rule

What no wap does to someone

What a loooong ass text :D
But yes, I feel this horror you describe. It's like realizing the person you depend on is a lunatic but you can't escape.

His actual favourite method is to just go "let's say I'm right and you're wrong, well then I'm right"

I'm not even kidding, someone once pointed out statistics that said that making abortion illegal doesn't reduce the number of abortions, it just makes them more dangerous. And he actually responded with: "Let's say you have 1000 abortions, and when you make it illegal, you have 100, but more dangerous. We would still be saving 900 lives, so it's worth making it illegal".

The beauty is that you can use that for literally everything, you create an imaginary world where you're right, proclaim it real and voilà.

It's the gush gallop, when those kind of intellectually dishonest assholes find themselves in a bad position, they start throwing shit out rapid fire, and then they go "so really, we're both right, but actually you're wrong"
You can't refute the facts, because they're not real. If you try to nail them down on one, they'll concede an infinite amount of points and make new ones
The only way to win is to steal the momentum and nail them on questions they can't answer on camera, then humiliate them
Which is no kind of way to exchange ideas, but that's not what they're there for

Reminds me of a Charlie Kirk video where a student said to him that there are statistics which provide a correlative link between abortion access and low crime; Kirk immediately goes on the offensive and says "WhO hAs MoRe aBorTioNs ThaN AnyOneE? BLAACK PEOEOPLEEE!!!! UR A RACISST!!!!", and his audience ate it up and clapped for him like a gang of excited seals. The strategy is always to derail the current conversation to one you prepared talking points for.

Chess with pigeons.