JMU Debate Team Opposes Debate
It’s been decades since I was in college so help me out here. Wouldn’t you expect a university debate team to support free speech and the airing of diverse ideas?
Yep, that’s what I thought too.
But you haven’t met the easily triggered members of JMU’s debate team. They’re leading the opposition to a scheduled appearance next week by conservative author and podcaster Liz Wheeler. The topic of her speech: The Ideology of Transgenderism.
Stunning.
These pearl-clutching lefties are so devoted to the trans movement that they want to dismiss and silence anyone who dares to question the notion that boys can become girls and girls can become boys.
Apparently a gaggle of so-called debaters have anointed themselves the arbiters of what is and what isn’t worthwhile speech at a state-supported university.
These are supposed to be lovers of debate. I guess they prefer to stick to esoteric, yawn-inducing topics such as presidential powers and the ethics of animal testing rather than actual issues that resonate outside their little debate club echo chamber.
These “debaters” are so clueless they’re proudly Tweeting their anti-free speech position:
The JMU Debate Team supports the flourishing of transgender people at JMU & beyond. We oppose the support given by groups on the JMU campus to bring Liz Wheeler to speak and we encourage any group offering her support to cease that support immediately.
— JMU Debate (@JMUDebate) April 19, 2023
See our full statement. pic.twitter.com/XyJM5JGWIb
Del. Nick Frietas from Culpeper read the debate team’s attempt to justify its anti-speech position and weighed in on the controversy yesterday:
It’s all very simple. If you’re saying something the debate team agrees with, that represents a flourishing of ideas and diverse perspectives. But if you’re saying something they do not agree with, that represents antagonizing marginalized groups.
Wheeler is coming to campus as the guest of a national conservative student group called Young Americans for Freedom. She’s a dynamic 33-year-old who has been on the conservative scene for several years. Like many of us, she shares the radical belief that there are two genders.
It’s worth noting that JMU hosted Anthony Fauci and CNN’s Jim Acosta (a JMU alum) in a Town Hall setting earlier this month.
According to their Tweets in late March, the university’s YAF members planned to attend to hear what these two lefties had to say.
So who really believes in free speech? A debate team that wants to shut down debate or the conservatives who were willing to listen to liberal drivel?
If you know any students at a JMU who haven’t been completely brainwashed by left-leaning faculty members, urge them to attend Liz Wheeler’s speech next Wednesday, April 26 at 6 p.m. in JMU’s Madison Union Ballroom.
