Lila Lavender, the 2019 national debate champion, whose paradigm reads, “Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. . . . I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I’m judging. . . . I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments. . . . Examples of arguments of this nature are as follows: fascism good, capitalism good, imperialist war good, neoliberalism good, defenses of US or otherwise bourgeois nationalism, Zionism or normalizing Israel, colonialism good, US white fascist policing good, etc.”

The irony is that all this tireless and uncompromising thought policing (and the exercise of their intellectual talents generally) is in the service of system that helps mostly upper-class (and of course white) students pump and preen and collect those extra brownie points -- so they can hustle their into the elite school of their choice, and (in most cases) serve the interests of the ruling class.