There's a reason that DInesh D'Souza so desperately wants to "debate" Kevin Kruse: D'Souza knows full well that a live debate favors those who refuse to argue in good faith. It favors those who make false claims that are unfalsifiable in the moment.
We have a strange and contradictory idea of what a debate is and what it does. We tend to imagine the format in its ideal form: two opposing sides from different perspectives, but who are both equally concerned with finding the truth.
We also think debates are circuses.
We also think debates are circuses.
Sure, in high school or college forensic debating, there are clear rules, there are judges, and there are teams who are laser-focused on crafting a logical argument.
But they don't necessarily care about the actual positions they are arguing at any given time.
But they don't necessarily care about the actual positions they are arguing at any given time.
In an informal public "debate," you have none of these guiding principles. Presidential debates, for instance, have none of the structure or discipline that high schoolers master.
Instead, they are loosely ordered series of more-or-less blowhard statements.
Instead, they are loosely ordered series of more-or-less blowhard statements.
When Ken Ham "debated" Bill Nye, for instance, they may as well have been speaking different languages. You can't make those two claims meet anywhere in the middle.
That didn't prevent picking winners, though. Sure, Nye won like 92% of the votes, but ask a Ham fan who won.
That didn't prevent picking winners, though. Sure, Nye won like 92% of the votes, but ask a Ham fan who won.
A "debate" between Kruse and D'Souza would play out the same way. D'Souza would get some of that tasty, tasty legitimacy he so desperately craves by being placed on equal footing with a real historian with degrees and everything. And he'd lie his way through his argument.
Nothing Kruse could say would make any difference. If he used dark magics to raise Strom Thurmond from the dead to testify about the party-ideology switch, D'Souza would claim that Thurmond was a shill for the liberal academic elite.
Every single slavering fan of D'Souza's would think he won, even if Kruse made him cry like a baby on stage and admit that the Southern Strategy was a thing. Facts don't matter to them, as evidenced by, well, their devotion to D'Souza.
More seriously, acting as though D'Souza's claims are worth dignifying in formal debate would give people who have never heard of him a completely misleading idea.
I KNOW, SHOCKING, RIGHT? Most people are fortunate enough never to have heard his name.
I KNOW, SHOCKING, RIGHT? Most people are fortunate enough never to have heard his name.
D'Souza is a fringe figure who is trying and trying and trying to push his mendacious star a little higher, and he needs the recognition of the academy he claims to hate so much to do that. A public debate would make it look as if there is something to debate in his claims.
So Kruse has just as much responsibility to dignify D'Souza with a debate as I have to debate the guy with 30 items in the express checkout line. We already know who is correct through clear and preponderant evidence, and that guy isn't going to admit he's in the wrong.
