When it comes to Christianity, there are countless secular atheists/agnostics (not going to go into whether those are actually different things because that's not relevant here) who are just your regular everyday people, who have not researched nor studied philosophy, skepticism and theology, may have a rather self-assured and even arrogant attitude towards Christianity and Christians, and are convinced that they could have a discussion with any Christian and have no problem in dismantling all their arguments.
But then, one day, they may encounter a Christian apologist who has studied and rehearsed all the argumentative tricks in the book in defense of Christianity and in opposition to secular philosophy and secular science, and the apologist just decimates the atheist, who has never encountered the claims, allegations and argument that the apologist is barraging him with. The skeptic may be caught by surprise, by argument he has never heard of and doesn't know the answer or refutation to, and he may be left speechless or mumbling for an incoherent answer that sound more like an excuse.
It takes an experienced skeptic who has heard all the arguments, and who actually knows what the actual answers and counter-arguments are, and knows the reason why the apologist arguments are fallacious (and can explain the reasons clearly and in an understandable and simple manner), to counter the best Christian apologists and their tactics.
This same situation can, in fact, happen with social justice "apologists" versus anti-SJW skeptics.
It may well be that 99.9% of social justice warriors are dumb as a post, who can't distinguish between their left and their right hand, and who go into an absolute meltdown at even the slightest of "triggering" events or words, who can't hold an intelligent conversation even if their life depended on it.
However, that doesn't mean that every single one of them is that stupid. There's that 0.1% who actually does have a modicum of intelligence and who has heard and rehearsed all the argumentative techniques and who have a lot of knowledge and experience into presenting a case that may leave most skeptics stumped.
In many ways, an experienced social justice skeptic may even be more dangerous and more deceptive than a Christian skeptic. That's because while both may use similar weak arguments, such as arguments from personal experience and eyewitness testimony, the validity of the social justice arguments may be significantly harder to counter, refute or dismiss than those of the Christian apologist.
For example, the Christian apologist may present arguments from miracles or supernatural events, either from his own personal (alleged) experience, or from eyewitness testimony, or may recount (personal or third-party) experiences about extraordinary things. However, these are never very convincing and are easy to refute by pointing out that even if they were true, even if all those alleged events had happened, there's no way of knowing what caused them, and that jumping to "God" is just a fallacious leap in logic.
However, when a social justice apologist starts recounting her personal experience, or the experience of others, in order to justify the necessity of the social justice ideology, this is much harder to counter or refute. If she, for example, recounts how she has been "sexually harassed multiple times", or recounts similar experiences from others, or starts throwing numbers and statistics at you... how do you counter this? There's no way of know if she's telling the truth, if she's embellishing or exaggerating, or how prevalent the things she says are. An attempt at a similar argument as above, ie. something along the lines of "even if all those claims were true, that still doesn't justify social justice activism" is just weak, and doesn't really work.
And that's just one example of such argumentative tactics. That 0.1% of social justice activists who are smart... are actually really smart, and can lay out a barrage of arguments, many of them very academic and on subjects that the vast majority of anti-SJWs have no experience on. Even a staunch committed anti-SJW who thinks that he has the intellectual high ground, may suddenly find himself struggling for responses and trying to avoid sounding weak, foolish, stubborn and like merely making excuses.
Of course those arguments absolutely do not justify the totalitarian fascist regime that they are trying to create in the western world, nor their violence, nor their "canceling" of people, nor any of their other extremist tactics. However, actually refuting their well-laid argumentative traps can be difficult.
And even if you were to say the above, most of them have a readymade answer (which they often present in a thinly veiled condescending tone) that you should be aware of: "Those are just some fringe extremists. You have been misled by sensationalistic youtubers and right-wing extremists who cherry-pick the few worst cases and make the entire movement seem to be composed of nothing but that. This doesn't happen at my university / in my community."
That's, of course, for the most part untrue. But how do you respond to that? Unless you have vast experience on examples of far-leftist extremism and can present them from memory, there's no good response. (And even if you were to try to present the examples, the apologist would just dismiss them as "a fringe minority" and "very rare cases".)
You might think of yourself as being able to have and win a discussion against SJWs, but this may backfire on you if you happen to encounter one of the smart ones.
(Btw, no, this post isn't a reaction to the above happening to me. I have merely seen some videos that are like that, as well as some anti-SJWs recounting such things.)
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