IMO if white supremacy and national socialist political parties are legitimized, it's because the people on the other side of the debate are doing something really loving wrong. It's the lack of debate in general that's letting people like Richard Spencer gain a following. Shouting down and attempting to silence someone gives legitimacy to their views. Putting them on a platform with people who can provide counters to their ideas and shut them down via debate is the proper way of dealing with ideas we don't like.
yeah i get what you're saying, tho you have to keep in mind that inherently malevolent, prejudiced ideas like white supremacy don't thrive on reason, they thrive on fear mongering and mob thinking. giving people like this an audience lets them have a megaphone to plant these seeds of fear in a wider net of people, and they don't have to defend themselves rhetorically, they just have to cast reasonable enough doubt, and giving them a chance to lay out an argument for their prejudice that
sounds good is enough to accomplish this. this is how any state-sponsored censorship or "boogeymanning" is done; you instill enough fear into the populace that they fall into line with a prejudiced ideology on their own.
having said all that, i'll stress that i'm mostly playing devil's advocate here. i don't see spencer as this much of a threat, and i don't mean to come across as dramatic or anything, but these are valid reasons to avoid publicizing the rhetoric of white supremacists. there's a long history in civilization of using media to drive people to a fabricated enemy with an us vs them mentality, and modern white supremacists are more than capable of causing this to happen again.
