I was a sophomore in high school when Roe v. Wade was struck down. My school’s philosophy club held a series of debates about the morality of abortion because there had been instances of volatile clashing between students on social media. Many of my friends attended these debates; most of them were pro-choice, but one of them was an anti-choice Catholic. This particular friend had been receiving anonymous death threats, and people were reporting him to the school’s administration for making a post celebrating the Supreme Court decision. One of these debates was held at a round table, with around 10 to 15 pro-choice students on one side of the table, my friend on the other and a large audience sitting elsewhere around the room. I decided to sit next to him while still grilling him that night. The idea of challenging him—even poking fun at his viewpoints—was a better method to get him to understand the harm in his views than simply deplatforming him. I had been motivated by the thought that it was okay to have friends who have wrong views—at least in my pro-choice perspective—as long as you actively try to bring them out of those views.
Jubilee is a popular YouTube channel that claims to “Provoke understanding & create human connection,” despite its weekly cycle of controversy and criticism. They have a series called “Surrounded,” which features a prominent commentator debating what are assumed to be random people off the street but are actually smaller influencers themselves. In a video from March titled “1 Progressive vs. 20 Trump Supporters (Feat. Sam Seder),” an interlocutor stated that non-white people in the United States “should assimilate…[into] European and Christian values and identity” and then affirmed that President Trump is not xenophobic enough for her. In another video from July, “1 Progressive vs 20 Far-Right Conservatives (ft. Mehdi Hasan),” an influencer named Connor, after failing to explicitly condemn the Holocaust, admitted he was a fascist. The audience applauded.
After these videos went viral, there were plenty of criticisms online of Jubilee for platforming these people with undeniably hateful views. Mike Burns from Wisecrack argued that the debates incite and validate inflammatory rhetoric from the participants. Redditor honeyfage says, “It’s designed to generate rage bait, not any kind of serious discussion.” Rage bait is a type of content that uses offensive or absurd statements to generate attention and interactions online. Garrison Hayes on TikTok accuses Jubilee of silently placing the same outspokenly far-right influencers in multiple of their videos to generate the sensationalism that the channel benefits from every week. I agree with all these criticisms. Platforming and validating fascists, and even portraying them as simply “conservatives” is as dishonest as it is ethically questionable. Yet, a question remains: Is there a better possibility for dialogue with hateful and ignorant people?
In the Buddhist Vimalakirti Sutra, an enlightened being in disguise as a merchant—Vimalakirti—lives in Vaishali, India. He was said to enter casinos, brothels, government buildings and liquor stores despite the general Buddhist aversion towards gambling, sex work, politics and alcohol consumption. Vimalakirti did not seek to engage in these activities, but rather to discuss philosophy with their regulars. He was known to visit the “places of debate in order to guide others to the Great Vehicle,” otherwise known as the aspiration to save all beings from suffering. In this story, he debates and converses with people, not to be right, but to alleviate the greatest illness of all: ignorance. Buddhism holds that all beings are lost in a cycle of dissatisfaction, and the only way to reach a permanent solution is to let go of wrong views that stem from ignorance.
Say one’s goal is to facilitate the birth of a better world or to exterminate the scourges they see, not only on the news but in their personal lives and relationships as well. Arguing with fascists to show off how right you are is then the wrong move. The theory behind the method should be to view debate as an act of radical compassion. If we are arguing about how you believe mentally ill and homeless people should be executed—like how Brian Kilmeade of Fox News remarked recently, per CNN—my motive should not be to make myself feel like a smarter or better person than you. That is the trap that I have seen almost all other people, including myself, fall into during debates. It often leads to an “agree to disagree” stalemate. The battle of ideas becomes a battle of who can be the loudest, and eventually no concrete conclusion is reached, and everyone involved is left agitated. The better motive should be to meet someone where they are, regardless of how bigoted or nihilistic they are. It should be to show them that we can accept notions of universal humanity without losing the sort of dignity that many of these white supremacists and transphobes are yearning for.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”(Matthew 5:43-44). When Jesus says “love,” he does not necessarily mean you have to like your enemies the way that they are. I do not have to look at someone who sees me as inhuman because I am Latino and say “I love you!”, but I need to see their humanity and allow mine to shine to them reciprocally. Battling that ignorance is the ultimate compassion.
Compassion is a transformative virtue because extending it from oneself to others can have a tangible effect on the mindsets and behaviors of those to whom you extend it. Spiritually speaking, you should not be accepting everyone for who they are, as if they have some intrinsic qualities of chauvinism and foolishness. People can evolve out of those qualities, and if you get the chance to have a relationship with one of these types of people, you have the honor of helping them evolve.