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Thanks to the work of the Censorship Industrial Complex, an industry built of dozens of agencies and thousands of third-party cutouts including universities, we were led to believe that lockdowns and closures were just the way things are done. Vast amounts of the propaganda we endured was top down and wholly manufactured.

The concept of the Overton window caught on in professional culture, particularly those seeking to nudge public opinion, because it taps into a certain sense that we all know is there. There are things you can say and things you cannot say, not because there are speech controls (though there are) but because holding certain views makes you anathema and dismissable. This leads to less influence and effectiveness. 

The Overton window is a way of mapping sayable opinions. The goal of advocacy is to stay within the window while moving it just ever so much. For example, if you are writing about monetary policy, you should say that the Fed should not immediately reduce rates for fear of igniting inflation. You can really think that the Fed should be abolished but saying that is inconsistent with the demands of polite society. 

That’s only one example of a million. 

To notice and comply with the Overton window is not the same as merely favoring incremental change over dramatic reform. There is not and should never be an issue with marginal change. That’s not what is at stake. 

To be aware of the Overton window, and fit within it, means to curate your own advocacy. You should do so in a way that is designed to comply with a structure of opinion that is pre-existing as a kind of template we are all given. It means to craft a strategy specifically designed to game the system, which is said to operate according to acceptable and unacceptable opinionizing. 

In every area of social, economic, and political life, we find a form of compliance with strategic considerations seemingly dictated by this Window. There is no sense in spouting off opinions that offend or trigger people because they will just dismiss you as not credible. But if you keep your eye on the Window – as if you can know it, see it, manage it – you might succeed in expanding it a bit here and there and thereby achieve your goals eventually. 

The mission here is always to let considerations of strategy run alongside – perhaps even ultimately prevail in the short run – over issues of principle and truth, all in the interest of being not merely right but also effective. Everyone in the business of affecting public opinion does this, all in compliance with the perception of the existence of this Window. 

Tellingly, the whole idea grows out of think tank culture, which puts a premium on effectiveness and metrics as a means of institutional funding. The concept was named for Joseph Overton, who worked at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Michigan. He found that it was useless in his work to advocate for positions that he could not recruit politicians to say from the legislative floor or on the campaign trail. By crafting policy ideas that fit within the prevailing media and political culture, however, he saw some successes about which he and his team could brag to the donor base. 

This experience led him to a more general theory that was later codified by his colleague Joseph Lehman, and then elaborated upon by Joshua Treviño, who postulated degrees of acceptability. Ideas move from Unthinkable to Radical to Acceptable to Sensible to Popular to become Policy. A wise intellectual shepherd will manage this transition carefully from one stage to the next until victory and then take on a new issue. 

The core intuition here is rather obvious. It probably achieves little in life to go around screaming some radical slogan about what all politicians should do if there is no practical means to achieve it and zero chance of it happening. But writing well-thought-out position papers with citations backed by large books by Ivy League authors and pushing for changes on the margin that keep politicians out of trouble with the media might move the Window slightly and eventually enough to make a difference. 

Beyond that example, which surely does tap into some evidence in this or that case, how true is this analysis? 

First, the theory of the Overton window presumes a smooth connection between public opinion and political outcomes. During most of my life, that seemed to be the case or, at least, we imagined it to be the case. Today this is gravely in question. Politicians do things daily and hourly that are opposed by their constituents – fund foreign aid and wars for example – but they do it anyway due to well-organized pressure groups that operate outside public awareness. That’s true many times over with the administrative and deep layers of the state. 

In most countries, states and elites that run them operate without the consent of the governed. No one likes the surveillance and censorial state but they are growing regardless, and nothing about shifts in public opinion seem to make any difference. It’s surely true that there comes a point when state managers pull back on their schemes for fear of public backlash but when that happens or where, or when and how, wholly depends on the circumstances of time and place. 

Second, the Overton window presumes there is something organic about the way the Window is shaped and moves. That is probably not entirely true either. Revelations of our own time show just how involved are major state actors in media and tech, even to the point of dictating the structure and parameters of opinions held in the public, all in the interest of controlling the culture of belief in the population. 

I had read Manufacturing Consent (Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman; full text here) when it came out in 1988 and found it compelling. It was entirely believable that deep ruling class interests were more involved than we know about what we are supposed to think about foreign-policy matters and national emergencies, and, further, entirely plausible that major media outlets would reflect these views as a matter of seeking to fit in and ride the wave of change. 

