Licking The Overton Window

To the Overton Window, to the Overton Wall...

Part of growing up as a thinker is coming to accept that the things you heard about social science between the ages of 13 and 23 weren’t true.

No, a guy didn’t actually prove that everybody was a stern word from a lab coat away from pulling the lever at Auschwitz.¹

No, a guy didn’t prove that the mere act of play-acting the role of prison guard would turn you into a sonderkommando.

No, a teacher didn’t brainwash his students into neo-Hitlerjugend by making them sit up straight for a week.

That stuff was made up. If you didn’t know that before, you know now.

Here’s a new thing: The Overton Window isn’t real.

I said this among a group of friends, and they reacted like I said political parties weren’t real. “What do you mean the Overton Window isn’t real?”

I mean it’s not real. It’s fake. It’s a made up construct that doesn’t actually describe reality.

America does not have a “range of opinions.” It has taboos. It’s not a bell curve distribution of viewpoints around the current policy. It’s not even a bimodal distribution around the two party platforms. Millions of Republicans are hoping, clamoring, practically begging to be represented by someone who “says what everyone is thinking!” They will go to the mat for someone who so much as implies something close! And it doesn’t matter how much any mass of the public moves in the direction of any particular view, if the taboo remains. No matter how upset the right gets about immigration, no Republican politician will step up and say even 80% of what his voter base really wants to hear, not because it is “outside of a window” but because it is taboo. In a country where millions of people were vociferously demanding that remittances to Mexico be taxed to build a wall, the national media spoke as though the real question for Hillary Clinton was whether or not she planned to abolish the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement service!

As I shred this idea, I want to emphasize that a lot of what I say will seem very obvious to you. What will not be immediately obvious is that all of these things that you likely already believe, render the Overton Window as one of the most laughably absurd postulates in all of political science.

Not Old

I asked a couple of friends of mine how old they thought the idea of an “Overton Window” was.

One of them felt for sure that the term had to have come sometime after after the advent of mass democracy but certainly before World War II. A little prodding couldn’t get any more than that the term must somehow relate to the rise of socialist movements in Europe and the US. Whoever Overton was, he must have been concerned with the displacement of liberal parties by labour movements, and come up with the Overton Window to explain it.

One of them thought the term must date back to the 1960s.

Perhaps this Overton fellow was writing for National Review in its heyday, along with Frank Meyer and Bill Buckley and Whittaker Chambers and Russel Kirk? The Overton Window must have been his explanation for why you couldn’t get rid of the New Deal or something like that.

Or maybe Overton was some kind of public choice economist? Perhaps Overton was writing alongside Kenneth Arrow, James Buchanan, George Stigler, and Gordon Tullock. Or perhaps he was part of a later generation of Public Choice theorists who got really big in the 1980s, like Gary Becker, Mancur Olson, Vernon Smith, Amartya Sen, or Elinor Ostrom? Then, Overton Window is up there with “Median Voter Theory” and “Rational Ignorance” and “Rent Seeking.”

Now, I actually originally thought the term was older still.

Overton, after all, is a very Anglo-Saxon name. The kind of name that White people really don’t have anymore.² And given how often I hear it, and from whom, I figured that that Joseph Overton must have been contemporary with Thomas Carlyle or even further back, Edmund Burke or Basquiat or Tocqueville. The Overton Window seems so obviously correct, and is taken as such a fundamental premise of any political discussion, that it must have been one of the first observations ever made in modern political science.

In fact, the Overton Window post-dates the Cold War. Strictly speaking, the term post-dates the Iraq War.

The first thing to understand about the Overton Window is that it is a very recent theory. Joseph Overton was a libertarian political scientist born in 1960, writing in the 1990s for a libertarian think-tank called the Mackinac Center. And the term didn’t gain traction until after his death in 2003.

Not the 1980s. Not the 1960s. Not the 1920s. Not the 1890s. Not the 1790s.

Proposed in the 1990s. Named in 2003.

Does that make it wrong? Of course not. Just because a social science term post-dates the 1960s doesn’t automatically make it wrong (though it is a good heuristic). New things are discovered all the time.

But for the love of God, the idea has to be subject to debate. The idea is younger than I am!

What Exactly is the Overton Window?

For an explanation of the idea, we can look at the Mackinac Center’s explanation of the concept. I’ll be primarily referring to the video narrated by the Mackinac Center’s president, Joseph Lehman.

He makes a series of claims that we can examine.

The Overton Window is a model of policy change, and the Overton Window describes one big thing: ideas that are inside the Overton Window are ideas that are politically safe, the public is ready to accept them, but ideas that are outside the Overton Window are ideas that might be too radical for the public to accept. And any politician who supports ideas that are outside the Overton Window today risks finding himself getting defeated in the next election.

Anything that changes the public's perception of an idea can shift the Overton Window. Things like think tanks, the media, entertainment, a crisis, or historical events. Anything that gets the idea out in the open so that it can be discussed and debated has the potential to shift the window.

The Overton Window doesn't always move in just one direction. For a public policy on alcohol for example we have the Overton Window moving toward less freedom when Prohibition was enacted. The consumption of alcohol was made illegal because the public was fed up with the social problems caused by a very high alcohol consumption back in those days. When people saw the effects of Prohibition, however, they decided that the law that they thought they wanted, they weren't too happy with. And so the Overton Window shifted back and prohibition was repealed. So the pro prohibition forces overshot the Overton Window.

Policies where the window is shifted toward more freedom would be women's suffrage. Clearly that's an area of the more freedom today than it was a hundred years ago. And in an even shorter period of time, many of citizens rights regarding firearms have shifted in the direction of more freedom.

There's a common misperception about the Overton Window, and that is that politicians themselves move the Overton Window. That's backwards. What politicians are good at is detecting where the Overton Window is and reacting to it at any point in time.

The Overton Window cannot tell you if a policy is good or bad what the Overton Window does is tell you what policies are on the verge of possibility. Ideas that are near the edge of the Overton Window but just outside of it may be tomorrow's policy reality.

The Overton Window is meant to explain policy change. The Overton Window is moved by think tanks, media, or “historical events”. Politicians don’t move the Overton window, they seek it out.

That’s a series of claims. If those claims are false, then the Overton Window is false. This isn’t the build-a-political-theory workshop.

Overton Motte, Overton Bailey

The thing about the Overton Window is that it seems superficially, almost tautologically true. But does it actually describe reality? It is important not to fall prey to a common motte-and-bailey at play in these discussions.

It is very obviously true that if you aim to accomplish any political outcome, you will need at some point or another to engage in some form of persuasion. You’ll also need to engage in intimidation, maybe a bit of barter.³

But what this emphatically does not mean is that the key to getting what you want is by appealing to a majority of the voting public.

