How do you win a debate when you’re outnumbered 25 to 1?
Michael Knowles breaks down some of his most viral debate moments and reacts to his latest SURROUNDED episode, “1 Conservative vs. 25 LGBTQ Activists.” From heated exchanges to logical takedowns, Michael dissects the arguments, strategies, and tactics that helped him hold his ground in a high-pressure debate.
What were the strongest points? Where did the activists go wrong? And how can conservatives debate more effectively in hostile environments? Michael gives his expert analysis on what it takes to win the argument, expose the contradictions, and stand firm on the truth.
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My point is, fascism as a whole really loves to hone in on small portions of society.
And right now, I'm sorry, I'm going to outright call you a fascist.
Oh no.
Oh heaven.
Heaven for a fan.
What's it like to be surrounded by more than 20 people who want to rip you to shreds and devour your body?
Well, I just found out when I flew to Los Angeles to appear on the Surrounded podcast.
I've engaged in plenty of debates before.
The Surrounded debate was a little bit different than some of the others.
For instance, when I'm having an unmoderated, one-on-one debate, that's going to give me a different style of preparation.
What you want to do is give your opponent enough rhetorical rope that he or she can hang him or herself with it, as happened with Bronte on the subject of gender identity.
The percentage of women who get abortions because the baby poses a direct threat to their lives is a very small number.
Far less than 1%.
By direct threat to their lives, you mean they're going to lose their life?
Yep.
Okay, well, Michael, do you know what the leading cause of death for pregnant people is?
Pregnant people?
Mothers?
Does it bother you to use inclusive language?
It's just interesting because...
I prefer to use precise language.
So this was a great moment because we weren't even really debating trans identity or whatever.
We were debating abortion.
But she kept speaking and she got tripped up in this hobby horse of pregnant people.
So in those kind of debates, you just kind of let them keep talking.
Or maybe you gently pull them in.
To destroying themselves.
That's very different than when you have a moderated debate.
Are people who are marching shouting Jews will not replace them?
Nazis are bad.
Can you say yes or no to this?
Are you capable of that?
I don't need to answer a question because I'm not on the stage.
No, I did not ask you if Nazis were bad.
And I understand those are big words.
Are people who don't like Jews, real people who are Nazis, are bad people?
That's not what I asked you.
I've answered this five times.
No, you haven't.
You're rewording it.
Even Chris has gone my side.
I feel so badly for you.
Why do you feel badly for me?
It's very easy to play a victim.
- You can boo all you want to.
I don't give a half a . - So there, the way to win one of those debates is you have to be prepared to debate the moderator and win.
And in a live debate setting like that, you need to win over the audience.
What's a little bit strange about the surrounded debate format is there's not really a live audience.
There are just so many debate opponents that they themselves kind of constitute an audience.
But you don't have a huge amount of time.
The clock is running down, and all of the other participants are ready to vote out the other person at any given moment.
So it off-foots you from all these other kinds of strategies.
Now, compare that to going on a cable news talk show or something like that.
The cable news talk shows exist for people to speak over each other.
Unfortunately, I don't like it, but that's just how the medium is built.
You have to do that if you're going to participate in them.
And so you have to get your points in in a more concise way.
You do have to clobber people.
If there are multiple people in a debate panel, then you're going to form coalitions, and you really don't want to find yourself being the one surrounded by the people who are attacking you on cable news, especially if you don't know what you're talking about, as unfortunately happened to someone that I was recently chatting with on Piers Morgan's show.
Oh my god, are you really saying that the reason the Crusade, which was sent to the Holy Land to liberate the Holy Land, from whom?
From Jews and Muslims.
I'll tell you why the Crusade began, because the Eastern Emperor asked for help.
From the Western Pope because the Seljuk Turks were slaughtering Christians in the Holy Land.
Because those lands were Christian before the Muslims invaded in the 7th century.
So, that's why.
Those lands became Christian after the First Crusade, okay?
So let's be very clear.
The lands were Christian in the 1st and 2nd centuries.
Islam didn't exist before the 7th century.
What are you talking about?
Okay, I could go...
Listen, listen.
I can go all day if you want to talk about the Crusades.
Can you though?
Go on.
So in a cable news type hit, because it's all just a bunch of talking heads, facial expressions really matter.
You need to be still.
You need to be patient.
