I read a very excellent dissection from a debating champion on why most of what CK is being idealised for is not genuine debate:
”There's going to bethere already isa lot of talk about "debate" in the present moment. That's because Charlie Kirk, killed yesterday in Utah by a sniper still at large, was a practitioner of a rhetorical performance that he and his followers characterized as a kind of debate.
Kirk's media machine would set the scene for such events by pushing provocative stories and short videos demonizing racial minorities, LGBTQ people, women and other targets. Then Kirk would visit campuses and hold forums using a "prove me wrong" format that invited students to challenge his viewpoints (viewpoints such as "If I see a Black pilot, I'm going to be like, 'Boy, I hope he's qualified'"). Kirk's approach combined rapid-fire questions, prepared talking points, and capturing contentious moments on video to shape a narrative for his online audience.
To be clear, Kirk had the legal right to do all of this, and it may have some value as political speech, as does a political ad or a rally full of polemic.
But equally clear, what Kirk was doing was engaging in a silly kind of mock-debating. It's something we've seen more of in recent years: individuals making outrageous statements and then appending them with taunts like “now debate me” or “prove me wrong.” I'm not going to get into whether we should be policing the meaning of words like "debate," but I am inviting debate educators and alumni to understand and to be willing and able to explain the difference between “prove me wrong” rituals and the kind of debate we teach and facilitate.
A helpful analogy for some: In Game of Thrones, at King Joffrey’s wedding feast (the “Purple Wedding”), the couple and guests watch a staged, grotesque mock jousting match performed by jesters, each representing one of the kings who had vied for power during the War of the Five Kings. The intent of the performance is to ridicule Joffrey’s fallen rivals and glorify his own reign, and it is obvious to some of the attendees that Joffrey intends it to humiliate certain wedding guests. It's an example of powerful people using mockery to assert dominance and provoke conflict.
What that mock battle is to real war, Kirkesque "prove me wrong" rituals are to meaningful debate. One important difference between the mockery and the authentic debate space is that in those “prove me wrong” rituals, participants are often unwittingly facilitating their own mockery.
Actual debating, even when adversarial (and it can be quite adversarial), is mutual. Both sides accept the premise that arguments will be tested, refuted, and defended on reciprocal, if not necessarily neutral ground. Even in the most competitive formats, there’s a tacit recognition of rules (although the rules themselves can be debated on similarly reciprocal terms). What makes baiting so corrosive is that it hijacks the aesthetics of debate (assertion, challenge, rebuttal) but strips away the accountability. Very often, it forces others to debate their own dignity from a defensive crouch, as if one were in a show trial in front of a gallery of laughing partisans.
I've seen public debates, on-campus debates, between fierce political and ideological opponentsstudent groups, guest speakers on opposite sides of an issueand those events invited and respected good-faith argumentation and, most importantly, some level of willingness to engage with complexity. In contrast, “prove me wrong” events favor quips and discourage line-by-line or wholistic engagement. We ought to at least gently explain that difference as often as we can.
I will leave it to others to do a deeper dive on Ezra Klein's opinion piece in today's New York Times, but I read the piece carefully, conscious of my own beliefs about the causes and solutions of political conflict and how they differ with Klein's. And I am still left with the conclusion that Klein's conflation of debate with rhetorical provocation is amateurish and irresponsible, and it results in a lack of both narrative coherence and narrative fidelity in the piece. Even his opening statement, "[t]he foundation of a free society is the ability to participate in politics without fear of violence." ignores how actual open dialogue is not possible when practitioners of "prove me wrong" rhetoric open their dubious invitations with statements that clearly demonstrate a desire for certain groups to live in fear of violence.
Some parts of the piece suggest Klein doesn't even know Charlie Kirk's full history, such as when Klein mentions the assault on Nancy Pelosi's husband (as an example of political violence) without mentioning that Kirk openly praised that assailant and called for followers to bail him out of jail (acts of praise for political violence, the kind of praise that Klein condemns when it comes from those celebrating Kirk's assassination).
If we actually care about public discourse, we must stop mistaking provocation for dialectic. And while there are good arguments not to ban the provocations, advocates of authentic debate practices should carefully and proactively distinguish debate pedagogy from mock jousting matches designed to attract viewers and spectatorship at the expense of building mutual understanding.”