That’s what the mainstream does: in making use of fringe characters, the mainstream sands down their unacceptable aspects, to make them palatable to a broad audience. But it keeps the receipts, for later.
Which is to say that everyone in publishing and journalism knew Irving was full of shit almost from the beginning. But that’s not how you sell provocative stories about Hitler, or write profiles about The New Face Of Jazz.
[quote]
But then Lipstadt really looked at Irving’s work, pointed out how he was distorting the evidence, and that’s when everything fell apart.[/quote]
Right. There’s a long process that leads to this, though. To maintain his position, he had to work the True Believers harder. This makes the mainstream suspicious. So he had to work the True Believers even harder–attending rallies and such–all the while insisting to the mainstream that he was not himself a True Believer. This created a mainstream interest in the receipts, but also a dissonance between Irving’s brand and his reputation. The proverbial lawsuit is the final explosive attempt to reconcile all this after the proverbial Lipstadt comes along and collapses your context.
The more you think about it, the more it IS like these alt right characters on twitter. But it happened over 20 years instead of what, 20 months.
