You’ve probably seen the footage: Milo Yiannopoulos crooning an off key version of “America the beautiful”, while, in the background, white nationalist leader Richard Spencer and sundry other preppy goons smirk and give the Hitler salute.

The material leaked to Buzzfeed for its long feature on Yiannopoulos last week raises all sorts of questions about Milo’s forthcoming Australian tour, the most important of which is, quite simply, how the left should react.

For many liberals, the answer’s simple.

Ignore him, they say. The man’s a provocateur, a publicity hound who thrives on the outrage he generates. If we respond – particularly, if we demonstrate or protest – we’ll be giving him what he wants.

In general, bad things don’t disappear when we close our eyes. Historical experience shows that, if they’re not confronted, rightwing extremists flourish, using their meetings and marches to recruit and intimidate.

That’s why the call to ignore them generally comes from people casually confident that they won’t personally cop a beating from boot boys rallying in the area.

Yiannopoulos, though, poses a somewhat different problem.

He’s not a traditional activist; he doesn’t use his events to recruit. On the contrary, he stages campus visits almost entirely to bump his online traffic. As Jesse Singal wrote for NY Mag about Yiannopoulos’ so-called “Dangerous Faggot” tour of 2016, Milo depends on “a rich reinforcing feedback loop of predictable outrage generated by young college students, outraged coverage of that outrage, and, in turn, ever more attention.”

When he actually appears on a platform, the guy doesn’t have anything to say. After his recent Berkeley free speech stunt descended into farce (Yiannopoulos turned up for 20 minutes, signed autographs, posed for selfies, and left), Lucian Wintrich, one of the advertised attendees, agreed that the event was “a set up from the get go” and that Yiannopoulos had banked on his appearance being disrupted.

All of that makes the “pay him no attention” call rather more persuasive than it otherwise would be.

But it’s still wrong, for several reasons.

First, we can expect Yiannopoulos to make himself impossible to ignore.

He’s a self-described troll – and trolls specialise in forcing victims to respond.

Before visiting Sweden, for instance, Yiannopoulos announced an intention to lead a gay pride rally through a Muslim area. Of course, that march never happened but the proposal illustrates the sensibility he’ll bring to Australia.

If you’re determined to offend, everyone has buttons you can press. How much chill would conservatives show if, say, a leftwing provocateur announced a flag-burning ceremony on the steps of the war memorial?

Whether we like it or not, Yiannopoulos will provoke someone, simply because that’s what Yiannopoulos does.

Second, irrespective of demonstrations or protests, Yiannopoulos will get publicity.

His tour is sponsored by the old school masturbatory aid Penthouse, and promoted by celebrity PR agent Max Markson. Already, he’s all over the Australian media like a nasty rash, with profiles in Fairfax, News and the Daily Mail, and a live appearance on Sunrise. Andrew Bolt – who’s featured Yiannopoulos on his show – is currently promoting a pro-Milo petition instigated by Mark Latham.

In other words, if we don’t react, the meaning of the tour will be framed exclusively by a media remarkably susceptible to the Yiannopoulos snake oil.

Buzzfeed published the Nazi salute clip only a few days ago, along with leaked emails proving, beyond doubt, Yiannopoulos’ connection with white nationalists and racists.

In one email, Milo describes as “my best friend” someone called Devin Saucier from the white supremacist movement American Renaissance. We now know that Yiannopoulos worked with blogger Vox Day, who regards Anders Breivik as a hero, and the swastika-tattooed hacker Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer, a contributor to the neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer. That’s the same Auernheimer who tried to send readers to harass the funeral of Heather Heyer, murdered at the racist rally in Charlottesville.

These, and other associations, should, you would think, bar Milo from mainstream society.

Yet, after discussing the revelations, News.com airily explains that “some of Yiannopoulos’s behaviour seems darker than he claims” – and then goes on to list his tour details.

The supposedly liberal Fairfax doesn’t do much better.

On 6 October, Buzzfeed ran the headline: “Here’s How Breitbart And Milo Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas Into The Mainstream.”

Now look at Fairfax’s banner, three days later: “Alt-right speaker Milo Yiannopoulos seeks to ‘reveal hypocrisy through ridicule’”.

Well, that’s one way of describing what he’s doing.

Protest against Milo will at least offer some push back against the media’s tendency to give the suave, Cambridge-accented Yiannopoulos the kind of free pass they’d never extend to a tattooed skinhead.

A successful rally against him will need to highlight the obvious contradiction of his whole project: that, rather than being silenced, Yiannopoulos enjoys a far bigger platform than ordinary Australians, who have to take to the streets to make themselves heard simply because they’re not telling a wealthy demographic what it wants to hear.

For while Milo might present himself as a brave iconoclast standing up against a censorious left, in reality he’s more like a corporate brand, a product designed to funnel alt right rage into a revenue stream. He shot to prominence by pandering to the aggrieved “Gamergate” men, though he’d previously sneered at gamers as “pungent beta male bollock-scratchers and twelve-year-olds”. Since then he’s received massive funding from the rightwing billionaires Robert and Rebekah Mercer, sufficient to establish the team of interns and aides who labour on Milo-branded articles and websites.

That’s another reason why a large, vibrant and diverse protest might matter: not merely to oppose Yiannopoulos’ odious views but as an alternative to the Trumpish dystopia he exemplifies.

In 2017, you can buy ersatz rebellion from all manner of places. Milo, Infowars, Donald Trump himself: the name varies but the product you’re consuming remains very similar.

By contrast, ordinary people coming together to express an opinion offers a quite different – and much more optimistic – model of how politics might be done.

• Jeff Sparrow is a Guardian Australia columnist