[This comment was initially intended to be a response to the Christian’s comment “Jan 04, 2020 @ 18:31:03”, posted above the comment section to avoid “the comment shrinking effect”. Yet, as you can see, it grew into a full-blown essay of its own, and I would be really glad to see everyone’s responses to it!]
1. POSSESSION OF THE CULTURAL POWER AS THE “MAINSTREAM – FRINGE” SEPARATOR
There are a lot of things that you misunderstand about the “mainstream-fringe” dynamics, Christian. Let me give you a short description of what is a “mainstream”, what is a “fringe” and what separates them – with some examples to explain the things better.
For a view to be classified as a “fringe” one, it is not necessary for it to be defended only by a small minority of population. To the contrary: no matter how paradoxical it may initially sound, most “fringe” positions are supported by the majority of the general populace. So, Christian, your – undoubtedly factually correct – statement, that about a half of the American population reject the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) explanatory model, is simply irrelevant for the case of its positioning of these people’s view on the “mainstream – fringe” scale. There are a lot of other similar examples: say, more than a half of the American population thinks that there is an intelligent design behind the evolution, and the combination of random mutation and natural selection (and time) is not enough to explain it; however, this view is clearly “fringe”. Much more than a half of the population of any developed Western country, European countries included, accepts the objective existence of parapsychological phenomena like telepathy; nonetheless, this position is also “fringe”. A sizable portion of a population – maybe not majority, but quite a notable part for sure – express doubts about the safety and efficacy of some vaccines, and / or some specific contents of a vaccination schedule, yet such doubts are more than just “fringe” – they are much further from the “mainstream” on the “mainstream – fringe” scale than any of the topics are mentioned previously; “fringe of the fringe”, to call it so.
So, what makes all these topics “fringe”, despite the massive support for any of them? The fact that they dare to defy the positions supported by the hierarchical power – to be precise, by the cultural hierarchical power, one of its three forms (with political and economic hierarchical powers being the other two).
What is a cultural power? It is a hierarchical power, tightly held by a small, yet very active and highly vocal, entitled minority, to define “(un)reality”, “(im)possibility” and “(in)evitablity” themselves – and then to try to force this definition, oftentimes in a forceful manner, on a majority of non-entitled people who, unlike the aforementioned minority, held small-to-zero cultural power, either individually or collectively. This power is not something to be jocular or dismissive about; sometimes it can be more forceful – and therefore more dangerous, damaging and devastative – than the political and economic powers combined. By forcing people to accept the particular dubious and controvertible notions concerning what is “real” and what is “unreal”, what is “possible” and what is “impossible”, what is “evitable” and what is “inevitable”, as if they were indubitable and incontrovertible, the cultural enforcers can control not just their behavior – as political and economic powers are also quite capable of doing – but their very thoughts, and, by extension and to some degree, even their direct experience. And, if some people can resist and reject the attempts of being controlled in such a way – and such people are always present – the cultural power can easily denigrate, defame and dehumanise them, thus also turning them into an easy target for repressive acts by the political and economic powers as well – and, what is most horrible, by large masses of powerless people, who accepted the culturally enforced version of “reality” as their own and are willing to enjoy their own small yet intoxicating drop of illusive “powerfulness” by persecuting, vigilant-style, someone who even more powerless than them – the counter-cultural rebels.
What is the minority that is entitled with a cultural power? In different societies, different minorities claimed the right to define “reality”; but in modern Western society, the near-monopoly of “reality-defining” cultural enforcement is granted to the institutionalised academia. The academicians as power-wielders are, however, are not perfectly monolithic; they are separated in two groups, that are, simultaneously, mutually connected and dependent, since they share the same academic institutional space, yet also mutually competitive and adversarial, since they have to distribute the same power-resource of “defining reality”. In effect, this is a duopoly, quite similar to the Republican-Democrat political duopoly of the USA; two sides of it may be in a perpetual conflict with each other, yet they share the same overarching interest of not letting anyone third (let alone fourth, fifth etc.) to claim their exalted, power-providing status. One side of this cultural power duopoly is the institutionalised community of the technoscientific experts – the expertocracy. Another side of it is the academically entrenched and exalted coalition of the Authoritarian Left activists, usually of the SJW / PC or hardcore-environmentalist nature – the activistocracy, as I call it. It is the dynamics of power struggle (and yet, power alliance) between two powerful minorities of the expertocracy and the activistocracy within the power-permeated halls of academic institutions that define the powerfully enforced versions of “(un)reality”, “(im)possibility” and “(in)evitablity”. And the sum of such versions are exactly what we call the “mainstream” – the picture of the world according to the academic elites.
