Today, Explained - Debate or rage-bait?

Episode Date: September 16, 2025

Jubilee Media has figured out a way to make the issues that divide Americans go viral - for better or worse. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh and Devan Schwartz, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Adriene Lilly and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Vice President JD Vance hosting a podcast episode of The Charlie Kirk Show. Photo by Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The video is titled, Can 25 Liberal College students Outsmart one conservative? The conservative is Charlie Kirk. The 25 students are game. The video has 35 million views. My next claim is that Kamala Harris is a DEI candidate. I think that you're going to say because she's black and she's a woman. She was appointed because Joe Biden promised that. That video was produced by Jubilee Media, a new media company that draws millions of viewers with debates like Kirk versus kids.

Many people have praised Charlie Kirk for engaging in these debates, including yesterday, Vice President J.D. Vance, who filled in on Kirk's podcast. Everyone knew him as this fearless debate or this guy who would take the conservative message into hostile places and inspire younger generations to have courage. At the end, though, Veep took a dark turn. There is no unity with someone who lies about what Charlie Kirk said in order to excuse his murder. Coming up on today, explained from box, debate or rage bait? Hey, I'm Teffi, and I'm hosting a new podcast from The Cut called Teffi Talks. Think of me as your work, Bessie, who's here to give you all the juiciest pop culture deep dives, read celebrity tea leaves, and yap about modern life. New episodes drop every Wednesday on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app.

It's going to be so fun avoiding actual work together. What's up, everybody? It's Cam Hayward, your Steelers captain and host of not just football. is over. The NFL season is finally here. It's time to get locked in. We're covering the Steelers' home opener against the Seahawks and breaking down NFL and college football every week, bringing you face-to-face with current players and legends, and getting in the stuff that really shapes this game. You can listen to Not Just Football with Cam Hayward on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. It's game time. Let's go. I'm Noelle King with Spencer Cornhaber.

He's a staff writer at The Atlantic. His beat is popular culture, and he wrote about Jubilee. Jubilee Media is an online video content empire that has all sorts of entertaining videos that circulate on YouTube and TikTok. They include videos about very anodyne subjects like dating. I have a question. Okay. In a relationship, are you baby girl or is the partner baby girl? What the hell is a baby girl?

Like, like, pop culture. How can you tell of someone is an anime super fan? It also includes a lot of political content. Democrats are more patriotic than Republicans. And my understanding in Democrats being really patriotic is destroying the nuclear family, burning down flags, burning down buildings. We see just destruction in our cities. And generally the gist of Jubilee.

approach is that they get regular people, or people at least seem regular, into a room, a bunch of strangers, and have them talk about sort of difficult subjects, whether that's politics in the Middle East or what you find attractive. You know, kind of third real topics become spectator sport entertainment in a Jubilee video. Tell me about the founder and what he's trying to do. You spoke to him, right? Yeah, Jason Wiley is his name, and he is someone who hails from the world of business and tech. He was a consultant in his early 20s, making a lot of good money.

But he felt like he wanted to do something that would enrich the world. We want to create content that will make the world a better place. And use technology and online content to bring people together and spread a positive vision of society. I think in the midst of what we feel like

is some of the most divisive times that actually human connection and really understanding folks and having dialogue and empathy is quite a good thing. Before he worked in consulting and business, he was an intern on the Barack Obama campaign. He worked with the Clinton Health Initiative. He was sort of like a young, idealistic millennial. He also comes from a Christian background in Kansas.

I grew up as the younger child of two Korean immigrants. And both of my parents are now. not only Corinne, but they're also professors. That kind of background led into him founding Jubilee and initially started it as a nonprofit where he would make kind of socially conscious videos sort of like PSAs or short films with a message in hopes of using content to make the world better.

