MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan: You need "rhetorical judo" to challenge the far right

Most people go through life trying to avoid arguments. But as journalist Mehdi Hasan told me in our recent "Salon Talks" interview, he rushes into debate, relishing the opportunity to test his wits against all comers. He says that in every one of these rhetorical battles, he has one goal: Win.

Hasan, host of an eponymous political talk shoe on MSNBC and Peacock and formerly a columnist at the Intercept, can be seen online debating former Trump advisers like John Bolton (who has since turned against the former president) and Michael Flynn (who most definitely hasn't). In his new book, "Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking," Hasan lays out a how-to guide for debates and public speaking. I asked Hasan whether he was concerned about giving away his secrets to future opponents. "I'm a generous soul," he responded. "I just want to share."

Hasan's goals also go deeper than that: He says he wants  "to improve the quality of debate in this country." That applies to the average person, news anchors in corporate media who need to hold leaders accountable and also to Democratic politicians who too often fail to speak to voters' hearts and emotions.

What Hasan advocates is essentially about teaching people critical thinking skills. This is vital in today's America when it comes to assessing the veracity of claims made by both dishonest politicians and media outlets, especially given the way right-wing outlets like Fox News knowingly peddled misinformation about the 2020 election.

Watch Mehdi Hasan on "Salon Talks" here, or read our conversation below to hear more about becoming part of Hasan's rhetorical fight club.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

In "Win Every Argument" you write, "I prefer not to avoid arguments. I seek them out, rush towards them. I relish and savor them." Why do you enjoy fighting with people so much?

Well, first of all, Dean, it takes one to know one. I'm pretty sure that you enjoy it as much as I do because I listen to your [radio] show. I follow you on Twitter. I read your pieces. I think we're both disputatious individuals. I say in the book that perhaps it's a result of my upbringing. I grew up in a very disputatious household. My father encouraged debate and argument around the dinner table, on long drives, even on family vacations. My sister and I, we sparred over many issues. Still do. It's my background. And maybe there's something in me as well that just loves the idea of rhetorical combat.

The case I make in the book is, it's not just about your personality. It's not just about something you instinctively like doing or are good at doing. It's something we all do. Everyone in the world, every single person watching this, has at some point or another tried to win an argument, needed to win an argument, wanted to win an argument. My contention in the book is that anyone can win an argument. Let me show you how.

Have you thought of starting Mehdi Hasan's Fight Club? You go around the country and meet in the basement of a bar, or something? 

You got to add in a word in parentheses: (Rhetorical) Fight Club. 

Rhetorical Fight Club.

I can't do real Edward Norton, Brad Pitt-style fight clubs. There's a chapter on judo moves. I talk about how debating involves rhetorical judo, unbalancing your opponent, knocking them off balance when they're least expecting it. And I make it clear, I don't know how to do judo. This is rhetorical judo.

Why are giving away your secrets? Are you concerned that some of the guests on your show are going to read your book?

I am. My younger daughter actually said this to me while I was writing: "I don't understand. Why are you giving it all away? How you going to do interviews?" I would say a few things in response to that. No. 1, I'm a generous soul. I just want to share.

No. 2, I would say that I'm ready. I want to improve the quality of debate in this country. I want to improve interviews on air. I've lived here for eight years. I've been on MSNBC for two years, on Peacock for nearly three years. I want to improve what goes on on broadcast media. So if my colleagues can take away stuff from this, if guests can take away how to communicate with me, that's good for all of us. Serious point. That is good for all of us.

You and I have discussed before some of the failings of mainstream media when it comes to holding power to account. I'm all in favor of tougher interviews and as for my colleagues, if they can use it, fine. If guests use it, bring it on. Congressman Ro Khanna, who we both know, he actually tweeted a link to the book and said, "I'm going to buy this and read it before I go on Mehdi Hasan's show next time." 

I would say one small thing. I do outline a lot of my secrets in there. But not all of them. And it takes practice. One of the chapters is about practice. Practice them. I mean, I've got a 20-year head start on a lot of the people who are going to be reading the book. So good luck to you. As I say, bring it on. As you said at the start, I love a good row.

