For every Daryl Davis who can successfully talk down 100 Klansmen, you’ll find 100 Black people begging for their lives trying to reason with the Klan in their last moments. For every thought of “I can fix them!” that you may have, you have to weigh that against how many more people you’ll need to fix if you platform their ideas and treat them as something worth “respectfully debating”.

Convincing people to leave hate groups is a great thing to do, but if respectful debate were effective on the large scale, and we have no shortage of people respectfully arguing that hate is a bad thing, why is the far right a bigger threat now than it was ten years ago? Do not tolerate the intolerant, do not debate the undebatable, do not respect the unrespectable.