These sort of lost stories of manufactured evidence supporting racist ideas and policies, almost all of them were revealed to be hoaxes either at the time or shortly thereafter, even with people admitting to what they've done, and yet retained an enormous amount of power…Why were some people so quick to believe these things? Why did they resist the debunking? A kind of appetite and a market for a soothing idea to either make you feel better about a position that you're in, to make certain white America feel better about its policies, and to endorse new policies to reestablish a status quo. People who are creating these hoaxes are really often not creating, but responding to a desire for a reassuring false idea.