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June 29, 2023 - The Charlie Kirk Show
38:54
The High School Debate Disaster with James Fishback
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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High School Debate Changed My Life 00:03:09
Hey everybody, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
This is Andrew Colvett, EP of the Charlie Kirk Show.
I am joined by James Fishback with a really profound, deep conversation about high school speech and debate.
Now, wait, you may think this is a boring topic.
This has implications more far-reaching than you could ever possibly imagine.
Do you know that one-third of Congress participated in speech and debate?
Do 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?
This is a massive, massive story that went really viral.
You 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.
This 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.
We dive into it with James Fishback from incubated.org.
You're going to want to support this guy and what he's doing.
Really impressive.
Buckle up.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country.
He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
Turning point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
That's why we are here.
Brought to you by the Loan Experts I Trust, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage at andrewandTodd.com.
Welcome, everybody, back to the Charlie Kirk Show.
This is Andrew Colvett, executive producer of the Charlie Kirk Show, filling in for the one and only Charlie Kirk, who is indisposed today.
A little bit of a last-minute shuffle.
But we had a great show already prepped and ready to go for the man.
So listen, it's just plug and play.
All right.
Charlie will be back tomorrow with some, I promise you, very fascinating stories about what he is doing this evening.
So without further ado, however, I am thrilled to welcome my next guest, James Fishback.
I was alerted to these stories that he's been working on just a couple of days ago, and they are fascinating.
James, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
I'm excited to kind of dive into this.
We have the whole hour together, and we really need that much time.
So welcome.
Thank you for coming.
Well, thank you for having me, Andrew.
Yeah.
So, James, you are the founder of Incubate Debate.
And that's, and by the way, I think we're going to get the URL on the lower for you here shortly.
Incubate.org.
Definitely a worthwhile cause to donate to.
But this is just a wild story.
And you've published now two parts of it.
And, you know, we'll get those graphics up on screen.
Part one, you know, actually, let's take one step back.
The Wild Story of Incubate.org 00:06:21
Tell us your story of how you got involved in this high school debate genre area.
I 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.
Tell us about it.
Absolutely.
I did high school debate from 2009 to 2013 when I was in high school.
I grew up down in Broward County, Florida.
High school debate changed my life.
I had a really bad stutter growing up as a kid.
I was shy.
I was a talker, but I was shy.
And I had this passion for economics, for foreign affairs, what was happening around the country and across the world.
I didn't have an outlet for it.
High 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.
We need more of that in the country right now, I think.
And so then, you know, this activity gave me so much.
I came back from college and I did two years as a volunteer debate coach at an underserved high school in Miami, Florida.
And it was in those two years, Andrew, that I saw that high school debate had become a shell of its former self.
This was 2017 to 2019.
The 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.
It 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.
One 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.
Simple as that.
She identified as a Marxist-Leninist Maoist.
Those are her words, Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, and told the students before the round on her online profile, I will not vote for you.
So kids have a choice there, Andrew.
These are young kids, 13, 14 years old.
Do I stick with my convictions or do I conform?
Most kids I knew conformed because scholarships, accolades, college acceptance letters were on the line, depending on how well they did at these tournaments.
And when you conform, you self-censor.
When you self-censor, you create an echo chamber that is largely devoid of conservative ideas.
I'm an unapologetic conservative, but for me, this is profoundly a free speech issue.
I 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.
That's antithetical to debate.
It's un-American.
That'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.
This is bigger than one series of political beliefs.
This is about free speech and open debate.
Ideas, by the way, that set this country into motion 250 years ago.
You cannot engage in viewpoint censorship.
Free speech is ultimately about protecting the speech that you disagree with most.
That's what we have to do.
We've got to bring free speech back to high school debate.
That's really well said, James.
Listen, 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.
Somehow I missed it, but that's all right.
Somehow it was so viral that they, you know, they asked you at the free press to come back and write part two.
You know, I think I want to get into part two.
In some ways, I think it's even more shocking than part one.
But 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.
I 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.
I 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.
And what we see, you know, you think that these things are happening all the time.
And 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.
Blake is one of the producers on our show.
He's texted me about his own debate experience from high school.
And I mean, how many elected leaders that are now in Congress?
You know, it's the state level, at the federal level.
It's estimated to your Congress point, Andrew, to interrupt.
It's estimated that upwards of one-third of... sitting members of the United States Congress did high school debate.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, this is so foundational to the future of the republic.
