I think maybe Holiday doesn’t understand what he did. If you go back to:
The premise is that the base of people who he was trying to fleece already exists. Stirring up protest against his client didn’t create a market where none existed, it grabbed up market share. If there is a a group of young men with disposable income who will do anything they are told is forbidden, then those young men are going to be spending that income on something that society doesn’t like, he was just convincing them to spend it on his guy.
So the positive outcome of protesting isn’t to ruin the career of the person being protested, it’s to shrink the overall size of the market by signalling the unacceptability of the message.
Holiday is wrong that there’s a group of people who can simply be mind controlled by a few protests. They all still have their own thoughts and feelings. It’s easy to make observations about how people act as an aggregate, and foolish to make inferences about how individuals think based on easy aggregations. A simple, “do anything that is forbidden” predicts a massive black market in human flesh (that’s a good contender for the forbiddenest).
These people who will do anything forbidden are still driven by cultural values. They probably skew less empathetic than the general population but they are not uniformly psychopaths.
If they have disposable income, they are probably pampered and used to being safe, and they want to rebel within safe limits. They want to see they’ve upset “the establishment”, but they don’t want to do anything that will really blow back on them. So you bring in someone who will vastly exaggerate the power of minorities to make this group feel like they are punching up when they are really punching down and you’ve got a recipe for success. The stronger the targets of the hate speech actually become the less comfortable it is to attack them for people who were looking for an easy target. The more people raise awareness about the harm done by hateful political speakers, less comfortable it is for people with empathy to continue to support the actions that are causing the harm.
If the market for hate speech was stripped down to include only those people who lack empathy and are willing to put their safety at risk to fight for their cause, there’d still be a dangerous physical threat, but there’d be no money in the business of stirring them up (which is to say there’d be no money for corporate endorsements or big book deals, there’d still be money in it for small-time local operators).
