00:00:00.000Hey everybody, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:00:01.000This is Andrew Colvett, EP of the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:00:04.000I am joined by James Fishback with a really profound, deep conversation about high school speech and debate.
00:00:11.000Now, wait, you may think this is a boring topic.
00:00:14.000This has implications more far-reaching than you could ever possibly imagine.
00:00:18.000Do you know that one-third of Congress participated in speech and debate?
00:00:23.000Do you know that it's one of the most important things you get on your resume leading into college, which then leads you into your professional life?
00:00:31.000This is a massive, massive story that went really viral.
00:00:34.000You are going to be shocked at what some of these debate judges are doing to 12, 13, 14-year-old boys and girls that are just trying to argue a point.
00:00:44.000This literally went from coast to coast, and hopefully, it's going to help solve a really, really tremendous problem that is affecting our young people.
00:00:53.000We dive into it with James Fishback from incubated.org.
00:00:57.000You're going to want to support this guy and what he's doing.
00:01:23.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:34.000Brought to you by the Loan Experts I Trust, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage at andrewandTodd.com.
00:01:44.000Welcome, everybody, back to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:46.000This is Andrew Colvett, executive producer of the Charlie Kirk Show, filling in for the one and only Charlie Kirk, who is indisposed today.
00:01:54.000A little bit of a last-minute shuffle.
00:01:56.000But we had a great show already prepped and ready to go for the man.
00:02:57.000And you've published now two parts of it.
00:03:01.000And, you know, we'll get those graphics up on screen.
00:03:04.000Part one, you know, actually, let's take one step back.
00:03:09.000Tell us your story of how you got involved in this high school debate genre area.
00:03:16.000I mean, it's fairly niche, but when you actually peel back the layers, you realize just how important and how foundational to the future of America this project is that you're working on.
00:03:52.000High school debate ended up being the perfect outlet to be able to make good arguments, to engage with arguments from the other side, and to not necessarily convince people of things, but to get them to think about different perspectives.
00:04:07.000We need more of that in the country right now, I think.
00:04:10.000And so then, you know, this activity gave me so much.
00:04:12.000I came back from college and I did two years as a volunteer debate coach at an underserved high school in Miami, Florida.
00:04:19.000And it was in those two years, Andrew, that I saw that high school debate had become a shell of its former self.
00:04:29.000The tribalism that we saw in other parts of the country, whether that was in the media and corporate America and universities, along with the censorship, seemed like it was 10X in high school debate.
00:04:40.000It was just at such an extreme level that students were actually losing rounds, were being interrupted by grown adults for saying things like illegal immigrant, simply the word illegal immigrant in a debate about immigration.
00:04:55.000One judge I bring up in my first part of my reporting for the free press told students before the round: if you are pro-Israel, pro-police, or pro-capitalism, you will lose.
00:05:19.000These are young kids, 13, 14 years old.
00:05:22.000Do I stick with my convictions or do I conform?
00:05:26.000Most kids I knew conformed because scholarships, accolades, college acceptance letters were on the line, depending on how well they did at these tournaments.
00:05:35.000And when you conform, you self-censor.
00:05:37.000When you self-censor, you create an echo chamber that is largely devoid of conservative ideas.
00:05:44.000I'm an unapologetic conservative, but for me, this is profoundly a free speech issue.
00:05:50.000I got to tell you, I would be writing about this if there were conservatives before the debate telling kids: if you make a pro-choice argument or if you make an open borders or an anti-police argument, you lose automatically.
00:06:05.000That's why I think Democrats like Roe Conna in Congress or former Treasury Secretary under President Clinton, Larry Summers, have recognized this is a bigger than one party.
00:06:16.000This is bigger than one series of political beliefs.
00:06:20.000This is about free speech and open debate.
00:06:23.000Ideas, by the way, that set this country into motion 250 years ago.
00:06:27.000You cannot engage in viewpoint censorship.
00:06:30.000Free speech is ultimately about protecting the speech that you disagree with most.
00:06:41.000Listen, I think, you know, when we were talking on the phone, I gave you a call yesterday and I, you know, I confessed to you, I said, listen, I missed part one, but apparently it was so viral.