And 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.
I'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.
It was Obama's foreign economics advisor.
Yeah, I mean, he was warning about all this excess spending.
Anyways, I'm encouraged to hear that.
I think, you know, what was the, again, it went viral.
You got tons of responses.
They made you write part two.
What was the prevalent, most prevalent response you got from the audience?
Yeah, the most prevalent response actually was from the National Speech and Debate Association, which is the center of my reporting.
They 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.
I mean, so many, so many others on both sides.
Here's what they did.
Why Arguments Belong to Communities 00:06:16
Absolutely nothing.
They had a really easy opportunity, Andrew, to remove the judges in my reporting.
They didn't even remove them.
They didn't even denounce them.
Here's one judge.
They did not remove, denounce, nothing when they put out their statement, which is a two-page word salad.
Here's what one judge says to students.
This person's judged hundreds, 120 kids in Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey in the past year.
Quote, I'm quoting here directly from their online judging profile within the NSDA, the National Speech and Debate Association.
Quote, if you are white, don't run arguments with impacts that primarily affect people of color.
These arguments should belong to the communities they affect.
Andrew, 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.
How un-American does it get than that?
That's just insane.
I mean, absolutely, we run into that all the time.
I 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.
And 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.
But we're not allowed to have opinions because these things obviously don't affect us.
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We have James Fish back of Incubate Debate with us.
Fascinating conversation we're having about the state of high school debate.
It's a troubling account.
It's written in two parts.
Part one, we're just sort of getting into still.
But part two, in some ways, is more, even more explosive, James.
Correct 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?
It's the NSDAN SDA, the national speech and debate.
They'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.
This is a fairly remarkable thing.
I 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?
No, this doesn't even really relate to debate.
This is not debate anymore.
If certain people are said, hey, if you argue a certain position, you automatically lose.
That's not the debate that I knew.
I'm sure that's not the debate that Justice Gorsuch or Justice Katanji Brown Jackson knew or Senator Warren knew from high school.
This is a shell of its former self.
Listen, just this one example here.
Again, I'm quoting verbatim.
Let me just set this up by saying these paradigms are what students are supposed to read before the round.
They 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.
That was how these paradigms were supposed to be used.
And 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.
They more closely resembled a Twitter profile of a political activist than of an impartial adjudicator of a high school debate.
Here's what one student, one judge tells to students in their paradigm.
This is again, I'm quoting this verbatim, and this actually is still public right now on the Tabroom website.
He 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.
I will not have you making the debate space unsafe.
Wow.
I mean, think about the implications about that for you and the Charlie Kirk show audience.
You 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.
And these are legal distinctions that are now disallowed by a growing cadre of judges within the NSDA.
I mean, this is shocking stuff.
There's another example I hear that my producers are pulling up.
In his final round of the two-day tournament, and this is actually from part two, I believe, of your reporting.
Matthew was shocked to hear the opposing team levy a personal attack against him as their central argument.
The 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.
They then pulled up a screenshot of a tweet from earlier that month, which Matthew had responded to.
Shocking Attacks on the Tournament Floor 00:03:31
So to put it another way, the debate leaders are literally encouraging kids to collect docs dossiers on other kids to get ahead and debate.
Am I reading this wrong?
You're reading it spot, spot on.
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Fighting Ideological Rot in Schools 00:12:06
James, you just mentioned that one-third of Congress is suspected to have participated in high school debate.
This is a foundational, formative experience for many of the nation's future leaders.
And it's getting completely bastardized, which is really, and you wrote something here, which I think is really, really important.
It 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.
That'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.
Most students choose not to fight this coercion.
They 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.
This is a crucial, crucial point you make here.
And by the way, Charlie's very good at this.
He says, you know, his take on it is, you know, accept the bad grade, tell the truth.
Other 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?
I think there's a valid debate here.
But 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.
It's placed them in a really tough position.
You know, I think it's one thing, and I think Charlie's absolutely right.
In 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.
You take the failure.
But 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.
I think it's really hard to tell that person to stand by your convictions.
The natural thing for them to do is when an adult tells you to do something, you don't do it.
You think it's the right thing.
We have a macro view, you and I and your listeners.
We can look at how this is the context is happening in where free speech and open debate are under attack in all institutions in America.
Look at this one young girl who went on Fox a couple of weeks ago, Dana Perino show.
