Sep 5·
Part 1 of: How hard can it be to be friendly?
A look at socially responsible NOMAPs (non-offending minor-attracted people), science, and malevolence in the modern age.
By Bernie Najarian
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Let’s talk first, for a moment, about an earlier generation of deviants. The comparison is interesting.
Gay men and lesbians, surprisingly, weren’t always the regular taxpayers and emblems of consensual probity that most people see them as today. Older people remember that they were almost universally loathed on principle — thought to be weak, sick and destructive to empires. They were forbidden entry into the USA if they weren’t already citizens. They couldn’t serve in the military or contaminate young minds by teaching school.
I was one of them. It wasn’t pleasant, but there was hope for more understanding times. Unfortunately, many people loved feeling superior to the queers, and they really loved shouting down anyone who thought about extending understanding to this population of deviants.
Despite having to deal with these haters, we gays were generally a gentle and civil crew, and did our best to encourage rationality and mutual sympathy.
One day, I woke up to a front-page news story showing a big line of burning police cars in San Francisco. A gay city councilor had been murdered, his assassin had been let off the hook because he’d eaten a snack food, and gentle sissykind had lost it. They didn’t hurt anyone, but the equipment of the despotic system got put to the torch. Plenty of queer-haters punched the air that day, but in the world of power symbolism, a message seeped out: deviants had cojones too. For the many people who only respond to power, not reason, it was perhaps the beginning of respect.
The line of burning cop cars was actually a follow-up, a decade later, to a street riot at the Stonewall Inn in New York that had founded the modern gay movement (which had no initials at the time). Prior to that, groups of respectable gay and lesbian citizens had grouped together in the Mattachine Society (after its communist founders had departed) and other ‘homophile’ organizations, where they tried civilly to persuade Americans and their governments that gays and lesbians were mostly good citizens who could be respected and trusted as much as anyone else. Perhaps their efforts helped in the long run, but they made very slow progress, and were deliberately ignored as much as possible by most of the press and other opinion-makers. They offered very little that would startle anyone wallowing in the virtue-signalling pleasure-domes of prejudice.
It seemed that making progress required moments of unfriendliness.
Today, we have the LGBT, who are no longer deviants unless they artificially try to recreate the old atmosphere by adding on the Q and dying their hair blue. The mantle of cultural sex-weakness nemesis has been passed on to the pedophiles, a move apparently validated by the many stories we’ve all seen and heard from people who suffered highly unwanted sexual interference when young.
Unfortunately, the mantle of loathing has flown completely by the many, primarily adult-attracted mother’s-boyfriends and other mostly heterosexual rapist-opportunists who are believed by experts to account for as much as 80% of child sexual abuse. (https://www.dutchrapporteur.nl/Publications/OnsolidgroundTacklingsexualviolenceagainstchildrenintheNetherlands/index.aspx0, https://smart.gov/SOMAPI/sec1/ch3_typology.html, http://archive.is/oGutD). It has settled with full force not just on pedophilic offenders, but also on any and all pedophiles, hebephiles (persons attracted to young teens) or partially minor-attracted people who are firmly opposed to child sexual exploitation.
Today, at least in the English-speaking world, you can’t be innocent by simply being completely behaviorally innocent when you’re a pedophile. Criminality is automatically attributed even to the fully innocent — although not by everyone, by any means. The most prominent advocates of this automatic criminal status are members of a loud lobby group: essentially, the same furious demographic who once vociferously snorted their loathing of the homos. And since they’ve all developed amnesia about that, even those old enough to know better, the use of gays as a comparative example has no meaning for them at all. They tend to come back with (as seen in many tweets) “LGBT are consenting adults, but children can’t consent.” They say this as if the statement condemned even the pedophiles who fully agree that children aren’t able to consent. This is not, as you can see, a logical discussion.
In short, there’s still a gap among the sexual orientations in our understanding of one another. Even saying that a differently constituted sexual orientation is a sexual orientation is a red flag.
Still, earnest, sincere and conscientious people have hope. I confess that I am one of them. I truly have faith that humanity can slowly outfox its neuroses and build a culture that values truth, mutual respect and socially supportive behavior. I’m a charter partisan of the pro-NOMAP Mattachine.
