In a surreal scene in Toronto a year ago, writer Douglas Murray and I squared off against Blink author Malcolm Gladwell and New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg at Canada’s prestigious Munk Debates. Douglas and I argued for the proposition: “Be is Resolved: You Should Not Trust Mainstream Media.”

The Munk audience was solidly upscale-Toronto-intellectual, an MSNBC producer’s wet dream and as close to a pure home crowd as “mainstream media” could have. We won anyway. Voters moved from 48-52% against to 67-33% for, a 39% shift that was the biggest in the history of the event. Much of the action turned on Murray’s soaring destruction of Gladwell, who lost the event more or less single-handedly, with his lunatic reaction to an offhand comment.