Emily, and these are online
statements, their public statements, profiles that high school debate judges put up on
a website that's operated by the National Speech and Debate Association. That website is
called Tabroom. So when the article went to press, a lot of these
paradigms, all of them actually were still public. A couple have been taken
down and the screenshots are available on the internet. But tab room is where
a high school debate student would go and look up who their judge is before
the debate began. So you know, back in the day, you might
go and read a judge paradigm that would say, you know what, I
don't like when you speak three hundred words a minute, and I'd like for
you to focus on primary versus secondary evidence. They might say, I put
a lot of weight on how you impact your arguments, which is to say,
how you show why your argument matters in the debate. And that's how
paradigms were for the longest time. But what these paradigms that I uncovered and
many others, they just became riddled with this political and ideological bias that was
so conspicuous it was almost hard to believe. And I think that's why the
article resonated. I think there's a lot of articles that talk about whether that's
critical theory or d EI or whatever it may be in K through twelve or
in college. But I'd like to think I save us with humility. I
like to think I brought the receipts. I brought the actual judge's words,
which are public to this day, on what they were telling kids. You
know, collectively, the judges in this article judge north of a thousand students
in just the last couple of years, and then in debate, these things
act as a social network where you know, when one's judge tells you you
can't bring up a legal immigrant in a round, and then you lose that
round, all of a sudden, people start to pick up on something,
and then you create this self censorship that just stifles free speech. And I
think that's why a lot of people paid attention and shared the article. Of
course, I'm incredibly honored and humble that that happened. I'm actually writing a
follow up piece as we speak right now for Barrying for the Free Press.
Yeah. I wanted to ask about that because I suspect that the response was
as interesting as the original story, because it kind of colors the original story
with more our fleshes out the way people are thinking about what you describe what's
happening. So maybe if you could like preview a little bit of your follow
up and tell us basically just what you've heard from Judge's parents students, that'd
be great. Absolutely, you know the idiom blow up your phone. I
had heard it, I knew what it meant, but I never related to
it. Emily and my phone quite literally blew up when this article came out.
I've heard from everybody. I've heard from coaches, I've heard from students.
There's one student in particular, young woman from actually from South Florida named
Brianna Watley. She went on Dana Prina Prino on Fox News and told the
story that you know, she was having a debate on President Biden's foreign policy
track record, and before the round, the judge told her not to bring
up President Trump. She deemed it inappropriate. You know, who would have
thought you can't talk about foreign policy of a president without having a juxtaposition to
the previous administration. The coming article will focus on a couple of things,
and one of them is the nsda's response. I reached out six times for
comment in the lead up to publishing my article, and I didn't hear back
once from the NSDA, But they put out a two page statement thirty six
hours after the article came out, and I'll just less, so what's in
it? Let's talk about what's not in it. In the face of all
of these very clear, incontrovertible evidence, right of these judge paradigms being hosted
on their site, judging at their tournaments, saying things like, if you're
white, don't run impacts that primarily affect people of color. So for Emily,
for your listeners, that's to say, if you're a white girl from
Illinois, don't you dare talk about senseless violence that's afflicting communities in Baltimore or
DC. That's not your place. Or the one judge who says, hey,
if your pro Israel, pro capitalism, or pro police, I'm just
not going to vote for you, right. So what is the nsda's response
in that two page statement to those judges who judge their tournaments. They do
not condemn, They did not discipline, and they did not kick them out.
And I think, more than anything, that tells people something about the
NSDA that I couldn't even mention in my article because I can never could have
predicted their response. I asked for their comment, and that's what one judge
told me on the record. So I'm gonna be talking about in the follow
up piece, a judge from Kansas City that what was appalling to him it
should be really easy for a National Speech and Debate Association to stand for free
speech and open debate and to condemn and to dismiss these judges. And I
think a lot of people looked at that and said, okay, to the
extent that he only brought up a couple of examples, why was it so
difficult? Why could they not condemn and dismiss these judges? And I think
that tells an even more compelling story than anything I brought up in my original
piece. And it's probably useful here to go back to basics. Some of
our listeners are certainly very smiled with high school debate, if they went through
it themselves, or their children aren't going through it now, or grandchildren.