A sometime cultural hero called Jesus once suggested, controversially, that people should respond whenever possible to hate and anger by returning only kind behavior, based on the principle ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’ Perhaps this culturally embedded idea was one of the inspirations that motivated Nick Devin and Ethan Edwards in 2012 when they started the ‘Virtuous Pedophiles’ (VP) organization https://www.salon.com/2012/07/01/meet_pedophiles_who_mean_well/. Their approach was nothing if not wholesome and reassuring:
Our website is intended to reduce the stigma attached to pedophilia by letting people know that a substantial number of pedophiles DO NOT molest children, and to provide peer support and information about available resources to help virtuous pedophiles remain law-abiding, and lead happy, productive lives.
In their 2012 interviews with Tracy Clark-Flory of Salon, Devin and Edwards both put their personal best feet forward and directed their comments to the potentially understanding and tolerant.
Edwards, who raised three daughters of his own but never experienced any attraction to them, says he would never cross that line, “even if there was a zero percent chance I would be caught,” because of the damage it could do to the child. His ultimate sexual fantasy takes place in an alternate universe of sorts where children can actually give meaningful consent.
Devin, who was himself sexually abused as a child, similarly explains his ability to resist his desires. “I recognize that sexual contact with a child can be harmful to the child, and I’ve always been firmly committed to making sure that nothing I do will ever harm a child,” he told me in an email. “I refuse to let my problem become someone else’s problem.” It doesn’t hurt that he’s “always had a very good life — lots of friends, close family, loving wife and children, academic accomplishments, athletic accomplishments, a good career.” There is too much to lose.
This approach, as you might imagine, was not accepted at face value by all members of the public, and Salon took considerable heat for it. Nonetheless, the VP organization became well established. Those who appreciated it included not just minor-attracted people (MAPs) looking for support or help, but also abuse survivors who supported the anti-abuse peer support action, and a wide range of professionals.
For professionals, VP solved a critical problem. All prior studies of pedophiles and other minor-attracted people in psychiatric and psychological research had been based on highly biased samples. In most cases, only offenders were available for study, courtesy of exposure by the justice system. In a very few studies, other MAPs who had caused alarm to themselves or to someone else had come forward. Psychiatrist Gene G. Abel, for example, conducted a problematic 1987 study on ‘self-reported sex crimes of nonincarcerated paraphiliacs’ that included a sample of several hundred pedophiles supposed to represent the un-imprisoned majority. Examination of his data showed that the great majority, even though stated to be self-motivated to enter the study, were referred by their lawyer, a health care professional, or a parole officer (https://justpaste.it/4lfyj). There was no way to obtain data from any MAPs who might be well-adjusted, non-offending, and in general keeping their heads down. Now, VP offered an entry point into the missing sector of pedophile reality.
A budding expert on brain imaging studies of pedophiles, clinical psychologist James Cantor from the prestigious Canadian Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto (more recently, Director of the Toronto Sexuality Centre), was supportive of the new development. He told Clark-Flory, “In my clinic, roughly half of the people who commit an offense against a child are pedophilic. We do not know, however, how many pedophiles there are who never commit any offenses and never come to our attention.” He told Clark-Flory that he believed that a group like VP could help prevent child abuse.
It is hard to imagine someone who would feel more isolated than someone who recognizes he is sexually interested in children. In my experience, it is in those phases of greatest desperation that a pedophile is most likely to do something desperate, risking harm to a child … Mutual support among people who share the same daily battle with their own desires can go a long way in addressing the extreme isolation, serving as a potential pressure valve, adding layer of protection, helping pedophiles to keep their behaviors under control.
Cantor became just one of many researchers in North America and Europe cooperating with VP in publicizing academic research projects. These studies, usually based on professionally formulated questionnaires or interviews, attempted to assess the views, histories and attitudes of the newly broadened range of pedophile and other MAP respondents. The numbers of responses were sufficient that even studies of non-offending pedophiles as a group, in contrast to offenders, could be undertaken. There was no way to guarantee, of course, that all who said they were non-offending were truthful, or indeed that they were pedophiles at all. But it was reasonably expected that the proportion of dishonest and trolling responses would be low, and there was always the chance to insert bellwether questions into surveys to flag potentially deceptive responses.
Legacy of NOMAP participation in Germany’s Prevention Project Dunkelfeld program
In 2015, the cooperative atmosphere between researchers and VP members broadened out in the direction of Twitter. A prominent VP member who dubbed himself ‘Enderphile,’ a reference to science fiction author Orson Scott Card’s boy hero Ender Wiggin, became part of a small vanguard of VP members who established a beachhead on the feisty spin-wrangler website in order to extend their message that (as Enderphile’s posted profile stated) “believe it or not, there are pedophiles who never harm kids. Pedophile ≠ offender.”
