When the hardcore believers from /r/The_Donald moved to Voat, I was happy that it was still possible for anyone to read what they were saying. Similar to a honeypot or sting operation, we are probably worse off when they scatter back to the shadows.
We aren't, because unlike a criminal conspiracy, political ideas are viral. They don't spread well in the shadows. Like with an epidemic, if you even slightly lower the r factor, those ideas lose much of their power.
If you keep them in the light, if you normalize them, they spread like wildfire - as we have seen over the past few years.
Being on reddit anchored them to a wider community and gave them rules to abide by. This meant the true nastiness wasn't on display only hinted at. People drawn in by the memes from wider reddit weren't immediately repelled by the kind of nastiness that's on display in thedonald.win.
Now they're on their own platform they have no anchor and no real rules, they'll "muh free speech" themselves to destruction.
I think it's more complex than that all (or even most) republicans are racist.
What I'm trying to say is that the idiots you see probably are dumb enough to think they're geniuses, but there's a huge invisible support base (on all sides) of non-radicals who are fairly rational. And I think experience is the biggest difference between the groups. If you've seen a neighboring store burned you feel one way, if you've seen a neighbor threatened you feel another. The problem then is sharing experiences honestly so we can construct a mutual view of reality and then discuss the same issues.