Nobody Wins on “Surrounded”

A couple of weeks ago, a clip from a YouTube video titled “1 Progressive vs 20 Far-Right Conservatives” started circulating on social media. In it, the British-American journalist Mehdi Hasan debates a wide-eyed, snarling man named Connor, in what appears to be a windowless warehouse. A group of people form a ring around them, bright-red flags twitching in their hands. Hasan asks whether Connor believes in democracy. No, Connor replies—he prefers autocracy, identifies as a fascist, idolizes General Francisco Franco, and believes free speech should be abolished after a Catholic nationalist ethnostate is actualized. “I frankly don’t care being called a Nazi,” he says. After a bit of back and forth, Hasan, usually a relentless debater, stares at Connor in disbelief and says, “I don’t debate fascists.” There’s only one problem: he’s found himself in a room of them, each waiting for their own chance at virality.

This video is part of a series called “Surrounded,” a YouTube debate show created by the entertainment company Jubilee Media. The premise for the show is simple enough: a room of ideologically aligned laypeople take turns debating a notable public figure on a topic of contention. There’s Candace Owens, the right-wing commentator, arguing against feminism (“1 Conservative vs 20 Feminists”); Jordan Peterson, the academic turned conservative culture warrior, sparring with atheists (“Jordan Peterson vs 20 Atheists”); or Sam Seder, the host of the leftist internet radio show “The Majority Report,” condemning all things Donald Trump (“20 Trump Supporters Take on 1 Progressive”). The debates are split into four twenty-minute rounds, each centering on a specific claim stated by the host, such as “Donald Trump is a racist,” “No career will give women as much joy and fulfillment as raising children,” or “College is a scam.” To make a case against the host’s assertion, members of the group race to the center of the room and play a game of musical chairs; whoever reaches the chair first may stay until the round reaches time or until a majority of their cohort votes them out by raising red flags.

“Surrounded” videos are a dizzying and bewildering watch, as gruelling as they are compelling. The participants who fare best seem to be familiar with the conventions of interscholastic debate, spouting off statistics and logic puzzles with the alacrity of an extemporaneous-speaking champion. To win an argument in such a condensed amount of time, debaters attempt to short-circuit their opponent’s claim as swiftly and harshly as possible, treating their few minutes of airtime as a domination game rather than, say, a path toward truth or understanding. The goal here is not to inform or educate, to listen or process, to build or intellectualize but to win, to own, to dunk on, to break the opponent’s brain, to spawn an argument of such devastating definitiveness that the matter can be considered, once and for all, closed. Wave the flag, run the clock out—next.

Unsurprisingly, the public figures who appear on “Surrounded” frequently vanquish their opponents with ease. Ben Shapiro, Pete Buttigieg, Michael Knowles, Alex O’Connor—these are professional debaters capable of outwitting and outreasoning almost any audience member unfamiliar with traditional debate techniques, regardless of the topic or claim being considered. In the series’ first episode, which now has more than thirty million views on YouTube, the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk argued for abortion’s illegality against a rotating cast of “liberal college students,” some of whom were unable to conceal their disgust for Kirk’s position. “I hope your daughter lives a very happy life and gets away from you,” a young woman says as the round’s time expires. In another episode, starring a live streamer named Destiny, a woman in a MAGA hat attempts to regain control of an argument she’s long lost the plot of. “It’s almost like you’re attacking me because I’m a female,” she says, apropos of nothing. Kirk and Destiny relish this kind of hyperemotional reaction; by appealing to anything other than cold inductive reasoning, opponents effectively concede their argument. It’s as good as a checkmate.

