It is wildly dangerous, and counterproductive, to take a person with irrational, baseless grievances …. and give them a rational basis for feeling aggrieved.
Someone who feels punished for having unpopular (or even awful) thoughts is going to double down on those thoughts.
When the news started covering breitbart and alt-right forums, I went to one to see what these guys actually say (I didn’t stay long, but the impression I got was that they were mostly scared, unhappy people who believed they’d be safe and happy if only they could live in a white bubble and be left alone by everyone else; they mostly appeared to condemn the initiation of violence against anyone except, well, Jews like me; apparently my being Jewish is a terrible thing and can only be dealt with one way).
The thing is, their positions were built on irrational foundations — things that aren’t real outside of their minds. But if we say, “Breitbart and alt-right forums must be segregated from the normal, good population,” then we change that: they now have a grievance that (justified or not) does exist of outside their heads.
They won’t think, “I am being punished for having hateful views and maybe I should think about that for a while.” They will think, “I am being punished because that fucking jew sarah wants to take over and silence our culture — if she didn’t exist at all, this would never be a problem.”
This is not the way to move forward.