Not only do politicians pursue policy contrary to popular will on a regular basis, they pursue policies contrary to popular expectations.

This is a big reason why a near-universal feature of modern western democracy is unhinged conspiracy theorizing. It is extremely obvious that the people elected to be in charge are unresponsive to the wishes of the electorate. Upon further examination, they don’t even seem to be “in charge” themselves. Unable to, or forbidden from, assembling a coherent worldview of who actually is in charge, people begin to dip into the loony bin in a desperate scramble for answers.

The World Economic Forum. The Chicoms. German Nihilists. The Muslim Brotherhood. KGB Sleeper Agents. Interdimensional Vampires. Reptilian Pedophiles. Literal Demons.

Really think about what’s happening here. When Oliver Cromwell, not exactly a political moderate, saw Charles I committing crimes against God by decorating Anglican churches with gold, he didn’t need to make too many logical leaps. I have a king. The King is doing un-English things. The pattern of these un-English things seems to jive with Popery. The King has a Catholic wife. I think that the King is making common cause with Catholics.

Meanwhile, a significant chunk of Americans sees the policies of the US government, and cannot summon up any explanation save that it has somehow secretly lost every single war in which it has fought, and that every bad guy in the history books going back to the Bible has a seat at the table in the secret basement of the Federal Reserve. Every day it is a new atrocity or perversion, you discover that you aren’t allowed to oppose it, and nobody even seems to know who is asking for it.

What Actually Happens

America doesn’t have an “Overton window.” We have taboos. Policies change, whether by executive fiat, court order, or agency memo. Usually that court order is the conclusion of a comprehensive and well-funded lawfare campaign involving a series of contrived legal disputes. Meanwhile, dissent to policy is crushed by legal gag orders, terminated employment, and opaque community standards on public platforms.

But this exercise of power precedes the obtaining of public consent.

This is not a range of opinion radiating from around the current policy. In fact, America is a country where it is often taboo to enforce, or even endorse, a law that is already on the books. In America, people look at you funny if you even say that you support the Constitution. We had a little while where people were getting in trouble for saying that they liked the President.

Jim Jatras summarized the insanity pretty well in 2018.

Let's stipulate that the true Rechtsstaat, the rule of law state, where justice is administered in a truly impartial fashion, is a very rare thing in human history. The norm is politicized justice: where the holders of power in an elected system, that means of the winners, use the justice system to harass and terrorize the losers. But America today must be the only country that has ever been so goofy that the losers are able to terrorize the winners.

Whatever your feelings about the current administration, consider: the Feds come in like gangbusters, breaking down doors, rousting targets from their beds, seizing their personal documents and devices, subjecting them to piled on charges and questioning designed to result in perjury, obstruction, and conspiracy charges (especially the phony charge of lying to the FBI) adding up to decades in jail. Those accused are forced to plead guilty to a lesser charge or bankrupt themselves in the hope they will be vindicated by a jury of sheep their peers, where the Feds have a 90%+ conviction rate. That's the treatment meted out to Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Michael Cohen and others.

Conversely, clear evidence of crime such as mishandling classified material is a freebie. “No reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.” “Oh some of those emails are personal? That's okay you decide what's what, we trust you.” “There's a claim a foreign power hacked a computer server, which some compared to an act of war demanding retaliation? No, we don't need to see the server itself, your contractors report is good enough for us. And while you're at it go ahead and purge your electronic records, even material you're obligated to preserve, and smash up your smartphones and pull out the SIM cards.” “Oh, hey, does anyone need immunity? No need to bargain, we’re happy to provide.” That's the treatment accorded to Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, Tony Podesta, and their ilk.

It's no coincidence, comrades, that this disparity (which is characteristic of what is called anarcho-tyranny after the late great Sam Francis) is the work of denizens of a law enforcement and intelligence apparatus that has focused like a laser on two closely linked objectives. One: get Donald Trump. Two: At all costs, make sure that he cannot in any way move forward on his stated objective to improve ties with Russia. Those objectives are the two sides of the coin called Russiagate. All else, including the disparity of treatment given those close to Trump's versus his opponents, is a function of Russiagate. Other things also follow from this. One is trumps utter powerlessness even within his own administration. What kind of chief executive is reduced to tweeting what his subordinates ought to do, for example providing Congress with documents demanded from the Justice Department, versus ordering them to do it? Secondly, Trump's personnel. People wonder, especially on his foreign policy team: “Why has he surrounded himself with a swarm of neoconservatives and Bush-era retreads?” Maybe he's just one of them or maybe anyone who descended from the established warmongering line that he might appoint to office would be putting his head too into a noose and they know it.

How could Overton Window Analysis possibly explain this state of affairs?

An instructive case is this tweet from a man who is brought to tears when he gets called “Rabbi.”

Was Jordan Peterson struck by a lightningbolt of courage from the muses? did it suddenly after a multi-year conservative information campaign “enter the overton window” that this swimmer is a man, and it’s OK to say it?

No!

On April 19, Twitter removed its policy against “deadnaming”. So after a week Jordan Peterson proclaimed that his patience had its limits! Jordan Peterson, whose entire claim to fame was refusing to use preferred pronouns and getting punished by his university, had been using “Lia” for years before that point!

OK, I’ll bite, Jordan. Why can’t we tell the truth about “Lia” Thomas?

Before we continue, and I’m not going to put this in a footnote, ask yourself, why did it never become a conservative thing to put the chosen names of transgenders in scare quotes, like I just did right there? You know how many times I’ve seen Arabs refer to their favorite neighbor as “Israel”? (Example, this “antisemitic” divestment petition from the students at UWM.)

Back to the article Peterson linked. It does not so much answer a question as it does whine for nine paragraphs about the importance of clarity in language. The first paragraph comes out swinging. “Lia Thomas […] is a man.”

Two paragraphs show news media using she/her pronouns. Fourth paragraph complains that even critics are going along with it. Fifth emphasizes the absurdity. Sixth decries transgender acticists for being “obsessed” with pronouns. Seventh talks about how people are “playing along,” having been “socialized into the importance of being nice” Eighth paragraph talks about the dangers of self deception, and the ninth paragraph restates that “Lia Thomas is a man.”

ctrl+f “William” and the only results come from the last name of the author, Joanna Williams.

ctrl+f “censorship” “policy” “community standards” “threat” “forbidden” “ban” “style guide” and we get zero results.

The article is called “Why Can’t We Tell The Truth About Lia Thomas” and not only does the article not devote any time to discussing any of the actual control mechanisms preventing people from doing so, it doesn’t even deadname.

And fine! As Stephen Crowder showed us, Daily Wire employees get their pay cut if their social media gets throttled or demonetized. If Jordan Peterson doesn’t want to commit Twitter Seppuku, who am I to tell him otherwise.

