disconcert

Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote in 1945 about how fascists would bait decent people into faux-debates with similar tactics, noting that they "know that their remarks are frivolous" so they "seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert."

I put my question quickly and somewhat sternly, on purpose to disconcert him.

He is training an audience in the bad faith that Sartre so eloquently described when he wrote that fascists "delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert."

“E-bikes accelerate faster” than standard bikes, Mr. Kenny points out, and that sudden momentum can disconcert and bobble unprepared riders.

In Twin Peaks “they tend to disconcert us because there is something ‘off’ about them.”