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

by Ben Shapiro

They are interested in castigating you as a nasty human being because you happen to disagree. This is what makes leftists leftists: an unearned sense of moral superiority over you. And if they can instill that sense of moral superiority in others by making you the bad guy, they will. People on the left are taught from childhood that they are better than conservatives – it makes them feel good to hate conservatives. And that hatred is justified because, after all, conservatives are bigots.

You can convince him or her, however, that your opposition is a liar and a hater. When a leftist calls a conservative racist, the conservative tendency is to defend yourself by explaining why you aren’t racist. This is a losing battle. In fact, you’ve lost the argument the minute you engage in it. The proper response to a charge of racism is not, “I’m not a racist. Never have been. I have black friends, black bosses, black employees.” You’ve already given away the store by dignifying the charge with a response. The proper response to a charge that you beat your wife is not to explain that you don’t beat your wife and are in fact an ardent feminist: it’s to point out that throwing around accusations without evidence makes your opponent a piece of 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.

What you tend to do is you tend to demonize people who differ from you politically by standing on the graves of the children of Sandy Hook saying they don’t seem to care enough about the dead kids. If they cared more about the dead kids, they would agree with you on policy. I think we can have a rational, political conversation about balancing rights and risks and rewards of all of these different policies, but I don’t think that what we need to do is demonize people on the other side as being unfeeling about what happened at Sandy Hook.

What’s astonishing about it is for weeks now, you have been saying that anybody who disagrees with your position is absurd, idiotic, and doesn’t care about the dead kids in Sandy Hook. And then when I say that it’s a bullying tactic, you turn around and that say I’m bullying you for saying that. It’s absurd. It’s ridiculous.

When you’re discussing global warming, for example, the proper question is not whether man is causing global warming. 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.

with regard to healthcare, the left suggests that their entire goal is to make healthcare available to everyone. But they don’t mandate that a certain percentage of the population go to medical school. That’s because in order for government to guarantee a product’s availability, the government must either hire workers or force workers to get into a given industry.

Unless you are willing to force people using the law to go to medical school, you cannot have a successful universal healthcare system.