In case you haven't heard about the Jubilee project, the mission is to make videos of people stepping out of the comfort zone for a day or doing something they love for a good day. love for good cause. Around 2016, 2017, after Donald Trump's election, he felt like there was an opportunity for him to do something that was a for-profit business that would kind of dial up the entertainment value, but also make a very explicit effort to not just spread a positive message, but get people to move out of their ideological echo chambers and talk to one another from the right and the left. And so that became the Jubilee we see today.

There is a show on Jubilee's YouTube channel. It's called Surrounded. And it speaks to this idea that you should get out of your bubble and talk to people who disagree with you. It also has generated a lot of controversy. Tell me about Surrounded and how it works. Yeah, surrounded is absolutely wild to me. Black culture is toxic. Let's talk about that.

Stop, stop, stop, stop. You are literally not. Emotional liberalism right now. I am not putting off emotional liberalism. You're putting off unfounded lies. That's what y'all do. Youngstar said misinformation. Look at this man.

When I first came across it, it was during the, you know, last year's election cycle. And the first video I came across was titled, Can One Woke Teen Survive 20 Maga Supporters? He did not say that he was black. He's not a U.S. born citizen. Let's talk about the birth movement. There was legitimacy in questioning his birth certificate. Sheriff Gerard Pai, who I'm friends with, looked into the claims of that birth certificate. And there was questions of whether it was.

falsified. And just the title alone, you're like, how could this even exist? It just sounds like something you'd see almost like in a satire of a very aggressive and dystopian political culture, honestly. But then I watched the videos, and they really are both sort of cringy and tense. Listen, the idea that women have to sleep with men to get into position power is a misogynistic Live, boy, one moment. She's saying that we have to finish talking real quick. We have to open our legs to get jobs. That's exactly how she used it.

But also fascinating and fun and just these lively documents of human behavior, human communication styles, ways that people try to convince one another that they're right. Can you define communism? Yeah, basically it's mob rule. It's Marxism. It's mob rule. False. Literally all wrong.

Communism is a stateless, classless, moneyless society. Okay. The format has one person on one side, typically some sort of expert. debating 20 or 25 people on the other side of the aisle, and those people are not necessarily experts. Those feel like kind of normal people picked off the street, though in many cases they really were cast for having some sort of connection to the subject matter. And over the course of the debate, that one person goes head to head with one person from the outside of circle, and they debate some provocation that the person on the inside of the circle has

stated. My next claim is, conservatives don't actually care. about family values. So it's a very kind of like aggressive, lively, action-packed scenario for a debate. One of the videos that caught my attention early on was the one with the, you know, now late Charlie Kirk debating a group of young liberals. All right, Parker, what is a woman? A woman is an adult human person that has a desire to be in accordance with a particular set of social and cultural norms that are typically associated with a female sex. Now, define a man. You're looking at one. X, Y, chromosomes in a... Okay, but does God the father have X, Y, chromosomes? You know, he really went toe to toe with these college kids on all sorts of really hot topics. What is it about, let's say, a six-week baby that has a

heartbeat that is less moral worth than an 88-year-old right now with dementia in a home down the street? Do you think men can give birth? I think that... Yes or no question. I think that a person who is assigned male at birth, I don't think they can get birth. A sign male at birth? So people are not male at birth? I think that a person... See, your evidence that college is a scam, my friend. You know, no one in that room really agreed with Charlie Kirk. But as you watch the video progress, there was this sort of kind of odd sense of humor and kinship that developed between the college students and their ideological rival, you know, they were kind of taunting each other, but it seemed like they're all sort of like in on the joke, and the joke being that this is a ridiculous way

for anyone to talk to each other. How popular is surrounded exactly? And what kind of influence does it have? Is it just people watching, or does it mean anything? Well, it's a good question of what its impact is. As to its popularity, it's true that some of these videos are in the millions of videos. So we're talking, this is one of the most influential sources of political content on the internet period. The question of what these videos actually do to society and to their viewers, what kind of messages they spread is one that's certainly open for debate. Ideally, it creates a more robust democratic dialogue. The question for me is whether that is really happening, which is very hard to figure out. Or if it's just creating this sort of spectator's