00:06:53.000Somehow I missed it, but that's all right.
00:06:54.000Somehow it was so viral that they, you know, they asked you at the free press to come back and write part two.
00:07:02.000You know, I think I want to get into part two.
00:07:06.000In some ways, I think it's even more shocking than part one.
00:07:08.000But part one, I think it took the blinders off for a ton of people of how the views of our society are being shaped at such a young age and how censorship is happening now at such a young age.
00:07:23.000I mean, and I told you on the phone, I said, listen, Charlie in many ways cut his teeth by having uncensored, very public debates with college liberals.
00:07:33.000I mean, Turning Point USA, as you understand it, the show would not exist as you see it now had it not been for creating a platform for very public debates to happen.
00:07:44.000And what we see, you know, you think that these things are happening all the time.
00:07:47.000And what you've now exposed in this two-part series is that actually the debate that you understood when you were a kid, the high school debates that forged so many of our current leaders.
00:07:59.000Blake is one of the producers on our show.
00:08:01.000He's texted me about his own debate experience from high school.
00:08:05.000And I mean, how many elected leaders that are now in Congress?
00:08:10.000You know, it's the state level, at the federal level.
00:08:12.000It's estimated to your Congress point, Andrew, to interrupt.
00:08:14.000It's estimated that upwards of one-third of... sitting members of the United States Congress did high school debate.
00:08:20.000I mean, this is so foundational to the future of the republic.
00:08:24.000And here, here what we see is that the free expression, the clampdown of it that you saw on Twitter, that you've seen in social media, that you see from the progressive left.
00:08:33.000I'm encouraged that RoConna, he seems to be one of the few semi-sane Democrats that we have in Congress, that he reached out to Larry Summers, I think you said as well, who, by the way, was proven completely right on inflation.
00:08:47.000It was Obama's foreign economics advisor.
00:08:49.000Yeah, I mean, he was warning about all this excess spending.
00:09:02.000What was the prevalent, most prevalent response you got from the audience?
00:09:06.000Yeah, the most prevalent response actually was from the National Speech and Debate Association, which is the center of my reporting.
00:09:12.000They are the nearly 100-year-old National Debate League who's counted nearly 2 million alumni from 1925 to today, includes, by the way, Justice Scorsich, Alito, Katanji Brown Jackson, Senator Warren.
00:09:25.000I mean, so many, so many others on both sides.
00:09:42.000They did not remove, denounce, nothing when they put out their statement, which is a two-page word salad.
00:09:47.000Here's what one judge says to students.
00:09:49.000This person's judged hundreds, 120 kids in Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey in the past year.
00:09:55.000Quote, I'm quoting here directly from their online judging profile within the NSDA, the National Speech and Debate Association.
00:10:03.000Quote, if you are white, don't run arguments with impacts that primarily affect people of color.
00:10:11.000These arguments should belong to the communities they affect.
00:10:14.000Andrew, what this judge is saying is if you're a white girl from Indiana or from Florida, don't you dare talk about the senseless violence in Baltimore, Chicago, or D.C. That's not your place to do it.
00:10:27.000How un-American does it get than that?
00:10:31.000I mean, absolutely, we run into that all the time.
00:10:33.000I mean, this show is fearless about racial topics and we constantly get called, you know, all sorts of terrible names because we're not allowed to have opinions about that.
00:10:41.000And by the way, we're not allowed to, we're not allowed to have opinions about abortion either because we're a bunch of cis white males that aren't able to carry a baby unless we call ourselves trans or something.
00:10:51.000But we're not allowed to have opinions because these things obviously don't affect us.
00:10:58.000I want to talk about relieffactor.com.
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00:11:48.000Part one, we're just sort of getting into still.
00:11:51.000But part two, in some ways, is more, even more explosive, James.
00:11:56.000Correct me if I'm wrong, but part two, but it's like we have now a sea of these debate judges that are, and the USD, what's the acronym here, by the way?
00:12:10.000It's the NSDAN SDA, the national speech and debate.
00:12:13.000They're creating, they actually have a database called Tabroom, where they declare that debaters who argue in favor of capitalism or Israel or in favor of the police will lose the rounds they are judged in.
