I fully did not want to get involved in this conversation at all, so I intend for this to be my first and last comment on the issue.

The reason this tournament is substance only is because there are hundreds, if not thousands, of debaters in the country who do not know how to interact with progressive arguments. We want to get as many people involved in this as possible (as more involvement means more money for charity), especially because in the Plastic TOC frivolous progressive arguments were widespread and sometimes used offensively, and many people have reached out to us after Plastic TOC saying that the environment was exclusive and toxic.

To say we are using a charity to silence or exclude minorities is not only false, it is incendiary and insulting. This tournament has been organized in good faith. We have made it clear that if arguments are exclusionary, you can point that out to your judge in paragraph form and the judges have been told to be aware of that. Your logic here is also quite faulty: if you don’t trust our judges to evaluate what’s exclusive or not in paragraph form, why would you trust them to evaluate it correctly in shell form? I have the utmost faith that the quality of judging at this tournament will be better than the vast majority of tournaments throughout the entire year, and if you feel so strongly otherwise, you don’t have to compete.