Stop debating about debating on the right's terms

The right obviously uses debate challenges as a cynical PR strategy. There are much better responses than "no"!

Time once again for the left’s semi-annual debate over whether we should debate reactionaries. This time it’s about a potential debate between actual doctor Peter Hotez and right-wing crank RFK Jr over vaccinations, but you may remember the same thing happening when Ben Shapiro challenged Matt Bruenig to debate a few years ago, or when Bernie Sanders challenged Donald Trump. In all of these cases, the question is the same: can leftists discredit radical right-wing ideas by discrediting them? Or does debating them actually legitimize them by drawing attention to them and suggesting that they are persuasive enough that they have earned a response?

My take, if you missed it those other times, has always been that deplatforming can work — but only under narrow circumstances that usually don’t hold. Either you have to have state power so that you can deplatform in a sufficiently exhaustive way, or the ideas have to be so marginal that you need very little buy-in from activists to stomp them out.

That said, a few tangential points: