Why the bad guys don't debate
Remember when Joe Rogan interviewed Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and they spent some time on vaccines, and a "Dr. Peter R. Hotez" expressed his horror at this, but then when Rogan invited him to come on the show and debate RFK he gave every excuse in the book for why he couldn't do it?
There's a reason for this.
Their side is not used to being confronted. They're used to sitting in a bubble, sipping lattes with people who agree with them, and deploring how many people refuse to accept their stupid opinions without question.
If people like this ever do debate, it's against someone handpicked by a cable news channel, and who agrees with them on the fundamental premise of whatever the question is. They then "debate" their three-percent area of disagreement. (These outlets would never have a guest debate someone like me, it goes without saying.)
Now and again debates and confrontations like this do happen, and the result is nearly always disastrous for the bad guys.
For instance, our friend Scott Horton had an extraordinary opportunity to debate Bill Kristol, the neoconservative who has supported every catastrophic foreign intervention you can think of, and who, never learning a thing from any of it, always favors more.
Kristol must not have known who Scott was, because his decision to agree to the debate is otherwise inexplicable.
As you may know, Scott completely demolished Kristol. It was so bad that when Scott attempted to speak to Kristol for a brief moment afterward, Kristol snapped, "I don't owe you another minute of my time."
Well, we just had another example of this phenomenon. Kate Klonick is a law professor at St. John University, and she just debated Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford, at the Soho Forum on the following resolution:
"The making of national internet policy was hindered, rather than helped, by the July 4th federal court ruling that restricted the Biden administration's communications with social media platforms."
A bit convoluted, but in effect she was arguing in favor of the Biden Administration's efforts to suppress the speech of certain individuals (including Jay himself, who is a plaintiff in the famous Missouri v. Biden case).
The debate fit the usual pattern: Bhattacharya, the dissident, demolished Klonick, the voice of the establishment, even though the resolution involves a legal issue and Klonick is a law professor while Bhattacharya has no background in law at all. Bhattacharya was completely in command, and repeatedly had to correct Klonick.
The Soho Forum's debates are conducted in the Oxford style: the audience is polled both before and after the debate on their position on the resolution, and the winner is whichever side changed more minds in its favor.
Jay changed four times as many minds.
Klonick's performance was weak throughout. She repeatedly revealed, especially in the Q&A portion, how little she knew about the facts of Missouri v. Biden. Among other things, she didn't even know that the Biden Administration had ordered Facebook to shut down groups of vaccine-injured people who were trying to figure out what they should do.
For me this is always a proverbial white pill: the bad guys are extremely unimpressive people, and cannot hold their own against us.
Even happier is that my folks in particular will be more impressive still once next year rolls around, because we're all doing this, and we'd like you in there with us:
https://2024Crusher.com
Tom Woods
