The best way to defeat a person’s ideology is to lay its defects bare before them – as well as to set out and arrange them in front of everyone else. The most well-functioning tool for exposing flaws is public debate; anything else will ultimately have the opposite effect.

Public debate is not easy, especially considering that many studies often point out that people's greatest fear is often public speaking combined with having to calmly arrange and sort their thoughts under pressure – sometimes aggressive pressure – while also readying their own lancing words…

But otherwise, what are the options?

A two-hour-long YouTube video where someone presents their own side, and then frames their opponent’s argument in a way that makes them seem the more reasonable party. Below it is an echo chamber of assenting, or ‘sycophantic to the political party’, comments number in the tens of thousands. How many then truly seek out, research for, and watch a counter two-hour video by the opposing party?

And then there was conservative debater Charlie Kirk, who was made somewhat famous by going to college campuses and debating leftist students with the intent to showcase logical inconsistencies with liberal party slogans and beliefs. I was never a fan of the man’s approach, but he was well-practiced enough in the skills of arguing and ready enough to go to battles that he often won. Not necessarily through the merit of the idea, but because his opponents weren’t so ready as he.

The worst thing imaginable happened just the other day; at one of his debate locations on a campus (which had become popular enough that it was more akin to a rally), he was shot and killed through the neck. It is the most grievous sin of intellectuals, and the utmost stupid if it were someone of a left-leaning orientation.

Ideas go and die when defeated in the court of public opinion: if they can be strung up like a blanket hung out to dry so the rising sun can shine a light through all of the apparent holes. Elsewise, they also die if no one listens, and then they slip into irrelevance and fade into time. The last and final way is a total genocide of a culture and people who hold a particular belief. Communism tried to get rid of the idea of capitalism and nobility, but they failed because they fell short of the requirements, which would be conquering the whole of the earth (and they bred their own nobles, “oligarchs", eventually, anyways).

The absolute best way to make sure ideas live is to martyr them. To hang them up on a cross while everyone is looking, and to burn them. If anything, that was the biggest lesson that the Jewish rabbi’s (“Sanhedrin”) learned when pressuring Roman governor Pontius Pilate to kill Jesus. Pontius was of the opinion that killing Jesus would only lead to unrest and would immortalize his ideas. I’d say, guess who became the most influential figure on earth for nearly two thousand years?

So conservative Charlie Kirk made a career out of debating, even if it was against people who did not, especially if college students weren’t prepared to meet that challenge. Regardless, public debate is incredibly important, and shame on the liberal educational and political establishment for choosing to try and shame, protest, and boo opponents, rather than teaching such a rigorous and important discipline to the students they were entrusted with.

Killing a debate opponent is also an intellectual sin – for if you bludgeon your opponents, you are either saying that A: they are right and you don’t like it, or B: you are incapable of meeting their level of intelligence. No sophist worth his salt would ever consider such a course of action.

Mr. Kirk is now a martyr, or an icon whose face will be plastered on shirts and hats; whose name will be used as a cudgel to beat down opponents. Dark is this day in our democracy, especially when the federal government has been overstepping so broadly. It was my hope that with the bad media and negative polls, they would have to be more restrained in their actions and more non-partisan. Already, a South Carolina teacher, Wynne Boliek, has been fired for saying about the murder: “In my honest opinion, America has been made better today, there I said it."

That teacher should not be in education, as they do not understand the possible ramifications of such a political murder. To take joy in the death of debate is to look wantonly towards the end of democracy.

Austin Petak is an aspiring novelist and freelance journalist who loves seeking stories and the quiet passions of the soul. If you are interested in reaching out to him to cover a story, you may find him at austinpetak@gmail.com.

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