But if you can speak Jims, what does high school debate mean to students?
So what Obviously there's the college application questions, but there's also the personal
questions. You know, so in a sort of professional scale, you know
what this could mean to them going forward as they apply to college, but
also personally what does it mean to them as students, as people who are
growing up. Absolutely, it's really easy to focus on the college acceptance angle,
the scholarship angle. College the path to college oftentimes runs through high school
debate for so many kids, not just directly right, the idea that you
could get a scholarship to go compete on a debate team. But the idea
that your test scores would go up, your ability to demonstrate, to get
rec and dation letters, those accolades, those awards would certainly stand out to
the admissions committee a number of these top universities. So the fact that a
student would quit debate or would not see success in debate because of their political
views would certainly be threatened. But what's more important than that to me,
Emily is the fact that these are kids at the end of the day.
Now, it's easy to forget that when they're talking about, you know,
vat taxes in Europe, or they're talking about what's happening in Ukraine and Russia,
or they're talking about, heaven forbid, what's happening at the southern border
to that one judge. But they're thirteen fourteen year old kids. These are
young boys and girls who have mustered the strength the courage to wake up at
five thirty am on a Saturday to put on that shirt that mom ironed and
that tie that Dad picked up at the store the night before that he had
saved up a couple of weeks for to make sure that you look good,
to drive you halfway across the county, to send you along your way.
The idea that a young girl would walk into that room and not even have
a shot because she was arguing in favor of school choice, or she was
pro life, or she believed that federalism was something that saved us during this
pandemic. That is, that's what's most devastating. So the idea that a
student would have to either conform or quit, and then in the process would
go through this humiliation. I actually bring up one example near the end of
the piece of a young girl who was ridiculed at the twenty eighteen National Speech
and Debate Association Tournament. She had made some conservative arguments. According to the
NSDA, people had said some incorrect things, of course, and so what
happened. The other students chased her around the national tournament at the convention Center
with shirts that said fuc k Trump, and they belittled her and ridiculed her
for at on her shirt and for the clothes that she was wearing. I
mean, the idea that a young girl would go through hell because she made
a conservative argument, and that nobody, no adult, the so called adults
in the room wouldn't stand up and say that is not right. That I
think, more than anything, Emily speaks to the systemic nature of just how
intolerant high school debate has become. And that's just it's sad, it's ironic,
it's hypocritical, but more than anything, it's Unamerican. And we've got
and that's why I found it incubate. We've got to bring free speech,
diversity of viewpoints, and merit back to high school debate. Children aren't traffic
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com slash freedom. I was going to say, there's two levels to that.
There's the question about the students, the questions about the adults, the
parents and judges, supervisors, teachers, etc. A lot of people have
opinions about what gen Z and current teenagers are like. Um In some cases
that might be informed by their child, their grandchild, of that child's encircle
of friends. You work with, you know, a subsection of the population
that happens to be interested in in speech to debate. But from that vantage
point of working with those students are sort of fears about their censoriousness or intolerance.
Justify is it just a slice of that student population that's been kind of
radicalized and poisoned on this question a free speech or is this a really widespread
and now it's just only a small slice that supports free speech? And what
is your take on what it looks like. There's good news and bad news.
