How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them: 11 Rules for Winning the Argument

by Ben Shapiro

This is what makes leftists leftists: an unearned sense of moral superiority over you.

College students’ sense of moral righteousness doesn’t come from achievement – it comes from believing that you are a bad person. You are a racist and sexist; they are not.

Calling you a racist and sexist, a bigot and a homophobe, gives them a sense of satisfaction with their status in the universe, even if they never help a single individual human being. This is a bully tactic. When

What they want to teach instead is that is you are personally ignorant, bigoted, corrupt, and mean if you disagree with them. Their opinions are not opinions; they are fact.

There are truly only three situations in which debating someone on the left is worthwhile. First, you must: your grade depends on it, or your waiter threatens to spit in your food unless you tell him why same-sex marriage is a detriment to Western civilization. Second, you found an honest leftist actually willing to be convinced by solid argumentation.

he got that politics is warfare by other means, and that you have to treat it like war.

There is no detente. Detente does not exist. No matter how nice or polite you are, they will come after you.

garbage. The truth is that your opponent, who labels you a racist without evidence, is the actual racist: it is he who waters down the term racism until it is meaningless by labeling any argument with which he disagrees racist.

You know he’s going to call you a racist, because he always calls his opponents racist. So hit him first by pointing out his vicious tactic.

Or, alternatively, he’d bring on kooks like Alex Jones, wait for them to go berserk, and then suggest that all gun owners were berserk nuts waiting to go off.

It’s important to do this. The left doesn’t have a playbook. They have a play. One play. The play: you’re a jerk. they have a play. One play! The play is you’re nasty.

The point was to force Morgan into an area in which he was uncomfortable. Morgan would later slam down that copy of the Constitution and call it “your little book” – rejecting a universally-accepted framework for discussing gun control, and throwing it in the American people’s faces. Just over a year later, Piers was off the air.

The question is whether man can fix global warming – a question to which the universally-acknowledged answer is essentially no, unless we are willing to revert to the pre-industrial age.

To take another example, with regard to healthcare, the left suggests that their entire goal is to make healthcare available to everyone.

That’s what they’re finding out in Britain, Canada, and Israel – all countries in which private medicine is on the rise, legally or illegally, outside government auspices.

avoid. If you force a leftist to answer why we should all give up our nice cars while the Chinese and Russians continue to dump toxic waste into the atmosphere, they will avoid.

Ronald Reagan was not a god. He himself would have said that. Don’t follow people. Follow principle.

The conversation is meaningless until you force the left to define terms. Until then, we can all agree on useless platitudes.

The left is expert at imagistics. The right is not, because the right falsely believes that shallow imagistics can be beaten with substance.