Close your eyes, and you can already picture the scene: a circle of foldable chairs, an eerie clinical glow of studio lights, maybe even an oversized clock sitting ominously in the center of the room. A bell rings and, almost immediately, debaters rush to the table, fighting to be the first to hit a button and begin spewing vitriol.
In one form or another, these dramatized political debates have spread across the internet, reaching just about everyone with a social media account.
In recent years, companies like Jubilee have gained attention for their debate videos, creating a daunting new form of debate culture. Today, the Jubilee YouTube channel has over 10 million subscribers, with some videos reaching up to 30 million views. With their popularity continuing to rise, a growing number of students, myself included, have begun to question the implications of this sensationalised form of debate on campus culture.
When students open their phones to see clips of everything from “Candace Owens vs 20 Feminists” to “Can You Stop Being Gay,” what does that say about what structured debate and political discourse should look like?
“I do not generally watch Jubilee because they don’t platform healthy debates or bridging divides,” politics major Emma Sweeney SC ’27 said. “Instead, they feed off of our increasingly polarized political sphere.”
What’s more is that lots of students and people our age now turn to these shows for information and education. It is almost effortless to defer to the figureheads, the winners and losers of such debates, who seem to be omnipresent within the digital age. In wrongfully awarding them a sense of political authority, we absorb the rhetoric that follows.
On YouTube, Jubilee’s description reads: “provoke understanding & create human connection.” The deep division that has ensued makes this sentiment almost laughable.
They have swapped “understanding” for aggression, and “human connection” for monetized extremism. Gilding this as a true form of “debate” just makes this kind of propaganda more palatable.
Jubilee is not the only perpetrator. Many echo the same formula with “debate me” culture and how-to debate classes, titled by absurdities such as “how to destroy anyone in an argument” or “debate as a weapon.” Debate is no longer defined by a legitimate exchange of ideas.
“It makes me worried about how polarized our country is becoming,” Sweeney said. “And although I believe, or maybe hope, that most people are not actually this diametrically opposed, Jubilee is telling us we are.”
It is no coincidence that prominent “debate me” figureheads, such as Charlie Kirk and his “Turning Point” following, have made the liberal arts out to be some big joke.
Kirk always relied on his repertoire of statistics and talking points to execute a guerrilla attack on his opponents. This incredibly fast-paced dynamic, oftentimes unallowing depth, made a spectacle of students who struggled to deliver counterpoints fast enough. Arguments became sensationalized clips, and suddenly people all over the internet are reducing students’ complex thoughts to a three second clip of their stammered reply.
Previous debate competitor and coach Floria Auerbach SC ’27 described how, in her experience, student debate culture has changed over the last decade.
“I literally watched someone laugh at another person for not knowing a fact,” Auerbach said. “It really reminded me of the way that people converse with each other on Jubilee because it was like ‘oh, you don’t know that? You dumb, dumb idiot.’”
The dismissive laugh that’s meant to communicate intellectual superiority. Words spoken without any pauses followed by the smirk that creeps onto their face when you slip up. These are the moments that mimic Jubilee. In an instant of confusion, you are made out to be a fool by a performative sharpness of the intellect. This hostility towards uncertainty has become so oddly fashionable, even in institutions of higher education.
“We are in class — we shouldn’t walk into a classroom knowing everything,” Auerbach said. “If you need to scoff at someone, laugh at them, put them down in order to feel like your argument has legs, then you don’t have a good argument.”
Debate is becoming increasingly less about open discussion and more about domination – a critical shift that many, like Auerbach, believe is reshaping the entire institution of learning.
Auerbach argued that this emphasis on the domination and the villainization of your debate opponent is deeply connected to a common concern in the world of academia right now — students are losing the art of active listening.
Our desire to engage in complex discussion is diminishing. In its place lies the drive to win.
The need to defeat your enemy not only leads to a breakdown in classroom discussions and debates but also fundamentally misconstrues the goal of debate and political discourse in general. For Auerbach, students lose the nuance of an argument if they view their opponent as wholly wrong.
“When we teach students that winning and losing is the most important thing [in a debate], it’s teaching them to have complete faith and trust in incomplete ideas,” Auerbach said.
Jubilee’s systematic sensationalization of debate culture can serve as both a symptom and a driving cause of the growing political polarization across the country. In valorizing winning and stampeding while presenting confusion as weakness, the prevalence of Jubilee-esque content has already seeped into the spectre of political discussions on campus, in and out of the classroom.
“Why have we gotten to a point that we’re so afraid of being wrong?” Auerbach said.
Maybe because wrongness is no longer treated as a step closer to the truth, but as evidence of intellectual failure and justified grounds for public humiliation.
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