"Not a debate" is 100% accurate. They just copy paste some tangential and paper thin propaganda and tweak the verbiage. Basically LLM slop with some extra steps. If you punch a hole in that topic (after a bunch of equivocation and nit picking) they retreat to some other copy-paste talking point.

It's easy to look "smart" at a glance when your conversation technique is the exact same playbook as Charlie Kirk:

• Pick someone random with minimal preparation (college student :: commenter)
• in a poor environment for a debate (a desk under a tent :: deep thread in a random comment section)
• and throw a nonstop stream of garbage at them (unexamined statistics on black crime :: unexamined stats on USSR beef production)
• when cornered, appeal to a genetic fallacy and change the topic ("that's a fake woke study" :: "that's CIA propaganda")

There's no way to have a conversation unless you already start in agreement with their priors. I've watched them get backed into a corner on basic stuff that contradicts their own talking points in the same thread. Paraphrasing it went something like "Communism is a perfect rational science" => Why don't we discard the pseudo-religious trappings and make decisions that optimize for quantifiable quality of life indicators à la the HDi? => "Well actually communism is required for the vibes"