Mehdi Hasan on winning arguments against the far-right: "We can push back. We can win"
The broadcaster discusses "throwing a grenade into the US media", debating the far-right, and his new bestseller, Win Every Argument. Photography by Tristan Bejawn
In May 2013, political journalist Mehdi Hasan took to the floor of the Oxford Union, where he’d once mastered debating as a feisty undergraduate student, to argue that Islam is a peaceful religion.
Timing was crucial. Hours beforehand, an Al-Qaeda-inspired terrorist attack had led to the tragic murder of British soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich, southeast London. As anti-Muslim sentiment spiked across the UK throughout the summer, a video of Hasan’s blistering speech went viral. In it, he can be seen employing a series of impassioned defences, detailed facts and comic quips to dominate his opponents and win over his audience. The clip has since been viewed over 10 million times and still generates popular reaction videos.
“We just cracked the top 10 Amazon bestsellers in America!” he exclaims, a decade later, entering the room with a beaming smile. We’re meeting backstage at Conway Hall in Holborn, central London, where he is due to speak in a few hours’ time. On his short trip lasting only a few days, he’s been doing the rounds between various heavyweight interview slots: Good Morning Britain on ITV, BBC Radio 5 Live with Nihal Arthanayake, James O’Brien’s Full Disclosure podcast. At 43-years-old, dressed in a grey suit and tightly-fastened tie, with short hair and a trimmed goatee, Hasan has returned to the English capital for a few days to promote his New York Times-bestseller, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading and Public Speaking.
“I have a low bar. If people can say, ‘this has helped me improve my communications, my messaging, my public speaking ability; it’s made me more confident, it’s provided me with certain keys to unlock certain doors’, I will be a happy man,” he explains, after we take our seats, when I ask about the purpose of the book. “Of course, I have grander aims, too. If I see colleagues in the media changing their interview styles based on stuff they read in it, great. If I see people saying that we need to have more robust debates and not platform the gaslighters, brilliant.”
Before the pandemic, Hasan — who was born in the UK to Hyderabadi Indian parents and grew up in Harrow, west London — gave regular speeches in the US, where he now lives with his wife and their two children. He noticed that parents from minority communities, in particular, “those who usually want their kids to make money, be a doctor, not faff about with public speaking and journalism”, kept asking how their children could learn to debate like him.
“I think people were living under siege. Politics has come to you on every doorstep, in every walk of life. So I thought to myself, is there something I can do to give back?”
For left-wing young adults forging identities during the post-financial crash years of the early-2010s, when the Conservative-led coalition government’s austerity agenda and creeping anti-immigrant rhetoric monopolised politics, Mehdi Hasan personified what victory in opposition could look like.
As an editor at New Statesman and then Huffington Post, and a mainstay on primetime shows like BBC Question Time, in Hasan, people with south Asian heritage could see someone else with brown skin confidently battling our country’s whitewashed rightward drift at the highest level.
For British Muslims, his willingness to call out Islamophobia with nuance, while speaking proudly to his own faith, provided a rare, protective presence in an otherwise toxic media landscape.
Hasan’s Al Jazeera show, Head to Head, which ran from 2013-2019 — in which he would sit on stage at the Oxford Union grilling high-profile guests on subjects ranging from national security to climate change, economics to religion — enhanced his reputation as one of the fiercest interviewers in the English-speaking world.
He relocated to the US in 2015, as the Labour Party lost their second consecutive General Election. In 2016, Britain voted to leave the European Union and the US elected Donald Trump as president.
Hasan found himself straddled between two shocked, broken societies; poised to articulate the zoomed-out failures of Western democracy and import his confrontational broadcasting style from one side of the Atlantic to the other.
“Al Jazeera said: come out and do a weekly show in DC. And I was like, go cover an election? Go cover Hilary Clinton becoming president? Yeah, I’ll do that! Little did I know that some dude would come down a golden escalator in New York and turn my life and the world upside-down,” he chuckles.