Her name is Brianna Watley.
She was told by her judge before the debate.
The debate was on President Biden's foreign policy track record.
A lot to debate there, by the way.
She was told by her judge not to bring up President Trump before the round, totally unprompted.
She said, I don't want to hear anything about Donald Trump.
How can you have a debate about Biden if you can't bring up the 45th president, his predecessor?
We look at things like the Abraham Accords.
We look at what happened in North Korea, the increase in NATO member funding.
And she was told, don't bring up President Trump.
I mean, this is what's happening.
You know, my reporting is adjust the facts kind of.
I brought the receipts.
I brought the actual judge statements that are public on the NSDA's website.
But this is a student who's rising up and says, I can't bring up Trump.
I can't debate.
And if I can't debate, I'm not doing this anymore.
Well, they're trying to otherize conservative ideas.
They're trying to, honestly, they're trying to dehumanize conservatives.
This is one I'm going to read from your reporting again here.
This is a judge, Lindsay Schroedick, who's judged over 120 students at tournaments in Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey.
She's been certified by the NSDA with cultural competency badge and some other stuff.
So until last month, her paradigm, again, her paradigm is her POV.
It's in this tab room database that you went into.
She says this.
She tells debaters: if you are white, don't run arguments with impacts that primarily affect people of color.
These arguments should belong to the communities they affect.
So, again, you are not allowed to have an opinion on black fatherlessness in the home.
You're not allowed to have an opinion about Harvard and their acceptance of Asians, their acceptance rates of Asians.
You're not allowed to have any opinions that might affect a community that you don't belong to.
And 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.
I am my sister's keeper.
That something that affects you and justice that affects you affects me.
This sense that we are all one American family that resonated so profoundly at the time.
I mean, I'm old enough to remember that moment.
And 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.
It's profound the change that's happened, is it not?
It totally, totally isn't.
This isn't a political issue at all.
This is a free speech and open debate issue.
My piece, despite me being a conservative, is not about defending conservative ideas on their merit.
It's about defending conservative ideas because they ought to have a role.
They ought to have space for them in a high school debate of all places.
That's, of course, the great irony.
You know, this is a bigger issue than I think just progressivism, Andrew.
We're seeing the new establishment say that you're just not allowed to debate certain things.
We 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.
So this is a progressive problem.
I'm happy to see some progressives stand up and say we've got to defend free speech.
But 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.
Let's go ahead and play Cut 64.
This 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.
Play Cut64.
I got a zero on a project proposal in my class because I used the term biological women, which is apparently not allowed anymore.
She 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.
And I 100% know that this is like the most biased grade ever because my project is about transgenders competing in biological women's sports.
How am I supposed to do my final project if I can't use the word biological women?
But that's what my project is about.
James, this isn't just, I think that that clip's important because it shows that this is an institutional rot.
It's an ideological rot that is pervasive within the educational community.
Take 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.
Why is this so prevalent in education?
I 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.
That 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.
And 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.
Conservative ideas are just not welcome because they are deemed, they are labeled as racist, as xenophobic, as fascist.
And 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.
Again, the goal isn't for necessarily a conservative to change a progressive's mind.
The goal is to simply get a progressive to say, hey, you made me think.
Maybe 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.
Maybe that's something I have to rethink.
And open debate and free speech allows that pursuit of the truth to happen.
I 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.
So this has not impacted every debate judge.
But you said, in general, students voluntarily and mutually disclose their evidence to their opponents before the debate.
This makes sense, right?
Because you get to see where they're going to come from.
It gives you an opportunity to sharpen your perspective and your debate.
But you mentioned this one judge.
It's just, I find it shocking.
And 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.
Ex-Braithwaite, who's judged 169 debate rounds with 340 children, students, has her own disclosure policy within her paradigm, again, on Tabroom.
So you get to look at your judge and get to see what their paradigm is, which uses the racial epithet.
One, N-words don't have to disclose to you.
Two, disclose to N-words.
So this is blatant racial discrimination.
And she's basically saying if you are a black student, a black debater, you don't have to disclose your arguments to your competitor.
How is this allowed, James?
Why is this person still a judge and why are they not kicked up?
I have no clue.
And that is the most egregious example because that is textbook racial discrimination.
Look, the NSDA has a lot of judges.
There's no question about it.
But when we provided incontrovertible proof, this is a public statement on a website that's still available.
