Editor’s note, July 21, 2025, 2:15 pm ET: A recent Jubilee featuring journalist Mehdi Hasan, titled “1 Progressive vs 20 Far-Right Conservatives,” went viral on social media. In the video, some of the far-right conservatives Hasan debated refer to themselves as fascists, which has created controversy online. To learn more about Jubilee’s video strategy and the trend of combative political debate videos, check out the story below, originally published on October 10, 2024.

It seems as though the country has been engaged in one long screaming match since 2016. Go on YouTube or scroll through X and that feeling gets a face. Videos claiming that someone “silenced” or “destroyed” another party in a discussion about politics abound on social media. There are now nearly unavoidable clips of conservative personalities like Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro arguing with college students at liberal universities or leftist commentators on their social platforms. Meanwhile, videos of random folks with polar-opposite political views sitting in a dark room arguing over hot-button issues — and often saying wildly offensive or misinformed things — are on the rise.

At the end of September, a YouTube video titled, “Can 1 Woke Teen Survive 25 Trump Supporters” went viral, drawing attention for its absurd, Battle Royale-like premise. In two weeks, it had accumulated 9.6 million views. The video sees 19-year-old liberal TikTok pundit Dean Withers (a.k.a. the “woke teen”) thrown into a lion’s den of young, zealous Trumpers eager to prove him wrong. One by one, he argues with his opponents across a table about reproductive rights and Kamala Harris’s bona fides. One clip where he appears to stump a woman during a discussion about abortion and IUDs garnered millions of views on X.

This is just one of the contentious and extremely clicky scenarios explored by the media company Jubilee in its popular YouTube series “Surrounded.” The series’ setup looks like a satire of what debate has become in the age of Trump: extremely competitive, theatrical, and unbalanced (literally and emotionally) to boot. What should theoretically be an exchange of facts and logic has become the ultimate bloodsport for a certain type of “thought leader” often happy to traffic in opinions and distorted truths. These oral pugilists are more interested in some online-only version of “winning” than having meaningful discourse.

Across the political spectrum, there has proven to be an appetite for watching people shout at each other. These on-air clashes have been the bread and butter of cable news networks like CNN and Fox News. Still, these filmed debates mostly promote the pessimistic notion that the US is too polarized to be saved. They’re frequently a front-row seat to all the misinformation, conspiracy theories, and regressive attitudes polluting the political landscape and affecting people’s daily lives. So why can’t........

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