The problem is that when it is no longer dangerous, he acts as though his decision to violate the old taboo was an act of bravery. When he could have just as easily posted triumphantly on April 20⁴ something like “Thanks Elon for removing Twitter’s draconian deadnaming policy that had been keeping us muzzled. Let me be the first to celebrate by saying that William Thomas is a MAN!”

By not drawing attention to the fact that his sudden burst of courage was due to a policy change, Peterson contributes to a false consciousness. This is equivalent to Elizabeth Warren arguing that inflation is caused by corporations being all of a sudden greedier than normal. The conversation should always be laser focused on speech codes, who gets to make them, and how exactly they found themselves in that position.

Everything about the LGBT movement makes it clear that power precedes consent in politics.

After Andrew Sullivan first suggested the idea of Gay Marriage in 1989,⁵ Caldwell describes how:

it didn’t take long for gays to figure out that judges were friendlier to them than the public. In 1993, a Hawaiian judge said that restricting marriage to males and females was bias. In 1996, Hawaiians amended the state constitution (69-28) to enshrine heterosexual marriage. Defense of Marriage Act of 1996 stopped cross-state license recognition of gay marriage. In 1999, Vermont’s supreme court ordered the legislature <think about that!> to come up with a plan for gay marriage rights. So in 2000 we got “civil unions.”

2003 saw a Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice basically redefine marriage as being a welfare institution established by government. Suddenly, gay marriage was not a contradiction in terms, but rather something that was unfairly “banned”.

Well into the twenty-first century, there was not a single state in the union where voters viewed gay marriage favorably. As late as 2008, a California ballot proposition to amend the State constitution to ban same sex marriage won 52.2-47.8.

In the words of the Freedom to Marry Project:

“Same-sex couples began marrying in Maine on December 29, 2012 after voters in Maine became the the first jurisdiction in global history to proactively extend the freedom to marry to same-sex couples by popular vote, on November 6, 2012.”

In fact, this is not the whole story. In January 2009, the same month Obama was inauguarated, Maine had passed “An Act To End Discrimination in Civil Marriage and Affirm Religious Freedom”, which legalized same sex marriage in the state, recognized out-of-state marriages, but allowed clergy and court clerks on an individual basis to refuse to perform the ceremony. In November of 2009, the same year, a “People’s Veto” ballot referendum would repeal that law, 52.9-47.1. A stronger margin than California! In Maine!

So then what happened? Christopher Caldwell lays it out quite well in The Age of Entitlement, if you will forgive me to block-quote nearly an entire page:

The gay rights movement, as it began to focus on marriage, was an odd mix of political idioms. While it used a rhetoric of exclusion traditionally deployed by downtrodden ethnic minorities, gay marriage was also the single cause that most united the richest and best-connected people on the planet. It united them politically more than either tax rates or financial regulation did. The Human Rights Campaign, which lobbied for gay rights legislation and backed gay rights litigation, was bankrolled by Amazon, American Airlines, Apple, Citibank, Coca-Cola, Dell, Goldman Sachs, Google, Hershey, Hyatt, IBM, Intel, Lexus, Macy’s, MasterCard, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Nationwide, Nike, Northrop Grumman, Orbitz (“Visit GayOrbitz.com”), Pepsi, Pfizer, Pottery Barn, Prudential, Shell, Starbucks, Target, Tylenol, UPS, Whirlpool, and Williams-Sonoma—to give only a selective list of its very largest contributors. It had moved its staff of 150 into the old headquarters of B’nai B’rith in the heart of Washington, D.C., midway between Dupont Circle and the White House. In a neighborhood where any major lobbying firm might consider it a status symbol to rent a floor, the Human Rights Campaign owned an entire nine-story, two-wing building.

The investors George Soros and Michael Bloomberg, tech billionaires Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, entertainers David Geffen and Brad Pitt, Republican financiers Paul Singer and Seth Klarman—all backed gay marriage with millions in donations. Support for gay marriage in Silicon Valley was almost unanimous. Google’s employees gave 96 percent of their campaign contributions, and Apple’s 94 percent, to oppose California’s anti–gay marriage Proposition 8. There were no equivalents on the other side. When it was discovered in 2014 that Mozilla chief executive officer Brendan Eich, the designer of the web browser Firefox, had given $1,000 to support Prop 8 six years before, a storm of outrage forced his resignation.

There was a similar pattern for celebrities and elites who volunteered their time and services: They were all on the pro–gay marriage side. Literally all. Reuters discovered in 2014 that of the country’s 200 largest law firms, 30 were representing lawsuits against state Defense of Marriage acts. Not one was defending these laws. The gay rights activist and litigator Roberta Kaplan⁶ worked pro bono on behalf of Edith Windsor—a coup, because it permitted Windsor to tap the vast paralegal and social resources of Kaplan’s firm, Paul, Weiss.

Kaplan’s heavily subsidized, expertly staffed machine of constitutional revision was fully armed to do battle against . . . nothing. Midway through the case, the Obama Justice Department informed Kaplan that it would not be defending its law. In the case that eventually became Hollingsworth v. Perry, California attorney general Jerry Brown opted not to defend his state’s marriage law, either. When the veteran Republican Supreme Court advocate Paul Clement agreed to defend the law on behalf of a congressional advisory group, pro–gay marriage activists pressured the corporate clients of his law firm, Atlanta-based King & Spalding, which not only did not support him—it cut him loose.

Note here that this means that lawyers are losing their jobs for defending the policy that existed, at the time that it existed.

Pipe dream though gay marriage had seemed at the turn of the century, unstable though its support appeared in opinion polls, it was now next to impossible to find a member of the so-called One Percent who had anything bad or even skeptical to say about it. There was an interlocking of directorates in journalism, the foundation world, the legal profession, and the bench. Kaplan wrote that NPR legal correspondent Nina Totenberg had helped her pick out her outfit before her oral arguments in Windsor, that Ariel Levy, covering the case for the New Yorker, wept tears of joy when the decision was handed down, that oral arguments for the Obergefell case in 2015 “felt like old home week for LGBT civil rights advocates at the Supreme Court,” with Gavin Newsom, the San Francisco mayor who had illegally issued marriage licenses in 2004, and Margaret Marshall, the Massachusetts judge who had penned the Goodridge decision, sitting side by side.

Or let’s take it from Roberta Kaplan herself, from her book Then Comes Marriage.

Edie might have been rich by the standards of middle America, but she certainly was not by Manhattan standards. She and Thea were not exactly Wall Street titans—they lived in a modest two bedroom apartment that they had first rented and then purchased in 1986, and they had invested Thea’s inheritance from her family wisely over the years. More importantly, Edie did not live differently in relation to many of the judges and justices who might hear her case, and frankly, those were the only people we needed to persuade. I did not buy the notion that any plaintiff challenging DOMA had to appeal to everybody across America—that was just mushy “group think” that had nothing to do with the actual specifics of winning the case.