The bad news, unfortunately, is it is real. It is pervasive,
this intolerance. I've seen it on work with thousands of students over the
last couple of years, all across Florida, which as you know, is
a battleground state, really represents both rural and urban progressive parts like Broward and
Palm Beach County, and then rural parts where I live up in the Panhandle
in Madison County. It happens on both sides. It's a really good Axios
poll that came out last year asked young people. Seventy percent of young Democrats
say they don't want to be friends with a Republican. Thirty percent of young
Republicans say they don't want to be friends with a Democrat. And that's exactly
what I'm seeing on the ground, is this initial aversion to even forget how
a conversation. Do not want to be friends with another individual who either voted,
or as parents, voted a certain way or a certain views on certain
key issues. The good news is that despite how pervasive and how pernicious that
divisiveness is, it's pretty easily curable. And the way to do that is
through free speech and open debate. Get both sides in the room to respectfully
and in good faith have conversations about what they believe. Don't compel speech,
don't compel one side to say something that they don't believe, don't force one
side to take an argument that they don't believe. But at the end of
the day, if we can get people, and I've seen it. We
had a debate camp two years ago at the University of Florida. I'll never
forget this one young girl from a wealthy community in Orlando, and she came
in and was talking about another student and said, you know, would you
want to go get ice cream afterward? Just hanging out? And they said
no, he's a Republican. And I thought, at the time, lord
how, you know how had no idea any it, never really spoken to
him, but the idea that he was Republican. I guess it came up
in a prior discussion. They were having a conversation about policies. And at
the end of that camp, and to this day, those two are thick
as thieves. And it's not because we forced them to sit down and have
a conversation they didn't want to have. We just created, we facilitated,
not a safe space, Emily like the other side wants to push, but
a sacred space. And in that sacred space, everyone's view, everyone's life,
everyone's experience, everyone's perspective matters and has to be respected. Well.
One thing I think about a lot are the incentive structures. And you know,
in a space like this, the judges should have the incentive to be
fair, and the problem seems to be that their concept of fair is a
inaccurate and be just out of whack with what a lot of other people's concept
of what actually constitutes fairness. You know, it's this question that we keep
coming back to. We can't define where, can't come up with common definitions
for bigotry, equality, hate speech, any of those things anywhere near consensus
on that anymore? So, what does the incentive structure look like for national
speech and debate competitions all of us to improve? If you know there is
you know, some of that good news and bad days you talk about,
some people have this totally different concept of what fairness is. How does it
get better? It gets better. The way it gets better is through the
citizen judge model. And that's something the NSDA has really been reluctant to adapt.
We adapted it on day wanted to incubate debate, which is to say,
you bring in members of the community, You bring in first responders,
you bring in local members of the judiciary, you bring in das, you
bring in public defenders, you bring in mom and pop business owners, members
of the armed forces, right you bring in a wide enough swath the population
who actually can be fair. The issue with high school debate is the people
who judge it largely are the people who went through it a couple of years
prior and now they're at Wesleyan studying gender femininity studies. Right, So that's
the issue. And then I think that on the individual judge level, they
make the round about themselves and about this existential crisis. You hear judges in
high school debate talk about the role of the ballot, which is to say,
what does it mean to vote for one team over the other. And
if you vote for the team that says that Israel has the right to defend
itself, the ballot then becomes pro apartheid, and you're sending a larger signal
to the debate community that what is happening in Gaza, what is happening in
the West Bank is okay. And so that's how they view it is that
actually, if a judge decision comes out that they've voted on an argument that
was pro school choice or was pro life, that word is going to get
out so fast, asked Emily. It will make your head spin and that
person that judge will actually become a pariah in the high school speech and debate
community. So there's an incentive structure that aligns with their individual place in a
social network and kind of their value there. But the fix is really really
easy, and that is to reach out to members of the community who actually
represent the electorate, who represent a wide range of views. Have them come
out and judge. We've had such a privilege, such a great time with
them. They give great advice, they're so happy to be there, and
they'll tell us, you know, no one's ever asked us to come judge
a high school debate tournament before. So my advice to the National Speech and