(An important digression: while it is the Authoritarian Left that are currently in control of the academia, and thus dominant in the sphere of cultural power, it has to share the space, and power, with the Authoritarian Right in the spheres of economic and political powers. As for the Libertarian Left and Libertarian Right, they are equally disempowered, and thus marginalised and banished into the “fringe” zones of society and culture. One may say so: while not everyone who is on the “fringe” is libertarian, almost anyone who is libertarian is on the “fringe”.)
However, the uneasy yet stable alliance between the expertocrats and the activistocrats faces a problem that is not just hard – it is getting progressively harder year by year: the large masses of people, who are culturally obliged to trust the duopoly of the technoscientific experts and academic activists, and to believe everything in the versions of “reality” formulated by them in the blind and thoughtless fashion, dare to scrutinize and check expert and activist pronouncements, and the assertions lying in their foundations – and well as personal and professional integrity of the ruling experts and activists themselves. And, in most cases, they find both the experts and activists themselves, and the positions presented by them as “reality”, badly wanting. As a result, they lose both the trust in the wielders of the cultural power, the expertocrats and the activistocrats, and the faith in the justifications of the cultural power, “the scientific consensus” and “the social justice”.
Such disillusioned people become the new supporters of the “fringe” – the large sector of society, in fact, the majority within it, that is solely defined (and loosely connected) by its defiance of the academic establishment and its “consensus” positions. And, happily for them, they get an increasing support from within the halls of academia itself: there are an ever-growing number of the “renegade” experts (as well as the “renegade activists”) who reject the “consensus” positions and support the “dissensus” ones instead – and encourage the populace to defy the academic elites further. So, the “fringe” sector of society and culture appears, as an alliance between the external (large swathes of the disillusioned populace) and the internal (“renegade” technoscientific experts and academic activists) opposition to the monopolistic, oppressive cultural power of the academic elites, and its anti-hierarchical counter-cultural counter-power is steadily growing.
2. “FRINGE’S” OWN “MAINSTREAM”: THE COUNTER-POWER DYNAMICS WITHIN THE COUNTER-CULTURE
As I said above, the most important characteristic of the “fringe” sector of society and culture is its profound diversity, since “fringeness” of a position is defined only negatively, not but what it is but by what it is not: it is not a position supported and enforced by the duopolistic academic establishment. Otherwise, it can be just anything: from the decisive rejection of the materialism and its highly questionable idea of the inviolability and immutability of the laws of physics – to the moderate doubts about the safety and efficacy of some vaccines; from the radical condemnation of the violent institutional psychiatry – to the detailed criticism of the purely Neo-Darwinian, intelligent-design-excluding interpretation of the biological evolution; from the hesitations and reservations about the usage of GMOs – to the publicly expressed acceptance of the existence of the consensual intergenerational sexuality.
And, not surprisingly, some of the contrarian views have much more popularity and support within the “fringe” circles than others, thus effectively creating its own internal variant of the “mainstream – fringe” hierarchy: now, one can speak of “the mainstream of the fringe” and “the fringe of the fringe” (or “fringe squared”, as I named it). And – not surprisingly – the degree of the “mainstreamness” and the “fringeness” within the “fringe” is largely defined by the relative degree of social power held by the supporters of this or that position.
One can ask here: but the “fringe” is defined by its powerlessness, isn’t it? Yes and no; “fringe” is defined only by a cultural powerlessness, and even this type of powerlessness is still somewhat relative: to be clearly classified as a “fringe”, a position should be dismissed by the cultural-power-wielding academic elites as a whole – that is, by both sides of the cultural power duopoly, by the expertocracy and the activistocracy, in the same time and to the same degree; and this is not always the case. Moreover, the cultural power is not the only one in existence – political and economic powers also exist, and their influence in the sphere of culture – including technoscience – should not be underestimated.
So, let me describe you a kind of “fringe’s” own informal hierarchy, to clarify how a counter-power can turn into a power of its own.
