Who Will Shift the Overton Windows?

 

On August 20, 2024, CBS News reporter Caitlin Huey-Burns asked Donald Trump: “Will you accept the results of the election?”

“If it’s free and fair,” answered Trump (see here, from time stamp 0:30).

[Already] Asked and answered, as your attorney may say if the other side persists on the same lines, when in court. But Burns persists: “If you lose the election, will it [the election] have been legitimate?” (from time stamp 0:56)

Overtly, she’s being concerned about his mental health. But he knows her game.

This is an absurd question. How can a person know beforehand? Trump repeats his logical answer. Burns shifts to whether the assassination attempt caused him to have PTSD, clearly an attempt to disqualify him on mental health grounds in the public eye if he says it did. He says “No” and moves on, cool as a cucumber.

Overtly, she’s being concerned about his mental health. But he knows her game.

Meanwhile, CNN’s Kaitlin Collins’s question, “Will you accept the results of the election, regardless of who wins?” was directed at Senator Ted Cruz—a loaded question (see here, from the start, but the real beginning is worth watching, too, here). ‘Not unconditionally, but if it is free and fair,’ was his response. Collins is forced to reframe her question as a Yes-or-No-only question by dropping all context. Cruz called it out openly: “I think that’s actually a ridiculous question.”

And what did CNN report two days later (May 24, 2024)? [emphasis mine]

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz refused on Wednesday to say whether he will unconditionally accept the results of the 2024 election, the latest in a series of comments by prominent Republicans that seek to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the upcoming presidential contest.

CBS News and CNN opened an Overton Window that limited acceptable speech inside a bait-and-switch strategy: “You must have unconditional faith in our democracy. You don’t?”

The subtext is: “Surely you are not saying you are an insurrectionist?”

Do CBS News and CNN accept Russian election results unconditionally?

But both Trump and Cruz successfully shifted the Overton Window, Trump with a straight face, calm and logical, Cruz via a heated exchange, which, thankfully, increases views of the Cruz-Collins video. Note that Cruz also successfully drops new data, that Democrats, too, have never unconditionally accepted the apparent election results, when they had misgivings about the process after losing.

Do CBS News and CNN accept Russian election results unconditionally?

Why is it blasphemy in mainstream journalism to merely raise a doubt and call for an investigation? Welcome to the concept of the “Overton Window.”

 

What’s an Overton Window Anyway?

The concept of the Overton Window was developed in the mid-1990s by the late Joseph P. Overton, who was then a Senior VP at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy (and remained so until his untimely death in an aircraft crash in 2003). The concept was originally applied only to politics. See this two-and-a-half-minute video here.

As the Mackinac Center explains [emphasis mine]:

The core concept is that politicians are limited in what policy ideas they can support—they generally only pursue policies that are widely accepted throughout society as legitimate policy options. These policies lie inside the Overton Window. Other policy ideas exist, but politicians risk losing popular support if they champion these ideas. These policies lie outside the Overton Window. But the Overton Window can both shift and expand, either increasing or shrinking the number of ideas politicians can support without unduly risking their electoral support. Sometimes politicians can move the Overton Window themselves by courageously endorsing a policy lying outside the window, but this is rare.

I think we are in those rare eras where awakened politicians can, and must, move the Overton Window.

I think we are in those rare eras where awakened politicians can, and must, move the Overton Window. The neo-Marxist march through academe and media has severely compressed the window of allowable discussion. But many citizens are now well aware, courtesy social media, of how such restrictions blind them.

Many commentators, including me, do not limit the usage of the concept to politics and to political policy.

Further, many commentators, including me, do not limit the usage of the concept to politics and to political policy. The concept can readily be applied to mainstream media and academe, which are more influential than politicians in narrowing the window of discourse, and thereby often blocking the truth itself.

For example:

1. With rare exceptions (like the Murdoch-managed Fox News or Sky News), mainstream media will never seriously entertain climate skepticism, or even less the charge that climate alarmism has no scientific basis at all. When scholars make such an informed judgment, they are condemned as “conspiracy theorists.” Well, merely “a theory of a conspiracy” need not be laughably absurd. It may even be true. But the term is now used only pejoratively to describe the proponent as someone wearing a tinfoil hat.

2. Prestigious universities and economic journals do not entertain the idea that central banking functions of controlling the money supply and influencing interest rates are always and automatically evil, that the free market can define what money is used (whether gold or some other), how much of it is produced, and let interest rates across the yield curve be solely the result of market forces (which, incidentally, has the effect of making interest rates stable). Milton Friedman, the so-called apostle of the free market, did not speak out against central banking. If one looks at an Overton Window frame defined by the horizontal (rather than the vertical) axis, Friedman was at the edge on the right side. Yet, the entire Austrian School of Economics was outside the window.

Discourses within the economics window were only about what the central bank ought to have done, e.g., during the pandemic or the Great Depression, or after the global financial crisis. Many such heated discourses created an impression that we were seeing unbridled free speech in operation. Yet the actual truth never came out on public-owned media, only wrongheaded documentaries and films like Margin Call (2011) that foolishly elevated Wall Street’s role in the global financial crisis, did.

