1NC Ritter is a racist and the negative should lose for endorsing his scholarship – his relies on blatant far-right rhetoric, bad faith characterizations of critical debate, and rhetorical fallicies analogous to far right – for example, he says debate is good because it “stop debaters from antisocial and violent behavior like using drugs and joining gangs” and critical debate is “capitalizing on diversity for personal gain” – both of those are white supremacist dog whistles commonly used by the far right to denigrate Black people.

The competitive interscholastic debate1 community is, and for a long time has been, quite diverse and incredibly inclusive.2 Although the diversity of the community does not reflect the various ways that society is diverse with complete precision, it is difficult to think of another community that is more diverse and inclusive. The diversity and inclusivity of the debate community opens safe spaces for those who might be, for one reason or another, excluded from other interscholastic activities. Like other interscholastic activities, competitive interscholastic debate helps to prevent students from engaging in anti-social and violent behavior such as using drugs, joining gangs, and other juvenile/criminal conduct; provides opportunities to escape poverty; and even saves students’ lives.3 The debate community’s values of diversity and inclusivity also generate opportunities for students of socially and politically disempowered identity groups. But to say the community is diverse and inclusive does not suggest the community is not fractured. With regard to the community’s diversity and inclusivity, some of the most significant, recent fracturing of the community has resulted from competitors’ attempts to capitalize upon the community’s diversity and inclusivity for personal gain by resorting to identity politics in debate under competition rules. The strategic use of identity discourse is itself a social disempowerment tactic that undermines the community’s diversity and inclusivity. Many competitive interscholastic debaters have proven quite adept at deploying identity discourse as a disempowerment tactic and then successfully guising the disempowerment tactic as a tool of social empowerment. They wrongly liken themselves to activists by citing successful examples of empowering identity politics in radically different contexts where discourse is not regulated by competition rules, including a strict win-loss structure, speech times, and exclusive community norms regarding audience nonparticipation.