You need to be calm.
Calmness is really important.
The moment you get a little agitated, especially when the camera is so close up on you, you start to look like you're unraveling, as perhaps you saw happening with my interlocutor there.
And then if they start to say things that aren't true on a subject that you maybe know something about and they don't know anything about, then it looks absolutely devastating.
And that is the point of those.
You need to make sure that whatever point they raise, you just smack it down in a way that is charitable but decisive.
That medium is unlike the Surrounded podcast, which is 20 minutes for every single topic.
That medium is one to two minutes max for the viral exchange that goes around the medium.
So fast forward to the Surrounded podcast.
I have over 20 people who want to rip me apart, sitting all around me, ready to jump in, fighting for the opportunity, time limited, to destroy my views with facts and logic.
Here's how it went.
So what about the right of a kid to have his natural mother and father?
Because when the rubber meets the road in gay marriage, it's not just two people living together.
You could always do that.
It's not two people doing those things you guys do, that you could always do that.
It's the ability to adopt children and in some cases acquire children by going to the baby store and purchasing the eggs of one woman renting the womb of another woman and Raising children depriving them intentionally of their natural mothers and that's very wrong.
So here's that does infringe on the right I understand that you believe that.
And all the scientific literature, by the way, backs that up.
That's not true.
It is true.
Fact check that, please.
It is true.
Let's let them fact check that on the video and progress with the conversation.
I'm happy to fact check it for you right now.
No.
The study that you're referring to is the Michael Rosenfeld study out of Stanford in 2010. And it said that kids raised in gay households did just as well in school as the other kids.
It's not a study.
No, it was a major study.
But it was wrong.
It had a major methodological error.
And it's been corrected by multiple other studies.
I would love to engage with you on that in a sec.
Would you?
Yes, in a sec.
The majority of people in society are okay with these things.
And society's laws should reflect what the majority of people are okay with.
The majority of people were okay with slavery for much of the 19th century.
So should society's laws just reflect that?
Slavery is bad.
Gay marriage, gay adoption, he's like, that are not bad.
Gay adoption is very bad for the kids.
I'm not even knocking the guys who want to do it.
I understand there's a natural longing to have kids, but it's still bad for the kids.
Okay.
So you can tell he implicitly concedes the debate when he shifts the ground of it.
So initially he says, it is not true, it is not backed up by the scientific literature that it's bad for kids to be raised in same-sex parent homes.
And I say, no, it is.
And I start to explain why, though.
He ends up cutting me off so we couldn't really talk about many of them.
And he says, well, never mind that.
Most people think it's good, so it's good.
And so he shifts it from, all right, let's see, is there any rigorous scientific study that's actually looked into this?
Oh, shoot, maybe Knowles here actually does have some studies.
Okay, well, never mind.
Let's turn to public opinion surveys instead.
But of course, you know, 50 million Frenchmen can be wrong, which is the point that I made to him, people popularly.
Have held views that have been quite wrong for history, and we've corrected them.
But there are other studies, perhaps the most prominent of which came in 2012, which examined kids raised in same-sex households and normal family households on 80 different measures of emotional and social well-being.
Whether they're going to end up on welfare, whether they're going to end up hooked on drugs, whether they're going to end up with anxiety and depression and all that sort of stuff.
And it found out that on 77...
Out of 80 measures, the kids raised in the normal households fared better than the kids who were raised in same-sex households.
Even Jubilee tried to do a fact check on this to back up their point, but it's totally indefensible.
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I get my steak, and Elisa says, Don't take that whole steak, Mac!
I haven't had that yet!
I said, Wait, hold on.
You want me to cut this steak in half?
I'm a grown man.
I'm not going to eat this full New York strip steak?
No, I want to have some.
I said, fine, I'm a good husband.
I cut the steak in half, even though I want to eat this entire delicious New York strip from Good Ranchers.
I take half.
But then she tells me later, she goes, but there's also a little ribeye over there.
You have some of the ribeye and then you have...
I said, okay, that makes a little bit more sense.
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A key skill that you need to develop for any kind of debate is your BS detector.
You need to be able to identify when someone is saying something that he knows nothing about, as happened in this clip.
Going back to specifically same-sex marriage, you said you argued from an anthropologist.
Anthropology?
That's like your basis of...
Yeah, men and women are different, and marriage involves one of each.