00:12:30.000I mean, can anybody, anything be more antithetical to the spirit of debate than literally cutting out the knees from underneath certain debaters with certain perspectives?
00:12:40.000No, this doesn't even really relate to debate.
00:13:06.000Let me just set this up by saying these paradigms are what students are supposed to read before the round.
00:13:12.000They were originally conceived to allow students to learn more about their judge and their preferences, not their political or ideological preferences, but whether they liked kids to speak at 300 words a minute or at a more moderate pace, whether they preferred primary versus secondary source evidence, whether they wanted students to focus on the impacts or why their arguments mattered.
00:13:34.000That was how these paradigms were supposed to be used.
00:13:37.000And then in that period from when I left high school in 2013 to when I came back as a coach in 2017, the paradigms became riddled with political and ideological statements.
00:13:48.000They more closely resembled a Twitter profile of a political activist than of an impartial adjudicator of a high school debate.
00:13:56.000Here's what one student, one judge tells to students in their paradigm.
00:14:00.000This is again, I'm quoting this verbatim, and this actually is still public right now on the Tabroom website.
00:14:06.000He says, quote, if you are discussing immigrants in a round and describe them as illegal, I will immediately stop the round, give you the loss with low speaker points, give you a stern lecture, and then talk to your coach.
00:14:25.000I will not have you making the debate space unsafe.
00:14:33.000I mean, think about the implications about that for you and the Charlie Kirk show audience.
00:14:38.000You are now, we are now raising up a generation of young people that are not allowed to debate the merits of immigration based on a very important bifurcation that we've had on the books and our laws for generations: that you can legally immigrate and you can illegally immigrate.
00:14:57.000And these are legal distinctions that are now disallowed by a growing cadre of judges within the NSDA.
00:15:08.000There's another example I hear that my producers are pulling up.
00:15:12.000In his final round of the two-day tournament, and this is actually from part two, I believe, of your reporting.
00:15:18.000Matthew was shocked to hear the opposing team levy a personal attack against him as their central argument.
00:15:25.000The opposing team argued: this debate is more than just about the debate, it's about protecting individuals in the community from people who proliferate hatred and make this community unsafe.
00:15:39.000They then pulled up a screenshot of a tweet from earlier that month, which Matthew had responded to.
00:15:47.000So to put it another way, the debate leaders are literally encouraging kids to collect docs dossiers on other kids to get ahead and debate.
00:18:10.000And again, these other banks that I deal with, it's like, here's 955,000 pages to sign and they don't call you back and they don't work weekends.
00:18:18.000I had a problem with one of the things on the process because it was one thing that wasn't filled out.
00:18:22.000And they respond on a Sunday within minutes.
00:18:24.000You're trying to get a response from a woke bank on a Sunday.
00:19:19.000James, you just mentioned that one-third of Congress is suspected to have participated in high school debate.
00:19:27.000This is a foundational, formative experience for many of the nation's future leaders.
00:19:32.000And it's getting completely bastardized, which is really, and you wrote something here, which I think is really, really important.
00:19:40.000It said, you said, once students have been exposed to enough of these partisan paradigms, they internalize that point of view and adjust their arguments going forward.
00:19:49.000That's why you rarely see students presenting arguments in favor of capitalism, defending Israel, or challenging affirmative action, which, by the way, just polling shows affirmative action is universally unpopular, but I guess you can't do it in high school debate.
00:20:03.000Most students choose not to fight this coercion.
00:20:06.000They see it as a necessary evil that's required to win debates and secure the accolades, scholarships, and college acceptance letters that come with winning.
00:20:16.000This is a crucial, crucial point you make here.
00:20:20.000And by the way, Charlie's very good at this.
00:20:22.000He says, you know, his take on it is, you know, accept the bad grade, tell the truth.
00:20:26.000Other people, like Ben Shapiro, say sometimes you should feel free to lie to your college professors, et cetera, et cetera, just to get the grade and get out, right?
00:20:37.000But I want you to just explain that motivation really quickly: the tough position that these debate paradigms are placing kids that don't follow the narrative.
00:20:51.000It's placed them in a really tough position.
00:20:53.000You know, I think it's one thing, and I think Charlie's absolutely right.