I could just stop this article right here. Could there BE a more plain speech debunking of this ridiculous notion that you need to change public opinion in order to change public policy?

Obergefell v. Hodges didn’t just rule that homosexuals were protected by the 1789 Constitution. More importantly, they are protected by the 1964 Constitution. Hostile Work Environment. Disparate Impact. The entire legal regime of political correctness that was built up over the past fifty years to stop you from calling me the n-word outside of extenuating circumstances after Christmas Eve. Overnight, it became de facto illegal to endorse traditional marriage during working hours. And every single LGBTNGO moved onto the next frontier faster than Picard could say “Make it so.”

I could quote Caldwell all day. I often do. Read Age of Entitlement.

Political correctness was a top-down reform. It was enabled not by new public attitudes toward reactionary opinions but by new punishments that could be meted out against those who expressed them. The power of political correctness generally derived, either directly or at one remove, from the civil rights laws of the 1960s. “Subversive” became a term of praise in academia around then—but it was deployed in an unusual sense. “Subversive” scholars were supporting the very same things the government was mustering all its budgetary and enforcement power, and the corporate and foundation sector all its funding and ingenuity, to bring about. Rarely did professors now seek to subvert (as they had in the past) promiscuity or atheism or pacifism. Today’s “subversive” opinions—that there ought to be more blacks in positions of authority, that a gay relationship is just as good as a straight one—were given special protection by civil rights laws, and there were now hundreds of thousands of people at all levels of government and business who had been trained to impose them.

Caldwell is wrong about one thing. They were subverting pacifism.

You can also tell how much policy in the country is out of step with people’s desires and expectations from the fact that the average American doesn’t even know how many black people there really are. If you’re reading this site, you probably know that we’re approximately 13% of the population. The average American thinks that a whopping one in three Americans are black. Shouldn’t they know that the real number is one-in-eight? How could anybody, looking at this country’s laws and culture, ever predict such a thing?

In the 2010s, Americans believed that one in four people in the country were some kind of LGBT. Again, given how doggedly the president and the courts were taking up the issue, and the near total lack of dissent in any form of media, how could one infer otherwise? How could one infer that it’s only at most one in twenty five?

Here’s How Bernie Can Still Win

2016 was an odd year in politics, with both party establishments facing off strong insurgent campaigns with wildly different levels of success. Bernie Sanders ran openly as a Democratic Socialist, and Donald Trump ran openly as Donald Trump.

An unusual feature for the Democrats that year was a near categorical refusal to run on precisely the issues on which they were actually popular.

Whatever you as the reader of this site may think about the merits of the policy, Medicare For All was popular with a majority of Americans, including a majority of Republicans. You will notice also that nonetheless, we do not presently have Medicare for All. What a majority of Americans do not, did not, and likely never will support, would be Medicare for All, including illegal aliens. This did not stop the entire Democratic primary field from endorsing that poison pill. But that doesn’t make sense, does it? A policy has majority bipartisan support among the public, and we don’t have it. Meanwhile, ten different progressive politicians from across the country all running for the presidency unanimously endorse a variant that nobody really asked for?

Or what about abolishing ICE? Remember when that was a discussion? Who wanted that? No more than a quarter of Democrats. Which Democrats endorsed it? Just a bunch of obscure nobodies like New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Wisconsin Representative Mark Pocan, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, California Senator Kamala Harris, and Massachussets Senator Elizabeth Warren. How can this be? A group of politicians, whose job it is to “locate” the window of acceptable policy, converge on endorsing a policy that a supermajority of people in their own party oppose, and each and every one of them holds the same or higher office now than they did then!

But still, let’s give it to Bernie that he shifted the Overton Window (which is a thing politicians aren’t supposed to be able to do) to allow for Democratic Socialism (which did not result in any form of policy change). Certainly, it’s the case that after Bernie’s election, there was a distinct uptick in self-identified radical leftists, usually affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America⁷, achieving high office. This, despite the DSA promoting policies which are almost universally unpopular, including open borders, the full decriminalization of sex work, abolishing the second amendment, transgenderism as a Title IX protected class, and, of course, reparations.

In other words, an organization that nobody likes, supporting policies nobody wants, endorsed candidates who won high office, using clout they gained from a candidate who lost in primary. Policy change achieved: Zero. In short, it is more accurate to say that Bernie Sanders did nothing more or less than break the taboo against calling yourself a socialist in American politics.

Manufacturing Consent and Avoiding a Backlash

It is true that any system in the long run relies on the consent of the governed. But there is a strong difference both morally and conceptually between changing your opinion and gaining your consent.

Consider the case of James Comey. Eight years ago, then-FBI Director Comey informed Congress that as a part of an ongoing investigation (illicit communications with a minor) of Rep. Anthony Weiner’s (D-NY) electronics, he would be reviewing emails discovered which related to Hillary Clinton’s aforementioned private email server. As Jatras noted, that investigation had originally closed after Hillary basically said “listen don’t worry about it.”

Republican lawmakers made the memo public within literal minutes, and Drumpf of course had a field day:

“Perhaps, finally, justice will be done […] I have great respect for the fact that the F.B.I. and the D.O.J. are now willing to have the courage to right the horrible mistake that they made. This was a grave miscarriage of justice that the American people fully understand. It is everybody’s hope that it is about to be corrected.”

Now, all of that stuff about justice, that never happened. But Trump did end up winning in 2016. Hillary Clinton herself personally blamed Comey for costing her the election.

So going into 2017, the Obama-appointed James Comey was not exactly popular among the Democrats. This, even though Comey had been, at the exact same time, carrying out an investigation ordered by Barack Obama into Trump’s (falsely) alleged ties to Russia.⁸ Even that excerpt from Jatras doesn’t cover how insane that whole saga was. There was a fake dossier about Trump peeing on hookers.

Anyway. in May of 2017, after a week of testimonies to Congress about that Russia investigation, Trump fired James Comey.

Mr. Comey learned from news reports that he had been fired while addressing bureau employees in Los Angeles. While Mr. Comey spoke, television screens in the background began flashing the news. In response to the reports, Mr. Comey laughed, saying that he thought it was a fairly funny prank. Shortly after, Mr. Trump’s letter was delivered to F.B.I. Headquarters in Washington.

The most informative part of the whole saga, however, was that night’s episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

Mediaite summarizes it well.

Well, that was a little awkward.

At the beginning of his opening monologue during last night’s broadcast of The Late Show, host Stephen Colbert informed his audience of the shocking news that FBI Director James Comey had been fired by President Donald Trump. (Apparently, the story had broken just minutes ahead of the taping.)