The show is most tolerable when opponents are equally matched, when each party understands the proper rules of engagement. To afford such outcomes, Jubilee stacks audiences with content creators looking to use the channel’s platform to grow their profile. In many of the liberal-versus-conservative videos, Gen Z representatives Dean Withers, Naima Troutt, and Parkergetajob, as he’s known online, masquerade among the normies, waiting for their turn to eviscerate their counterpart, which they often thrillingly do. Withers has become a wildly popular debate streamer, with four million TikTok followers; the Times profiled him last December, calling him a potential “Democrat bro whisperer.” Troutt is also a popular TikToker and has provided “Surrounded” with many of its most viral moments, like when she called Kirk’s smile “creepy” or caught Owens in a contradiction about whether women belong in the workforce or not. (Was Owens not working at that very moment?) On the right, creators such as Sarah Stock often appear in “Surrounded” debates to provide an articulate foil to liberal arguments, while the aforementioned Connor, from Hasan’s debate, runs a popular far-right meme account under the pseudonym Pinesap and is affiliated with the white-nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes.

What is Jubilee hoping to accomplish by platforming radical perspectives and facilitating rage-bait blood sport, even between nominally well-meaning ideologues? According to its website, the company suggests that its content fosters “human connection” through “discomfort and conflict.” “I don’t think it’s good for society to deny an opportunity for discourse,” Jubilee’s former creative director, John Regalado, told The Atlantic earlier this year. In the same article, Jason Y. Lee, the company’s founder, claimed “that authenticity is what young people desperately are seeking,” and Regalado said that the internet is “updating our tolerance for disagreement.” Jubilee is far from the only outlet capitalizing on this thirst for debate and discord—they’re actually late to the party. Shapiro and Kirk have become two of the most popular, and powerful, right-wing pundits by travelling the country and filming debates with college students, the viral clips of which function, for conservatives, as evidence of how wokeism has ruined the minds of young people. The left-wing streamers Destiny and Hasan Piker have had high-wattage debates with red-pilled extremists such as Fuentes and Andrew Tate, exposing to an audience of millions the lunacy of their bigoted, hateful politics. I challenge anyone to watch these debates and conclude that human connection was fostered, or that a worthwhile exchange of ideas occurred. Was that ever even the point, anyway?

Public debate is, of course, not a new phenomenon. But what makes content like “Surrounded” particularly modern is how it attempts to anthropomorphize the internet, turning incendiary discourse into live-action role-play. What if the meme account posting radical right-wing content could talk? What if the Twitter thread detailing Trump’s perennial misogyny was a person? And what if these forces met, in real life, for a bit of undercooked linguistic combat? Jubilee seems less interested in intellectual evolution or ideological cohabitation than it is in dramatizing salacious, degrading social-media spats with help from paid representatives. (The company’s other YouTube series include “Ranking,” which features videos such as “50 Girls Get Swiped by 5 Guys: Hot or Not?”; on another show, “Odd One Out,” there’s an episode titled “7 Plastic Surgery vs 1 Secret Natural.”) Is the company’s content symptomatic of our impoverished political discourse, or is it an active perpetuator of it? I’m not sure it matters: the brain-eroding slop central to “Surrounded” ’s viral appeal offers little more to the viewer than lobotomization.

Near the end of Hasan’s “Surrounded” debate, a man named Richie rushes to the table for a second time. “I can see in your eyes there’s a level of exhaustion from being here,” Richie says. “This is where my empathy comes in.” And it’s true: Hasan thus far has treated the debate as armed conflict, ruthlessly interrupting his opponents and sandbagging any hope for a substantive exchange. Could Richie be trying to rectify that, to set the table for something true and good to come from his brief moment in the spotlight? Not more than two minutes later, he tells Hasan, who is of Indian descent, “You’re not American.” Later, a backward-hat-wearing twentysomething promotes the “great replacement” theory, before telling Hasan that he’ll be sent “to the promised land.” What choice does Hasan have but to bare his teeth and enter attack mode? This is, after all, far from a civil argument; it’s a warning from a corner of the internet, a prideful ambush from people finally given the chance to speak. Nobody’s hands are clean, and nobody leaves a winner. ♦