00:20:55.000In college, you take the L, you take the failure if it means not getting rid of the world biological women, as we recently saw with a college student.
00:21:07.000But we have to remember, Andrew, these are 12 and 13-year-olds, young girls, who signed up because they had a passion for what was happening in the country and they wanted to be able to learn more about it.
00:21:18.000I think it's really hard to tell that person to stand by your convictions.
00:21:22.000The natural thing for them to do is when an adult tells you to do something, you don't do it.
00:23:06.000She tells debaters: if you are white, don't run arguments with impacts that primarily affect people of color.
00:23:14.000These arguments should belong to the communities they affect.
00:23:18.000So, again, you are not allowed to have an opinion on black fatherlessness in the home.
00:23:23.000You're not allowed to have an opinion about Harvard and their acceptance of Asians, their acceptance rates of Asians.
00:23:31.000You're not allowed to have any opinions that might affect a community that you don't belong to.
00:23:36.000And you bring up this really interesting thing here, James, where you hearken back to Barack Obama's famous speech at the DNC, where he says, I am my brother's keeper.
00:23:49.000That something that affects you and justice that affects you affects me.
00:23:52.000This sense that we are all one American family that resonated so profoundly at the time.
00:23:57.000I mean, I'm old enough to remember that moment.
00:24:00.000And how far the progressive lens has moved on from this, like, we are all in it together to your viewpoints don't matter and we're stifling these young people and basically holding over them the threat that you're not going to get into the college that you want.
00:24:15.000It's profound the change that's happened, is it not?
00:24:41.000You know, this is a bigger issue than I think just progressivism, Andrew.
00:24:45.000We're seeing the new establishment say that you're just not allowed to debate certain things.
00:24:50.000We actually see it in our party on things like the Ukraine issue, where you have some senators who will accuse you of carrying Putin's water if you ask for there to be an inspector general on the Ukraine fund allotments, or if you ask questions about whether the military funding that's going to Ukraine is actually exacerbating the conflict and taking more lives because it takes away the option for a diplomatic negotiated settlement.
00:25:18.000I'm happy to see some progressives stand up and say we've got to defend free speech.
00:25:22.000But make no mistake, there are people in our party who are against the idea of free speech when it comes to particular issues that they want to guard and protect with their life.
00:25:35.000This is a student, just to give the audience an example here, that was given a zero in class for her project because she used the term biological woman.
00:25:47.000I got a zero on a project proposal in my class because I used the term biological women, which is apparently not allowed anymore.
00:25:54.000She even said it was a good project proposal, but I got a zero because I use this term that's exclusionary and not allowed anymore.
00:26:03.000And I 100% know that this is like the most biased grade ever because my project is about transgenders competing in biological women's sports.
00:26:12.000How am I supposed to do my final project if I can't use the word biological women?
00:26:19.000James, this isn't just, I think that that clip's important because it shows that this is an institutional rot.
00:26:28.000It's an ideological rot that is pervasive within the educational community.
00:26:32.000Take a second here and tell me, James, why you think that this viewpoint, this type of sensorial, you know, we're blocking actual ideas from being debated.
00:26:46.000Why is this so prevalent in education?
00:26:49.000I think it's prevalent because one side has ostracized and marginalized and stigmatized the other side to the point that they're calling the other side Hitler and fascist and all racist and homophobe and all of that nonsense.
00:27:04.000That anything that that side argues, even basic facts like biological women, those need to be stamped out because those are dangerous ideas in their mind.
00:27:14.000And what happened to this young girl on a college campus is exactly what's happening in high school debate, is exactly what's happening in the workplace or happening maybe in your kids' eighth grade or 10th grade history class.
00:27:25.000Conservative ideas are just not welcome because they are deemed, they are labeled as racist, as xenophobic, as fascist.
00:27:37.000And the sad truth, Andrew, is that if there were actually a debate where progressive and conservative ideas came together, had those teachers, had those debate coaches of the NSDA allowed debates to happen in a fair and balanced way, you wouldn't have progressives saying these things about conservatives because you would have an opportunity for them to engage with their arguments.
00:27:57.000Again, the goal isn't for necessarily a conservative to change a progressive's mind.