Which specific culture are you referring to?
Because we have so many cultures that have communal relationships in which people are raised.
When you said in the act of procreation, have you ever heard of it takes a village to raise kids?
That's not something that's just a saying.
No, no, no.
It actually happens literally in specific cultures.
No, no, no.
But when I say procreation, that's the act of...
Creating the child.
And usually there aren't three or four people involved in that.
It's usually two people.
Yeah, but even those people that do create the child oftentimes were referred to as different genders depending on the culture that it is that you're observing.
Which cultures are you referring to?
We could talk about the Mayans.
We could talk about certain Amazonian cultures.
I recognize that they're not Western cultures, so you might not prioritize them.
But that doesn't mean that they don't exist, unfortunately.
Well, they no longer exist, the Mayans.
Oh, right, because of colonialism.
I'm glad that you're just pointing it, though.
What was their view of gender?
What specifically are you referring to?
Gender is something that's specifically a social characteristic that we're all performing in right now.
I mean, you can't say...
No, no, I'm not asking your opinion.
I'm asking what...
You brought up the Mayans.
What did the Mayans think?
That's just something that is observable.
But what did the Mayans think?
You brought it up.
You seem so confident about this.
What did the Mayans think about marriage and gender?
People can look up right now.
If you're right here at Google...
Michael's trying to hone me down on trivia night right now.
No, I'm just asking you to explain...
Right now what we're trying to talk about specifically are examples of what's happening.
I'm asking you to explain the point that you brought up.
Yes, this is really an important point.
And so he's not the only guy who's fallen into this error.
But a lot of people in modernity, they think, well, no, surely there must have been a billion different views, you know, of marriage.
Because people deny the natural law.
They deny objective moral reality.
So they just think, well, it just stands to reason that all these different cultures in history must have had totally different views.
But the thing is, they haven't.
Because the natural law is real and human nature is real and it doesn't really change.
So when he says, well, the Mayans.
I think, look at this guy, this guy doesn't know anything about the Mayans.
Okay, what did the Mayans think?
And then he does this tap dance for three minutes because he can't answer the question.
I enjoy engaging in all of these kinds of debates because I like ideas, I endeavor to seek the truth, and I like to persuade people of the truth as I see it.
So I dig them all, but I, in particular, I liked this format.
This format is great.
I love this, and I'm just irritated that we didn't think of this first and do this show ourselves.
Some of the interlocutors are a little more serious than others, but I really liked chatting with all of them, and they have a great deal of my sympathy.
I think Michael knows this annoying, to be quite honest.
Disrespectful and kind of unintelligent.
I think he's a fucking Nazi.
The way that they...
Usually dishonestly present my views is that I hate them or that I want to kill them, which I don't.
I've explicitly said that I don't.
They say, oh, well, we don't want people to die, but they know damn well that the suicide rates skyrocket the second you remove access to gender-affirming care.
That was one of the most horrific experiences I've ever had, talking to another human being.
I'm very glad I did it and I'm never doing it again.
Yeah, Michael's a f***ing clown.
I've talked to Ben Shapiro, I've talked to Charlie Kirk, I've talked to a lot of conservative figures, and he is the worst at having some sort of cohesive argument.
All he tries to do is push people's buttons to get these emotional responses that then he can turn into those viral clips.
I was all pretty funny and I suppose to be expected that they would call me Hitler or whatever, you know, an evil, stupid cretin.
The one part that I disagree with is with the guy with the beard, Mason, who says, "Look, I've talked to these other conservatives and all the other conservatives are all above board, but that Knowles, you know, that Knowles, he's just bomb throwing and he's not really trying to pursue an argument.
He's just trying to be provocative and get an emotional response." That is in fact the opposite of what I do.
Okay.
I think I would probably have higher ratings if that is what I did, but I don't.
If anything, I think my...
The presentation here was a little bit dry and friendly and conciliatory.
I'm just stating my views, which are views that most people agreed with until very recently.
Views like marriage is between a man and a woman.
Views like men can't become women.
I even granted the premise that there's a distinction between biological sex and gender expression.
As far as I know, I'm the only conservative who grants that publicly.
Frankly, maybe the fact that I'm friendly about it is more irritating to them.
If they just have to contend with the ideas themselves, it leaves them more vulnerable, I think.