“One thing about being in the US is that there is a massive appetite for a British approach to interviewing and journalism. So that’s been interesting, taking a Jeremy Paxman-esque, John Humphrys-esque approach, throwing it like a grenade into the US media and seeing how the explosions ricochet around.”
Hasan’s emigration to the US sat at a threshold in time. The normalisation of social media technology across the 2010s made engaging in political commentary throughout the latter half of the decade feel very different to the former half.
The collapse of traditional print media, explosion of keyboard warfare and atomisation of smartphone storytelling, among other forces, democratised access to news with good, bad and chaotic consequences. Social discourse became reshaped as populism soared and public opinion polarised into digital echo chambers.
“The Arab Spring in 2011 is a good example. That was a moment of hope, where social media actually worked. Communications were seen as a way to unlock doors, change minds and rouse people from slumber,” Hasan says.
“I think what’s happened since 2016 is — and this is one of the main reasons I wrote the book — we’ve seen this infiltration into our public spaces, our political arenas, our media spaces, by bad faith actors, en masse; people who con and gaslight and grift, 24/7, with no shame, no pause, no break. As someone who loves verbal jousting, even I can’t deal with it! If you told me 10 years ago that certain people wouldn’t be allowed on my show, I’d be like, don’t be silly, I’ll argue with anyone, anytime, any place. Now, I say, no, I’m not going to argue with people who deny reality, who argue hot is cold, up is down, black is white. It’s a waste of my time. It’s an insult to my viewers and readers. And it unnecessarily gives them a platform and a boost they don’t deserve. That, for me, has been the single biggest shift.”
In 2018, he started hosting a current affairs podcast for investigative journalism website The Intercept. By 2020, he’d been offered his own show on the cable television channel NBC’s new streaming platform, Peacock; The Mehdi Hasan Show now airs every Sunday evening live on MSNBC. As Trumpian politics raged around him — he became an American citizen weeks before the 2020 election and was therefore able to vote — his unique ability to cut through the performative sugarcoating of American news broadcasting, challenge his guests with the rigour of a debating champion and call out Fox News for being “a propaganda arm of the Republican Party” quickly made him one of the most respected and feared journalists on the US media circuit.
“I was on Good Morning Britain this morning and Susanna Reid asked me, “why did you leave? You could have been presenting a show here!” And I don’t know if that’s the case. I don’t know if I would have the freedom to do what I do in the US here. Which is bizarre, because I’m a lefty, brown, Muslim immigrant there. By rights, I shouldn’t be anywhere near any mainstream platforms! But as Riz Ahmed and Idris Elba have pointed out, in the arts, in the media, there is weirdly more opportunity in a country like America — which, in terms of how it treats its Black population, is way more racist than Brits are. But strangely, it is more open to outsiders, more willing to let immigrants get their foot on the ladder.”
By combining Western philosophy and social science with anecdotes from Hasan’s years as a journalist, Win Every Argument deals in arming readers with intellectual as well as practical tools to move with. The opening chapter is ‘Winning Over an Audience’, in Hasan’s view “the most crucial thing of all.” ‘Show Your Receipts’ emphasises the need for drawing on a foundation of well-sourced facts. “I’m known for doing fact-check videos, reality checks, myth-busting… I’m a believer in the idea that we can push back. We can win.”
Playbook debating tactics are brought to life with worked examples that are easily searchable online and entertaining to watch: his viral takedown of Donald Trump’s campaign advisor, Steven Rogers, which remains pinned to his Twitter profile; his hard-pressing of former US National Security Adviser, John Bolton; his interviews with Joe Biden’s former White House chief-of-staff, Ron Klain, a famed debater who trained Al Gore and Hilary Clinton. “Every time I get him on my show, he’s always got a great response,” Hasan says of Klain, his most challenging opponent yet. “He’s occasionally one step ahead of me, and I enjoy that. I enjoy it when someone gets the better of me. It’s an adrenaline rush.”
But the playbook is also torn up. Disturbance is precisely the point: Hasan recognises the urgency of winning arguments with people who have real-world power.
