(PartiallyPolitics.com) – A high school debater has accused the National Speech & Debate Association (NSDA) of censorship after she stated that she was warned by a judge at a recent tournament to not bring up former President Trump as it would be seen as “inappropriate.”
Briana Whatley, the high school sophomore in question told “America’s Newsroom” on Tuesday that during an NSDA tournament in March right before they started a debate on “President Biden’s former foreign affairs track record,” a judge explicitly told her that she should not refer to former President Donald Trump as it would be considered “inappropriate.” Whatley in her statement on Tuesday argued that if what they could say was being censored then this no longer constituted a debate and that the NSDA needed to be viewed as an organization where free expression was no longer allowed for students.
These latest allegations come after James Fishback, the founder of Incubate Debate, recently told Fox News Digital that the NSDA had been taken over by woke ideology. In an essay published on Twitter Fishback also argued that while debate had previously changed his life it was now taken over by left-wing politics. He proceeded to state that debate has now become a space where students could be punished for their ideas rather than be allowed to compete to support them. As he stated, students were also being told which arguments were considered appropriate or not.
National debate champion Lila Lavender, in 2019 had claimed that she was a “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist” and that it was not possible for her to leave her ideology behind when entering the debate floor to judge.
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