Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Debating Tips for Tangling With Liberals

First of all, you should go forth and read Aristotle’s “Rhetoric” before you engage in any further debates with anyone.

Being accurate or correct has only limited bearing on the success of an argument. You, or your opponent, just has to establish the appearance of accuracy or correctness. The superior speaker can win an argument even if his position is false, nonsensical, or contradictory.

The personal character of the speaker, his reputation with the audience, and your relative reputation also have strong bearing on whether or not other people will be persuaded in the course of speech.

Contemporary liberals (especially those younger than 35) tend to be unread, untutored, and inexperienced in alternative points of view, no matter how educated they are or what their pedigree is. For this reason, you should carefully explain any references to older material, and if it is a debate by written correspondence, you should provide accessible citations to explain the position.

  • Maintaining your comportment is critical in any contested discussion. If your voice becomes strained or up-tempo, you become visibly agitated, or if you otherwise lose your temper, you are also liable to lose the audience.
    • Learning the emotional self-control to achieve this can only be done through practice.
    • Reliably being able to manipulate your opponent into losing his composure is a key skill to develop, so long as you can achieve it without visibly provoking it yourself.
  • If you know your opponent’s argument better than he does, it becomes much easier to anticipate what he’s going to say, and also to manipulate him to your advantage.
  • If you can counter the opponent’s argument by demonstrating a contradiction or error under his own belief system, it’s more effective than doing so under your own.

If you’re uncertain as to whether or not you have understood your opponents’ statements, you can repeat back to them your understanding, and then ask them if you have comprehended their statements correctly. This both prevents you from making a misstep and helps to establish a rapport to the other side of the contest.

Whenever you can find a point of agreement between yourself and the contestant, amplify that point of agreement, especially if it is a trivial point. If you can encourage the person to see them as in alignment with you before you get into the point of disagreement, then they will be much less willing to offer a spirited defense.

The majority of inexperienced debaters will be so thrilled to hear you agree with them on anything that they will be far more willing to cede a critical point later in the debate.

If you can find a way to rephrase a controversial argument in anodyne terms that would be acceptable to the opponent, do it, because most inexperienced speakers will be unable to recognize a rephrased argument, because they have only been trained to respond to a given argument using a certain set of terms.

Experience can teach you the various ‘trigger words’ of the typical American which will get them to froth and become enraged. In a debate, it’s much easier to get the opposing side to cede all of their points if you can navigate around these triggers.

Given that formal debate has almost been eliminated, even in academies, the chief concern in informal debate is in controlling the trashing-around of your opponent so that he speaks to your advantage.

To break the opponent’s resistance, you ought to establish your case in a dialectic fashion, carefully breaking it apart. While it may be sometimes sufficient to expose a contradiction in the argument of your opponent, to popular audiences, the sophistic presentation of the speech is much more important.

Since all audiences are now common audiences, the Socratic method is only useful at appealing to the minority with the cultivation to appreciate it, and even those are often more than a little bit crazy.

Finally, you should never waste time debating someone on their home grounds, surrounded by their friends and supporters — unless you are confident enough in your abilities that you can rephrase an argument so well that they have no idea that they actually started off disagreeing with you on the essential points.

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Why People Drop Out of the Edgysphere

Like some of the people at blogs, podcasts, and other publications around the alt-right, I have a track record of being on the edgy side of politics, probably because I’m a thrill-seeker who likes pushing limits and arguing difficult positions.

I can’t help but notice that there’s always a fair amount of churn among writers and other people who get big, attract negative attention, and then bow out of the spotlight either for a little while or permanently. This is one of the ways by which the liberal establishment is able to do so well: their spokespeople get rewarded financially and socially, so that once they build up a profile, the success feeds upon itself, rather than imposing additional risks on them that they’re not able to bear.

I’ve personally been through maybe four of those cycles total under my real name and pseudonyms, so it’s what’s normal for me, and I can probably give some useful advice to those who have only been through zero, one, or two.

#1: Higher Profile Means Higher Pressure

When you start getting attention, influential people will move to snipe you, doxx you, damage your reputation, and aim to get you fired. This can also happen with mobs that, in aggregate, have as much firepower as one or two influential people.

In general, people don’t go after small fish, because they don’t feel that you’re a big enough threat to deal with, and the prestige rewards for smashing you aren’t sufficient to be a motivation.

People like Richard Spencer have been defamed by the international left repeatedly for taking a visible leadership position. This is the real cost that democracies impose on people who might upset the political apple cart, because it’s one of the only systems in which the opinions of normal people are politically dangerous.