Debate Association is, kick out all these judges, kick out all the former
high school debaters who want to come and make the rounds about themselves in their
own politics. Bring in business owners, bring in faith based leaders, first
responders, and make the debate about the issues and about the communities that the
students represent. And let's talk about the adults second, because you know,
people of millennials, gen xers, a lot of people from prior generations,
you know, outside of gen Z older than gen Z for the most part,
we're raised with this sort of consensus opinion on free speech that you know,
on a playground, America's a free country. I can do what I
want. Blah blah blah. It was a sort of reverence for the old
kind of Aclu Skulky approach, which was controversial, the controversial you know,
a couple of generations ago. But for people who are you know, the
age that they're coming into parenting and all of that now is really how we
saw it as a country, and that I think has probably changed a little
bit, but maybe not as much as it has in gen Z. Maybe
it has. And I'm curious for your take on where are the sort of
adults, judges, parents, teachers fall on these important questions, just in
the same way you sort of explain how it has affected kids and where they
stand on it. Yeah, I think the parents are represented country on these
issues. That there's a lot of split right on the issues that are being
debated, and the issue of free speech, there's usually a lot of consensus
around this. But as you can imagine, just because a parent believes that
while hate speech may be abhorrent or while this particular thing should be accept right,
it doesn't necessarily mean that the student is going to align with what their
parent believes. The big thing here is sort of that power law, right,
which is twenty percent of the judges, let's just say roughly represent eighty
percent of the influence and the clout within the world of high school speech and
debate. So, you know, the the NSDA and their statement said,
you know, this is cherry picking. These are just a handful of the
forty seven thousand ballots or paradigms rather that are on their website tabram. The
problem with that analysis is that it assigns equal weight to these judges. Emily,
there is no equal weight between my mom coming out and judging a high
school debate tournament and Lyla Lavender, who is the twenty nine National College Debate
Champion, someone who for the past year and a half has been coaching high
school students and whose word spreads like wildfire and carries a lot a lot of
weight incredibility in the high school debate scene. So these are educators, these
are high school judges, but at the end of the day, they are
increasingly viewing this as sort of a I'm viewing it anyway, as this trojan
horse issue. We're on the outside, we're for free speech were four critical
thinking. We're for all the things that open debate offer students, but the
second that gate, that horse gets through the gate, you get the d
EI agenda, you get the CRT agenda. They try to stamp out the
so called what they deemed hate speech. You have judges telling students. We
found just over twenty judges who judge three hundred kids at the National Hornament just
last week in Phoenix told the students before the round to not be transphobic.
Okay, well what does that mean. I mean there's no kids in high
school debate, Emily who are yelling slurs and bringing up a student's gender identity
and these ad hominem attacks. That doesn't happen. This ambiguous reference to transphobia
is really about not questioning the prevailing views on so called gender affirming care.
To be transphobic to these judges is to say that women should compete in women's
sports and men should compete in men's sports, or to say that children cannot
consent to puberty blockers or to life altering surgery. So by signaling these statements
to the students beforehand, they profoundly change the debate, and they make what
would normally be. And what is in America a fifty fifty or a seventy
five twenty five issue? They make it look like a ninety five five issue.
And if you advocate for simple guardrails, or you advocate for fairness in
high school women's sports, then all of a sudden, you're a transphobe.
You get labeled as such, you get pushed out of this community, and
you don't reap any of the benefits that I did as a high school debater.
And we used to think about these things as sort of, you know,
Brooklyn versus Kansas, So what's the matter with Kansas versus you know,
the hipster coffee in Williamsburg. But I'm curious, you know, I think
you're right forres such a good cross section, But even as you travel and
work with all kinds of students, it seems to me that a lot of
regional distinctions in this deep ideological question of hatred versus transphobia, versus bigotry versus
science, capital s science, a lot of that stuff, those boundaries have
really been blurred because of social media and the Internet. You can be a
kid in Kansas or Wisconsin where I grew up and still be imbibing the same
ideological stuff because it's in the curricula and it's on the Internet. So have
you noticed that as a true like our regional distinctions sort of melting away because
of the Internet, because of the way curricula has been nationalized with like sixteen
Team Project and all of that. Absolutely, I'm seeing that on the ground.
