Mockery is neither data nor reasoning: no update is epistemically required of the person attacked.

That depends -- mockery is just a form in which many things can be clothed, including data and reasoning.

But in any case, the original claim was

If a view cannot stand up to mockery, it doesn't deserve defenders

which, without too much contortions, could be reformulated as "a view which cannot encourage sufficient fortitude in any of its defenders does not deserve to be defended". And then you said

if you can bully someone out of defending their beliefs, you win

You do? What do you win? And how does that relate to whether the belief mocked was (epistemically) correct or not?

I think you're confusing the issue of whether something is valued (and so worth defending) with whether something is empirically/scientifically correct (and so "true").