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As politics has become more tribal and geared toward demonization instead of debate, it’s amazing how many important questions don’t seem to be asked any more. Instead of discussing issues rationally, people are stuck in little boxes based on where they fall on an issue. Whatever happened to actually assuming that there are two potentially legitimate sides to a debate and hashing them out based upon which one makes more sense? Of course, to do that, you’ve got to get beyond political correctness to ask the basic questions -- questions that are deemed racist, sexist, fascistic, etc., etc., as part of an effort to shut down necessary conversations. At the end of the day, if you want to actually prove someone wrong, you’ve got to engage him on his ideas and make better, more logical points. If you can’t even handle the basic questions so many people have, then maybe you don’t have the best ideas.

1) Are we really doing transsexuals a favor by pretending they can change into another gender and allowing them to mutilate themselves via surgery or are we actually setting them up for failure when we pretend that they’re not mentally ill?

2) Couldn’t you make just as good an argument that America is a matriarchy as a patriarchy? Life expectancy for women is 79 in the United States while it’s 72 for men. Men are expected to pay for everything on dates. Men are required to sign up for the draft; women are not. Divorce courts are notoriously stacked against men. Fifty six percent of college students are female and only 44% are male. In the United States, 78.8% of murder victims are male. In 2015, men suffered 93% of the workplace fatalities. In other words, if you want to claim one gender is at an advantage or disadvantage in the United States, doesn’t it almost entirely depend upon what factors you pay attention to and what factors you ignore?

3) Are the problems black Americans have as a group a result of racism or a result of the sort of culture that Thomas Sowell talks about in “Black Rednecks and White Liberals?” A culture that leads to a significant percentage of black Americans committing more crime, being more anti-intellectual and producing far more children out of wedlock than many other groups?

4) Shouldn’t we roll our eyes at people who come up with new reasons to be gratuitously offended most of the time? Aren’t people who are offended by things that most people just shrug off, the ones with the problem, not the rest of the world?

5) If the government gives money to Planned Parenthood and PBS, why would it be wrong for the government to give money to the NRA or Heritage Foundation?

6) Do we make life better for college students by coddling them, giving them “safe spaces” and encouraging everyone to be incredibly sensitive about what we say in front of them or are we setting them up for failure in a world that only cares what you can deliver, not how you feel about anything?

7) If you’re gay and a Christian doesn’t want to bake you a cake for your wedding, why can’t you just go to another shop? We wouldn’t demand that a black baker make a cake for the KKK, that a Jewish baker make a cake for a Nazi or even that a liberal baker make an “I love Trump” cake. So, why should Christians, whose religious beliefs are protected by the First Amendment, be punished because some gay couple thinks they can turn their persecution of Christians into a payday?

8) If Hillary Clinton and illegal aliens don’t have to obey the law, why should the rest of us respect the law? Why shouldn’t we break the law any time we think we can get away with it?

9) If it takes two to make a child and if a man is quite correctly held financially responsible for a child after he’s born, then why shouldn’t a woman need the permission of the man who impregnated her to end the child’s life? After all, she didn’t make that baby by herself.

10) Given that California is poorly governed, a negative influence on the rest of the country and doomed to go bankrupt, wouldn’t America be better off if California does secede?

11) If we really want to settle the fight between the Israelis and Palestinians, shouldn’t we suggest the same formula that Americans used? We paid the Indians for their land when possible and drove them away militarily when it wasn’t -- until we took the land for ourselves. Why not suggest that the Israelis crush the Palestinians, take their land and let the surrounding nations that claim to love the Palestinians settle them as citizens?

12) If America is geared toward benefitting white Americans, how do you explain the fact that Asians perform better as a group academically and make more per capita income than Caucasians?

13) What if the Parkland kids you see on TV don’t represent the kids who died or even their own classmates? Instead, could it be that they have no moral authority at all because they were just tragedy-adjacent liberal kids who saw a bunch of dead bodies and thought, “Wow, this could be my opportunity to get on TV?”

14) What if frequently racist comments and vicious generalized attacks on white people made by black Americans on TV and social media were treated with the same sort of disdain that we reserve for white supremacists and Nazis? Do you think that would improve or damage race relations?

15) If we can have sanctuary cities and states where our immigration laws aren’t followed, why can’t conservative states refuse to allow abortions or arbitrarily lower the federal tax rates their residents have to pay?

16) Given that women now make up 56% of college students, shouldn’t our focus be shifted away from helping women in colleges and toward helping men?

17) Poll after poll after poll shows that there are a very significant number of radical Muslims out there. In some countries, a majority of Muslims could fairly be labeled as radical Islamists while in many others, only a small percentage would fit that definition. However, since we have no reliable way to tell the moderate Muslims from the blow-up-the-infidels, throw-the-gays-off-the-building, Jews-deserve-to-die Muslims, does it not make sense to take steps to limit Muslim immigration as much as possible since their religion represents a unique threat? Even if you grant the fact that most Muslims are moderates, it does not change the fact that the radicals make Islam the most violent and terrorist-prone religion on the planet. Why shouldn’t we take that into account?

18) Wouldn’t our military be a lot more effective and wouldn’t we lose fewer troops if we were less concerned about civilian casualties? The conquered Japanese didn’t work so well with us after WWII because we never killed their civilians (because we killed large numbers of Japanese civilians); they worked with us because we were stronger than they were and they knew we’d use as much force as necessary to keep them in line.

19) If being racist is such a horrible thing, then isn’t it also horrible to falsely accuse people of being racists without having good evidence? In fact, given the small percentage of Americans who dislike people specifically because of skin color and the large number of people who falsely accuse people of racism, could you not fairly argue that false accusations of racism are a much bigger problem than actual racism?

20) Wouldn’t we be better off as a nation if fewer people voted? For example, if you’re taking in more from the government than you’re paying out, why would we want you to vote? If you’re convicted of a serious criminal charge, how does it benefit our nation to have someone like you voting? If you don’t know who the Vice-President is or which party is against abortion, how does it improve our country to have you give your input?