Enderphile, while tweeting, soon encountered repeated questions and challenges, and attempted to deal with them by blogging well-thought answers out on his new Medium.com blog, which he labeled ‘Pedophiles about Pedophilia.’ His attempts to answer FAQs like “isn’t pedophilia a mental illness” often led him to delve into the publications of the research community, and his synopses of the information won him the firm respect of a number of researchers.
This laudable attempt to de-ghettoize the NOMAP peer support idea ran up against the brute reality that Twitter was a psychological combat zone the like of which had probably never been seen before in the social mainstream (https://www.inc.com/jeff-bercovici/facebook-twitter-social-conversation.html). True, rival website Facebook could also be vicious, but the atmosphere there was muted by the preponderance of friendly and family material, as well as by administrators whose commitment to free expression was quixotic at best. Twitter tried not to shut down controversy, whereas Facebook did so spottily and without much rhyme or reason. A young heterosexual school teacher called Josh Bizley had tried to set up a Facebook page to support the NOMAP movement, but was shut down by admin after just a few months of posting his mildly worded thoughts amidst torrents of abuse and threats against his family. Facebook notices to Bizley seemed to blame him for the abuse.
On Twitter, there were daily attempts by apoplectic newcomers to report the Enderphile account to administration as belonging to — gasp — a pedophile, but these were ignored. The same laissez-faire attitude, however, also allowed people to send Enderphile and other NOMAPs as many death threats, gross images and suicide injunctions as they wished to. As anyone who’d been through the earlier gay experiences of the 70s and 80s would predict, there were plenty of people who had such wishes.
Every day, you could see highly similar conversations taking place between polite NOMAPs, most notably accounts like that of the endlessly patient 21-year-old Andrew Thomas (@andrew_thomas55), and raging trolls who made every conceivable threat in all-caps while accusing their conversational partners of being degenerate baby rapers. When some abstinent pedophiles, in a spirit of open honesty, disclosed that they sometimes fantasized about sexual acts that they would never do in real life, outraged women, and occasional men, would tell them, usually amid curses and violent video clips, that they were no better than those who actually committed crimes. They should be rounded up, the women said, and killed colorfully, or at least forcibly treated with some mysterious treatment that was supposed to alter their condition.
Enderphile blogged about some of the common matters these objectors raised — for example, he authored a piece about the realities of psychological ‘help’ called “Help! What help do pedophiles need?” (https://justpaste.it/4q6vs). The more auto-irate posters predictably refused to read these pieces, because obviously, the socially schismatic author could only be biased; but nonetheless, the articles gained many hundreds of reads, sometimes thousands. Professionals generally found them reasonable. Other NOMAPs also chipped in with essays about their lives and personal histories; one, TNF-13, himself an abuse survivor, even set up a multi-article endeavor that went into all aspects of abuse prevention and recognition (https://www.csaprimaryprevention.org/).
These sincere and conscientious approaches gained much secret support in emails sent to the authors by various readers, but publicly visible support was thin, and subject to troll attack. Still, friendliness seemed to be slowly but surely winning the day. The American Psychiatric Association went so far as to call pedophilia a sexual orientation in the draft 2013 version of its updated Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Only an outcry of protest from people dreading the appearance of sanctioning intergenerational consent made them adjust the text to retain the condition as a paraphilia (http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/scitech/science/333603/pedophilia-erroneously-classified-as-a-sexual-orientation-in-medical-manual/story/, http://943thepoint.com/did-the-apa-change-the-definition-of-pedophilia-to-a-sexual-orientation/, https://www.madinamerica.com/2013/11/dsm-5-changes-pedophilia-interest-disorder/).
They still, however, firmly said that pedophilia wasn’t a disorder requiring clinical attention except in cases where it was combined with additional factors likely to cause either acting out in abuse, or harmful self-hatred and depression. In the website of the popular mag Psychology Today, the sexual orientation terminology for pedophilia remained: the article stated “For the condition (of pedophilic disorder) to be diagnosed, an individual must either act on their sexual urges or experience significant distress as a result of their urges or fantasies. Without these two criteria, a person may have a pedophilic sexual orientation but not pedophilic disorder” (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/conditions/pedophilia). This wording has been reviewed by website’s editors as recently as June, 2018, and remains in place.
