It all started with "armed to the teeth", with no opposition to that remark... so it all went downhill from there.
If they start off saying something that makes you instinctually feel like you're going to have poor footing to stage an answer, stop and examine the words they used for a moment, even turn that back to them first and ask them to clarify or explain what they mean. They're trying to trip you up, see if you can get them to trip up trying to explain the wide pitch they just threw to you. Then people may see that it was not even close to the strike zone, or at least the "host" will feel the heat for throwing wide pitches.
Right, even if you don't make the other guy stumble, you at least obviate the first staging and maybe get a new one you can turn more easily.
The key, when they frame the debate, is to take one of the points and do a pivot into some other framework they do not expect.
Once you put them off the lead, stay a step ahead and let their frames sink into quicksand.
The left mostly engages in sophistry, not debate. Well, the right does it too, but the left is a lot better at it. Where we go wrong is we think doing an excellent enough debate is somehow going to shut down the left. It
never will because they
aren't debating. They are using techniques of sophistry to try and make us tie ourselves into a straight jacket. You don't get to use that amazing debate skill until you have demolished their framework and replaced it with one of your own.
THEN you can go about putting out the amazing debate skills and make the poor demolished lefty cry.
We have an inherent advantage if we learn to do this well. We are by and large amazing debaters, because of all the practice that suffering this reframing has given us, so once we get
PAST that false framework we can piss all over the left with impunity.
You don't beat Morgan by being a better debater, you beat Morgan by re-framing the debate into something he can't deal with.
We've all seen by now what happens when someone is effective at doing this to Morgan, he breaks down and calls you "unbelievable stupid" or some such. That means the guy just beat Morgan, and look what happens in the media coverage when that occurs. Morgan got hurt in the court of public opinion four times as bad by Larry Pratt's calm, quiet method of driving Piers to apoplexy, than he did by AJ's apoplectic rant. And Pratt didn't even re-frame very well at all...he was terribly clumsy about it, but even terribly clumsy shut Piers down because the left doesn't know how to deal with reframing the debate.
With these people it's not about being good or right, it's about learning the techniques of sophistry they use against us, and judo-flipping their own momentum back upon them. HB34 should get a kick out of that analogy...
