The Overton Widow

The Newest Culture War Mints Some Unexpected Recruits

TFW you find out your squad is into terrorists.

The Overton window is moving at speeds no one could imagine just a few years ago. It’s rocketing left, transforming the abnormal and absurd into the rational and just. Bad ideas that were once unthinkable have become normal. The bizarre and the depraved have become every day. The fringe is the new center.

What is the Overton Window exactly? Named for American political scientist Joseph Overton, it’s the “range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. 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.”

Overton’s key insight was this: if your goal is to get the public to accept an idea that is outside the window, you have to move the window. 

And so, over time, the Overton Window  moves—usually slowly.  The change can be imperceptible as things gradually become mainstreamed. In some ways, the Overton Window was a force good as certain things that were in common practice became unacceptable to society, due to societal pressure or persuasion. The Window moved and presto, Americans tossed out practices like forced child labor, paddling kids in schools, and public hangings. 

What was once considered extreme slowly gains widespread acceptance by the public: abortion, gay marriage, swinging, recreational drugs, prostitution as socially acceptable “sex work.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

But there used to be.

My, how the Window has changed! Now it only moves one way—leftward—and at a speed unimaginable to earlier generations. 

I mean I knew college campuses approved of violent Antifa and BLM tactics: the firebombing, the Molotov cocktails, the vandalism, the burning of police precincts. I knew they wanted me and people like me dead, exterminated to the last breeding pair. This is not news.

What I didn’t know was how extreme the bloodlust was and how open they’d be about it. Normally one does not broadcast to the world one’s fondness for mass rape as a tactic of war. That used to be considered uncooth in polite circles, until extremely recently.

The Overton window moved so fast it left normal people behind. We are the Overton widows. We are the bad people now, the ones who oppose mass rape and torture.

My fellow Overton widows include my natural enemy, the crass feminist comedian Amy Schumer. She’s still an abortion-loving shitlib, but her Instagram feed has become a safe space for other normals who are appalled at the grotesque sadism of the left.

Her posts are the wailing of a newly widowed woman abandoned by people she thought were her friends.

An Amy post

And Just Like That, Wokeness Is Out the Window

Is woke virtue signaling finally over? Is it okay to lean in to unpopular political opinions again? Have enough people finally woken up to the fact that the Overton Window is in the hands of people who plan to make TikTok videos of their beheadings?

Amy Schumer and I logging on to social media every morning.