You know, you go to a place like Holmes County, Florida,
which President Trump won, you got eighty percent of the vote in twenty twenty,
and you'll you'll have kids there who are parroting a lot of the progressive
sort of usual talking points. And it's not necessarily showing up in the curriculum
at school. A lot of it happens via social media. And look,
that's fine if they have those views, that's perfectly fine. You know,
incubate debate. We try to do is make sure you can defend your views,
that your views are rooted in evidence and in logic. And what I
do to both kids on both sides, and I love doing this in rural
areas just as much as an urban progressive areas is. I'll say, who
thinks Trump's a racist? Or who doesn't like Trump? And then a kid
will three or four kids will pop right up, and I'll say why,
I'll say why is Trump? Well, and like literally the wall, and
then we'll say, okay, well, why is the wall racist? And
he says, well, we're keeping you know. And then it'll go on.
And so there's not a lot of meat to that. And the same
thing will happen, although not as much, but the same thing will happen
in rural areas in the Panhandle or in southwest Florida. I'll say, well,
who doesn't like Joe Biden? And a couple of kids will jump up,
and he's a socialist, right, you say, and why is he
a socialist? Or why is he a communist? Or whatever the case is.
And look, there may be some arguments where you could find some evidence
where you know, President Biden or President Trump, you can tie some socialism
or potentially some racial prejudice or the perceived racial prejudices and policies. But no
student has been able to eloquently explain that the first time around. So one,
it's an exercise and humility. It's also an exercise in students really being
able to see that. Hold on a second, I have this view maybe
because of my parents, or maybe because I watch Chris Hayes, or maybe
because you know, Taylor Lorenz is showing up on my TikTok a lot.
But I don't actually back these views up. And some of the most successful
students and incubate debate have actually been these self avowed progressives who have gone out
and add for universal healthcare or advocated for raising taxes on the wealthy, you
know, to fifty sixty percent of income. And if they can do that
in a way that meets the basic requirements of an argument, which we call
claim warrant impact claim is what you're trying to prove warrant is why is your
claim true? Impact is why do we care? If they can do that,
and they can convince a panel of five judges who are going to range
from a local sheriff's deputy to a local pediatrician to a faith based leader to
a member of the United States Navy, then by all means, let it
be heard. It's not our job to say they're wrong because of our political
beliefs. It's the other students in the rounds job to refute them and to
prove that they're wrong. And if that doesn't happen, and if those students
arguments stand undisputed, they'll win the debate. And that's how it should be.
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Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. And this is another problem with
just the divisions that everyone deals with, that one you deal with probably very
acutely. What the problems are students and judges and coaches running into when it
comes to citing sources for instance, we're talking as this question over debate itself
was raised with Joe Rogan, R K Junior and Peter What's his name,
I forget. Yes, the lab code doctor who spewed all kinds of disinformation
in the name of dispelling disinformation during Code of It and medi has and who
wrote a book about debate, has told him not to debate on this question.
Joe Rogan offered him like one hundred thousand dollars to debate RFK Jr.
That would go to a charity of his choice. And basically there are big
voices on the left to have come out like and said don't debate. The
debates not worth it. But there's a very real question of somebody who's a
medical professional who has all this information he claims his valid some of it turns
out to be wrong, versus somebody who does actually I think have some disinformation
out there, like RFK Junior has very different interpretations of studies and just coming
to a common understanding of facts. Now it is increasingly impossible of citing sources
that are reliable, and that has hurt our ability to even have these conversations
and debates. Can you speak to how that might be a problem as students
are looking for sources to site and just basic information to back up their claims.