DSM-5 text on paraphilic disorders
The Neurobiology and Psychology of Pedophilia: Recent Advances and Challenges, Gilian Tenbergen et al., 2015 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4478390/
Serious counterattacks against this winning-through-decency approach were slow getting organized. Enderphile and the other NOMAPs happened to arrive on Twitter during a lull in organized activity against free speech by MAPs. The masked Anonymous ‘hacker’ movement, in 2012, had focused its distinctive mix of stoned, lulzing sadism and furious social activism on the task of removing all MAPs, lawful or unlawful, from online discourse. This #OpPedoChat campaign, launched against a group who had as much internet savoir-faire as the Anons had, gave them mixed success in its first year, but finally gave the group a collective bloody nose, with the imprisonment of the ringleader Michael Crockett (albeit for hacking a government website) and the destruction of a much-loved exploit that Anons had been using to trigger Twitter’s anti-spam bots to eliminate any account they chose to target. (I chronicled this story in detail in June, 2014 https://justpaste.it/413q5). In 2015, a few Anonymous types made the usual threats to d0x the newly arrived NOMAPs (d0x = find and publicize their names and contact info) or hack their accounts, but when those efforts yielded no results, they mostly diverted their attentions elsewhere. The chronically understaffed Twitter had become a soft spot for hundreds of ISIS recruiters and child and zoophile pornography posters who made transient but effective accounts. Overlapping Anonymous contingents devoted themselves, sometimes with heroic persistence, to the rapid detection and removal of these accounts.
Enderphile took flak from successive waves of semi-organized trolling rabble, often exotic in nature — transsexual-rejecting feminist cliques, anti-pedophile posters of underage-looking animé images, English football hooligans, and so on. He began to show some exasperation at the daily arrival of extreme people horripilating at him as a child rapist, despite his profile header saying, “Sexually attracted to children through no choice of mine, but choose not to act on it because I know it would be wrong.” (http://archive.is/Qw6q2). As a husband and father with young children, he was especially taken aback by the many trolls who shouted that he was likely to rape his own children and that they therefore should be taken away by authorities. He developed his own hashtag, #moronlogic, linking his responses to particularly lame-vicious troll tweets, and was not afraid to call people who tried to twist his words ‘idiots.’ At the same time, he remained cordial with people who didn’t repeat the overly-familiar trollisms. The well-constructed blog pieces on Medium kept coming.
In mid- to late 2015, in retrospect, the character of the internet as a whole changed. As soon as Donald Trump became a serious prospect in the U.S. elections and made his infamous June 16, 2015 speech calling Mexicans ‘rapists,’ Twitter and other websites were transformed by hopeful bigots who had formerly been quiescent. Suddenly there was an infinitely spewing Pandora’s box of aggressive accounts given to reviving old prejudices and using Big Lie propaganda to put Trump into office. We now know that Russian disinformation accounts like the infamous TEN_GOP, feigning being a Tennessee Republican, geared up as early as Nov. 2015, and were often avidly pro-Trump. They blended in easily with the local American swarms; TEN_GOP, who stated black victims of police shootings deserved to be shot, ultimately gained 136,000 followers, though that number undoubtedly included some thousands of retweeting bots from the same troll farm ‘he’ came from himself (https://www.buzzfeed.com/kevincollier/twitter-was-warned-repeatedly-about-this-fake-account-run).
A plethora of ‘white nationalist’ Americans, who had been on the fringes of Twitter in late 2015, ramped up their activities as the Trump internet force field gained chaotic power in 2016. They included a group of four activist women I studied in detail, who were associated with a Nevada-based, self-proclaimed Russian monarchist tech guru called Michael Anissimov (https://justpaste.it/5wky3). Anissimov, who called for creating “an all-white society on North American soil,” was one of the milder posters of the new breed; the degree to which he may have been connected to a Putin regime he clearly generally approved of was unclear. On the more florid side, the well-known American fascist thug Andrew Anglin was just one of many far-right extremists who had Twitter accounts at that time. Memes depicting fascist clichés like Jews in ovens were ubiquitous and were sent out to greet nearly every post made by a Democrat-associated celebrity. In early September, 2016, Enderphile and friends were discovered by Anissimov’s girlfriend Kristina (@kurisu_kitsune at the time) and her friends, and were enthusiastically added to the target list of people to be threatened with being ‘ovened’ — along with gays, Jews, and transgenders. The NOMAPs survived this onslaught intact, but the experience clearly didn’t reinforce the image of a world where reason and good intentions could possibly hold sway.