What I had not understood was just how far-reaching this effort to manufacture consent is in real life. What illustrates this perfectly has been media and censorship over the pandemic years in which nearly all official channels of opinion have very strictly reflected and enforced the cranky views of a tiny elite. Honestly, how many actual people in the US were behind the lockdowns policy in terms of theory and action? Probably fewer than 1,000. Probably closer to 100. 

But thanks to the work of the Censorship Industrial Complex, an industry built of dozens of agencies and thousands of third-party cutouts including universities, we were led to believe that lockdowns and closures were just the way things are done. Vast amounts of the propaganda we endured was top down and wholly manufactured. 

Third, the lockdown experience demonstrates that there is nothing necessarily slow and evolutionary about the movement of the Window. In February 2020, mainstream public health was warning against travel restrictions, quarantines, business closures, and the stigmatization of the sick. A mere 30 days later, all these policies became acceptable and even mandatory belief. Not even Orwell imagined such a dramatic and sudden shift was possible! 

The Window didn’t just move. It dramatically shifted from one side of the room to the other, with all the top players against saying the right thing at the right time, and then finding themselves in the awkward position of having to publicly contradict what they had said only weeks earlier. The excuse was that “the science changed” but that is completely untrue and an obvious cover for what was really just a craven attempt to chase what the powerful were saying and doing. 

It was the same with the vaccine, which major media voices opposed so long as Trump was president and then favored once the election was declared for Biden. Are we really supposed to believe that this massive switch came about because of some mystical window shift or does the change have a more direct explanation? 

Fourth, the entire model is wildly presumptuous. It is built by intuition, not data, of course. And it presumes that we can know the parameters of its existence and manage how it is gradually manipulated over time. None of this is true. In the end, an agenda based on acting on this supposed Window involves deferring to the intuitions of some manager who decides that this or that statement or agenda is “good optics” or “bad optics,” to deploy the fashionable language of our time. 

The right response to all such claims is: you don’t know that. You are only pretending to know but you don’t actually know. What your seemingly perfect discernment of strategy is really about concerns your own personal taste for the fight, for controversy, for argument, and your willingness to stand up publicly for a principle you believe will very likely run counter to elite priorities. That’s perfectly fine, but don’t mask your taste for public engagement in the garb of fake management theory. 

It’s precisely for this reason that so many intellectuals and institutions stayed completely silent during lockdowns when everyone was being treated so brutally by public health. Many people knew the truth – that everyone would get this bug, most would shake it off just fine, and then it would become endemic – but were simply afraid to say it. Cite the Overton window all you want but what is really at issue is one’s willingness to exercise moral courage. 

The relationship between public opinion, cultural feeling, and state policy has always been complex, opaque, and beyond the capacity of empirical methods to model. It’s for this reason that there is such a vast literature on social change. 

We live in times in which most of what we thought we knew about the strategies for social and political change have been blown up. That’s simply because the normal world we knew only five years ago – or thought we knew – no longer exists. Everything is broken, including whatever imaginings we had about the existence of this Overton window. 

What to do about it? I would suggest a simple answer. Forget the model, which might be completely misconstrued in any case. Just say what is true, with sincerity, without malice, without convoluted hopes of manipulating others. It’s a time for truth, which earns trust. Only that will blow the window wide open and finally demolish it forever. 

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Learn Why The Globalists Are Killing Their Own Monetary System

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“You hear people say, ‘Well, we did the best we could with what we knew.’ No, they did not,” he says.

During a recent episode of Dr. Phil Primetime, viewers were provided a dose of reality regarding the complete failure of health “experts” during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“You hear people say, ‘Well, we did the best we could with what we knew.’ No, they did not,” Dr. Phil said. “They knew better. And if they didn’t know better, they damn well should have known better. That’s what they’re paid to do.”

Explaining he’s “not some conspiracy theorist,” Dr. Phil noted, “I’m saying we need to think about whether we’re going to rely on science and how we’re going to react when the government comes in and starts telling us what we can and can’t do. I think we need less government. I think if they would step back, we tend to have a way to work these things out.”

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‘What economy are we f**king living in that it costs seven dollars to buy an apple?!’

A distressed woman took to social media to slam the insane price hikes in the Biden economy, highlighting how one apple she purchased at a Whole Foods store cost upwards of $7.