1) “Almost-mainstream”. This is the highest position of the “fringe’s” hierarchy: views that are supported either by expertocracy or by activistocracy, but not by both at once. The most well-known of such views is the criticism of the GMOs: GMOs, while being enthusiastically promoted by the vast majority of the technoscientific expertocrats, in company with the large segments of the economical and political elites, are being actively opposed by the notable part of the environmentalist activistocrats, in company with smaller parts of economic and political elites, as well as a few “renegade” technoscientific experts. Another one is anti-psychiatry and critical psychiatry: while dismissed by most members of the technoscientific expertocracy, as well as the vast majority within the political and economic establishments, they are constantly kept afloat by the portion of activistocrats in alliance with the “renegade” minority of the expertocrats.
2) “Core of the fringe”. These positions are rejected by the vast majority within technoscientific expertocracy, and dismissed by most wielders political or economic power, yet the activistocracy is not overtly hostile towards them. Therefore, a few “renegade” experts, and a small minority of political and economic actors who support them, can work without being intensely demonised. The most common “fringe” sphere of research with such status – as well as, probably, the most well-known “fringe” area at all, often symbolising “fringe” as such – is parapsychology, accompanied by transpersonal psychology, near-death studies and non-materialist philosophy of mind. Other areas with a similar status include some heretical models and applications within physics and cosmology, such as applied cold fusion – or, as it is more commonly called today, low energy nuclear reaction (LENR) or chemically assisted nuclear reaction (CANR) – or Big Bang-rejecting Electric Universe model.
3) “Distant fringe”. These are the stances that are not just dismissed by the vast majority within expertocracy, but are also furiously attacked by the overwhelming majority within activistocracy, because of being associated with the Right-wing (and activistocracy is dominated by the Authoritarian Left). An easy example of such stance is the criticism of the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) explanatory model: it is demonised by almost the whole culturally powerful academic elite, technoscientific expertocrats and environmentalist activistocrats alike, as well as their numerous allies within the political and economic elites, yet the support of the other parts of political and economic elites, ones where the Authoritarian Right is still powerful, keep the CAGW criticism, and the small bunch of “renegade” experts who support it, at the margin of the academic circles, not allowing it to be damned completely and banished to the area that may be called…
4) “Fringe of the fringe” (“Fringe squared”). Here reside the views that are dismissed the overwheming majority within all elite circles combined – be they cultural, economic, or political – and supported only by a coalition of powerless populace (oftentimes a large number of such populace, however) and a very small number of “renegade” experts and activists – “renegade” enough to be banished from the expertocratic and activistocratic circles for their heresy. Any criticism of any particular vaccine, or any specifics of the vaccination schedule, leads one to this censored, ostracized, persecuted area. So is the doubt of the currently dominant explanatory model of AIDS (the one that states that it is caused by HIV).
Yet even the “fringe squared” is not the limit of heresy – and of censorship, ostracism and persecution. There is still an area that is situated even further in the “fringe” direction – an area where we, the people who is now on this comment section, are dwelling.
3. THE ULTIMATE “FRINGENESS”: DEFENDING CONSENSUAL INTERGENERATIONAL SEXUALITY
5) “Fringe of the fringe of the fringe” (“Fringe cubed”). Well, here we are together: on the furthest margin of the modern culture. We are in the zone that not just condemned, but hatefully damned; not just censored, but forcibly gagged; not just ostracised, but utterly dehumanised; not just persecuted, but violently assaulted. This is the zone there the defence of the consensual intergenerational sexuality – along with child and adolescent sexuality, and paedosexuality, as such – currently reside.
The repression that the people who dwell here may face are beyond everything the “closer-to-mainstream” parts of the “fringe” – even the “fringe squared” – tend to experience. For these, slightly more powerful and socially accepted, parts of the “fringe”, repression usually take the form of professional and academic reprimands and dismissals, combined with a public defamation and insults, and some degree of ostracism in the powerful sectors of society; yet this repression still tend to stop at the border of overt physical and psychological violence. For the defenders of the intergenerational sexuality – and, even more, for the ones who are paedosexual themselves – it does not stop at all, anywhere, moving all the way forward to the atrocious and the sadistic.
Here one can endure the cruelty perpetuated by the violent arms of the cultural elite – coercive (read: violent) institutionalised psychiatry, the police force of the technoscientific expertocracy, and the vigilante gangs, the activistocracy-blessed informal enforcers of “politically correct” dogma. The political elite, which base its power on violence, assist them with the police and other “law enforcement” violent actors, while economic elite adds to the repression with the intense and unrelenting online platform censorship.