In November, 2016, as the presidential election drew near, Julian Assange and Wikileaks added to the cacophony by kicking off the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which took out-of-context food phrases from the hacked emails of Democrat campaign organizer John Podesta and overlaid them with dire tweets from Assange warning about Democrats dabbling in occult blood rituals (full story: https://justpaste.it/58jer). A film of a 1997 visceral performance art piece by Marina Abramović, who knew Podesta’s brother socially, was put together with some decontextualized witticisms about pizza, plus whimsical photos of a Washington pizza restaurateur’s god-daughter playing games, and conjured into an Edgar Allan Poe nightmare that featured Democratic politicians everywhere, as well as any non-Trump Republicans, gathering in pizzerias to rape babies and then kill them (debunking and perspective: https://justpaste.it/18t8f, https://justpaste.it/19845). This epic of social lunacy, aimed at people who had fantasies of violence against pedophiles and who were eager to target them at any Democrats or liberals they could find, came down hard on the actual pedophiles in the NOMAP movement as a wall of new trolls. It turned out, however, that NOMAPs and supporters had an advantage in debunking Pizzagate, since, unlike most critics, they couldn’t be scared away by being stigmatized as ‘pedos.’ Ultimately, they played a strong role in dismembering the conspiracy theory.
The sheer force of Pizzagate, however, with its hidden army of Russian posers and amplifying machines, showed that the NOMAPs had inadvertently taken on a very powerful enemy — Vlad Putin. Vlad had won many right-wing American hearts and minds with a speech that was widely circulated as his 2016 Christmas address. Actually, it was from a think tank speech made in 2013. He opined that traditional heterosexuality needed to triumph over homosexuality and the ‘degradation and primitivism’ of pedophilia if the majority white populations of western countries were going to save themselves from submergence under a tidal wave of foreign values.
Another serious challenge to Russia’s identity is linked to events taking place in the world. Here there are both foreign policy and moral aspects. We can see how many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilisation. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious and even sexual. They are implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan.
The excesses of political correctness have reached the point where people are seriously talking about registering political parties whose aim is to promote paedophilia. People in many European countries are embarrassed or afraid to talk about their religious affiliations. Holidays are abolished or even called something different; their essence is hidden away, as is their moral foundation. And people are aggressively trying to export this model all over the world. I am convinced that this opens a direct path to degradation and primitivism, resulting in a profound demographic and moral crisis.
America’s savior speaks
As Putin’s troll farms made divisive right-wing AND left-wing statements in order to crowbar against democratic civility, a starkly clear picture emerged showing that the accusation of pedophile crimes among politicians was one of the major planks in his hidden election platform. The time was ripe. A coincidentally timed scandal in the UK, started by a fantasist named Nick or Carl (full name long protected by court order, recently revealed as Carl Beech) who claimed to have been sexually used, as a boy, by a gang of top politicians who were child rapists and murderers, had not yet been fully debunked, though it was thoroughly debunked later (https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2173222/stepbrother-of-vip-paedo-fantasist-nick-reveals-serial-liar-has-torn-apart-their-family-with-constant-probing-from-police/). This tale pumped fuel into the trollish ‘satanic elite pedophile’ inventions that were touted to involve politicians all over the English-speaking world. Daily new pseudo-scandals were generated by the troll farms to vitalize the Pizzagate fictions (Katy Perry video shows her in demon worship! Bieber tells church group he saw pedophilia all over the music industry!).
Julian Assange buys into the wild fantasies of Carl Beech with an assured “really”
Ever shaken hands with a Democrat? If so, you too are probably a Satanic Pedo.
NWO = ‘new world order,’ an allusion to the Illuminati conspiracy theory. Liz Crokin is an openly pro-Putin Pizzagate promoter.