#2: Your Friends Will Stab You in the Ass

The lower the stakes, the more vicious the infighting. You can always expect the people who were your closest supporters to turn on you later, for various reasons. It requires a lot of effort and caution to avoid this sort of thing from happening. It can and does really happen, even to people you would think it could never happen with. It’s just how people are.

Progressives in particular can pay way more than 30 pieces of silver to get people to flip to their side, or to otherwise neutralize themselves so as to become more friendly to the zeitgeist of progress. Most people are cheaply purchased.

 #3: Anonymous Defamation Will Happen

Embittered people with a grudge, or just random envious people, will libel you and you’ll have no recourse. They’ll make goofy photoshops of you, create entire websites dedicated to attacking your character, and otherwise make writing to a larger audience more challenging. This is just the way that people try to cut down the tall poppies, and part of being a better man is to avoid in engaging in it if at all possible. They’ll also do it to clear out their competition, because it’s usually easier to destroy than it is to create an alliance.

Also, they’ll go after your wife or girlfriend if you have one, to try to pressure you to shut up by putting pressure on her.

One aspect of this to keep in mind is that anonymous-defamer types will tend to prefer going after people who are more vulnerable to its impacts. If they know that it can do damage, they’ll do it. If it doesn’t look like it can, they’ll keep their mouths shut.

#4: They Get Bored and Life Circumstances Change

Writing and speaking takes up a lot of mental energy. It’s even more difficult to write arguments that are contrary to dominant beliefs, because it attracts more conflict, and being able to manage that conflict requires similar levels of mental energy. It’s just much easier to focus on a job that pays well than it is to deal with public affairs for little to no reward.

Matrix references are too popular, but it is entirely possible to jack out and enjoy your steak instead of dealing with all the hassle that comes with going against the grain in a political culture that rewards conformity and punishes individual deviations.

Another factor is that people often enter into niche political groups to find a like-minded social circle, out of dissatisfaction with their previous one. Once they have their circle, they feel no more impetus to get out in front of the public, and thus the initiative begins to stagnate into a circle of old friends.

This is perhaps entirely natural, maybe even important, so it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Thoughts for Your Consideration

The goal of a minority school of thought should be to ultimately either displace the majority or to carve out a defensible position in which the former minority view becomes the dominant view. Defense is much easier than attack. It costs the defense comparatively nothing to protect their social position relative to how expensive it is to attack it.

The goal should not be to behave as if remaining on the fringe is all that you care about.

Also, this post is intended to be a warning to people, especially young people, who step into this sort of thing casually. Staying power is much tougher than getting some initial success, just because the immediate rewards for quitting are high, and the reward for sticking with it has an uncertain payoff.

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How to Shift Public Opinion

Most people don’t really understand how to shift public opinion because they have a tough time grasping the concept of leverage.

It’s easier to think about influence at the sub-Dunbar level, even with all the tools available now for even impoverished people with an internet connection to reach millions. To handle influence at scale, you have to think in terms of abstractions rather than in terms of individuals.

The typical response to a radical proposal is that “it will never work” because of inertia. While it’s possible that it will never work, the point is not necessarily to achieve the radical proposal, but to establish it as a gravitational center, and then to pull  and push attention & conversation to that center.

An example of such a proposal is “Restore the Stuarts.” Saying this absolutely po-faced on Fox News would probably not do the trick on any meaningful timeline. That doesn’t really matter all that much, because by doing that, you’re establishing a new boundary that more timid opinion-nudgers can define themselves against.

The timid person might want to be more radical, but they know that it wouldn’t be practical. But by appearing more radical than the timid person, you make it possible for the sissy with a larger audience to shuffle several steps to the right. The larger and more powerful that you can make the gravitation on the outer right, the stronger the pull is felt by the timid ones who minister to the masses, who in democracy only care about the consensus, safe opinion.

The timid editor or TV producer acts like the basic political science model of rational election-winning positioning. Their whole function is just to look at the scale of public opinion, and then to plunk themselves down at the center to maximize their appeal to their market. By forcing more weight onto the right side of the scale, you can shove around the timid people who react predictably with little in the way of meaningful agency.

This is why in politics, the intellectuals are more powerful than the populists — the populists only react to the frame set by the leading thinkers. Crushing the opposing side’s thinkers enables you to re-set the field that the little shiny spokespeople must reconfigure their positions to react to the changed field of public opinion.

This works better if you really do want  to achieve something like “Restore the Stuarts” or “Return France to the Bourbon Monarchy” or “Reinstate the Articles of Confederation” or “We Demand Texan Independence,” and behave as if you believe that it’s possible with absolute certainty. It’s the low-ball or high-ball offer that you don’t necessarily expect to get in the first round, but might be able to get through successive rounds of aggressive bargaining.

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