“I thought it was probably just like two to three dollars. I scan this mother effer. I scanned it — seven fuckin’ dollars. Seven,” the woman explained, saying she bought a “SugarBee” apple.

The woman next described asking a clerk to verify the price.

“Literally, the moment I scan it I was like, ‘Wait, what?’ Because the thing is, I had to weigh it… and I weighed it and then there was like one of the staff members. And I was like, ‘Um, excuse me? Is this actually seven dollars?’ And she, like, input all her information, and she’s like, ‘Yeah, seven dollars.’”

“What economy? What economy are we fucking living in that it costs seven dollars to buy an apple? I could’ve sworn like some other apple that I bought from here was not fucking seven doll– that’s crazy!”

The young woman’s frustration towards rising prices in the Biden economy comes as Gen Z’s discontent with “Bidenomics” is beginning to manifest in polls, showing the demographic is listing the “economy” as their top priority going into the 2024 election.

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Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act offers blanket immunity to health providers who jab children without parental consent, according to N.C. appeals court.

A North Carolina Court of Appeals found that a clinic whose personnel gave a 14-year-old boy a COVID-19 shot without his or his parents’ consent was protected by the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP Act). 

The court unanimously ruled in March against Tanner Smith and his mother’s constitutional rights despite calling the act of forcing the child to get a COVID-19 jab against his will “egregious.”

From The Vaccine Reaction:

Despite calling the act of forcing a child to get a COVID-19 shot against his will and without his parent’s consent, “egregious,” the court unanimously concluded that the PREP Act preempted state law and protected the defendants from being held liable for battery, violation of Tanner’s mother’s constitutional liberty and parental rights, and violation of Tanner’s bodily autonomy and plaintiffs’ federal constitutional rights.

The incident began in 2021 after the Western Guilford High School in Greensboro, North Carolina sent a letter to Tanner’s parents claiming that unless he got tested for SARS-CoV-2, he would not be able to “return to football practice until cleared by a public health professional.”

The letter went on to say the school would be hosting a free clinic that offers COVID testing, adding that “consent for testing is required.”

Then things took a turn for the worse.

The following day, Tanner’s step-father took him to the clinic at the local school for the free testing so that Tanner could return to football practice. The school district failed to inform the parents that a there was also a free vaccination clinic along with the free testing at the school that same day. While Tanner’s step-father waited in the car, Tanner filled out a form that he believed was for the free testing needed to return to football practice. At that time, one of the clinic workers attempted to reach out to Tanner’s mother but she was not available. Tanner’s step-father who was waiting outside the clinic was not called.

Tanner made it clear to the the clinic workers that he was there for a COVID-19 test and not for the COVID shot and that he did not want a shot. However, one of the clinic workers was heard to have said, “give it to him anyway.” Despite his protest and the clinic’s failure to get parental consent, Tanner was given a Pfizer/BioNTech Comirnaty COVID shot.

Tanner and his mother sued the school district and the vaccine clinic alleging battery, violation of Tanner’s mother’s constitutional liberty and parental rights, violation of Tanner’s bodily autonomy and violation of plaintiffs’ federal constitutional rights.

But the trial court dismissed their complaint in 2023 due to the PREP Act shielding the defendants.

The Court of Appeals affirmed the trial court’s decision last month, claiming that although N.C. state law requires a healthcare provider to obtain written consent from a parent before administering any vaccine to a minor, the PREP Act “preempts” state law.

“Its intent is to prevent the egregious conduct alleged in the case before us, and to safeguard the constitutional rights at issue—Emily’s parental right to the care and control of her child, and Tanner’s right to individual liberty,” the court wrote. “Notwithstanding, the statute remains explicitly subject to ‘any other provision of law to the contrary’ under the broad provision preempting state law in the PREP Act.”

The PREP Act, which began in 2005, states that the Secretary of Health and Human Services may recommend the use of one or more countermeasures after declaring that a disease, health condition or threat to public health constitutes an emergency.

In that case, a healthcare provider covered by the countermeasures “shall be immune from suit and liability.”

“To further define who was covered or granted immunity under the PREP Act, the Secretary set forth a declaration on Mar. 17, 2020 that defined ‘covered persons’ as including, ‘manufacturers, distributors, program planners, and qualified persons, and their officials, agents, and employees, and the United States,’” The Vaccine Reaction reported.