I have sent it to many journalists in the industry, including at my network, at other networks. And I've only had — thank God, touch wood — positive feedback from colleagues. An unnamed anchor at another network sent me a very nice note saying, "I loved seeing how you prepare behind the scenes because, a) it was similar to what I do, but b) it also gave me ideas." I love that. I love the fact of sharing good practices.

As I say in the book, it's part how-to, but it's also part memoir. There are better interviewers out there than me. If they want to read the book, please do.. Not necessarily for tips, but just to read some good stories. I have some fun stories about people I've clashed with over the years. From inside the Saudi consulate — yes, I came out alive — to the former heavyweight champion of the world, Vitali Klitschko, now the mayor of Kyiv, who is leading his city's defense against an illegal Russian invasion, to various celebrities and others. So there's some fun stories in there as well about arguments and debates and interviews I've had in weird places.

There's one unique thing we're living through right now. People call into my radio show from the right, and it's not like they're lying. They actually think what they "know" are facts, and they're not facts. I've learned not to get mad at them because they've been misled. They literally think, "Well, I was told this by Fox News," or "I read this at the Daily Caller." These right-wing publications have misled these good people. How do you debate people when they have their own set of facts and it's not malicious? 

I spend a lot of time in the book trying to address this point because I'm frustrated as much as you are. I said after Donald Trump won in 2016 to a colleague of mine, I was at Al Jazeera English, let's just jack it all in. Let's just be accountants, not that there's anything wrong with being an accountant. But what is the point of doing what we do if there are tens of millions of people out there who just believe this nonsense? And again in 2020, with QAnon and the big lie and all the denialism.

I would say two things, and I address this in a couple of chapters in the book. There's a chapter in the book called "Beware the Gish Galloper." It references this idea of people on the right who push misinformation deliberately. Not the people you were talking about. I'll come to the people you're talking about in a moment, the kind of people who believe it. I'm talking about the pushers of misinformation, the bad-faith merchants, the BS artists, the con men. How do you deal with people like that? Because they're not arguing in good faith, and simply reciting a bunch of statistics to them or bringing your receipts is not going to work. 

I talk in the book about how you have to expose their strategy. Remember, often in an argument, you're not trying to change the other person's mind. You're trying to win over the third person, the audience, the neutrals who are watching. We spend a lot of time arguing with another person, forgetting about the audience, who are key to this, especially you and I who have audiences as part of our profession. But it's not just professional journalists. Whether you're in a boardroom doing a business deal, whether you're in school or college. Wherever you are, there's an audience.

So I talk about the need to win over the audience, expose the strategy. Call it out, I say. Don't budge when they try and run over you with a torrent of bullshit. And pick your battles. When these people come at you with nonsense, they throw 100 lies at you, 100 conspiracy theories. You can't bat them all away. Don't even bother trying. Pick the most absurd one, take that one apart to expose the entire nonsensical strategy. So that's the three-part guide I talk about in the book to dealing with the Gish galloper.

But then there's the people who believe the Gish gallop, the people, as you say, who are not arguing maliciously but believe this stuff. I think with them you have to find a bond if you're going to try and get through to them. Personally, I think a lot of these people are lost, sadly. Sorry to sound so pessimistic, but I do believe a lot of these people are lost.

But the people you think you can convince, throwing facts and figures is not going to work, as you say, because they have their own facts and figures. "Alternative facts." I think what you have to do is find a way to identify with them on a personal level. That is key. Emotion, appealing to people's identity, not just their interests, is a very important way of bonding. What is a shared identity that you have? 

I tell the story in the book of where I'm sitting in front of a small-c conservative audience in rural England on a live BBC panel show, and I'm asked to defend the rights of a terror suspect. Back in 2009, 2010, I think it was, the U.K. government wanted to extradite a terror suspect to Jordan where he would be tortured, and I was making the argument that shouldn't happen. We should be against that.

It was an elderly white crowd. I was the only brown dude in the entire room. And what did I do? How do I get through to these people? They don't care if I cite a report from Amnesty International, the European Convention of Human Rights. What did I talk about? I talked about British history. I talked about the history of British liberty. I talked about the Magna Carta of 1215 A.D., the first constitutional document in British history. I talked about what Britain was great for and why were we sacrificing those liberties and traditions simply for this one guy. And I got applause from the crowd, not because they instantly agreed with me at that moment, but because I found a common ground that we all shared, we all agreed upon. I got them to identify with me. We were all in this together.