Publishitzer Prize-winning fake news story from the ‘failing New York Times’ of fake news, yournewswire.com
The NOMAP community was clearly less than the size of a fruitfly in relation to Putin’s psy-ops Trojan Horses. Even in small quantities, however, their socially responsible viewpoints were green kryptonite to the scheme of making bogeyman pedophile accusations the perfect psy-weapon for cutting the heads off the Democrats and their Hollywood supporters. Vast energy was poured into drowning out their disruptive attempts at social cooperation. The number of bot-like accounts screaming that pedophiles were evil and Satanic and that the worst was Podesta the Molesta (a happily married fellow who had never shown the slightest sign of minor-attraction) was overwhelming. Sanity itself was the size of a fruitfly in Putin’s disinformation scream world. New waves of trolls emerged almost daily to shriek at Enderphile and colleagues. Donald Trump’s shaky election win on Nov. 8, 2016 only made the Podesta the Molesta trolls more vociferous than ever. Putin, who had come close to fighting a proxy war with Barack Obama in Syria, was clearly not ready to slow down his campaign to disinvest the Democrats forever from power. Plenty of conservative Americans were well spooked by ISIS, smuggled refugee deluges, transgender children and gay wedding cakes, and they were eager to play along. It was all but impossible to distinguish them from the farmed trolls.
Pizzagater Travis Neliton from Oregon, definitely not Russian, reciting the disinformation gospel
Any doubt about whether the small group of NOMAPs were considered important or irrelevant to geopolitics ended when they acquired a disinformation troll army of their own. Abruptly, in Jan. 2017, several newly appeared groups of internetters with professional-level operational security (e.g., untraceability of names, photos and connection information) enthusiastically feigned being in favor of the liberation of adult-child ‘pedosexuality.’ Some called themselves Heart Progress and maintained that pedosex was just another laudable variant of loving; a group with a different approach — adults supposedly ‘transgendering’ as children and loving their fellow children — called itself Clovergender (https://justpaste.it/15vex). The latter group soon faded out, but Heart Progess made a very loud internet noise, proclaiming itself to be the true exponents of pedophilic values on the web, unlike the soft-spoken and self-inhibited NOMAPs. Heart Progress propaganda including such outrage-klaxons as asking Americans to wake up and be more supportive of bearded Muslim males who had supposedly married 3-year-old toddlers. As has been shown in background investigations by Snopes and other skeptics (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lgbtp-adding-letter/), these trolls also deliberately set about to both defame and rile up the LGBT community by claiming progressive gays were now welcoming pedophiles in as another letter in their scarily indefinite LGBTTQQIAAP+ string. The final P, originally added to represent ‘pansexual,’ was made out to stand for ‘pedophile.’
Another recruit radicalized against those darn American liberals. Trolls got a heavy response by tweaking Americans with maximally outrageous fake pedophile opinions.
Nothing to see here that would deliberately troll conservative Americans! Totally convincing liberalism, amirite? The Heart Progress trolls maxing out the horsey-scare index of their false flagging about pedophilia and Islam.
In reaction, waves of hostile people emerged attempting to clean out the NOMAPs along with the Heart Progress exponents — whose kool-aid they had drunk in the first place in order to become radicalized against these predacious pedosexuals. Masked Anonymous members reappeared on the scene and blurred together with Satan-finding Trump fundamentalists. One prominent activist, Mellisa Zaccaria, claimed direct communication from God in her deluge of YouTube videos about the need to terminate the pedophiles. I profiled her efforts in detail in June, 2017 (https://justpaste.it/PizzaZaccaria).
Hard to challenge an activist directly sponsored by Eternal Divinity Inc.
Enderphile in particular was pestered by Mellisa’s wack-fundamentalist claque and its interlinked Anonymous groups. They despised his statements implying that some pedophiles were trustworthy. To biased individuals, a statement that a member of the targeted minority might be trustworthy, and, indeed, virtuous, is just as inflammatory as showing an old Muslim dude marrying a 3-year-old. Prejudice is partly an outgrowth of neurotic dreads about whole groups being turned away from common welfare — a pseudo-causal explanation of their differences from the social mainstream (see more about this matter below). Enderphile’s good-guy-ness was just about the most provocative thing on the internet.
One fortunate aspect of Heart Progress’s troll onslaught was that to publish their planned types of verbal provocations, they almost invariably had to break Twitter’s regulation against promoting child sexual exploitation. The NOMAPs joined avidly in with the Pizzagaters and Anonymous members in reporting the offending accounts for violation. To counteract the initial Heart Progress attack was a difficult task requiring about three months of work, but thereafter, short-lasting upsurges of a few outrageous accounts were all the group could manage. Anonymous members succeeded in having the Heart Progress website expunged, though their masky motivation was the misguided conviction that they were fighting pedophilia.
