Goldtent TA Paradise

Jack Black & Kyle Gass & and Shifting The Overton Window

1. pedro_deleon says:

   July 17, 2024 - 9:24 pm at 9:24 pm

   (Sunday in OZ — Kyle Gass of Tenacious D apologizes)

   I can tell you what is happening here, but most aren’t ready to hear it.

   The majority of people don’t actually have their own opinions (or rather, convictions). They only express what is deemed popular or acceptable according to the overton window of acceptable discourse.

   What is happening is a “Great Recalibration” of that window.

   For years we were told it was acceptable to have political violence on the left (“Mostly peaceful riots.”) and that anything on the right, a punch, simple words, okay symbols, walking into a building, was ultra violent. The media and celebrities lead this narrative, and cemented the Overton window firmly in their preferred direction.

   The vast majority of people complied. The social pact demands it. It whipped them into mob mentality, and people did really mean things to each other (cancel culture, etc.) because it was acceptable and approved by the narrative. (sound like the rise of some country’s political movement you know from history?). This is how good people turn into bad people.

   But after the actual, visceral failures the Biden debate, that window began to shift. No amount of cognitive bias could prevent people from going “this is weird, we’ve been lied to.” (Covid revelations helped too) It came acceptable for people, for the first time in a long time, to question the narrative. They could now talk about it at the office, at home, in public and social media. That was not possible a month ago.

   So when just 2 weeks later we had the attempted assassination of Trump (and people unfortunately lost their lives or were injured)…nothing squared up anymore. The ultimate violence was not from the Right, as they were told, but TO the Right.

   The deaths were real, the tragedy was real. Some people, unaware of the deaths (or slow to process the events), continued to reinforce the OLD Overton window. Now their co-workers and friends and family, free to question for the first time, reacted against them. The public and the media reacted against them. This is what happened to Kyle Glass and Jack Black here. They didn’t read the room, they didn’t catch what was happening to the window, and they fell outside of it. The backlash was swift and harsh and not just from the right, but from people in their immediate circle…even the media.

   There are some who really do believe the assassination was faked or justified, that Trump really is the big H of our times. These are the radicals who have been yanking at the Overton window for years, and who, until now, have successfully skewed and skewered it to their side. They are the ones who are not apologizing, not deleting, not retracting and still gnashing their teeth. They are the ones that wrecked things for a long time. These people are unredeemable and we should never forgive them for what they did to our country and much of the world, for they truly are destructive and violent and not really part of the social pact.

   But here is the part most aren’t ready to hear:

   The majority of people aren’t those people. They look like them, sound like them, hated like them, and even did some very bad things…but they were told to, programmed to. Again, most people do not have their own strong moral core or opinions. The survival instinct of civilization tells them to just go with the flow, even when that flow has been hijacked for bad purposes.

   That hard part? You’re going to have to forgive them. To heal as a country and a nation, you have to let these people change their minds. They will go from saying horrible things and even doing them, to wherever we are headed next. Hopefully, that next is peace and unity and gradual abandonment of the current woke policies that have so divided us and damaged us as a nation. That historical country I mentioned earlier? Or others you know? They all changed too.

   Most people aren’t ready to hear that yet, but I suspect this is where Trump is headed and maybe after his speech, more will see it.

   But until then, this is why I and others are very loudly pointing out people falling outside the moving overton window and still espousing hate. Some are radicals and some are the masses. I don’t want anyone cancelled or fired. But I want the window to shift. Shift back away from the Abyss. That is why we have to point it out every time, especially now, when we have a chance to change that we haven’t had in a very, very long time.