I had a listener call my show, and I remember this vividly. He calls up and says, "Biden has open borders." And I go, "What do you mean, open borders?" He goes, "There's no border control." I say, "So no one is working at those little tollbooths? They've all gone home? They're sitting home watching TV?" There's this long pause. He goes, "You shut up." That was his answer to me, because no one had offered a real-life rebuttal. He's just sitting there with his friends going, "It's open border." 

Also, you did something else fantastic there, which is another chapter in my book, which is you didn't come back with a number of how many border patrol officers are employed by the Biden administration. You made a joke that someone can understand, and that got through to him in a way that a bunch of statistics wouldn't have done. 

There's something else you talk about here, which is the idea of pathos and ethos. You talk in your book about the example of Michael Dukakis, in a famous 1988 presidential debate when he was asked about if his wife, God forbid, were raped, how he would respond. He came back statistics and this answer that had no emotion. You also cite a great book from years ago, Drew Weston's "The Political Brain," which I used to cite to people all the time. Explain to people why, if you just give numbers in a debate, people's eyes are going to gloss over. 

Well, you have to go back even to Dale Carnegie, who said we are emotional creatures, not logical creatures. My daughter is doing debate in high school. You're taught about how to make the argument and the impact and the warrant and the claim and the evidence. That's all great in theory. In real life, people do not respond to statistics on their own. I'm not saying to drop facts and figures. That's a mistake too. You need a factual underpinning to anything you're trying to say. You need to bring your receipts, as I say in one of the chapters in the book.

But the way you're going to get through to people is by convincing them at an emotional level. Aristotle told us this over 2,000 years ago with the pathos argument, the appeal to emotion, not just to logos, but to pathos. I think that is absolutely key.

A lot of Democrats have never quite understood that and never taken it on board. The Democratic Party's approach to political debate is to assume that everyone is some rational calculator, sitting and going, "Well, that tax plan will give me $2,200 more than that tax plan, therefore I will vote for that tax plan." That's not how people vote. I've never met anyone who goes into a voting booth based on just having gone through all the policy documents.

There's a reason why there have been six presidential elections in this century, and Democrats have won three and lost three. The ones they lost were John Kerry, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton. What did they all have in common? They recited dry policy. In Weston's book, he says the "political brain" is an emotional brain. It's not a rational or a logical brain. You have to appeal to people's emotions.

In 2016, we know that Hillary Clinton had the better platform. We know she had the policies that would've helped Americans with child care, with health care, the environment. But Donald Trump had "Ban Muslims, build a wall." He was appealing demagogically to his supporters, to their base instincts of fear, paranoia, anger, bigotry. I'm not saying you should appeal to those emotions, but you have to appeal to some emotions. 

You remember Al Gore. He was all about fuzzy math. This is a problem for Democrats: I don't know what it is, is it the liberal arts education, the law school background? You can't even blame law school. I used to blame law school. But then again, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, both lawyers. They were able to do it. They were able to appeal to people's emotions, use soaring rhetoric, connect with people on an instinctive level. 

I tell the story in the book of Bill Clinton at a town hall in 1992 with George H.W. Bush, where a woman asks, "How does the national debt affect you personally?" George H.W. Bush gives a long answer about interest rates and going on tour and how it's important to cut the deficit. Bill Clinton stands up off the stool, goes over to the woman, looks her in the eye and says, "How did it affect you?" That is connecting with people on an emotional level. That is how you win millions of people over.

It's so important to be authentic. Joe Biden has that authenticity. I have many criticisms of Joe Biden's presentation and oratorical skills, but he has an authenticity which allows him to connect with people when other Democrats come across as wooden or stiff or calculators. I think that is so important, to make the emotional argument. The heart steers the head, and if it's heart versus head, the heart will win.

Some Democrats are better at it now. Barack Obama was uniquely gifted at that. I think with Biden, what you're getting at is the authenticity of a man who has personally lost so much — his wife and child early on and his son as an adult — and how that changes you as a person. 

One quick other example that comes to me is John Fetterman. The Republicans tried to throw out the idea that, "This guy had a stroke, he's not fit for office." That helped Fetterman. People connected with, "Oh, he's got a problem. I have a problem, or my parents had that problem." That enabled him to connect with people in a very authentic, emotional way.