Absolutely, Emily, could you imagine if in eighteen fifty eight, as
Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln were about to take the stage and take
part in some of the most important debates in the history of not just this
country, but in the history of history, if some journalists had shouted,
don't debate. That's not the answer to actually have to defend your views in
front of the public, your views on popular sovereignty, on federalism, right
on the idea of slavery. So what I would say is that this example
between RFK Jr. And Peter Hotez is the latest example of the collapse of
open debate in America. And that's what I think the article tries to connect
to is that, look, if you can't have a debate in high school
debate, you really shouldn't be able to have one everywhere. And that's actually
what's happening. Right If you look back at the last couple of years,
if the people who had pushed the policies on the American public had actually had
to defend their views in open, public, long form debates, we would
have avoided a lot of the calamities that we saw. Think would one in
three kids be reading below grade level. If the proponents of endless school lockdowns
had to defend their ideas in a debate with somebody on the other side,
would there have been one hundred and thirty six percent increase in adolescent speech language
disorders If proponents of forced masking on toddlers had had to defend their arguments at
an open, long form public debate. Would young men be suffering from myocarditis
at rates forty four times higher than the unvaccinated control group if those forcing maxine
mandates on healthy eighteen year olds going off to college had had to defend their
arguments in a public long form debate. So debate is really the path to
truth. And by truth I mean the singular truth, not your truth,
not my truth, not one of many truths, not my lived, experienced
truth. But as Vivek Ramaswami offense says, the truth, the path to
that truth emily runs through free speech and open debate. We've seen that time
and again through history. The idea that there's a settled science, that nothing
is, that something cannot be debated is a pathetical to the idea of debate.
I think a lot of people want to take that to the nth degree.
And I welcome that. Should we have a debate about Nazism, about
Hitler, about whether slavery was good or bad, and I say, bring
it on. Right. Slavery is abhorrent. It is a bankrupt idea,
and if someone believes that it isn't, let them get up in a room
of their peers and defend that and let the other person respond, and there
will be no doubt. They will be shown, they will be humbled that
their idea is bankrupt, that it is wrong. And that's how you prove
a point. The idea that something cannot be debated is just so wrong that
we have to really radically we push this idea forward. Make no mistake.
Open debate made this country what it is today, and for lack of better
world, what we've got to do is you've got to make debate great again.
Well, I also wanted to ask how much you're dealing with that issue
of my truth versus your truth versus the truth, because I do decent amount
of talking too high school and college students, and one thing I've noticed but
they really respond to is moral clarity. Like they really seem to be desperate
for moral clarity, for a foundation of stone to be building their sort of
moral house on stone and not sand, and they have this kind of nagging
sense that it's all built on sand because they've been conditioned in this moral relativism
since they're children. It's like almost they don't know anything else except that something
else's probably right and something else probably feels better. But that's just my own
little tangent, my experience. But how much do you see students grappling with
that, coming in with this prerequisite belief or prerequisite disbelief and truth and this
idea that things actually are relative kind of baked into their world view. Well,
I would put it this way. I think your lived experience aligns and
is congruent with my lived experience in this particular area of intersectionality. Yeah,
it's it's exactly right, Emily. The I think the biggest issue here is
the disconnect between emotion and fact. You know, we had the CNN and
NBC and NonStop during the pandemic talking about you know, you're going to die
if you don't wear a mask, and you're going to kill someone's grandma if
you don't get vaccinated, and stigmatizing people. But the issue that we saw
in the pandemic is a lot of people just won't let facts get in the
way of a good argument, right, The idea that they have to adhere
to the facts to advance an argument that is just that's anathema to what they
believe. I think a lot about that Bill maher sketch or episode from a
couple of years ago where he really ripped progressives and said, you guys were
totally wrong over on COVID. You exaggerated the statistics. We actually brought up
this poll which one of the questions was, what do you think the chances
are that someone would go to the hospital if they got COVID? And so
forty one percent of Democrats thought it was over fifty percent. So there was
even odds that you would end up being hospitalized if you got COVID, and
