The ancient aphorism urges us not to argue with fools, because from a distance other people can’t tell who’s who. This truth is but one of many reasons never to get into a debate with the likes of Ben Shapiro.

It’s not worth your time to know who aging conservative wonderboy Ben Shapiro is. If you don’t already, consider yourself spared. All anyone need know is how to avoid being drawn into his Thunderdome of Logic. A thoroughly satisfying lesson landed this week, courtesy of soon-to-be congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

On Wednesday, Shapiro challenged the 28-year-old candidate for New York’s 14th congressional district to a debate. For her efforts, Shapiro would compensate the Democratic Socialist with $10,000 for her campaign. For the uninitiated, this might look like an innocuous offer. Ocasio-Cortez gets to stock her campaign’s coffers while also having the opportunity to win over an unlikely new audience. Make no mistake, though, the offer is a manipulative maneuver made in bad faith. Shapiro isn’t looking to match wits with his imagined opponent: He wants to degrade her in public, and turn her into content.

First of all, he made the offer knowing full well that either she’d take him up on it, whereby he would profit from her sudden political-star status, or she’d turn him down, producing free, easy publicity from conservative headlines claiming the Left’s latest hopeful is too frightened to spar with the Far Right’s Anthony Soprano Jr. in the Marketplace of Ideas. Ocasio-Cortez chose a third option: She ignored him. After a while, however, when the inevitable headlines started to wend their way across conservative Twitter, she commented on one of them.

Just like catcalling, I don’t owe a response to unsolicited requests from men with bad intentions. And also like catcalling, for some reason they feel entitled to one. pic.twitter.com/rsD17Oq9qe — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) August 10, 2018

Not only did she sidestep Shapiro completely, she did so with flair–comparing his debate request to another form of badgering: the catcall. Shapiro handled the diss about as well as one might expect. He accused Ocasio-Cortez of painting him as a sexist and of being anti-Semitic, for some reason, then retweeted about a million of his followers’ echo-chamber-y tweets agreeing with him. (Sidenote: Shapiro is a fierce crusader against “identity politics.” You know, unless it’s his own identity as a white, Jewish man that can be politicized.)