> commonly it's implied that "if you walk away from the debate therefore you are wrong", which is fallacious. Nobody owes you a debate.

You might be wrong, you might be right, either way that does mean forfeiting the debate. It's like folding in poker -- yeah, you might have great cards, but you folded, and nobody owes you any of the money on the table.

> Then the initial argument needs to start from a place of "intellectual honesty".

Uhm, no. Might as well say assuming a 50/50 ratio to be free of bias is not intellectually honest, so "they started it". And then those could in turn point to someone else, and so on.