My Competitive Debate Cancellation Story
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Policy debate
12 min read
The article centers entirely on competitive policy debate, its culture, judging practices, and evolution. Understanding the formal structure and history of policy debate would give readers essential context for the author's experience and criticisms.
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Cancel culture
14 min read
The article is fundamentally a personal narrative about being 'canceled' in a specific community. Understanding the broader phenomenon of cancel culture, its mechanisms, and debates surrounding it provides important sociological context.
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Glossary of policy debate terms
16 min read
The article describes debaters performing 'unrelated speech acts' and arguing that topics are 'problematic' rather than engaging with policy arguments. The kritik (critique) is a specific debate strategy that underlies much of what the author describes, and understanding it illuminates the cultural shift in competitive debate.
I did competitive debate all throughout high school. But now, I am regarded in debate as a uniquely sinister figure—my friends who remain in the activity tell me that I’m seen as a mix of Hitler, Ted Bundy, and, I was going to say Mao, but debaters actually tend to like him. So maybe Mitt Romney. When a debate tournament happened at my college, and I was casually walking through, a loose friend of mine—in high school at the time—was told to “stay away from that guy,” (me), as if I was planning to take his wallet or detonate a bomb.
In fact, purportedly there is only one figure more reviled in high school debate than me. That guy is Michael Moreno, and he is hated because he recorded a video of a coach arguing that space is not real, but is instead a projection of white fantasy. What a monster! The coach also claimed, in response to the point that black astronauts can verify that space is real because they’ve been there, that he could verify that space wasn’t real because he hadn’t been there. He likewise denied the existence of Paris!
The story of how I came to be canceled is very funny and quite insane at every level. Some background about policy debate—the kind I did—is that it’s a completely insane left-wing echo-chamber. For debate, it is a century of 2020. Some common features of debate:
Instead of arguing for the topic, debaters say that it’s problematic to expect them to argue for the topic, and instead perform some unrelated speech act, like reading a poem about being Latina. This is the strategy of about a third of teams.
One of the most common responses to the above is claiming that it somehow undermines anti-capitalist revolutions.
Debaters often argue that the way black people are treated in America is indistinguishable from slavery, and if anything, perhaps somewhat worse.
They also argue we should give back all the land in America to indigenous people. They then claim that it’s problematic to ask where the 350 million people currently living in America would go.
The second most competitive national tournament was won in 2025 by a team claiming that pretending to be magic mermaids is a good strategy for black liberation. Their last speech began “hoodoo voodoo power, the power by which my magic come, has made this living
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