Sure! Debate is a skill, and I think the, to use your term, "anti-woke" side performed it better. Debate skill is not, however, equivalent to truth. As an ex

Sure! Debate is a skill, and I think the, to use your term, "anti-woke" side performed it better. Debate skill is not, however, equivalent to truth. As an extreme example, imagine a child debating with an adult. The adult asserts that the moon is made of cheese. It's entirely possible that the adult could "win" that debate by any reasonable measure because most children are (understandably) terrible debaters. This being despite the fact that the adult is clearly wrong. Now, it's certainly harder to debate well in favor of a bad idea. Given two equivalently-skilled debaters (eg two random adults), one would expect the cheese-moon position to be soundly trounced. But given a proposition that's much more contentious (like "Cancel Culture is Toxic"), I think it's pretty easy to "win" despite being (imo) incorrect. This is possible because I judge the best debater only by what was said in the debate, but I judge whether cancel culture is really toxic or not from years of information, experience, and many points and nuances of argument that none of the debaters hit on (or didn't hit on in depth). Hence the disparity. (And, as an aside, I love how IntelligenceSquared handles this when judging the debate: they poll the audience before and after the debase and whichever side moved the larger percentage of the audience to their side "wins").