On April 22, NGG made its final stop of The Unf*ck America Tour at UC Berkeley, openly calling for conservative students to “COME AT US” on its Instagram account. At its philosophical, fifth-century-B.C. origin in Athens, debate has been imagined as a collective search for truth. The Socratic method rules that a debate should start from shared beliefs, test them through relentless questioning to reveal contradictions, refine their coherence and birth ideas through a slow midwifery of thought. College debate booths have been devoid of this process, providing us instead with a simulation of it. The audiences are presented with a choreography of a debate hollowed of its essence. There’s no room for compromise, no time to nurture thoughts, no conditions that allow dialogues to unfold. Unlike any other rhetorical device that clarifies and strengthens an argument, these formats amplify performance: They exhaustively enrage and stimulate the participants for inflated rhetorics and bloated e...