The National Speech & Debate Association (NSDA) chooses debate topics for high school competition and runs hundreds of high school tournaments including the annual national tournament, which started this week  in Arizona. Six thousand students from across the country will compete. The NSDA  rules are very clear that “Judges should decide the round as it is debated, not based on their personal beliefs.”

Nevertheless, Tabroom, a public database maintained by the NSDA, reveals that the organization does not enforce its rules, apparently in the interest of what progressives regard as “the greater good.” The database includes each judge’s “paradigm,” meaning what that judge regards as important in judging debating technique. (The use of jargon like “paradigm” is why I dropped out of debate club.) Does a debater speak too fast, look down when speaking, have an annoying voice, or say “uh” too much? Does he or she use too many anecdotes, rationalizations or appeals to authority? When debate competitors learn that a particular judge will be judging their performance, they need to pay heed to that judge’s priorities….which is why the presence of this judge’s “paradigm” in the database is disturbing:

“Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. . . . I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I’m judging. . . . I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments. . . . Examples of arguments of this nature are as follows: fascism good, capitalism good, imperialist war good, neoliberalism good, defenses of US or otherwise bourgeois nationalism, Zionism or normalizing Israel, colonialism good, US white fascist policing good, etc.”

or this judge’s paradigm…

“If you are discussing immigrants in a round and describe the person as ‘illegal,’ I will immediately stop the round, give you the loss with low speaks”—low speaker points—“give you a stern lecture, and then talk to your coach. . . . I will not have you making the debate space unsafe.”

or this one’s:

“[I]f you are white, don’t run arguments with impacts that primarily affect POC [people of color]. These arguments should belong to the communities they affect.”

Asked why they include debate judges whose own profiles indicate that they will not follow the principles of judging supposedly required by the governing body, NSDA humina-huminas that it’s up to each school to decide which judges it believes are appropriate and that the database provides sufficient transparency to permit that. But what the organization is really doing is facilitating the suppression of free speech and the indoctrination of students into following the Great Woke Way.

The NSDA absurdly argues—and remember, it’s supposedly a debate authority!—that its rules are enforced and valid, even if the organization allows individuals who openly defy those rules to present themselves as debate judges on the NSDA database.

As I thought about this, I began recalling my family’s battle with a bedbug infestation several years ago. It was infuriating and frightening: we would think we had the problem fixed, and then we would detect these tiny specks on a pillow, or wake up with an inflamed red spot on our skin. Eventually we eradicated the little bastards, but it took total focus, discipline, perseverance and sacrifice, as well as ongoing vigilance to ensure that the disgusting and unhealthy problem was not creeping back, literally.

The outbreak of personal liberty and basic rights-defying ideology in our education system is exactly like a bedbug infestation. It arose because of inattention and carelessness, as well as ignorance regarding the insidious nature of the phenomenon. By the time we realized how far advanced it was, the threat to our freedom and quality of life was dire, so far advanced that it seemed that avoiding being over-run and infected was impossible. Fortunately, we acted in time…but it was a close call.

That is what we are seeing now as a committed, anti-American movement grips our culture’s metaphorical throat. Debate clubs are just a microcosm of a far deeper threat.

Incidentally, my last statement constitutes a “paranoid right-wing conspiracy theory” according the official Woke Advancement Propaganda Handbook.