sport sense of political discourse that really actually might end up driving people to more extreme corners and also in a way trivializing our political debate by making it into this, you know, piece of entertainment. Since Charlie Kirk was killed in Utah, I think a lot of people have been debating the debate, right? Charlie Kirk, at his best, people who loved him will say he went to a campus, he would sit down with people who didn't agree with him, and he would go for it and he would let them go for it, and he would hear them out, and he would interrupt, and that's what democracy is supposed to be about. And so even people that really don't like his politics have said, this is what it should be all about. And yet, you know, I hear you saying millions of people

watch this, does it really move us forward at all? Since Charlie Kirk was killed, I wonder if your thinking has evolved in the past couple days on this at all, about the value of this? I would say, yeah, I'm actively kind of questioning some of the things I thought. I never made up my mind exactly about whether this Julie was a good thing or a bad thing. Yeah, you're a reporter. You know, reporter critics, I'm allowed to have some opinions, but it's more me trying to analyze what's actually going on here. And I, you know, I think unsatisfying this is, is to say, it's a mixed bag.

But one thing that I feel more since Charlie Kirk's death is the extent to which our online media ecosystem is turning politics into this game of almost like characters or avatars or sort of like warriors and champions for their respective sides. And people who are watching at home are getting invested in those sides and having a rooting interest almost like you would for a sports team or a pop star. Not to say that politics was ever this pure realm of substantive exchange of ideas,

but in a way, something like Jubilee, which is trying to get us back to the notion of politics as a debate, as a free-flowing form of ideological exchange, may actually just be feeding the superficial and sort of dehumanizing aspects of being engaged with politics or viewing politics. That was the Atlantic's Spencer Cornhaber. Coming up, a professional debater speaks. Support for the show today comes from Indeed.

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Where did I learn to debate? I think around the dinner table, my family is very disputatious. The Hassans are known for having strong views. So there was a lot of debate around the kitchen table, the dining table, political, social, cultural, religious. All of it, huh? Yeah. still, to this day. Who's that? That's Mehdi Hassan. He's the author of Win Every Argument. He's a progressive. He's founder of the new media company Zateo. And his debate with 20 far-right conservatives went viral over the summer. We plan to do a show on the Jubilee debates and the argument about whether they are of value or not. And we called you because you appeared in one of these debates that went very viral. And then Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah. And then Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah.

And many people said Charlie Kirk was doing it right. He was showing up. He was debating people he disagreed with. That's the right way to do politics. Do you agree with that? No, I don't believe that Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way to quote former Vox boss, now New York Times columnist Ezra Klein. A good friend of mine, I totally disagree with Ezra on that piece he wrote.

I don't think Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way. I do have to add the standard caveat because Fox keep clipping some of us on the left out of context, obviously he shouldn't have been killed. Obviously, we all condemn his murder. Obviously, a political assassination in response to speech you don't like is unacceptable in America and are very scary. But if you're asking me about the content of what Charlie Kirk did when he was alive, it was awful. It was horrific. It was reaction. It was bigoted from his show to his quote-unquote debates. This idea that he was some kind of Socratic debater trying to get to the truth. No, he wasn't. He was doing a prove-me-wrong tour over the years where him and Ben Shapiro and others

go to college campuses, find some guy with, you know, blue hair who says something provocative and then dunk all over him and then clip it up and go viral and then have a YouTube video saying Charlie Kirk slash Ben Shapiro destroys college student. All right. What about Jubilee? So Jubilee is a little bit different. Jubilee claims to be non-partisan. They say that they are trying to get people from all sides to get in a room together. I mean, on paper, what they're aspiring to is.

at minimum, neutral, if not good, what turns up on YouTube is not necessarily always the case. I think they have gone quite far in their audience selection, certainly on my show. I think it's now universally recognized. I think even Jubilee would recognize,

even though they haven't put out an official statement, but I would hope they'd recognize that their vetting did not work if they did indeed deploy vetting. It was an audience, you know, I thought we'd have one or two crazy people in. It was one or two normal people and 17, 18, crazy people. When I say crazy, I mean outright, self-proclaimed fascists, racists, and the rest.

