The alt-right especially have the strong tendency to back down when confronted, then continue using dog-whistles and other less-provably-problematic things, which helps them build up support while keeping their fellows around them, until they break out and start calling for racial purity again, but this time with a bunch more people blindly following them.

It's a festering cancer that needs to be excised, not given new places to which to metastasise.