Just minutes after white nationalist Richard Spencer finished his speaking engagement at the University of Florida on Thursday, the Los Angeles Times published a report that made clear who had won in the latest overhyped battle of anti-fascists and college students versus professional hate-mongers: “‘You are trying to stifle our free speech,’ white nationalist Richard Spencer tells Florida protesters,” read the headline.

Once again, Spencer, the “leader” of a “movement” that could fit in a phone booth, had managed to stir up a mass panic on a college campus simply by asserting his legal right to speak. And by merely showing up in Gainesville, holding a press conference, and standing on stage while students attempted to drown him out with chants like “Go home, racist, go home,” Spencer had not only garnered weeks of free national publicity, but emerged looking to many like the free-speech champion he claims to be.

“Mission accomplished,” boasted Andrew Anglin at the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website. Everything had gone according to plan: “Libshits freak out, university spends $600,000, we get mad media coverage, we look great in front of a bunch of apes.” Spencer’s site, altright.com, crowed—with little exaggeration—that “Florida was a stunning success for the alt-right.”

This might seem like a strange kind of “success”—a speech that was largely drowned out by campus activists, and which attracted only a tiny group of perhaps two dozen white nationalists, most of whom were chased off campus (and in one case sucker-punched) by counter-demonstrators when they left the event. But Spencer is following the tried-and-true model of far-right provocateurs like Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos, recognizing that university campuses and 19-year-old activists are easy marks for the snake-oil salespeople of white nationalism. Book a speech, and voila: University administrators will react with undue alarm, anti-fascist groups will peddle completely unfounded rumors about the terror about to come to town, the mainstream media will hype the proceedings like a heavyweight boxing match, and some well-intentioned and misinformed student activists will resist calls to boycott the event and show up to try and shout down the speaker.

That’s precisely what happened in Gainesville—and that’s why Spencer, though impossibly outnumbered, won the battle. As he marches victoriously toward other schools across the country, the campus resistance ought to learn from the Gainesville students’ mistakes and instead follow the playbook of the anti-Nazi movement in America a half century ago.