If you click the paradigm, it links you directly to the NSDA's judging profile or ex-Braithwaite.
It says that if you're Asian, if you're Hispanic, if you're white, whatever, you have to hand over your evidence to the other team.
And if you're Black, you don't.
By the way, no race, no student benefits from this rule.
A black student would think, hey, I won the round because the judge put the thumb on the scale.
The white student is going to resent it.
And you're actually going to create racial division.
Believe it or not, and this is not an exaggeration.
This type of policy, if you could even call it that, stokes racial tension, contributes to strife.
That's what it does.
And now the white kid or the Hispanic kid resents the black kid because the black kid won the debate because they got a privilege.
They got a kickback that they didn't even ask for.
So this perverted racial equity reparation idea that we're going to let black kids do this and white and Hispanic and Asian kids do that.
Why can't the National Speech and Debate Association remove and denounce this individual?
It's been one month, one month, Andrew, and to your viewers since I published part one, and the NSDA has done absolutely nothing.
They continue to allow people like S. Braithwaite to racially discriminate against students.
Yeah, I mean, this is Jim Crow in the debate.
I mean, this is like reverse Jim Crow.
Is the bigotry of low expectation?
Reverse Jim Crow in Debate 00:07:29
It's condescension.
It's racial.
It's explicit discrimination.
It's a profound and disappointing, but not surprising that this person still has a job judging students.
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Hi, I'm Peter.
Hey, man, Jace with a why.
Yeah, I figured.
So to start out, like, tell me, what's your favorite kind of food?
Pizza.
Oh, man.
What?
You can't eat pizza.
Why not?
It's bad.
Why?
Because it's like pretty bad for you.
But what makes it bad?
Oh, yeah, no, it's like probably one of the worst things you can eat.
How come?
Because of like the ingredients in it?
Which ones?
I mean, yeah, like basically all of them.
Name one.
I mean, you said your words, pizza.
All right, I'm cutting this off right now.
It's clear you're an idiot and deserve no more of my time.
Welcome back to the Charlie Kirk show.
James, you said that clip before the show.
I thought it was great.
Tell me what you're getting at with that clip.
There'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.
And I kept running into the same thing on the Trump point.
And 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.
When I would ask a student, what do you think about Trump?
And they would say, he's Hitler.
He's a fascist.
He's a racist.
And then just like Peter did at that gym, when Jace was saying pizza is bad, as a follow-up, why is that?
Why do you believe that?
And there was just blank stare, or there was no real substance in response.
And that was a really good way to test whether somebody had something substantive to say about the point in question.
Debate is all about having an argument, building up the evidence, and then defending that argument to the opposition.
And 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.
And 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.
And those are all fair game.
But 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.
I 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.
I asked them the same thing.
Why do you feel that way?
And they also struggle to come up with reasons.
Debate isn't about telling kids what to think, conservative or progressive.
It's about telling them how to think.
And if you're going to have a view about Vice President Harris or about President Trump, you have to be able to defend it.
And 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.
Yeah, I think that's brilliant.
How come?
Why is pizza bad for you?
You know, because you said it.
It's pizza.
I was cracking up when I was watching it.
Listen, we've got two minutes till we wrap up, James.
I mean, I think we've thoroughly demoralized the audience with the state of young people and high school speech and debate.
Just real briefly here, what is the solution?
Do we reform it or do we get behind incubate debate and you guys are trying to kind of do your own thing and create another avenue?
What's the answer, real quick?
The answer is capitalism, free markets, competition.
It always has been.
It always will be.
If 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.
That's what I'm doing with Incubate Debate.
I encourage others who are motivated former debaters to stand up and do the same.
Let me talk about Incubate Debate.
It's the fastest growing debate league in America.
We'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.
And 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.
They can, of course, learn more at incubated.org.
That's great.
So now, are you looking to branch out of Florida?
Are you looking for people to sort of like franchise this to other states?
30 seconds.
Yeah, we are.
We're looking at that sort of TEDx independent model.
I 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.
We are pushing ahead.
We are trying to capture this moment.
We have the momentum on our side, and we want to bring this model nationally.
We want it to be independent.
We want kids to be able to debate like they used to.
That's what's going to really push this idea forward.
Well, it's a noble cause, James.
Thank you for exposing this.
I'm so glad this went so viral.
I think it was really shocking for a lot of people.
James, best of luck to you.
Incubate debate.org.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
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