One who becomes these violent power-wielders’ captive, can be subjected to the treatments that will horrify anyone as insanely cruel and unusual… unless they are directed at the supposedly inhuman abomination of the “paedo”. They may range from the psychological and even physical torture (“treating cognitive distortions”, “aversion therapy” etc.) to the physical maiming and crippling (such as chemical castration).
But what is most horrid, is that gruesome repression is not limited to the “mainstream”. The relatively powerless “fringe” areas, usually quite accepting of, and friendly to, the heresy of all kind (even if to a differing degree, depending on the topic), are as hateful, and as prone to the censorship and persecution, toward the paedosexuals – and to the defenders of the intergenerational sexuality who are not paedosexuals themselves – as the powerful “mainstream” ones are.
I’m always filled with pain and disgust when I observe how the repressed and disempowered people on the “fringe” are enthusiastically witch-hunting someone who even more repressed and disempowered than them. It is hard to imagine a visage uglier than powerless persons, who know what it’s like to be persecuted by power higher than theirs, enthusiastically turn into powerful persecutors themselves, seeing someone even lower than them in the degree of powerlessness. In my view, it is just a common manifestation of a hidden lust for power – vengeful and vindictive power – that so many disempowered people harbour in their hearts. Yet, since they are unable to enact their dreamed-about vengeance on their hated powerful persecutors, they seek someone, in relation to whom they, themselves, would be in a position of power, and thus in a position to enjoy the actualisation of the violent vindictiveness.
Of course, they would also need to explain their repressive actions for themselves in a way that will allow them to perceive themselves as noble and heroic, rather than cruel and vindictive; as the defenders of the weak who dare to confront the superior and overwhelming power, rather than the cruel vigilantes who enjoy the power over someone who is even more powerless than them. Well, the “fringe” vigilantes do have the narrative that allow them to see themselves heroic.
Being relatively disempowered, “fringe” dwellers understand the social mechanisms of power, and the behaviors of the elites wielding it, to a good degree. They understand – and correctly so – that not all power is public and visible, and that the informal and covert links and relations between powerful actors across all segments of hierarchical power play a notable role in the elites’ power obtainment and power maintenance. The analysis of the parts of power that are usually hidden from a public view, and thus also from a formal institutional control and accountability, is an important part in the “fringe” social analysis – and, one must say, oftentimes this is a very well-done, perfectly rational and evidential, analysis indeed.
Oftentimes, but sadly not always: such analysis, while being vitally necessary to fully understand the social functioning of the power elite circles, can be easily misused or overused. The clear sign that such misuse or overuse is visible, when the careful assessment of the unprincipled and harmful, yet comprehensible and expedient, covert and semi-covert activities directed at the obtainment and maintenance of power, is abandoned for the sake of what amounts to an unhinged horror movie script – which is, while being produced by an unrestrained flight of fantasy, rather than by a rational analysis, plays a cynical and convenient function in the life of its creators. Its role is: the persecuted ones’ justification to participate in persecuting someone who is even more persecuted than them.
What I mean here is the mythology of the “paedos in the power elite” – the notions that the world is covertly ruled by the cabals of elite paedophiles, who infiltrated, and control, all the areas of social power. I think, that the reason why it was created in the first place, and why it survives for so long, and rebirths each time despite being destroyed, once and again, by objective evidence and argumentation, is simple and ugly: with this mythology, the myth-makers persuade themselves into a worldview based on a power inversion. In their eyes, the most overtly persecuted and evidently disempowered minority in the modern world are perceived as being super-powerful – yet in secret, behind the scenes.
With such a head-over-heels, upside-down view of power hierarchy, cruel vigilantes can perceive themselves not as violent actors attacking ones who are lower in a power hierarchy than them, but as heroic figures engaged in a desperate fight with the overwhelming power of the ruling elite. A highly convenient way to vent off powerless hatred and vengefulness, and simultaneously remain noble and exalted in one’s own eyes.
Such way of self-misunderstanding is, I suspect, common to all enthusiastic witch-hunters of all times and places. However, trying to explain this to witch-hunters themselves is not just useless, but dangerous, since there is a tacit assumption active during any witch-hunt: anyone who defends a witch must be a witch oneself – and thus must never be listened to, but gagged and punished (that’s why non-paedosexuals who try to defend consensual intergenerational sexuality are constantly at risk of being falsely perceived as “paedos” by the hateful opposition). This is what turns which-hunters’ thinking into a constant self-validating vicious circle: one can’t be dissuaded from believing into one’s correctness and heroism if one not only refuses to listen to anyone who disagrees, but attacks the disagreeing person as well.
