🔒 Chessboxing: Why the Right Can't Win Debates

As this is a politically opinionated column, I tend to get three different types of response: Lefties agreeing with me, lefties respectfully disagreeing with me, and occasionally, righties who, in every single case, very obviously did not read what they are responding to except maybe part of the headline.

 Something that absolutely grinds the shit out of my gears like few other behaviors is when people retort against something they have not read. When they try to appear as though they’re engaging with the piece, usually they are responding to an argument they assume is in there somewhere, or else they’re arguing something that’s already covered in the text.

 This isn’t unique to the right side of politics—I’ve seen the left do it as well—but the difference is that I’ve rarely seen the right not do it.

 I don’t want to simply boil this phenomenon down to “the right doesn’t read,” but it is something like that, or it has at least become something like that, and the question it raises is why is it that the right is the side that has the reputation for wanting respectful debate? The answer is very interesting: We have two completely different ideas about what debate actually is. For the right, it’s boxing. For the left, it’s chess.

Any right winger who stumbled onto this piece stopped reading a while ago and is already headed down to the comment section, so for a while it’s just you and me, my fellow leftie. We’re going to talk about Steven Crowder and we’re going to talk about Charlie Kirk, but before that, unfortunately, we’re going to have to talk about Dave Rubin.

 Rubin is popularly regarded one of the dumbest people on the American right-wing ecosystem, and that’s a competitive field when people like Chaya Raichik exist. He was recently the featured guest on one of those “Surrounded” debates, which, if you’re unfamiliar, is a web series by a group named Jubilee who take one opinionated public figure and put them in a room with 20-25 people who disagree with them. The guest debates them individually against a prominent ticking clock. I’ll drop the link at the end because it’s over one and a half hours, and if you start watching it now, you’ll get distracted by laughing and groaning at Dave Rubin and won’t come back.

 Dave Rubin, to the delight of social media, really got bodied in this debate which, across three different sub-topics, is about how Woke is bad and Trump is good. Against 20 young people the episode title ostensibly labels “far-left,” he fell over himself constantly in his flailing attempts to answer simple questions, like, what Trump has done that’s actually good. After fumbling a question about the economy and inflation, he tries to switch to the topic of Trump’s tariffs, where his young opponent expertly maneuvers him, like Han Solo flying the Kessel Run, into arguing against the right-wing ideological pillar of free trade. 

 Some of his performances are better than others, but not because of his skill; his multiple opponents aren’t all equally charismatic or quick witted. Despite his reputation for dumbness, he is just good enough at doing something that he’s able to make a living as a public figure doing it (and it helps that he’s a token minority, as a gay man). He is no Ben Shapiro or even Jesse Watters, but he’s competent-ish. The problem he ran into, here, is that what he’s competent at was not useful in this situation.

 We can laugh at him appearing dumb, which he does, but being dumber than the people he’s debating isn’t his fundamental problem. The problem is not that he brought a knife to a gun fight. His opponents, most of them, came armed with memorized statistics and numbers and facts and details. Rubin came armed with memorized talking points and memes. The problem is that he brought boxing gloves to a chess game.

It’s different to simply being bad at this. He actually misunderstands what he’s supposed to be doing. So, when the topic of the Iran War comes up, Rubin unleashes the official GOP talking point that has worked since 2003, which is that Middle East Country X needed to be attacked because they had Weapons of Mass Destruction. When the guy he’s talking to brings up some established facts to counter this, Rubin is caught off guard and needs to do a hard switch to “Islamism is bad for progressives.”

After this harrowing ordeal, Rubin slinked back to safer spaces to weep about how he had literally feared for his life the whole time.

Rubin’s disadvantage isn’t a consequence of the format. When Jubilee did an episode of the same show with the ideologues reversed—a progressive (podcaster Sam Seder) in the middle surrounded by Trump supporters—it was Seder who had all of the numbers and details memorized. His opponents slung nothing but talking points and memes that had been fed to them by the president’s communication apparatus. When Seder asked them for examples or statistics to back up their claims, they appeared puzzled that he would ask for that. Providing evidence for claims instead of just repeatedly stating them isn’t, in their mind, how this is supposed to work.

These are people who cannot debate in the way that “debate” is properly understood. They are doing something that resembles debate in the sense that bumper bowling resembles adult bowling. You’ve got the same lane, the same ball, and the same pins. However, you don’t necessarily have the same strategy. If you’re bumper bowling, all you have to do is throw the ball and you will knock down some pins. Throw it enough times and you’ll get all of them. What’s happening in these Jubilee debates is that the right-wingers don’t understand that the bumpers aren’t there.

 What I’ve come to realize is that your average Trump supporter tends to believe they are the debate professionals because they have sort of been fooled into thinking that via trickery from the “thought leaders” on their own side.

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