You mentioned that your daughter is doing high school debate. Do you think debate should be mandatory in schools across this country?

Yeah, I do. I'm no expert on the curriculum and I think we've got bigger fights to fight about the curriculum, especially in places like Florida. But yes, I think it's not just about debate or argument or rhetoric. It's about critical thinking. The reason I love debating and arguing is because you are exploring the basis for something. You're not uncritically or blindly accepting.

Something I learned as a kid from my dad was to question everything. We live in an age of social media where people just forward stuff on WhatsApp and you're like, "Oh, that's a picture of Syria." No, it's not a picture of Syria. It might be from somewhere else. There's a lot of fake news out there and we've just uncritically accepted it on our Twitter feeds or Facebook pages or WhatsApp. I want people to interrogate everything. I think we would be in a much better place, especially with all the conspiracy theories that are floating around, if people were taught critical thinking, the art of good faith debate and how to understand the media.

We have a lot of people today who just don't understand how the media works: what is a reliable source, what isn't a reliable source. I think media and political literacy is missing in our schools and that's why we're not creating the best of citizens right now. We have one of the lowest turnouts in the industrialized world when it comes to elections, even though we have some of the most crucial elections.

You talk about confidence in your book. You need confidence. But confidence only comes from practice. You give the example about asking your boss for a raise, which is inherently confrontational. What do you tell people about how to have the confidence to do it in a way that is productive?

First of all, like with debate itself, I believe it can be taught, I believe it can be learned, I believe it can be developed. I give examples in the book, people like Winston Churchill, who we all remember as this great orator. He wins World War II with "Fight them on the beaches," speeches for the British. But he had really bad moments as a younger person. He had a really bad stammer, lacked confidence, messed up his speeches in the Commons. But he got through it. He learned his way through it, and I do genuinely believe anyone can learn this stuff. 

The same applies to confidence. Confidence is not some fixed, innate attribute. It's something that we can develop and grow and expand. It is a belief in yourself and you have to work on that belief in yourself. 

That applies across the board to anything you want to do in life. There's one quote from "Seinfeld" that I should have put in the book, but I didn't.  Polls suggest that people are more afraid of speaking in front of a crowd than dying. So Jerry Seinfeld says, "If you're at a funeral, you'd prefer to be in the casket than giving the eulogy." That's how much we lack confidence, how nervous we are about speaking. But there's nothing wrong with that.

Cicero, the greatest orator of ancient Rome, was always nervous. And every time I stand up, I'm nervous. I talk about it in the book, moments where I'm like, "Uh oh, what's going to happen?" Even though I've been doing this for years.

So the first point is just recognizing the issue, acknowledging the issue, working on that issue. I give tips in the book about how you can try and improve your confidence, raise your game, whether it's through things like visualizing success, which is a very important technique used by some of the great athletes of our time, to basic stuff that people forget about.

And honestly, surround yourself with the right people. One of the reasons we lack confidence is because either we are negative or the people around us are negative. The people you surround yourself with have an impact on you. I wouldn't have been able to get where I am today were it not for people in my family, friends and colleagues who have helped me get there and given me that boost, whether in the moment or over time.

I also talk about faking it. Confidence is something you can and should fake at times. There's times I've had to fake confidence. It's key, because without that, if you ask me what is the most vital thing you have to have in order to win an argument, it is confidence. Because I would argue that even when you know you're wrong, even when you know your opponent has a better point than you, it allows you to still keep going.

I mean, look at Donald Trump. There's no scenario in which he would be president of the United States in 2016, without having a ludicrous amount of overconfidence in his own abilities and his ability to get to that job. And to BS his way through interviews, debates, etc.

You can even be confident in saying you don't know. 

You can be confident in a concession. You know this as a lawyer, sometimes you just go, OK, I'm just going to let that one go. I concede that one because I'll come back later with a stronger point. Don't double down on something that you're losing on.  That again requires confidence — the confidence to say, "Yeah, I don't know" or "Yeah, you got me. You got me on that one. I give up."

Is there one thing that really is your touchstone when you're getting ready for a debate?

