One of the more unpleasant lessons life eventually forces upon you is this: you cannot argue with activists.
Not argue in the way reasonable people understand the term. Not the old-fashioned exchange of ideas where facts are placed on the table, logic is applied, evidence is weighed, and—miracle of miracles—the stronger position wins the day.
That world does not exist in activist circles.
Facts mean nothing to them. Logic means nothing to them. Even reality itself—death, destruction, collateral damage piled up like wreckage after a storm—barely registers. The only thing that matters is the narrative. Everything else is stage dressing.
Most activists are not misguided intellectuals. They are not tragic idealists blinded by their own sincerity. They are, quite simply, pure-blood idiots. Narrative addicts. The kind of people who will happily march off a cliff as long as someone hands them a slogan while they do it.
For them, the promised land matters. The punchline matters. The emotional climax of the story matters. The path that leads there is irrelevant.
If the route involves wrecking industries, immiserating populations, destroying infrastructure, or shredding entire economies along the way—well, those are merely technicalities. Details for someone else to worry about.
The destination is holy. The journey is disposable.
This is why debating activists is a fool’s errand. You are attempting to apply the rules of rational discourse to people who abandoned those rules long ago. It is like trying to play chess with someone who has decided the pieces are optional.
You can shout facts until your voice breaks. You can produce graphs, documents, data, photographs, even the smoking ruins of policies that failed spectacularly. It will not matter.
Because they are not there for the argument.
They are there for the audience.
And this is the crucial point most people miss. Activists hate many things—counterarguments, ridicule, exposure—but there is one thing they hate far more than all the rest combined.
Being ignored.
Activists crave attention the way moths crave flame. They need eyeballs. They need cameras. They need the intoxicating sensation that the world is watching them. They are the ultimate show-offs, the peacocks of public dysfunction.
Every stunt is a performance.
They glue themselves to roads. They vandalize paintings. They scream at microphones. They parade themselves in front of cameras with the theatrical seriousness of people who believe history itself is pausing to observe their bravery.
What they truly want is not change.
What they want is reaction.
Shock. Outrage. Fear. Admiration. Hatred. Applause.
It does not matter which one they receive, as long as the emotional current flows in their direction. Attention is their oxygen. Public reaction is the dopamine drip that keeps them coming back for another performance.
They are narcissists of the most aggressive variety—people who would gladly burn the planet to ashes if the flames happened to illuminate them from a flattering angle.
That, unpleasant as it may be, is the leverage point.
You do not defeat narcissists by arguing with them.
You starve them.
Ignore them.
Not symbolically. Not partially. Completely. Treat them as background noise. As irrelevant disturbances in the social landscape. As people who simply do not exist for the purposes of public discourse.
When they break the law—and many of them inevitably will—apply the appropriate legal penalties. Quietly. Methodically. Without spectacle.
But beyond that?
Silence.
No cameras. No endless debates. No breathless headlines. No televised panels asking whether the activists “have a point.”
Just the cold indifference of a society that refuses to participate in their theater.
Without attention, activists shrivel. Their performances collapse into absurdity. Their carefully choreographed outrages echo into empty space.
They wither the way vampires do when the blood supply runs dry.
The comparison, I suspect, is not accidental.