I am Native American. Whites are Native Americans. What are you talking about? What are you talking about? I'd like to start to say, I really don't find the Constitution that important. I find it to be like a 300-year-old document. You have to have at least some things in common in order to actually have a civilization. And immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, I come into this country now, disrespect us.

They hate everything that we believe. They don't even speak our language. Tell me why you decided to go on surrounded. There were multiple reasons. One is, as I say, I like a good argument. And 20 to one, there's a good odds. I'll take those odds. So, you know, the idea of going into the Lions Den and debating a bunch of people who disagree with me, I thought would be fun.

That's number one. Number two, I spoke to my good friend Sam Cedar from the majority report who had done a jubilee. And he told me that it's worth doing. It's not a setup. up, it is actually have value. You will reach a whole new audience. And, you know, people like my daughter and my nieces and others were saying, oh, yeah, Jubilee. We know Jubilee. All the kids watch Jubilee. And it's amazing, since I did Jubilee, how many younger people are now coming up to me in the street versus older people, because they recognize me from that circle debate show.

So it was a chance to reach a new audience. That was number two. And number three, you know, it looked like a lot of right wings have been dominating that space. You know, prior to me going on Jubilee. All the top-rated people who had done Jubilee on YouTube with the most views were Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Candice Owens, Michael Knowles. That was, you know, the lean of YouTube and Jubilee. And I thought, well, actually, maybe people like me and Sam Cedar can, you know, try and give a different point of view. And what happened? What happened was the craziest two hours of my professional life as a journalist. I was not expecting. and maybe I should have been, but I was not expecting the kind of people I sat across. I'd watched a lot of jubilees. I knew there's some nut jobs. I knew there's some extremists.

I'd watch Sam Cedar show. I knew there were a couple of people who came and said white supremacist things and far right things and dumb things. But I didn't expect one after another people to be telling me to my face that I should get the hell out. I don't even like, I should get the hell out. Yes. Why? I don't want you here. Do you care more about helping Americans or immigrants in this claim?

Immigrants are Americans. I'm an immigrant and an American. Well, immigrants are not Americans. Americans are the people that were born here. That's not true. That I'm a proud fascist, as one person told me. Very early on in the debate. Hey, what can I say?

I think you say, I'm a fascist. Yeah, I am. What? Normally people want to deny the F word. We spent the last week with Republicans up in arms that anyone would call them fascists and that's what led to the death of Charlie Coe. And yet here I was sitting in a warehouse in L.A. with a bunch of young, mainly white people saying proudly, yes, we are fascists, we are racists.

How do we debate fascists? Like, should a person debate fascists? No, I'm not. And that's why I said at the time, if you watched that clip, about halfway through the conversation, I said, what are we doing here? I don't debate fascists. And all of the right wingers watching in the circle, they got very upset because Jubilee then moved this guy out. And so many of them spent the next two hours. Every time they came up to the chair to debate me, they would say, oh, you're banning people you don't agree with.

First and foremost, I don't believe you're pro-American. in the value system that you claim to uphold, especially with free speech, if you're not willing to debate people that don't share your values. So isn't the whole entire point of a debate to debate people that you don't agree with? And I was like, that's not what it is. I don't debate because fascists don't believe in democracy. They don't believe in debate. They don't believe in my equal worth as a human being. So why would I debate such people?

