Charlie Kirk’s recent visit to USC was one of many stops on his “American Comeback Tour,” a nationwide journey he’s taking in an effort to see if liberals can “prove him wrong.” When he arrives at a university, he sets up a booth where anyone can come up to debate him on their chosen topic. While many see this as an excellent opportunity to one-up a conservative influencer, this situation only encourages the platforming of dangerous ideologies.

Debating ultra-conservative commentators can sound fun in the abstract, but it begs a deeper question: What is this really doing? Anti-conservative ideologies don’t gain anything by platforming viewpoints such as Charlie Kirk’s, and only end up giving conservatives a louder microphone to spout anti-abortion, anti-women and pro-genocide thoughts.

This was particularly exemplified when Gov. Gavin Newsom brought Charlie Kirk to his podcast, where they discussed a number of issues from the economy to transgender rights. After the interview, Newsom received widespread criticism for his labeling of transgender participation in sports as an issue of fairness, disappointing many LGBTQIA+ activists. In his effort to have discourse with a conservative commentator, Newsom only gave conservative viewpoints more credence.

These tactics also simply fail to gain political traction — despite identity fear-mongering, many voters do not see issues such as transgender participation in sports as something that would swing their vote. Many more care about the ways economic policy will be shaped to materially improve their lives, rather than the never-ending discourse that we continue to give conservative commentators.

When Charlie Kirk says that “police brutality is largely a lie” or that “white privilege doesn’t exist,” the response doesn’t need to be to give him more air time to explain why. It rarely ever causes people to move away from him, but it does carry a large risk of pushing more young voters down the alt-right pipeline that is becoming more threatening in a Trump era.

In addition to its political ineffectiveness, the endless need for debate also has the potential to harm marginalized communities. Forcing those who have lived through oppression to re-explain it in a way that can be validated by others puts an additional labor burden on them, and sometimes simply isn’t possible.

This article is not a call for us to stop debating. There is no doubt that having discourse over political, social and economic issues is both beneficial and necessary for our collective progression. But it’s a question of what types of discourse we are pursuing; when it focuses entirely on blanket statements that conservative commentators make in an effort to rage bait, nothing real is done.

Instead, we should refocus and emphasize debates around the solutions to the very real problems presenting themselves. Rather than spend our time arguing with Charlie Kirk, we should debate the intricacies of what types of political moves can be made to resist economic shocks due to Trump’s policies, the suppression of free speech at universities or growing anti-transgender sentiment across government.

These conversations are more productive because they have the potential to grow and evolve. Debates between individuals and groups mutually interested in progress give space for more nuanced approaches to solving issues such as economic inequality and racial oppression. But when we decide to debate people who don’t believe the former two to even be real phenomena, we do nothing except give them a platform.

So while I don’t seek for this article to be taken as a stance against all debates, I do ask for us to take a more critical approach to what types of debates we entertain. It’s easy to fall into the rabbit hole of battling conservative fear-mongering because of the sheer amount of evidence that says the exact opposite — it’s not hard to point to the numerous statistics showing the growing wealth gap in America or the reality of police brutality against Black communities.

The debates that get us further are the difficult ones that require proposing in-depth solutions to these problems. They are the ones that make us take a further step than simply recognizing that an issue exists, and force us to critically interrogate the advantages and drawbacks that come with both policy-oriented and non-governmental solutions. Yet refocusing the conversation to this yields the potential to expand progressive efforts despite the amplification of conservative ideology.