To jump out of the temporal sequence for a paragraph, I’ll add that further scheming along the same lines by the troll farms has managed to come up with another two fairly successful pieces of fake news in 2018. One was a reprise of the idea that pedophiles were trying to tack onto the LGBT movement, and the other was a scare story about a fake pedophile pastel rainbow flag that everyone should keep a MAGA eagle eye out for. Both efforts were debunked by Snopes. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lgbtp-adding-letter; https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/maps-pride-flag/. The Putinist effort to keep faux pedophilia paranoia at the top of the American conservative agenda is undoubtedly still being schemed on today. It makes up a significant part of the popular fake-White-House-insider ‘QAnon’ 4chan troll campaign that is serving as a political Dungeons and Dragons game for flakier conservative Americans and their bot friends today.
Mellisa’s incorrigible announcements, throughout 2017, that Enderphile was on Twitter “justify his lust for children,” and to create an atmosphere conducive to child sex, were irritating to the conscientious dad. He responded by giving her and her fellow attackers their proportionate share of his “#moronlogic” retorts and related critiques of intelligence. Twitter, however, had set out a new policy on Dec. 30, 2015 that the website would not tolerate “online behavior that is intended to harass, intimidate, or use fear to silence another user’s voice.” The utterly obnoxious gay far-right vilifier Milo Yiannopoulos had been taken out in July, 2016, for his verbal abuse of actress Leslie Jones, and this event had made a big impact https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/twitter-milo-yiannopolous-banned-leslie-jones-1.3686843. Users were picking up on the somewhat hidden information that slurs against intelligence were being botted as attempts to “silence another user’s voice.” Mellisa and various other hater groups got together and mass-reported Enderphile’s more sharply worded answers for harassment and abusive behavior — a crude irony, since these ‘victims’ of Enderphile’s stern retorts had been constantly throwing every provocation they could his way, including accusing him of raping children or wanting to do so. In early May, 2017, their dastardly plot succeeded. The Enderphile1 account was suspended. There was much jubilation.
So it goes in a world where dimly programmed robots are what social media can afford to use to enforce their standards of politeness. C3PO, the diplomatic bot, is still a long way away in the future.
An enderphile2 account appeared on May 17, and the exponent of pedophile abstinence was back in business. Already, however, he had one engine streaming smoke, so to speak. It’s against Twitter’s terms of service to follow up an account suspension by setting up a second, identical account. Some ISIS operatives did it over 150 times, but it remains a vulnerability, even though there isn’t an automated way of reporting such a case to the website.
Many more attempts at reasoned discussion followed, as did more blog pieces, though these were ever more dedicated to positioning against troll vilification shouts: “On how trolls completely obviate what fantasy is and how it works in order to vilify pedophiles — ‘You fantasize about child rape!’” (May 24, 2017), “On how the public attempts to silence our voice — ‘No, I will not keep it to myself, it is imperative that we speak up.’” (May 29, 2017), “On how people don’t understand how unchosen conditions work — ‘Pedophilia will never be accepted!’” (June 13, 2017). The second Twitter account, despite being a duplicate of the first, survived until early Feb., 2018.
The poster claims to be a registered nurse
During 2017, Twitter’s brass became ever more concerned about violence and intimidation promoted by their punters. In August 2017, in reaction to fascist Andrew Anglin’s much-tweeted involvement in the violent confrontation at a ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, they went so far as to suspend all accounts associated with his website, Daily Stormer. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/daily-stormer-charlottesville-twitter-accounts-deleted-heather-heyer-funeral-a7897411.html. In Dec., 2017, they went further and came out with a policy stating that “in addition to (taking action against accounts) threatening violence or physical harm, (we) will also look for accounts affiliated with groups that promote violence against citizens to further their causes. This includes any group that promotes violence either on or off Twitter’s platform.” https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/18/twitter-today-starts-enforcing-new-rules-around-violence-and-hate/
What Twitter’s Dec. 12, 2017 “broader agenda to craft new policies focused on reducing the amount of abuse, hate speech, violence and harassment” meant, in the milieu that the polite NOMAPs worked in, was that any testy retorts made to outrageously provocative troll accusations could be reported to the website with devastating effect. It didn’t take trolls long to figure out that they could could assemble a couple of dozen mass reporters, elicit an indignant remark such as “bullshit” from someone they were flailing and cursing, and then mass-report the person into an account lock. For the first time since tweeters got the sabotage of accounts by fraudulent spam-blocking under control in 2014, accounts with minority viewpoints were intensely vulnerable to being eliminated by malicious troll gangs.