Colbert seemed taken aback when upon the announcement of the bombshell, his audience broke out into applause, likely believing this was something of a setback for the Trump administration. (It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Colbert’s core audience is largely anti-Trump.)

Noticing the confusing reaction from the crowd, Colbert immediately joked about it.

“Oh well, huge, huge Donald Trump fans here tonight,” the late-night host said.

Colbert would then go on to continue with the rest of his set, which included some snipes at Trump for firing the man who many Democrats have blamed — including Hillary Clinton herself — for costing Clinton the election in November.

And that is likely where the narrative confusion had set in for the audience last night. They’ve been primed to despise Comey because of the perception that he handed the presidency to Trump with his late-October letter about Hillary’s emails.

However, until yesterday, he was in charge of the FBI’s investigation into potential collusion between Trump associates and Russian operatives, which has caused many Democrats now to highly criticize the termination, labeling it a “constitutional crisis” and a “coverup.”

It took Colbert less than 30 seconds to update the crowd’s firmware, such that when he said that the firing was Jeff Sessions’s idea, they booed appropriately.

Your marketplace of ideas, sir.

What about arming al-Qaeda in Syria? Was that decision made before or after NATO lobbying firms and think tanks like the Atlantic Council and the Qatar Foundation spent billions to turn jihadis into celebrities? Let’s just quote the paper of record.

“You are not going to find this neat, clean, secular rebel group that respects human rights and that is waiting and ready because they don’t exist,” said Aron Lund, a Syria analyst who edits the Syria in Crisis blog for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “It is a very dirty war and you have to deal with what is on offer.”

This is a perfect demonstration of the insane power of taboo. Imagine if anybody were to speak in such blunt terms about Hamas. I could imagine those words coming out of someone’s mouth, but that person would never work at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

When it came out that the Moderate Rebels of Nour al-Din al-Zenki had engaged in the time-tested jihadist past time of sawing off a Palestinian child’s head with a knife (wait… what?), the American Century Foundation wrote that “In the Syrian Proxy War, America Can Keep Its Hands Clean or It Can Get Things Done.”

“If the United States cannot absorb its proxies’ bad behavior, on and off camera, then its strategy in Syria is likely untenable. If, on the other hand, the United States really is serious about pursuing a two-pronged strategy—challenging the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad militarily while backing rebel allies to counterbalance jihadists within the Syrian opposition—well, then it will have to back Zinki and other groups like it. […] If the United States wants to reinforce a meaningful non-jihadist constituency within Syria’s armed opposition and retain its own influence by proxy, then Zinki is a natural, if unpalatable, partner. But if Washington insists on keeping its hands perfectly clean, there’s probably no Syrian faction—in the opposition, or on any side of the war—that merits support.”

Who was he writing that for? The public?

Or what about this gem from the Atlantic Council. “Syria: The Right Saladis Can Make All the Difference” In a ringing endorsement of the Jaysh al-Islam, NATO’s think tank informs us that

Jaysh al-Islam leader Zahran Alloush has similarly reversed previous policies hostile to Western values. In an interview in 2013, Alloush rejected democracy, adding that only an Islamic system would guarantee justice and equality for all. He also voiced hatred toward Shia Muslims and many believe him to have orchestrated the kidnapping of famous Syrian pro-democracy activist Razan Zeitouneh, among others. Yet, Alloush is also a staunch opponent of ISIS and Nusra. Jaysh al-Islam has increasingly worked with civilians to support local administration, the justice system, and policing efforts in Ghouta, according to Istanbul-based Syria expert Sinan Hatahet.

After Eli Lake conducted a lengthy interview with a man who had put Alawites in cages as human shields against the Russian Air Force, Lake wrote a follow up article complaining that:

The second point worth making here is that Alloush has been smeared in [Arab-world media] as a terrorist in league with al Qaeda and the Islamic State. No serious expert on Syria credits this claim. It's the kind of propaganda we hear a lot from the Iranian, Russian and Syrian foreign ministries, and the news outlets that publish this line uncritically.

John McCain infiltrated Syria in order to meet with FSA freedom fighters who turned out to have kidnapped Shi’a muslims.

The Grayzone has a good minidocumentary on the propaganda effort to rehabilitate head-chopping jihadists as gallant freedom fighters. There were dumb Hollywood movies and Netflix Specials made about the “White Helmets.” But none of that was about moving the window for a future change in policy, it was about manufacturing consent for a policy that was already in play.

Was arming al-Qaeda in the Overton Window? Did it need to be? It is hard to imagine a majority of Americans thought that that was a wise policy. But let’s say that the propaganda was enough to make it “thinkable”. Then that would be the first step in a pro-jihadi policy pivot. But it wasn’t! It was the last! It is obvious that the US National Security establishment works under the premise that it is better to beg forgiveness than ask permission. More often, gaslighting the public is a lot easier.⁹

When the director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University said that The Destruction of Islamic State is a Strategic Mistake, was that to move the range of American public opinion in support of ISIS? If it was, did it work? Yet the American policy at that time for the past two years was effectively to be the Islamic State’s Air Force. When Dennis Kucinich, a US congressman, asked about the policy, it was rhetorical. There was nothing even he could do about it.

You know who else doesn’t believe in the Overton Window? The Office of the US President! (Jump to 13:45)

Question: Do you have any concern that Tucker Carlson's interview with Vladimir Putin could further erode support for Ukraine aid in the United States?

John Kirby: I - we're convinced that there is strong bipartisan support on Capitol Hill for supporting Ukraine. And we know there's efforts now to bring something up onto the Senate floor for a vote that would have Ukraine, Israel, Indo-Pacific, and humanitarian assistance supplemental funding in it and - without the border. We'll let the folk - we'll let senators work that out. The President believes that support for Ukraine is critical - particularly right now, as Russia continues to try to hit their defense industrial base, continue to hit their units on that battlefront from - from east to south. It - it's vital. And he's confident that - and he - and based on the meetings he's had with - with leaders on Capitol Hill and the discussions he's had, certainly over recent weeks, that, again, the leadership - even on the House side, the leadership is solidly in support of supporting Ukraine. Now, whether they're going to - how they're going to be affected or impacted by a television interview, I couldn't begin to - to guess.

Question: I guess I'm asking beyond just Congress. Among the American people, many of whom, you know, watch Tucker Carlson's show and are inclined already to be skeptical of American support for Ukraine, would hearing directly from Putin potentially erode that further - not just in the halls of Congress but among the people?

John Kirby: I think the American people know well who is at fault here. And I think they know that there was no ground whatsoever for the invasion on February 22nd, two years ago. The - he - he invaded a neighboring country with- - without provocation. Ukraine wasn't a threat to anybody, and the American people understand that. And the American people understand what Ukraine is fighting for. And all they're asking for is our help. They're not asking for American boots on the ground. Again, I don't think the American people are going to be swayed by one single interview. And I think anybody that watches that interview - I - again, I haven't seen - whatever - whatever is said - need to - need to make sure you're - you're - remember, you're listening to Vladimir Putin. And you shouldn't take at face value anything he has to say.

