I’m so sick of everyone practicing the art of obnoxiousness.
I’m sick of it from both sides, people making each other angry through gimmicks and then positioning themselves to be the “levelheaded” ones in the conversation.
This style of debate, although it has been around for a while, is perhaps best encompassed by conservative political activists like Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk. Their whole schtick, particularly early in their careers, was to go to college campuses and argue with 18-22 year-olds about politics.
Kirk and Shapiro’s debates are fast-paced, filled with logical fallacies from all participants and so incredibly fascinating. In 2019, when this kind of discourse was at its peak, I was mesmerized by what I can only describe now as the intellectual train wreck of the beginning of debatelord culture.
Kirk founded Turning Point USA, a conservative political group focused on “the principles of fiscal responsibility, free markets, and limited government,” according to its website. Turning Point and its satellite organizations have wildly surged in the wake of his assassination on Sept. 10, 2025. One organization in particular has been making waves — Club America, a high school offshoot of Turning Point’s college associations.
Organizations like these are a terrible idea, and people agree. It is an earlier intrusion by the very institutions that have caused such terrible rifts in the current American political ecosystem.
The average high school freshman is 14 years old. At that age, no one should be entrenching themselves so deeply in an ideology that they are fundamentally opposed to contradiction, to being challenged, to admitting that they were wrong and changing their minds.
Your high school years are the time that you should be the most open to new ideas, even more so than college. High school is when you should be discovering every school of thought there is, ones that are wildly different from anything you’ve heard of before; you’re going to begin forming the basis of the political ideas you will explore further with more life experience.
This is normal — natural, even. Many teens get a massive ego boost by being seen as an intellectual outlier, even if their opinion might make them seem like they’re tipping toward the bottom end of the scale. That is, up until political organizations, particularly extremist ones, step in to validate some of these claims.
In case this wasn’t clear, this is by no means an argument against any political organization’s right to exist. It is a plea to keep them out of spaces where almost none of their members are eligible to vote.
For every person that joins a political club before they have the chance to truly understand their own position, a guy by the Student Center demanding passersby debate him is created. For every political club that preys on naivete, the deconstruction of what should be American cultural norms becomes even more evident. College has always been billed as a forum of ideas, but now we can’t even have a conversation.
In fact, it’s the exact culture that these high school political clubs breed that creates these environments where kids feel forced to decide their identities too young to truly understand them. There is a degree of life experience almost no high schooler truly has that goes into forming morals and values — until then, you truly are just an amalgamation of what everyone around you is saying.
So, if that’s the case, why box yourself in? Why let the people around you decide your identity for you?
The people who disagree with you are rarely your enemies, especially when none of you have your learner’s permit. Every ideological zealot created in high school is another reason why civil discourse is dead, and why it’s now just screaming disguised as winning.
We are losing nuance. We are losing forums for open debate. But most frighteningly, we are losing our hearing. If we go deaf to everyone except those who shout above the fray, we eventually stop being able to hear our own thoughts.
This campus is one of the most conservative in the country, and we have many vocal advocates for MAGA and conservatism. I turn to you as leaders in this — I am not asking you to be silent here, but I am asking you to lower your voices. If the largest political bloc on campus can do that, I promise that the rest will follow.
To the non-conservatives: this is not a them-first situation. This is everyone at once. Campus conservatives stepping back is not them leaving a power vacuum, it’s creating a space to breathe.
Here is my advice to any person who considers themself an ideologue: open your ears, if only for a day. Attend a meeting for the opposite party, sit in the back (or the front!) and don’t say a word. See where they’re coming from, and don’t try to debate after — just be polite on your way out, and maybe hold the door. Then do it all again next week, and the week after that.
The moment you humanize your opponent, it gets a whole lot harder to hate them. You may find your views changing — and that’s okay! — or not, because that isn’t the point. Division does not eventually circle back around to unity, and at some point, if you continue to surround yourself with screaming, you will lose your hearing entirely. And to be politically deaf is to be politically dead.
