(Robert Jonathan, Headline USA) A high school debating team member claims that a tournament judge earlier this year warned her that any mention of former President Donald Trump in a foreign policy discussion about Joe Biden’s record in that arena was “inappropriate.”
Florida student and free speech advocate Briana Whatley came forward on Twitter to assert that the judge “couldn’t put her personal ideology to the side to judge me impartially.”
She added that “I’m not the only student that has had to self-censor in debates.”
Whatley also revealed that the National Speech and Debate Association allegedly allows woke bias to determine the framing of debate questions.
“The NSDA and judges alike need to stop inputting their own narratives into our debates,” Whatley insisted.
In a Washington Examiner essay, Whatley — who loves politics — succinctly set forth how the 45th president’s foreign policy record was fair game, despite the judge’s admonition, especially in contrast with his successor.
“Put simply, I had to conform to [the judge’s] ideology if I wanted a chance to win. Of course, my argument wasn’t ‘inappropriate.'”
Whatley explained that “Trump’s presidency was enormously consequential, and Biden’s has paled in comparison. Trump convinced NATO members to increase their contributions, he was the first president in a generation not to start a new war, and perhaps most notably, he brokered the Abraham Accords,” she said.
“Those agreements established diplomatic recognition between various Muslim-majority states and Israel. I wasn’t allowed to say any of that. My preparation and research had gone to waste. I was censored and I lost.”
Whatley further outlined the purported default and rigged progressive tilt of NSDA topics that, for example, assume that cosmetic diversity in the form of affirmative action hiring practices are a positive and that voter ID laws are “oppressive.”
“Debate is the last area on Earth where students should be shamed for making fact-based arguments. Unfortunately, it happens all the time,” she lamented.
In an interview, Briana Whatley recently told Newsmax that “it’s dangerous when [debate] judges are allowed to make these ambiguous terms and be able to penalize students like myself for making arguments that [don’t] coincide with their personal ideology.”
The forthright teen declared that “adapting to your audience and conforming to your judge are two different things, and I won’t stand for it.”
She has separately chided her own “closed-minded” generation for relying way too much on platforms like TikTok for their current-events information.
In a May 2023 article for The Free Press, James Fishback, the founder of an organization called Incubate Debate and formerly an NSDA fan, wrote that “Unfortunately for students and their parents, there are countless judges at tournaments across the country whose biased paradigms disqualify them from being impartial adjudicators of debate…
“[J]udges are making it clear they are not only tilting the debate in a left-wing direction, they will also penalize students who don’t adhere to their ideology,” he implied about what seems to be a go-along-to-get-along censorship scenario.
"It was a debate about President Biden's foreign policy track record, and she told me it was inappropriate to mention President Trump."
High school debater Briana Whatley was not allowed to bring up Donald Trump by her teacher in a tournament. pic.twitter.com/SO2jooaRG6
— NEWSMAX (@NEWSMAX) June 28, 2023
In a split-screen with Whatley, Fishback told Newsmax that “we’ve got to bring free speech back to high school debate. The stakes could not be higher.”
In a statement, the NSDA indicated that it instructs its volunteer judges to steer clear of ideological bias.