Even the journalist when he asks about the Tucker interview, has to re-emphasize that he is asking about the views of the American public, because John Kirby’s initial answer made no mention of popular opinion as a factor in our Ukraine policy whatsoever. “There is strong bipartisan support on Capitol Hill.” That’s it!

No, the only concern any policymaker ever has when it comes to things like this is “backlash.” Or, in the case of Trump, a “whitelash.” They are not concerned about convincing you to agree, they are concerned about demobilizing you. It is not about making a bunch of people say yes, it is about making a few people say yes, and sapping your motivation to waste your time saying “no”.

Your Republican Party, Sir

One characteristic of people on the right who bring up the Overton Window a lot is that they tend to be very young, and they fail to appreciate just how much the range of discussion has shifted under their feet, while the range of opinion remains predominantly the same.

Recall in my article on the Right to Be Reactionary. The range of opinion on homosexuality is not much different in Ramallah as it is among Republicans.

Consider even the very idea of Political Correctness. From Caldwell.

There was no clamor in the general public to suppress heterodox thinking. Americans’s views on free speech had been remarkably consistent. In 1955, in the immediate aftermath of McCarthyism, the Harvard sociologist Samuel A. Stouffer published a classic study called Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties. His goal was to figure out how willing people really were to let communists do three things: make a speech in their community, teach in a university, or have a book kept in the public library. After 1972, the National Opinion Research Center added several scenarios to Stouffer’s to test communities’ tolerance for speech that insulted their sensibilities on race, religion, and democracy. On no issue did the eagerness to ban speech rise significantly in the decades preceding political correctness. In fact, the percentage of people who would permit a library to lend a racist book rose slightly, from 60 percent in 1972 to about 63 percent in 1990.

Or consider this gem from the New York Times.

This graph tracks “yes” answers to the polling question “Do immigrants strengthen the United States?”

The year before I was born, the year my parents got married in New York City, no more than a third of people in either party thought that the country was better with them in it.

Nonetheless, the country had them in it. Along with my dad’s parents, his four brothers¹⁰, who by that time had all had at least one child each. My mom’s mother, father, and sister. More aunts and cousins on that side than I can count. A dozen Dominicans and dozens of Haitians, all scattered across New York and Florida.

In 1994, only 1/3 of Americans thought it made the country better for them to be here.

Yet here I am. Despite that bipartisan public agreement that my mom and dad should have stayed on the island, I exist as living proof that the views of the American public don’t count for a Haitian cookie.

And look what is bemoaned in the graph. Republican support “only” went up by eight percentage points, while Democratic support went up by fifty one, and this is proof that Republicans have lost their mind somehow!

And yes, rising Democratic support may explain… the continued existence… of a policy that was already in play… when it was unpopular… and had been since 1965. But what it doesn’t explain is how much more intolerant and censorious Republican media and political organizations had become over the unchanged views of their base over the same period. So many people in the early 90s were regularly writing for major news organizations, appearing on conservative or even liberal news outlets, and getting their books published, that now I get raised eyebrows at Republican events even for saying their names. For a relatively tame example, look at the editorial board for Takimag.

Why are they writing for Takimag? Is it because their views are unpopular? Demonstrably not! They are the unreconstructed remnants of the early nineties. And the views of Republican voters on immigration have not changed since then. And yet these people (by which I mean people who proudly read Takimag) were some of the loudest in celebrating that Donald Trump had somehow moved the Overton Window on Immigration! That doesn’t make any sense! He was giving voice to a view that was made taboo!

Again, no issue makes it clear just how unresponsive policy is to the public than those of sex and gender. Consider this performance from former Governor Asa Hutchinson after he vetoed a bill that would ban “gender affirmation” for minors in the state of Arkansas.

“I guess that’s the conservative position.”

You could say, “ah, well, the Overton Window just says that he will be voted out.” In fact, Hutchison was in the middle of his second term as governor, so he could not run for re-election anyway. Ah, well, there you go! The Overton Window is only for politicians who are seeking re-election! A theory of policy outcomes that doesn’t account for term limits, lame ducks, or revolving doors.

And why does this only ever go one way? Nobody has ever heard of a Republican Governor, in the lame duck phase of his governorship, pivoting hard to the far-right and going full Let Them Look West, making good on all of the crazy promises he made back in his first primary.

We may not know the specifics of what was going on with Hutchison, but it’s incredibly easy for any of us to come up with a few theories as to what happened with Hutchison. Tucker suggests a few. “Have you spoken to any corporate interest in the State of Arkansas about this bill?” He references a previous instance where Kristi Noem of South Dakota pulled this same maneuver, but she was honest enough to indicate that she was pressured by the NCAA. And we could go back further. Age of Entitlement has a great section about how Heaven and Earth were moved to get Arizona to adopt the Martin Luther King holiday.

But what’s important here is that any theory you come up with is effectively a debunking of the Overton Window, and any rational political actor should instead do their best to emulate whichever strategy successfully made it so that the governor of this state:

was willing to humiliate himself on Tucker Carlson Tonight in defense of gender surgery for kids.

Whatever shifting of the Overton Window occured, was manifested in the voting patterns of the Arkansas legislature. But the actual policy that was manifested, which is what the Overton Window is meant to predict, was in direct opposition to their wishes. All of the effort that was spent shifting the Overton Window in Arkansas was completely wasted, relative to whatever effort was spent by Wal-Mart corporation calling up the governor on the phone and threatening to divest.

In fact, the Overton Window was in play in that conversation.

“I go back to William Buckley; I go back to Ronald Reagan, the principles of our party, which believes in a limited role of government,” Hutchinson said. “Are we, as a party, abandoning limited role of government and saying we’re going to invoke the government decision-making over and above physicians, over and above healthcare, over and above parents?”

When Hutchison makes rhetorical appeals to Reagan and Buckley and limited government and parental rights, that’s him adhering to the existing Republican Overton Window.

When he then turns around and stabs his constituents in the back in the name of gender ideology, that’s him showing what the Overton Window is good for.

Beautiful Losers and Rules for Radicals

In 1993, Sam Francis released the book Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism. In the essay which gives the book its title, he discusses how James Burnham viewed politics as a struggle for power among elites, rather than a battle of ideas as such. Because the right up to that point refused to grasp the reality of what it means to seek, seize, and retain power, they get infiltrated by leftism and managerialism. In other words, they become Beautiful Losers.