He recalls spending time in the school corridors as a teenager after being sent out of lessons for answering back to teachers. “I like to think I still have the rebellious streak,” he says. “Now, it’s more about knowing which battles to pick. I’m always the person who wants to go right to the edge, but I try not to be dumb enough to go over the edge, because that’s where people get in trouble.”
To put it another way, Win Every Argument is interested in solving universal problems of everyday life — Hasan gives the example of a job interview, because “you’re making a case for yourself” — as well as debating raucous, Trump-style rhetoricians, for whom firmer, more precise tactics are required in the chamber, on screen or around the dinner table. The book advises how to neutralise ‘Gish gallopers’, “people who overwhelm you with nonsense in a short space of time,” and advocates playing to Aristotle’s idea of ethos, or credibility, by leveraging Ad Hominems to undermine an opposition’s character.
It is a smart yet bare-knuckle approach — a combination punch that its author sees as necessary for progressives to have any chance of wrestling back control of public conversation. It is no secret that, over the last few decades, left-wing politicians and commentators have struggled with employing bold communication tools and adapting to the frontier of clickbait engagement, and therefore capturing the hearts and minds of voters at the ballot box.
“The Left defines persuasion as giving people the facts and they will see through all the lies. No, that’s not how it works,” says Hasan. “Our brains don’t work like that, none of us…we are hard-wired for storytelling, emotion, passion. Showing, not just telling.”
Indeed, Joe Biden may have defeated Donald Trump in the bizarre 2020 American election. Since coming into office, he has also surprised sceptics by incorporating the policy ideas and delivery styles of popular Democratic voices like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into his leadership agenda. But Trump’s attempt to return for a Republican candidacy run-off with the younger, smoother, yet no less authoritarian Florida Senator Ron DeSantis remains a real threat to any perceived forward movement for American democracy.
Similarly, opinion polls may point towards an upcoming Labour victory against Rishi Sunak’s repeatedly disgraced Conservative government at the next General Election in the UK. But heavy doubts remain about Keir Starmer’s potency as a conduit for the sort of radical regime change that many believe is needed to solve crises like the spiralling cost-of-living, climate change and collapsed National Health Service.
“I tear my hair out watching people with great points, great facts, great studies. They are right! But what’s the point if they can’t convey it? If they can’t persuade other people? It’s my version of saying: if a tree falls in the woods, and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a noise? If you can’t convince the people with your facts, you didn’t win the argument,” Hasan concludes.
“The Right has understood this for a while. They understand the darker side of human beings, and they’ve played to the paranoia, the fear, the resentment. We see that with Suella Braverman and the boats, we see that with Donald Trump and the wall, we see that across Europe and the West right now.”
Hasan is flying back to the US first thing in the morning to present a special report marking 20 years since the invasion of Iraq. He will be joined by Noam Chomsky, for the veteran intellectual’s debut appearance on MSNBC, and UN Security Council weapons inspector, Hans Blix. Together, Hasan points out, his guests make up a combined age of 188 years, showing his ability to invite a broad church of perspectives on to corporate mainstream television.
After we finish talking, I hang around until the evening to watch Hasan’s on-stage Intelligence Squared conversation with Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland. At the end, for a bit of fun, audience members are invited up to debate. Two men and one woman who all look to be in their early-twenties step forward. Hasan is given three positions and one minute to defend each.
First, that Donald Trump should have a second term in 2024.
Second, that Western intervention in the Middle East has been a good thing.
Third, that Gary Lineker was wrong and should apologise for his tweet.
Taking a deep breath, revelling in the challenge, Hasan pauses for a few seconds, buying some time, and holds up his hands.
“Before I do this, I just want to make sure that anyone watching knows: I do not believe what I’m about to say! Okay!?”
Then he clicks into gear and launches into a demonstration of how to win every argument.
Words by Ciaran Thapar
Edited by Dan Hancox
Photography by Tristan Bejawn
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Gosh, there is so much good stuff to read here -- and my to-be-read list is already starting to topple! Thanks for your great work
What a great read. I love his assessment of the media since the 2016 election cycle. Like another comment below. My book is on the way. I watch Medhi always.