Yesterday, Joe Rogan offered critics of his recent guest (conspiracy-theorist Robert Kennedy Jr.) to come on his show to debate.
This isn’t a real thing. Podcasts do not follow classic debate rules. A reasonable person cannot possibly win. The more somebody is rational and able to pin down their opponents with facts, the more the crazies will wiggle out and deny or ignore the facts.
Misrepresentation
RFKjr misrepresents the science, such as confusing ethylmercury with methylmercury.
There’s no way to rebut him. You can generically cite “the science”, that the consensus says mercury doesn’t behave as RFKjr claims. But’s that’s not going to work because the audience already agrees that scientists are corrupt and lie.
Alternative, you can teach science, why the two forms of mercury are different, but that won’t work, because the audience doesn’t understand even the basics of high-school chemistry. A 3 hour long lecture on basic chemistry will not get them to the point where they can understand the difference between the two compounds.
RFKjr has been evading this question for over a decade. You can’t defeat him on this question. Or any such scientific questions.
Interruptions
Then there is the problem of interrupts. Joe Rogan isn’t a debate moderator who will cut the opposing microphone to let one side speak. The crazies just interrupt any rational point.
The best example is Mike Lindell. In 2021, he spent 8 month claiming to have “Absolute Proof” that Chinese hackers flipped votes to Biden in the 2020 election. He put on a “Cybersymposium” where he promised to release that proof. In the end, he didn’t actually produce the proof. When CNN’s Donnie O’Sullivan challenged him on it, Lindell’s response went this way:
Donnie: If you are correct, if you have that evidence…
Lindell: [interrupts] No, just forget about the evidence. If I’m right, then China took our country. Right now. Do you care? Would that bother you?
Donnie: You’d have to show the proof first, right…
Lindell: [interrupts] Would that bother you?
Donnie: Of course it would…
Lindell: [interrupts] Okay, then why do you think I keep going? Do you think I like getting attacked?
Donnie is an experienced CNN reporter, and yet he still flails around trying to pin Lindell down. Rewatch the exchange. There is simply no overcoming Lindell’s skill here. Lindell has spent 2 years successfully defeating everybody who tries to pin him down on the point that he never released the “Absolute Proof” he promised.
Rhetoric
Then there is the rhetoric. For example, ivermectin is described winning a Nobel Prize, a wonder drug. Yes, but curing parasites has nothing to do with viruses. But a large part of RFKjr’s audience believes in “cure-alls”, that all disease is nearly the same, and that a drug that cures one thing probably can cure another, from arthritis to indigestion to female troubles to headaches to impotence.
So what do you do? Do you stop and address these rhetorical flourishes for the misconceptions they imply? If you do so, then you miss the larger factual debate. But on the other hand, if you don’t address the belief in cure-alls, they’ll win the larger factual debate about ivermectin.
You can’t win against such rhetoric, no matter how much the facts are on your side.
Brow beating
The Lindell interview above is a special kind of rhetoric, taking control of the conversation, causing the other side to answer on your terms. Note how Lindell didn’t answer Donnie’s questions, but forced Donnie to answer his questions.
Donnie is a skilled CNN interview, with years of media experience with this sort of thing, and he still is powerless against Lindell’s ability to take control of the conversation.
Ignore
No matter how a good a point, they’ll just ignore the rebuttal. It’s like the Lindell exchange above, where the question is “Where’s the evidence?” and the reply is “Don’t you care about our country?”.
In debate competitions, the judges will knock off points when you do this. But in podcast debate, this is the norm. Nobody can pin you down and disprove your point if you just ignore them.
It’s not an offer to debate
It’s not us sane people refusing to debate RFKjr, it’s RFKjr who is refusing to debate — in the written form.
There is a decade of written text debunking him, such as this bit on mercury. He ignores it, because he can’t win at written debate.
That’s why he demands verbal debate. He will use these tricks and win. He’s unbeatable. He’s like the bully in school that’s 4 inches taller than you that calls you a coward for not meeting them after school to fight.
We see this online, with legions of RFKjr fans calling critics cowards for not wanting to debate on a forum where they are 100% guaranteed to lose.
Conclusion
RFKjr has over a decade’s experience defending his irrational claims. He’s not following any rules that we normally associate with “debate”. There’s no chance anybody can defeat him in a live forum like Rogan’s podcast. It’s not “debate” no matter how much they insist it’s “debate”.
He’s lost the written debate, but his supporters can’t read, so it’s not reaching him. It would be useful for somebody to go on Joe Rogan, not for a debate, but just to discuss these things with Rogan (without RFKjr present).
That somebody shouldn’t be Hotez, by the way. That guy is only slightly less crazy than RFKjr. There’s a ton of other rational people debunking RFKjr that would be reasonable.
I was with you up until the last paragraph, which I found rather jarring. Whatever your differences with Hotez, don't they amount to no more than a quibble, on the scale of the torrent of irrational abuse he's been subjected to from right-wing nutcases and anti-vax lunatics? Why insult him in a way which comes off as moral equivalence between him and the conspiracy-mongers?