Now, I’m not a Burnhamite, because I enjoy morality and I enjoy hurling polemics from a moral high ground. I don’t think it’s cool or hip to be amoral or an apologist for insane criminal behavior. But as an empirical description of politics actually works, Burnham for the most part slammed it out of the park. Francis takes the analysis forward, however, demonstrating that the neoconservative movement that Burnham spent the latter half of his life proliferating¹¹ had hitched the right’s wagon to precisely the same groups that have an overriding class interest in liberalism, and a hatred of all things conservative.

The strategy of the Right, he says, should be to “enhance the polarization of Middle Americans from the incumbent regime, not to build coalitions with the regime’s defenders and beneficiaries.”

The very next year, the Republicans picked up 54 seats in the House and eight seats in the senate, giving them control of the House for the first time in 40 years, and control of the whole congress for the first time since 1933.

Is it because Newt Gingrich read Sam Francis? It’s impossible to tell. It is likely Gingrich would never dare today to even say Sam Francis’s name.

But there is one name Newt Gingrich likes to say a lot.

Saul Alinsky, the author of Rules For Radicals.

“What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be,” Alinsky begins his book. “The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”

It is a guide to guerilla politics, of making a little feel like a lot.

Alinsky himself was never a member of any Communist Party. In that way, he’s like J. Robert Oppenheimer or Harry Dexter White. Sure, they rubbed shoulders with communists and went to a couple of meetings, but they weren’t ideologically committed in any way to the ideology. Depending on the circumstance, they’d attach themselves to globalist liberalism, which was probably closer to their actual viewpoint. It was more of a pragmatic attachment in opposition to Fascism and Nationalism. They’re just really worried about Franco, you know?

From Alinsky himself:

“One of the most important things in life is what Judge Learned Hand described as 'that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you're right.' If you don't have that, if you think you've got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide.”

It wouldn’t matter where you dropped Alinsky. Medieval Spain. The Third Reich. The USSR. He’d still agitate and dissent. He’s got that revolutionary spirit.

Gingrich brought up Alinsky a lot during the 2008 election.

It was part of a larger Republican effort to reinforce the taboo against overt socialism in American politics by connecting Barack Obama to the left wing radicals of the 60s like Bill Ayers, leader of the Weather Underground.¹² Of course, Obama’s involvement with Bill Ayers post-dated Ayer’s time as the leader of a terrorist organization, as Ayers would later become a Professor of Education at the University of Chicago, while Obama was senator from Illinois. In the late 1990s, the two were both on the board for the Woods Fund of Chicago, a charity foundation with the self-stated purpose of increasing opportunities for the less advantaged.

You might be wondering, “hang on, how do you go from running a terrorist organization to becoming a professor of education and serving on the board of a large charity alongside your state’s senator?” For that, you should read Days of Rage by Bryan Burrough.

I’ve never read Rules for Radicals, but I have listened to Sargon’s review. What were Alinsky’s rules?

1. "Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have."

2. "Never go outside the expertise of your people."

3. "Whenever possible go outside the expertise of the enemy."

4. "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules."¹³

5. "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage."

6. "A good tactic is one your people enjoy."

7. "A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag."

8. "Keep the pressure on."

9. "The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself."

10. "The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition."

11. "If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside; this is based on the principle that every positive has its negative."

12. "The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative."

13. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

Analyzing each and every one of those rules is a bit beyond the scope of this article. But we can say this. Of the thirteen rules, only #12 relates in any way to persuading the public of your policy positions. Practically every other rule is about how to properly mobilize and utilize your support base while demoralizing and delegitimizing your opponent.

The conservative movement’s persistent terror that someone may be “using Alinsky’s playbook”, its futile insistence on trying to make politics about vague floating abstractions instead of power relations, is in fact an indicator that the Overton Window doesn’t explain or predict policy! The complaint, the fear, hinges on the idea that the public can, and often is, tricked into accepting policies against their desires and interests when they are packaged with a machiavellian approach to rhetoric!

Is there a way to learn this power?

Not from a Republican!

Newt Gingrich is not exactly my favorite Republican, though he is nowhere near the worst. If the party were to be restructured in my image, he would certainly have a place in it. One thing I can say in his favor is that he is a man who wants to win.

And Newt Gingrich is a man who takes politics seriously. Newt Gingrich has never settled for a “symbolic victory” in his entire life. The Republican Revolution? Making himself the face of the Republican party in every district? That Contract With America? Striking at Clinton’s coveted image as being Socially Liberal and Fiscally Conservative? All of that actually was straight out of Alinsky’s playbook! Those accusations against Obama were confession by projection.

He made enthusiastic use of the media as a pulpit to attack the President, especially after Fox News hit the airwaves in 1996. He was, and still is, a master of holding frame and putting his enemies on the defensive at all times. He was highly adaptive, only managing to overplay his hand when he took the ultimate shot at the king by trying and failing to impeach Bill Clinton. But even that failure consumed the Democratic Party’s time, attention, and clout. Bill Clinton used to be known for playing the saxophone. Now he’s known for screwing his secretary. The Dems had to work around the clock to make Gingrich seem uptight for acting like that was a big enough deal to impeach the President.

Personally, I tend to default to extreme skepticism whenever anybody talks about “using the left’s methods against them.” Usually, this is because anybody who says this almost certainly doesn’t actually understand what the left’s methods actually are. More often than not, they are proposing the political equivalent of a Melanesian Cargo Cult.

Of course, half the story is missing. Saul Alinsky may have claimed to be a plucky rebel, but he was the tip of the spear of one of the most vile deceptive conspiracies ever waged against the American public. Meanwhile, the only tool Newt Gingrich had to work with was the Republican Party. It would have to suffice.

And during the 2012 primary, Gingrich invoked these dark powers against the Republicans themselves.

After weak showings in Iowa and New Hampshire, Gingrich’s campaign was on life support. So he resorted to unleashing an aggressive attack against Mitt Romney’s wealth and career at private equity firm Bain Capital.

Many prominent conservatives and Republicans pounced, seeing it as an attack on capitalism itself. Even Rudy Giuliani, somebody who has had harsh words for Romney (his opponent in the 2008 GOP presidential race), likened Gingrich’s tactics to Alinsky’s.

But though they angered many on the right, the attacks undermined Romney’s electability argument — which had previously been his main asset in the GOP nomination battle.

Gingrich has continued his class warfare strategy in Florida, referring to Romney on Wednesday as somebody who was “liv(ing) in a world of Swiss bank accounts and Cayman Island accounts and making $20 million for no work. …”

It may be odd for somebody claiming to be a conservative to employ the tactics of the left, but Alinsky wrote an entire chapter on the arbitrary ethics of when the ends justify the means, noting that, “generally success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics.”

GOP nomination fights are often described as battles between Rockefeller Republicans and Goldwater Republicans. In 2012, Gingrich has brought us the Alinsky Republican.

