Jubilee’s Surrounded series turns political debate into a blood-sport.

One person sits in the center of a circle, facing off against twenty ideological opponents who take turns confronting them. The camera captures each exchange like it’s a penalty kick. There are no moderators, no timeouts, and no expectation that anyone will walk away with more clarity than they entered.

The premise claims to encourage listening. The branding leans into objectivity. The format delivers neither. Surrounded is engineered isolation; the person in the center becomes a target. The outer ring serves as a chorus of hostility, each participant rotating in for a shot.

Arguments are not aimed at persuasion. They are launched for spectacle. Exchanges are brief and unmoored. The goal is to trigger clips that will circulate across platforms. What might look like discussion functions more like performance.

The structure itself does not aim to produce clarity. It’s optimized for virality, reaction, and ideological posture. These debates feel strange because they are not debates. They are something closer to an epistemological game show, a participatory meme that feeds on our fractured political culture and regurgitates it as content.

What started as (arguably) a well-intentioned project to build empathy across ideological divides has metastasized into a digital vaudeville, fueled by spectacle, devoid of synthesis. The Atlantic called it Gen Z's Jerry Springer. But there's another, more corrosive lineage: the legacy of "debate bro" culture.

It's the natural extension of the smug undergraduate who read half of The Fountainhead, who speaks in the declarative rhythm of Ben Shapiro and believes victory lies in speed, not substance. But the debate bro is more than a stereotype; it is a genre of engagement. Its operating principle is adversarialism as performance. Ideas = sparring props. Arguments = less about their truth content and more about their clout-generating potential.

And Jubilee has made itself the natural endgame of this genre. Its "Surrounded" series literalizes the fantasy of the debate bro: one voice against twenty, rhetoric as gladiator sport. The lighting is dramatic, the editing tight. At its most viral, it approximates the theater of Squid Game.

To watch Jordan Peterson argue on Jubilee was to watch a man perform belief in real time - wavering, redefining, dodging, leaning forward with the intensity of a prophet and the incoherence of a man lost in his own lexicon. His tactic, such as it is, seems to be to exhaust interlocutors until they forget what question they asked.

In one segment, Peterson accuses atheists of not knowing what they reject. In another, he defines God as conscience, then as unity, then something else altogether. The result is linguistic vapor. No participant leaves with clarity. The viewer is left with vibes and bereft of information. What does it mean when the most viewed debate on God ends with everyone vaguely annoyed?

Sam Seder fared differently in his own "Surrounded" appearance. He came prepared. He came principled. He tried to fact-check. He even shook hands with his interlocutors. But by his own account, the experience was disturbing. The people who debated him weren't arguing in bad faith; they earnestly believed rank falsehoods, beyond the point of salvation.

This, in a sense, is Jubilee's unacknowledged ethic: persuasion is beside the point. What matters is presence, occupying the algorithmic space of the political colosseum. You win by being clipped.

Jubilee's defenders say it's better to have uncomfortable conversations than none at all. But what if discomfort is just the product being sold? What if the goal isn't understanding but monetized tension?

The production stages debates with baked-in asymmetry. A single expert is surrounded by a gallery of zealots. A scientist must "debate" a flat-earther. A progressive attempts to convince twenty reactionaries that child poverty is real. These are not good-faith matches; they're more rituals of collapse.

And the viewers - many of them - are watching to confirm what they already believe. The left watches for moments of snarky dominance, re-affirming their own superiority complex or moral outrage. The right watches for that one guy who "DESTROYS liberal logic."

Everyone gets their dopamine.

This is not how minds change. It is how identities harden.

The classical ideal of debate - as embodied by Socrates - was not to win but to pursue truth. In Gorgias, Plato stages a conversation where rhetoric is put on trial. Is it a tool for good or a weapon of manipulation? Socrates leans toward the former. Jubilee leans toward the latter.

No one watching "60 Republicans vs. Democrats Debate the 2024 Election" expects dialectical progress. These are not symposia. They are WWE matches for the mind. Arguments are props. Participants are avatars. The actual issues - abortion, climate, democracy itself - are diluted and depressed into clickable confrontations.

Even the aesthetics make this clear. Jubilee stages its shows in black-box voids or minimalist arenas, as if to simulate the weight of philosophical abstraction. But the form betrays the function. When you gamify discussion, you warp its telos. Debate becomes a scramble for narrative control, not a search for mutual insight.

Jason Lee, Jubilee's founder, may believe he’s building the Disney of empathy. But to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin: every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism. Jubilee’s sleek thumbnails, its dramatic strings, its manufactured epiphanies - these are the gloss of civility on top of a theater of algorithmic grotesquerie.

Some critics, like Sam Seder, hope that letting theocrats and nationalists hang themselves publicly might immunize viewers against their ideology. It’s a noble hope. But is that what happens in practice? Or are we simply increasing exposure, teaching audiences that even bigotry can be visually aesthetic, socially viral, and algorithmically rewarded?

In the 1990s, daytime talk shows put fringe voices onstage and created a moral panic. But at least they didn’t pretend it was education. Jubilee mimics neutrality while assembling rhetorical car crashes.

The problem isn’t just that Jubilee fails to change minds. It’s that it convinces people they are learning, when what they are actually doing is binge-watching ideologies collide.

We can’t debate our way to a better polity through TikTok edits and aestheticized confrontation. Understanding requires time, shared premises, and vulnerability. It requires silence. It does not survive jump cuts.