Just as Twitter’s pro-niceness policy was being rolled out, a professional fake news writer and a scandal-fabricating English tabloid coincidentally came out with articles smearing the NOMAPs as criminals. Former Hitler-admirer and much-banned ethics flouter Ian Miles Cheong, selling articles to Milo Yiannopoulos’s dangerous.com website, came out with an outrageous fake news story targeting Enderphile (full report: https://justpaste.it/1exxe). The story attempted to fuse Enderphile with a long-ago poster on pedophile websites, real name Justin Coulombe, who had once briefly used the same Orson Scott Card moniker, Ender Wiggin, as an online pseudonym. Coulombe, a French-speaking Canadian who had recently been arrested for online luring of teens and was being held in custody, was clearly different from the Spanish-speaking Enderphile, who made it clear with published geotags that he was a free man, and nowhere near Canada.
Cheong: Famous for fakery at an early age
Cheong attempting to spin-meld two different people, with added fabrications about the dark web, which neither person ever posted on.
Cheong’s fakery was a delight to some Anonymous members, among others
At almost the same time, screech-moralist Ben Lazarus, a 25-year-old writer for the tabloid The Sun in London, working with fellow-reporter Chris Pollard, published an outrage-panicking smear piece making the claims that all the NOMAPs on Twitter were “sharing their sick craving about children” and might be trying to “entice vulnerable youngsters.” (https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5117958/twitter-allows-perverts-to-share-child-fantasies/)
The article stated:
The Twitter paedophiles describe themselves as “non-contact” or “non-offending.”
But they openly discuss their “AoA” or age of attraction — sometimes it is children as young as five.
They also make the ludicrous claim that a sexual craving for children is really no different from being gay or bisexual.
And they even portray themselves as a persecuted minority — the argument used in the 70s by the Paedophile Information Exchange as it campaigned to legalise sex with children.
This is an excellent illustration of how professional word-twisters can spin an anti-child-sexual-exploitation (CSE) movement into a pro-CSE child-luring campaign in four sentences. One might think Lazarus, a self-proclaimed atheist Jew who is highly concerned about anti-Semitism, would be sensitive to the ways in which cooperative minorities can be Big-Lied as invidious conspirators, but the topic of pedophilia, like all current social panics, smokescreens any comparative logic. Minorities are no better off than they ever were.
Armed with their disinformation spin, Lazarus and Pollard managed to elicit vehemently misinformed reactions from big guns like Labour MP Yvette Cooper.
“Twitter should not be allowing accounts that defend or normalise the sexualisation of children” (Cooper said).
“They can’t just shrug their shoulders and pretend it’s none of their business.”
Tory MP Andrew Bridgen said: “Twitter must suspend the accounts.”
Kath Stipala, of the National Association for People Abused in Childhood, said: “Child abusers are manipulative. Twitter has been woeful. It needs to get a grip”
Child abusers may be manipulative, but certainly not more so than some reporters.
The Enderphile2 account was suspended a few days after the Sun story appeared, but not as a direct result: some far-rightists produced a notice from Twitter stating that it had been found in violation for abusive content. This was to some extent tit-for-tat, because Enderphile had also reported many of his antagonists for abusive content, sometimes with account-suspending results, but there were far more of them than there were of him. Also, the Manchester police had received a false report attributing a blog piece by another NOMAP, Robert West, to Enderphile, and the police had summoned Twitter to disclose Enderphile’s contact information. West’s blog piece had depicted the author’s reaction to being unexpectedly pressed into service by a volunteer organization to do child care for a day. Nothing had happened, but West had documented his calm reaction as he allowed himself to supervise children for the first time in many years. The confused Manchester police stated that they were ‘concerned’ about Enderphile; Twitter duly sent a copy of their summons for information to Enderphile’s email shortly after their notice of suspension.
The only indication that the Sun story had had a direct effect on Twitter’s handling of the NOMAPs was that another prominent NOMAP account, @simgiran, was also suspended despite never having used harsh language, and around a dozen more were placed in lock until the owners either provided telephone numbers, or successfully explained why they couldn’t do so. (Details related to this story: https://justpaste.it/1fsml).
To be continued in part 2! The 'Firehose of Falsehood' Technique and its aftermath.
Part 2 is at: https://justpaste.it/2brh7