Yes. It's John Stuart Mill's advice in "On Liberty," which is that you cannot know your own side of the argument without knowing the other side of the argument. The problem we have is we live in a world of confirmation bias. I mentioned earlier to surround yourself with positive people, but don't just surround yourself with people who agree with you. That's one problem. We surround ourselves with people who agree with us. We fill our social media with people and sources that we agree with and that we like reading. We assume that everything we know is true and that all the arguments are on our side. That is a deadly way to approach an argument. 

You have to steel-man your argument, I say in the book. We know about straw-manning. Straw-manning is when you misrepresent your opponent's argument, dumb it down in order to defeat the weakest version of it. That's easy. The harder thing to do is to steel-man your opponent's argument so that when you go at it, you go at the strongest version of it so you're ready for anything, for whatever fact, figure, argument they can throw. You don't just turn up for an argument. You don't turn up for a negotiation in the boardroom. This applies to businessmen, businesswomen, entrepreneurs. You need to be ready for anything. And you can't be ready for anything unless you've done the preparation, you've done the practice. There's a quote from Abraham Lincoln: "If you give me several hours to cut down a tree, I'll spend most of those hours sharpening the ax." Because you have to be ready.

And I just find that people are either shy, they lack confidence, they're lazy or they're intellectually arrogant. All of those, or a mix of those factors. That leads to people going into a debate, going into a negotiation, going into an argument unprepared. And there's no excuse for that.

And people say to me, "Well, how did you get that? How did you have that rebuttal? How did you have that quote?" Because I put the time in. When you see me in those clips you mentioned earlier, some of those viral clips with Erik Prince or whoever it is, the Saudi ambassador, and I'm going, "Aha, but you said this," I didn't just pull that out of my backside on the day. That is something that me or my team have come up with over several days or weeks of researching, reading. And not just reading the New York Times or whatever publication we think we like that agrees with us. Go read the publications of your opponents. If you're on the left, go read right-wing media. Understand where the other person is coming from. A) it's intellectually honest, but B) it's also a tactical move. It enables you to know what's coming your way.

You also have a chapter on personal attacks. Sometimes you've got to go personal folks, but it's got to be used the effective way. 

Got to be. Ad hominem attacks get a bad rap. They're actually vital to undermining the credibility of your opponent. This goes back to Aristotle again. He called it ethos. 

I remember being on Joy Reid's show during the time of Trump with a Republican congressman who was a white guy, but it turned out he was also an immigrant. People didn't know that. At one point I said, "But you yourself are an immigrant." There's this weird pause and he's like, "Well, I am. But I was brought here at a young age." What a weird moment. But that was all research.

And in strict debating circles, they'll say, "Oh no, no, you don't play the man, you play the ball. The fact that that person is an immigrant is irrelevant to the argument about immigration at the southern border." That's just not true. In the real world, of course it's relevant to point out that your opponent is either being hypocritical or being selective or not being fully honest with the audience. 

You debate a lot of people. Is there one person living or dead that you would love to debate that you haven't yet?

OK, so among living people, I would say Tony Blair, because he is someone I spent a lot of years covering. I went through a love-hate relationship with Tony Blair. As a younger man, as a teenager, I was a huge Blair supporter. In 1997, at the end of 18 years of conservative government, Blair comes in, this young, fresh Labour leader who is going to transform Britain. Then he invades Iraq with George W. Bush. I became one of his biggest critics in the British press. By the time I became a public figure and interviewer, he was gone from power. He rarely does interviews these days. He does softballs with easy interviewers. As awful as he is, I find him to be a brilliant intellect, a brilliant speaker, a brilliant debater.

No one's really ever nailed him on Iraq. He always slips out on the Iraq war. I would love to spend half an hour in front of a live audience going back and forth to Tony Blair on the Iraq war.

And as for dead, I have to say the Hitch, who I knew a little bit, the late great Christopher Hitchens. I say "great" in debating terms. By the time he died, sadly, a lot of his views were anathema to me. But the early Hitchens, I loved, because he was simply a great debater. If you want to watch fun arguments on YouTube of someone destroying their opponents, watch Christopher Hitchens on Fox and elsewhere.

I thought you were going to say Cicero or someone like that. I think Socrates would be kind of cool because it's all questions, the Socratic method. 

I'm thinking of people I think I might have a chance with.