There is no debate to be had with people. Fascism at its core is an anti-democratic authoritarian and, yes, very violent ideology. So no, I don't believe there is value to debating fascists. And if I'd known that people would be sitting down, you know, dismissing the Holocaust of Jews or saying I'm a fascist or saying, you know, the country was built for white people, or whatever it is, I would not have gone on that show, clearly, or I would have said, get other people. Look, I come from a proud anti-fascist tradition on the left where you don't platform fascists, you don't indulge them, you don't meet them halfway, you defeat fascism by defeating the ideology by offering something better and by being truthful. You know, a person who appreciated your appearance on Surrounded might say, look, these fashy types are out there. They're influencing young people in a real way. At least you showed up and gave them a run for their money.

No, that is the silver lining, I guess you could argue. I guess, and this is going to make me sound very egomaniaclycle and immodice, so I apologize in advance. So I guess people could say, if you're going to debate fascists, might as well be someone who's good at debating, and that's what I'm known for doing. So it better me than someone else who goes on and gets their ass handed to them. So in that sense, I get it. But the counter argument I get as well. A lot of my critics were saying to me, just by going on, you legitimize them. Just by going on, you amplified them.

Just by going on, you gave them credibility and respectability. They were able to clip up their clips and put it online and say, look, look, we own this mainstream journalist. We told him to get the F out of our country. Do you think you changed anyone's mind by appearing on surrounded? Certainly not in that room, no. And that wasn't the goal. What is the goal in debating if not to change minds?

So my goal is not to change my opponents, my very rarely can you change your opponents mind. My goal is to change the people watching at home, whether they are watching on an audience live in an auditorium when you're debating on stage, as I have done, or whether you're debating on YouTube and you know that 10 or 11 million people now have watched that surrounded show. You're hoping that in that 12 million or 11 million people, there are even a handful of people who are, you know, these days it's very hard to find truly open-minded, truly independent people. Most people are partisans, whether they want to admit so or not. But you hope that you found some independent folks to go, hmm, that's a good point that I hadn't heard before. That's a good statistic that I wasn't aware of. That's a good way of framing the issue that I haven't referred from my elected leaders. And look, people have reached out to me over the years, maybe not on the surrounded show.

But for example, something else I've spent the last year and a half doing nonstop debates on, both in New York, on stage, in Toronto at the Monk debates, on Pierce Morgan Show, is Gaza, right? I've done a lot of debating about Gaza, another very polarizing issue. and people have reached out to me and I have had messages from people saying I have switched my positions on this issue after listening to you, I didn't think about it in the way that you possess, and you have helped me change my positions on this genocide.

Would you ever go back on a Jubilee show? Would you ever do this again? Hard to say. Not anytime soon, but I think look, my advice to people and people have been calling me, other members of the media who have been invited by Jubilee have of course called me now to say,

hey, do you think I should do it? And my advice, I'm not going to tell you whether to do or not do it, each to their own. What I would say is, if I did go back, I would take more precautions as to who I'm going up against. I failed at my own test. I wrote a book called Win Every Argument, and the first chapter is know your audience, right? Know who you're going to be in front of. Know who you're going to be speaking to. And I thought about the YouTube audience, and I didn't put as much thought into who are these 20 people?

How are they being selected? How are they being vetted? What will they be saying? I turned up, Noel, with all this, like, information about, you know, for each of my claim, I made five, four claims. And each claim I had like, you know, I do my prep. I come with my receipts. I had my, you know, 14th Amendment.

I had my, you know, all this stuff, stats. And then I realized it doesn't matter with these people. They're not interested in engaging in the substance of what we're talking about. I'm sitting here going, Donald Trump doesn't respect the Constitution. Their response is, who cares about the Constitution? We need a fascist dictator. Like that is, you know, where do you go with that? Mejdi Hassan, he's the founder of Zetae O'Hadi-Muagdi and Devin Schwartz produced today's episode.

Amina El-Sadi edited, Patrick Boyd and Adrian Lilly are our engineers and Laura Bullard is our senior researcher. I'm Noelle King. It's today explained. Thank you.