“Bound by the broad scope of immunity provided by the PREP Act, we are constrained to hold it shields Defendants, under the facts of this case, from Plaintiffs’ claims relating to the administration of the COVID-19 vaccine,” the court ruled.

Eight Republican state House members urged the North Carolina Supreme Court in a legal brief on Friday to take the case.

“They have a special interest in protecting the fundamental rights of the parents they represent and for whom the General Assembly has recently enacted legislation on the very subject embraced by this appeal,” wrote Tyler Brooks of the Thomas More Society, who represents the eight legislators.

“Love the COVID-19 vaccines or despise them. Either way those sentiments are irrelevant to resolution of the legal questions here presented,” according to the legislators’ brief.

“On its underlying merits, this case instead offers up two interrelated questions that are far more foundational to our republican form of government: (1) whether, as this Court and the U.S. Supreme Court have repeatedly held, parents have a fundamental constitutional right to direct the care, custody, and control of their children; and (2) whether a state can have the very local governmental entities it has created commandeered by the federal government to serve ends directly contrary to the express statutory directives of the Legislature,” the brief continued.

“Unfortunately, the opinion that the panel of the Court of Appeals below felt constrained to issue subverts basic tenets of federalism and fundamental parental rights by permitting rogue action by local bodies and their agents to escape meaningful regulation by state government,” lawmakers argued.

Emergency health decrees imposed by unelected bureaucrats should not trump constitutional rights and bodily autonomy in a free country.

Read the ruling:

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Latest ‘border riot’ unfolded as overwhelmed National Guard soldiers and Texas troopers looked on

Stunning footage has emerged showing a massive group of illegal aliens swarming and destroying fencing along the southern border in Texas over the weekend.

The latest ‘border riot’ in the El Paso area unfolded on Friday as National Guard soldiers and Texas Department of Public Safety troopers looked on.

Hundreds of illegals charged through a makeshift barrier erected a few yards from the permanent international wall, video published by Univision correspondent Pedro Ultreras on Tuesday night shows.

Men can be seen using a broken section of fencing as a ladder to scale up and over a partition where the concertina wire had been ripped down.

“More than 300 migrants forced their way into the US from Juárez to El Paso this [weekend], overwhelming the national guard [and] tearing down the concertina fence,” Ultreras reported.

It is unclear what transpired after the incursion but some of the violators could face criminal charges, according to reports.

“The incentives are too many and no border barrier will contain them forever,” border reporter Auden Cabello asserted on Wednesday after watching the footage.

“This was much worse than what Jennie Taer and James Breeden documented several weeks ago in the same area.”

On March 21, National Guardsmen were overrun by hundreds of violent illegals who assaulted soldiers with impunity in a shocking scene captured on camera at Gate 36 in the border wall in El Paso.

While over 200 illegals who participated in the mob attack were charged with rioting, some were released into the U.S. – including at least two identified as “instigators.”

U.S. authorities are still bringing illegal aliens through Gate 36, as immigration news outlet Border Hawk recently documented.

Chaos unfolds constantly along the U.S.-Mexico border, as Infowars regularly reports.

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Penn Station was slammed by hundreds of illegal aliens arriving to New York City this week.

Dan Lyman on X | Gab

They’re about as impartial as you’d expect of a Manhattan jury.

Fox News host Jesse Watters on Tuesday broke down the first seven jurors who were selected for the Democrats’ criminal case against former President Donald Trump in New York City.

And surprise — they are about as “impartial” as you’d probably expect.

“Yesterday, 50 white women wearing masks fled the courtroom claiming they couldn’t be fair to Trump. Anyone wearing a mask at this point is not an impartial juror,” Watters said on his show “Watters World.”

Meet the first 7 Trump Jurors pic.twitter.com/8pTCbzj27N

— Jesse Watters (@JesseBWatters) April 17, 2024

Watters went on to describe how many of the candidates were dismissed because they turned out to be “undercover activists” who tried “sneaking” into the jury.

The seven jurors who were selected so far have different backgrounds but share one thing in common: they’re avid consumers of mainstream media like CNN and the New York Times.

What are they chances the court would allow a juror who likes Infowars and Tucker Carlson?

These jurors were ultimately approved by Judge Juan Merchan, a Biden donor whose daughter has close ties to the Democratic Party.

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