The death of Charlie Kirk reignited heated discussions about political speech in America, especially the value of arguing with people you disagree with.
One company, Jubilee Media, has tapped into that sentiment and has been going viral on YouTube these last couple of years with its high-energy and high-drama — and yes, gimmicky — debate shows where one person faces off against a big group of people who disagree with them. (Kirk himself made an appearance on a Jubilee show in 2024: “Can 25 Liberal College Students Outsmart 1 Conservative?”)
Jason Y. Lee says he founded the company to foster debates and build empathy in a polarized country. But critics argue that some of Jubilee’s content could be categorized more as voyeuristic clickbait than high-minded discourse. One show has women arranging themselves based on perceived attractiveness and men rearranging them; another involves blindfolded guessing games about which participant is Black or white.
More recently, Mehdi Hasan — author and founder of his own media company, Zeteo, and former host of his own MSNBC show — appeared on Jubilee’s flagship debate show, Surrounded. His episode was called “1 Progressive vs 20 Far-Right Conservatives,” and that too made waves.
Hasan said he was prepared to vigorously defend his views, something he’s become known for over the years. But when he showed up, he wasn’t expecting some of the featured debaters to openly call for his deportation (Hasan is a US citizen originally from England) — or for one to proudly declare himself a fascist. The episode offered unusual insight into the promise and perils of political debate, how we practice politics in the age of algorithms, and the value — and limits — of engaging with those you fundamentally disagree with.
Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Mehdi Hasan about his appearance on Surrounded — and what it taught him about this charged political moment.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Where did you learn to debate?
Where did I learn to debate? I think around the dinner table. My family is very disputatious. The Hasans are known for having strong views. There was a lot of debate around the kitchen table, the dining table, political, social, cultural, religious.
We planned 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 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 do have to add the standard caveat because Fox keeps clipping some of us on the left out of context.
Obviously [Kirk] 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 very scary.
But if you’re asking me about the content of what Charlie Kirk said when he was alive, it was awful, it was horrific, it was reactionary, it was bigoted. 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 he and Ben Shapiro and others go to college campuses, find some guy with 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/Ben Shapiro destroys college student.”
All right. What about Jubilee?
So Jubilee’s a little bit different. Jubilee claims to be nonpartisan; 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.
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 — those are good odds. I’ll take those odds. The idea of going into the lion’s den and debating a bunch of people who disagree with me, I thought would be fun.
Number two, I spoke to my good friend Sam Seder from the Majority Report who had done a Jubilee, and he told me that it’s worth doing. It does actually have value — you will reach a whole new audience. And people like my daughter and my nieces and others we’re 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, it looked like a lot of right-wingers have been dominating that space. 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, Candace Owens, Michael Knowles. That was the lean of YouTube and Jubilee. And I thought, well, actually, maybe people like me and Sam Seder can 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 — the kind of people I sat across. I’d watched a lot of Jubilees. I’d watched Sam Seder’s 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 person to be telling me to my face that I should leave the country, that I’m not a real American. “I’m a proud fascist,” one person told me very early on in the debate.
What? Normally, people wanna deny the f-word. We spent the last week with Republicans up in arms that anyone would call them fascists, and how that’s what led to the death of Charlie Kirk. And yet here I was sitting in a warehouse with a bunch of young, mainly white people saying proudly, yes, we are fascists, we are racist.
How do we debate fascists? Should a person debate fascists?
No. And that’s why I said at the time, if you watch 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.”
And I was like, “That’s not what it is. I don’t debate fascists 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?”
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 dismissing the Holocaust or saying, “I’m a fascist,” or saying the country was built for white people or whatever it is, I would not have gone on that show, or I would’ve 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, these fascist-y 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.
That is the silver lining. I guess you could argue if — and this is gonna make me sound very egomaniacal and immodest, so I apologize in advance — I guess people could say, if you’re gonna debate fascists, might as well be someone who’s good at debating. And that’s what I’m known for doing. So it’s better me than someone else who goes on and gets their ass handed to them.
So in that sense, I get it, but the counterargument 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, look, we own this mainstream journalist. We told them 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 opponent’s mind. Very rarely can you change your opponent’s mind. My goal is to change the people watching. When you’re debating on stage, as I have done, or whether you’re debating on YouTube and 10 or 11 or 12 million people now have watched that Surrounded show, you are hoping that in that 11 or 12 million people, there are a handful of people who are 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.” And, look, people have reached out to me over the years. I’ve spent the last year and a half doing nonstop debates. 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.”
The post The problem with debating fascists — from a guy who’s debated just about everyone appeared first on Vox.