Overton Windows can also differ across countries. In the United States, the Second Amendment remains sacred to many. Expressing the right to carry firearms is well within the window. The window discourse centers on semi-automatics and firearm ownership restrictions. Rarely do even Democrats signal a desire to buy back all weapons from the citizenry. But Prime Minister John Howard did exactly that in Australia after a mass shooting in 1996 in Port Arthur, Tasmania. Gun laws were changed. 640,000 weapons were turned in.

Today, in the Australian context, it is unthinkable for a major political party to assert a default right to carry even revolvers for self-defense. It’s too far outside its Overton Window; no discussion of it is possible on mainstream media.

Overton Windows can also differ across countries.

I can imagine that, in the Islamic Middle East, it may risk character assassination (or even a beheading, depending on the location) for politicians, journalists, or academics to openly and publicly support Israel’s actions against Hamas and Hezbollah. Even the West has moved its Overton Window to encourage a discussion of genocide by Israel, even though the actual genocide was carried out by Hamas and Hezbollah. Since Israel is a modern, relatively-free economy, the neo-Marxists are anti-Israel, even when it executes defensive action (including a retaliatory defense).

Can we rely on academe, media, or artists to expand discourse? No.

 

Academic Freedom, Artistic Licenses, and Shield Laws

Walter Block, a famous libertarian, wrote recently in support of the right of free association trumping academic freedom. But rights must always trump goals. Goals cannot exist in isolation of rights.

If academic freedom means the “desire” of academics to express themselves freely, fearlessly, and without risk to their careers, it is no more a desirable goal than the right of every citizen to do so. Academics should have no more freedom than any adult human being. Rights accrue to human beings qua mental capacity for free will. If comedians are given an artistic license to make fun of Jews or Muslims or transgender people, then it must be that such a license should be available to one and all. Special shield laws meant only for journalists are wrong, they should be designed for “acts of journalism” committed by any citizen, or not at all. If everyone is to be equal before the law, either everyone has shield laws or no one does, i.e., the laws protect anyone with a journalistic purpose—thereby protecting certain purposes for all. Indeed, anyone with an informed and well-thought-through opinion, a smartphone, and a social media account (or a blog) should now, as a default position, be assumed to be at least as good as anyone from a licensed media. Probably better, given the low depths to which the journalism profession has sunk, walled in by self-inflicted Overton Windows.

However, free-willed human beings often enter into contracts willingly. They limit themselves by choice, ex ante. An academic’s employment contract may restrict her from applauding Israel or denouncing it. If an academic is fired for a breach of contract, it has nothing to do with freedom of expression, unless the restrictive policy was hidden, too subtle, or introduced after the academic committed to employment (however, there may have been a contractual forewarning that the university reserves a right to change, well, its Overton Window boundaries on just about anything, in which case, the contractual right of the employer trumps the so-called academic freedom).

Property rights are inviolate. A venue owner should have the right to gag a speaker or a comedian from expressing their view on Israel or Donald Trump or gays. Corporations should have a right to discriminate against minorities, or majorities for that matter, but only if they make such a policy publicly available and subject themselves to denunciation and boycotts. One cannot employ a Jewish woman and only tell her after five years of hard work: “Well, we never promote women or Jews.” That’s fraud. This material fact should have been known to all applicants in the job ad itself.

Neo-Marxists use Overton Windows (as a concept widely applied) to push truth outside the window of discussion.

If peer-review academic journals are going to unpublish papers from Jews, Zionists, or those associated with Jewish universities, or refuse to accept submissions from them, those journals need to proclaim that policy loudly on their website and immediately cease any pretense of a meritocracy.

Neo-Marxists use Overton Windows (as a concept widely applied) to push truth outside the window of discussion. It’s pointless to rely on academics and mainstream media to widen them; they’re the ones (with some great exceptions) compressing and shifting them away from truth in the first place. Specialized devices like academic freedom, artistic licenses, and shield laws will most likely be used against the truth. The swamp of the Global Deep State is far-reaching.

Who, then, can widen or shift the windows in order to glean the truth?

 

The Clarion Call (with Apologies to Karl Marx)

Awakened citizens of the world, unite.

Unite in purposeful rebellion against those imposing controlled speech. Speak up. Speak to widen or shift the Overton Windows. Listen carefully to precisely the speech that’s banned on YouTube, Facebook, or is unthinkable in The New York Times or on the ABC. And then find ways to disseminate what you perceive as truth. Awaken your fellow citizens.

Informed and thoughtful citizens armed with a purposeful voice and a keyboard, well acquainted with the philosophy of natural rights, are what Ayn Rand called “the new intellectuals.”

Some powerful politicians are at least partially awakened, as Trump and Cruz clearly are. They can expand the permissible discourse. Encourage them. Yes, it is okay to say loudly there are only two genders with some rare exceptions and smash the window that tells you to choose only between six and nine genders.

You have nothing to lose but your chained vision.