My Mainstream, Your Lunatic Fringe

This column was published November 29, 2025 in the Manhattan Mercury.

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I remember a journalistic colleague once asking Topeka gay-bashing Baptist minister Fred Phelps on camera how it felt to live, work and operate in the lunatic fringe.

This was in the early ‘90s, pre-Internet, before social media.

Phelps grew red in the face and thundered forth with pure venom. In his mind, he was right, the rest of us were wrong.

Lunatic fringe? How dare you? 

In his unwavering certainty of position, the notion that all the rest of us reasonable people thought he was homophobic at best and bananas at worst, simply didn’t compute.     

There was no question – no one considered Phelps mainstream. He did not fit comfortably within the dominant tastes, beliefs, and behaviors of our society. 

In the newsroom back then, we operated within sort of an unwritten consensus, derived from mainstream popular opinion in the community: Phelps was an ignorant loudmouth with a following limited only to his brainwashed family. That consensus drove an equally unwritten journalistic axiom which became an unspoken newsroom rule. Don’t give Phelps what he most wants – airtime.

But it was sweeps week, and properly promoted, Phelps blowing a gasket on TV would attract the eyeballs (“Fred Phelps loses it…  tonight at 10!”). Ratings measured during sweeps week would become the Bible the sales force would clutch to their breast as they beat the streets, calling on clients to show which TV station had the juice, the numbers and the stones to deviate every now and then (twice a year during sweeps week) from the mainstream and hence, worthy of the most valuable commercial airtime.

Mainstream culture feels familiar and accessible because it reflects what most people already know and accept. Being mainstream can offer social safety and belonging. Ultimately, to be mainstream is to move with the cultural majority rather than at its margins.

From mainstream cultures emerge subcultures. The like-minded come together around a certain idea or activity that, while one-off the majority, the rest of us still accept as mainstream.        

Retiring K-State Marching Band conductor Frank Tracz and I discussed this recently on my radio interview show/podcast. Band geeks are a great example of a subculture. The president of the Kansas Livestock Association dropped by during their annual convention in Manhattan recently and talked about a conference center full of conventioneers “in uniform,” cowboy hat, boots, big shiny belt buckle.  

When I was coming of age, those of us who frequented discos with lighted dance floors, clad in polyester and platforms were considered a subculture. But never did we consider ourselves outside the mainstream.

Band geeks, cowboys, those who mastered the Hustle beneath the strobe lights and disco ball. We maintain our own identity and our own norms but always find a welcome space beneath the larger community umbrella of broad social acceptance.

These goalposts always move, that’s how society evolves. Mainstream Paleolithic hunter-gatherers had their subcultures. Those who led the Enlightenment changed the very nature of mainstream.

It doesn’t seem as simple today to define, much less fit comfortably within the dominant tastes, beliefs, and behaviors of our society. Is that evidence we’re at the beginning of another societal evolution?   

Lately, it seems like one person’s mainstream is another person’s lunatic fringe. It used to be easier to tell them apart. 

Mike Matson’s column appears every other weekend in The Mercury, and he hosts ‘Within Reason,’ weekdays at 9 a.m. on NewsRadio KMAN.