And, what makes the situation especially sad, witch-hunters are not necessarily cruel or irrational types outside of their which-hunt area. I, being myself a “fringe-dweller” all my life, know many persons whom I can, without a shred of doubt, call outstandingly open-minded and critical-minded at the same time, capable of analysing controversial topics without being overpowered by passion, who was suddenly and radically changed for the worse the very moment consensual intergenerational sexuality was mentioned in their presence; people who were transformed from rational thinkers into hysterical persecutors in a few seconds.
This is what I meant when I called the intergenerational sexuality a “fringe cubed” topic: this topic, and all people associated with it, are demonised and dehumanised to such crazy extent that even the persons who defy both most dominant narratives and their power elite authors, without much difficulty or stress for themselves, are simply incapable to assess this single dominant narrative in a rational way…
…At least, for now. Maybe the next generation would be not as susceptible to it as the current one?

Yes, when words are criminal it is a whole new world, but this is already real to some of us and I doubt Americans will resist it either. The move to include texts, even fiction, in illegal child pornography is already complete here in Norway. If you so much as described a sexual fantasy involving a minor in a private chat or a diary, and that record is found, then you are potentially in trouble. It seems to me that the sex laws are approaching the mere identification of a “pedophile” as enough to permanently remove him from society, with a definition liberal enough to include just about anyone who isn’t exclusively gerontophilic. As a non-pedophile I never thought I should say this, but pedophiles are now the only ones left who publicly take a reasonable view of sexuality, as well as the only advocates for free speech, with this blog the most outstanding example.

Universities are a place of great intolerance nowadays – the campus is effectively unsafe, and there is an aggressive marshalling to conformity.
Ancient Greece & Rome are a fascinating example of course. The old paganism had very different cultural, social and sexual norms. Christianity restricting sexual relations to the sacrament of marriage completely overturned Western society and civilisation.
Which makes me wonder: now that fornication is no longer a thing, it is strange that a kind of Anglophone puritanism has sprung up around sexuality, in many areas such as the ‘tabloid scandal’ and the strictly enforced age of consent laws.
It is something I cannot quite understand or fathom, given society’s proclivity for a greatly expanded sexual liberalisation in the last fifty years – indeed it is a paradox at the heart of the Anglophone attitudes towards sexual issues.

Please correct the link to your article “Hail, brave warrior, Nigel the Noble!”, it does not work.
When a US journal article is banned from access in the EU, I look at a copy of it on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, and if it is not archived there, I ask it to save a copy of the URL; since the site operates in the US, it will get the article and show it. Maybe that can help you.
Your correspondent should not speculate on the “childishness” of Greta Thunberg and her possible “manipulation by adults”. One must not forget that she has the Asperger syndrome, a milder form of autism combining high intellectual abilities with difficulties in personal and social communication. Her public speeches show a high intellectual maturity, and at the same time her reactions to people will seem strange.
Note that Hubbard made a Google Doc text answering the attacks against him: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wGGrODNSdwudrF1G4uerU2DsRxcSx3DR1Nbn6JOd7ho/edit
The Incendiary News is a Maoist-Stalinist journal, it carries thus under a new guise (denouncing paedophilia as a bourgeois predatory behaviour) the old homophobia of Stalinism, which considered homosexuality as fascistic (with Ernst Röhm and the SA homoeroticism given as “proof”), and indeed homosexual sexual acts were banned in the USSR in 1934.
Such a reactionary vigilantism against paedophilia, disguised as “fight against sexual violence”, or even “revolutionary” and “communist” activism, reminds me of the campaign to remove the murals by the communist artist Victor Arnautoff in the George Washington high school of San Francisco: some Black and Native American activists, joined by “liberal” students, claimed that these murals—showing the dark side of George Washington, with his slaves, or presiding over the conquest of the West and the massacre of Native Americans—glorify racism, slavery, violence, etc.
I have read Hubbard’s Thymos article long ago. I will explain in another comment why it irritated me: I found it somewhat misogynistic, and I think that all those who love girls and trust their capabilities will feel similarly.

It’s Texas, I’m not very surprised. If others would want to attend to his classes, but that minority decides to cause a boycott, can’t he teach online or something?