Hey, PC, y'all. This is Gerardo holding it
down for you today on the most dangerous
podcast
in the schoolhouse, two dope teachers and a
mic, where we remix the conversation
on race, power, and education.
How y'all doing? On this, emergency
episode,
I actually wanna talk about debate.
Not just classroom debate, but the way debate
gets taught,
the way it gets rewarded,
and the way it gets turned into a
culture.
Because it's not neutral.
It's not just about sharpening minds. The way
we teach debate has long term implications, and
the headlines we've been seeing for a good
minute drive that home.
Now I wanna be clear.
The recent killings of Charlie Kirk and representative
Melissa Hortman, which have dominated the discourse the
last twenty four hours, are not the same.
Kirk
built a career on cruelty, disinformation,
and stripping empathy from public discourse.
I bring in speaker of the house, Hortman,
because her name has been invoked as part
of the emotional discourse
around the shooting death of Kirk, but these
are not the same.
Congresswoman Hortman was a leader
elected by her constituents
who worked to build a better Minnesota.
So I'm not drawing on equivalence,
But both deaths remind us that rhetoric doesn't
just stay on
the page.
It spills into the world.
It shapes how people think, how they act,
and sometimes how violence
erupts.
For representative Hortman, her killer was fueled by
the rage bait peddled online
and in person by people like Kirk.
For Kirk, he is a cautionary tale of
what happens when just words
are more than just
words. So traditional debate
leans towards
domination. I would even say that traditional debate
culture rewards domination.
You don't have to care about truth, you
don't have to care about justice or compassion,
you just have to care about winning.
And when young people are trained up that
way,
some grow into adults who treat each other's
existence
like sport.
For them, argument
is an ego trip.
For the rest of us, it's the foundation
of past,
present, and future dangers that we face.
When I coached high school debate,
patterns emerged and were
internalized by young people with quickness.
So you have two sides, the affirmative and
the negative.
The affirmative has to build a real case,
evidence, logic, a roadmap for the judge that
leads to a plausible conclusion.
And the negative
just has to burn it down.
Judges reward the negative
even if the affirmative
misses just one point,
fails to answer one question,
fails to defend against one attack.
So, what's the lesson?
Well, first, the negative is much easier to
argue. Don't build, don't imagine, don't solve, just
win.
And when that becomes a mindset, it produces
people who think they've won
if they've humiliated someone,
even if their arguments are in bad faith
or detached from reality
altogether.
And look,
there were really some incredible debate coaches
around me at the time, educators who coached
with heart, purpose,
and intentionality
in giving our students the tools they needed
after graduation.
My point here is that there is a
culture there that is hard to disrupt
even for the most well intentioned among us,
but we have to try.
I'll never forget
around
where two
brilliant
young women of color faced
two young white men from middle class suburban
backgrounds.
The young women came prepared, thoughtful, engaged. They
had pored over their case files,
tried to have every piece of evidence aligned
to the affirmative argument that they were making.
And the dudes?
They mocked,
they bullied,
they condescended,
and they were rewarded.
Even losing a speaker point or two didn't
matter. They undermined the affirmative side and took
the win.
And it's not just unfair.
It's actually training.
It's training that produces a style of public
life that values force
over substance.
And some of those same boys grow into
the talking heads
who shape toxic political discourse
today.
It's crazy to me how
Charlie Kirk graduated high school in 2012.
I was in my thirteenth year teaching and
was coaching debate.
It was literally coaching students his age,
which makes this all the more jarring. It
actually makes me reflect back. Did I push
my debaters to think beyond the when?
Did I play into this
dominant white supremacist,
patriarchal,
capitalist
mode of debating?
I actually don't even know if
Charlie Kirk was a
debater,
nothing on Wikipedia to that account. Hit me
up if you know the answer to that.
But, one way or the other his method
is something that we've definitely seen in the
traditional debate
discourse.
And, it's something that others have written about.
About how so many thought leaders, particularly on
the right,
are engaging
current issues,
the challenges facing
our society today,
as a debate round.
Nothing more.
You know, people love to say that in
the marketplace of ideas the best argument wins.
That if you don't like an argument, make
a better argument.
And this is often
a the case made
against any form of censorship.
I'm not gonna talk about censorship today.
I'm a hip hop head. You can recognize
that I have
complicated
views on censorship.
But let's really be honest about this marketplace
of ideas.
The marketplace is an equal.
Sometimes the marketplace is a Walmart.
Yeah, you can find something decent,
but more likely there's cheap shit that people
are gonna consume readily,
voraciously,
and without shame.
So for cisgendered
heterosexual
white males,
debate is abstract.
They can play with ideas that don't show
up in their daily lives.
For marginalized communities,
our survival is literally what is being
debated.
So when someone argues that empathy is weakness,
or that DEI hires are underqualified,
or even dangerous,
or that teachers are groomers,
or that LGBTQ
folks should be put to death publicly,
or that Latine people should be fed to
alligators.
That shit ain't academic.
It's fuel for harassment,
for harmful legislation,
for violence.
Ever wonder who these debaters become?
Because they don't just disappear. They don't just
go and live quiet lives, being good people,
voting and mowing the grass every day.
Sometimes they emerge in the same way that
people like Charlie Kirk, or people like Ben
Shapiro, or people like Jordan Peterson,
or people like Donald Trump
appear.
And that's why
I feel urgency
in saying this.
We are living in a moment where rhetoric
can radicalize,
where debate as sport
spills into real world violence and harm.
Charlie Kirk's death is a product of the
very culture that he helped to build
and in which he thrived.
A culture that glorifies aggression,
dehumanization,
and winning the debate round at all costs.
Congresswoman Hortman's death shows the other side of
it, the danger faced by people who dare
to lead with compassion and equity in the
toxic climate.
The affirmative is always
under more pressure
and under more threat than the negative is.
These deaths are not the same. I really
want to emphasize that.
But they both show us what happens
when words are weaponized,
when they're trivialized by some,
and a matter of life and death for
others.
So,
what does this mean
for
teachers? What does it mean for the two
dope teachers around us?
It means we can't just teach kids to
win.
We need to teach them to listen,
to imagine,
to build,
to humanize,
and to live those values with consistency.
Because
for most of
us, this ain't just intellectual.
It ain't a game.
It's life and death.
This has been Gerardo.
Two dope teachers and a mic.
Stay urgent.
Stay building.
Stay human.
Stay dope.