00:28:02.000The goal is to simply get a progressive to say, hey, you made me think.
00:28:06.000Maybe my views about defunding the police in light of the Pew Research Center noting that 81% of Black Americans want police funding to stay the same or go up.
00:28:14.000Maybe that's something I have to rethink.
00:28:16.000And open debate and free speech allows that pursuit of the truth to happen.
00:28:22.000I want to bring up another example here, and then I want to get into solutions because you do mention that there are good debate judges out there still.
00:28:32.000So this has not impacted every debate judge.
00:28:38.000But you said, in general, students voluntarily and mutually disclose their evidence to their opponents before the debate.
00:28:56.000And this is kind of why I want to get into solutions because I can't understand why this person is allowed to be a judge.
00:29:02.000Ex-Braithwaite, who's judged 169 debate rounds with 340 children, students, has her own disclosure policy within her paradigm, again, on Tabroom.
00:29:14.000So you get to look at your judge and get to see what their paradigm is, which uses the racial epithet.
00:29:19.000One, N-words don't have to disclose to you.
00:31:40.000Just when you thought the government would stop trying to take over healthcare, Senator Bernie Sanders, that socialist Marxist communist, is pushing something that is no good.
00:31:49.000I'm urgently asking you to support the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste to stop the Senate from passing the Sanders Bill S1339.
00:31:57.000It would raise the price of prescription drugs by making it harder for pharmacy benefit managers to continue to save an average of $1,000 per year for 275 million Americans just like you.
00:32:06.000Bernie Sanders, he does, he is a sneaky commie.
00:33:52.000Tell me what you're getting at with that clip.
00:33:56.000There's a lot of wisdom in Family Guy, but I sent that clip because it's something that I encountered when I traveled all over the state for the past two years, my home state of Florida, and met with thousands of students to get them ready for incubate debates, our free nonprofit debate league in the state.
00:34:13.000And I kept running into the same thing on the Trump point.
00:34:17.000And look, whatever you or your viewers or I, whatever we think about Trump, let's just put that aside for one second, good, bad, and other, whatever we think.
00:34:24.000When I would ask a student, what do you think about Trump?
00:34:40.000And there was just blank stare, or there was no real substance in response.
00:34:47.000And that was a really good way to test whether somebody had something substantive to say about the point in question.
00:34:54.000Debate is all about having an argument, building up the evidence, and then defending that argument to the opposition.
00:35:01.000And if you can't do that in a basic conversation about pizza or about your feelings about President Trump, then we've got some work to do.
00:35:08.000And the point of the exercise is I've actually had a couple of kids who did it pretty well, who maybe talked about some foreign policy points or talked about some of the COVID spending.
00:35:18.000But it's really about whether you can defend something that is politically unpopular, where it's not the cool thing to say if you're 15 years old and you live in Miami or live in Broward County to say that you support Donald Trump.
00:35:32.000I got to say, I did it the other way for conservative kids in rural parts of the state who had some pretty strong feelings about Vice President Harris or about President Biden.
00:35:50.000And if you're going to have a view about Vice President Harris or about President Trump, you have to be able to defend it.
00:35:55.000And I think that clip really illustrates a lot of people struggling to articulate some of their highly convicted views about the former president of the United States.
00:36:37.000If you see something wrong with an organization or institution, you build your own, you compete, you destroy them, and you create something special and magical for the young men and women of this country.
00:36:47.000That's what I'm doing with Incubate Debate.
00:36:48.000I encourage others who are motivated former debaters to stand up and do the same.
00:36:54.000It's the fastest growing debate league in America.
00:36:57.000We've got over 3,000 kids in my home state of Florida who come together four times a year and debate the issues where no one is putting their thumb on the scale, where free speech, civility, and diversity of viewpoints reign true.
00:37:09.000And I got to tell you, Andrew, I'd be honored to have your viewers' support in this fight to bring free speech back to high school debate.
00:37:15.000They can, of course, learn more at incubated.org.
00:37:28.000We're looking at that sort of TEDx independent model.
00:37:31.000I was on the phone yesterday with a school board member in South Carolina, one as well with Texas with Senator Cruz to talk about Texas expansion.
00:38:05.000Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
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