Rudy Giuliani would complain to Fox News:

“What the hell are you doing, Newt? I expect this from Saul Alinsky. This is what Saul Alinsky taught Barack Obama, and what you’re saying is part of the reason we’re in so much trouble right now.”

What Gingrich was doing was trying to win. After Gingrich came in at a close third on Super Tuesday behind Santorum and Romney, Santorum urged Gingrich to drop out and endorse him.

Newt Gingrich called the bluff, and a week later, Santorum dropped out of the race himself.

Gingrich celebrated being alone in the field with Romney (and technically Ron Paul) by changing his campaign slogan:

Now, did this all work? No. Romney won the primary.

But is anyone going to tell me that Romney won because so many Republicans agreed with his policy positions? No, he won because the entire Republican Party establishment was thoroughly in his corner. Both Bush’s. Almost every single Republican Governor and Senator including Nikki Haley, Bobby Jindal, Lindsy Graham, John McCain, Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Michele Bachmann, John Boehner. Everyone. And when we’re talking about politicians endorsing candidates within their own party, it is incoherent to say that you could swing that endorsement by changing the range of popular opinion. That’s the whole point of endorsements.

Gingrich was the insurgent candidate, and he walked so Trump could run.

Shifting Opinion versus Raising Consciousness

So what’s the point of anything? What’s the point of convincing people of things or doing any kind of political discussion if the Overton window isn’t real?

Remember that the Overton Window is specifically about changing the range of opinion in order to change the policies that politicians are willing to support.

Imagine you are Lenin. You see a lot of workers who want shorter hours and higher pay. They shouldn’t be satisfied with that. They should demand paid vacation! Stock options! Clear payment schedules! The government should guarantee employment and collective bargaining power! Agitating for this is moving the Overton Window. Eventually, someone who comes in and says that prices and production should be set by the unhampered market will find himself speaking to a sea of confused and unsympathetic faces.

On the other hand, consider that Lenin goes to his existing core of socialist associates and says this:

“Gentlemen. It doesn’t really matter what the majority of people think. Certainly not outside of a few major cities. What matters is that we maneuver ourselves to choke points of finance, information, and political decision making. I’ve been studying the mechanisms of this government and I think that we need to maximize system entropy by supporting any movement that challenges the legitimacy of this state. It doesn’t even matter what it is. If somebody has a complaint that will drain the resources of the government, we need to make sure we’re out in front of it. It’s not about winning votes in the election, it’s about twisting the arms of politicians until we get what we want. Be underhanded. Break the rules. Be Gay. Do Crime.”

If some Bolsheviks disagree with him, and Lenin spends time trying to convince them otherwise, he is not doing that to shift the Overton Window. the Overton Window is where it is. He is calling for a change in strategy. He is organizing.

Raising awareness of the Tsar’s tricks. Imposing Democratic Centralism over the party. Alerting his supporters to the presence of class traitors, factionalists, and social democrats (who are the moderate wing of fascism). Drilling them on talking points. Stopping them from getting distracted or selling out. These are important duties of a party leader, or of any polemicist, really, and it’s why I write. I want you to stop falling for tricks. I want you to start thinking about politics in a serious way. And I want you to stop believing in dumb nonsense like the Overton Window.

Derek Robertson is a writer, reporter, and producer at Politico Magazine. After the 2018 midterm, he wrote a piece entitled “How an Obscure Conservative Theory Became the Trump Era’s Go-to Nerd Phrase.” He interviewed the Mackinac Center’s president, Joseph Lehman.

“Honestly, we needed a way to explain to regular donors why they should support a think tank in the first place if they care about ideas,” Lehman told me. “The Overton window began literally as a way to solve a little bit of a fundraising and communications challenge. And Joe Overton, my colleague, was busy trying to work this into a brochure, but he died before that was complete.” He went on to say, “It fell to us who worked with him to put it together.”

By his own mouth, it was a fundraising pitch for a think tank. Put it down. let it go. Stop talking about it. Thank you.

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Understanding how politics actually works has something of a steep learning curve. This list of recommended reading is long. If you’re just starting out, I’d say to start with Caldwell, then Parvini, then Greenblatt:

Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky

The Dictator’s Handbook, Why Bad Behavior Is Often Good Politics by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith

The Age of Entitlement by Christopher Caldwell

The Myth of the Rational Voter by Bryan Caplan

March to the Majority by Newt Gingrich

It Could Happen Here by Johnathan Greenblatt

Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky

Crisis and Leviathan by Robert Higgs

Democracy: The God That Failed by Hans-Hermann Hoppe

The Transgender-Industrial Complex by Scott Howard

The Open Society Playbook by Scott Howard

10% Less Democracy by Garett Jones

Then Comes Marriage by Roberta Kaplan

Cronyism: Liberty vs Power in Early America by Patrick Newman

The Populist Delusion by Neema Parvini

Big Israel: How Israel’s Lobby Moves America by Grant F. Smith

And, of course, this series would not have been possible if I did not have access to A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media.

1. To believe that the concentration camps were like the Milgram experiment, you have to believe that not only the prisoners but also the guards were initially told that they were doing a simple delousing. Further that when the guards heard the screaming, the commandant would open the door to the active gas chamber, poke his head in, then turn back to the guard and say “don’t worry, they’re fine. keep going.” Safe to say that neither Jankiel Wiernik, Dario Gabbai, nor Miklós Nyiszli ever write about anything like that.

2. If you heard someone was named Thomas Benjamin Washington III, you would almost certainly assume that they were African American.

3. Insight, perception, sense motive, and deception are also useful skills. Who knows, a bit of linguistics, some sleight of hand, maybe even some Use Magical Device, am I right, fellas?

4. A big day for the right wing.

5. "In 1991, when the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force asked its membership to rank civil rights issues in order of importance, marriage did not even make an appearance.” -Caldwell.

6. Also known for filing the Sines v. Kessler lawsuit against the organizers of the 2017 Charlottesville rally.

7. The Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, are effectively a left wing NeoCon outfit led by “former” CIA operative Gloria Steinem and Hillary Clinton sellout Dolores Huerta. Its ideological father was Max Schachtman, a first-generation traveller of the Trotskyite to Neoconservative Pipeline.

8. This is not to say that the Trump campaign didn’t engage in any foreign collusion.

9. And a lot more fun.

10. Uncle Domingo joined the army during the Vietnam War, got his citizenship, and Hart-Celler did the rest. Mom’s mom had family in Florida.

11. The first half of Burnham’s life was spent as a Trotskyite, naturally.

12. In fact, there is a stronger continuity of personnel between the Socialist Party of Eugene V. Debs and the Republican Party than there is with that same party and the Democrats.

13. This rule is a bit dangerous if you don’t understand it, because then you might start doing Democrats R Real Racists, but in principle Rule 6 and certainly Rule 7 would account for this.