the answer was between one and five percent. Right. So a lot of
that emotion emily about lockdowns, about forced masking, about vaccine mandates stemmed truly,
we talked about miss and disinformation stemmed from progressive misinformation that really tore the
country asunder for several years, that forced inner city kids to learn behind a
laptop where they didn't, of course, actually learn that delayed speech development in
young toddlers because of this misinformation. So what I tell students when I'm going
and visiting colleges, when I'm visiting students all over the state of Florida,
is let's talk about the why. What is your warrant? What is the
why behind your argument? Because if you're going to make an argument as to
why we should have forced masking, and your argument is predicated on the belief
that fifty percent of Americans who get COVID will end up hospitalized, your argument's
going to fall flat. Right, There is a world in which you could
have argued that forced masking if it were effective, if it prevented transmission,
if the underlying pathogen was as deadly or right, it's morbid to cause this
hospitalization, if those facts lined up with what you are claiming, then that
would have been a fair argument to make. But it just so happens that
it didn't. And that's the biggest thing is really reminding and humbling. It's
usually humbling exercise students. Your claim, what you're trying to prove has to
line up with your warrant, which is why is it true? There's a
really funny family guy clip there's almost a Family Guy clip for everything. Family
Guy is signed filed episode for Everything, but it's about pizza. And Peter
goes to the gym. He goes to a CrossFit gym for the first time,
and he goes up to this millennial gym trainer and he says, all
right, I'm ready to get started. And he says, all right,
what's your favorite food? And he says pizza. And he says and the
gym trainer responds, you can't eat that. And then he said why and
he said it's awful. It's one of the worst foods. And he said,
well why, And then the jim because you know the ingredients, he
says, name one, He's like all of them. And that's just in
so many different ways, Emily, that exact framework, he replaced pizza with
Trump, replaced Trump with not getting the vaccine, replaced not getting with the
vaccine with school lockdowns, or with the Ukraine policy, and that this becomes
part of the dynamic. Is the idea that an argument is beyond debate.
Is the exact argument we have to debate that if you criticize the Ukraine policy,
if you criticize it in any way, shape, or form. You're
obviously carrying Putin's water, And why are we even talking about this If you
criticize vaccine mandates, obviously you're an anti vaxer and you want people to die
in your callous And that's exactly sort of what happened. So I think that
was a really funny example of factor stranger than fiction. These types of conversations
happen all the time, and I would say that debate is ubiquitous, right,
Most debates that happen don't look like, you know, Lincoln versus Douglas
in fifty eight, don't look like Kennedy versus Nixon in sixty Heaven forbid Hillary
versus Trump in twenty sixteen. But most of these debates, Emily, happen
every single day at the water cooler, around the dinner table, at work,
in classrooms, when you're talking about the issues that matter. Those are
the debates that matter. And we have to do a much better job as
Americans to be able to listen to the other side more and think critically and
respond respectively for what is being said. And you know, even though your
listeners may have not done high school debate, there's no question they had a
discussion. I'm sure in the last little bit about the role of federalists were
about vaccine mandates or about the trans issue, and how we conduct ourselves in
those conversations is effectively how one should conduct themselves into debate. Jim's where can
people go to learn more about incubate Debate. They can go to incubate debate
dot org. We are a five O one C three nonprofit. We are
you know, Florida's the third largest state in the country. We've got thousands
of active students there. In addition to bring in free speech back to high
school debate. We're doing it at no cost. And we're really the only
organization in Florida and in the nation that can say that not only are we
not only are our tournaments free for the students and the coaches and the parents
to attend end, but they're also free because you don't have to bring out
meet these judge requirements where you have to go out and find another former high
school debate or and fly them down and have them judge. So everything we
do is no cost. I would encourage your listeners to go on incubate debate
dot org and if they like our work and like what we're doing. I
would be I would be honored for their support. James Fishback is the founder
and executive director of Incubate Debate. James, we really appreciate you coming on
the show. Oh it's my pleasure. Thank you. Emilie. Of course
you've been listening to another edition of The Federalist or radio hour and then like
you should see culture editor here at The Federalist. We'll be back soon with
more. Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray.
All right,