I know about this. But it’s kinda separate topic already.
The Left was 100% trying to goad Trump into pulling the Insurrection Act card, and (probably) turning general opinion against such a radical move.
There’s lots of subtlety behind that “crass” talk…
Someone on X said, and I’m more than halfway in that camp, that Trump and Musk did a 4D move on the whole Epstein files matter.
No, its directly in line.
I even connected the dots.
You say:
That.
I respond with how Trump in fact Did do a lot to bring down the temperature.
Seems correct to me. 
.
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Fair point.
And Trump admin. did back off from the hasty and stupid stuff they first said about Pretti.
But I was referring to larger narratives.
Unfortunately, social media is the ONLY way one can be informed about politics, at least in the USA. That’s part of why boomers simply do not believe that reality is happening.
X is designed for intelligent people who can filter out the meaningless BS, which people need to be free to post. The minute you start trying to decide who and what is acceptable (beyond really basic controls wrt stuff like snuff films, depictions of abuse, etc), you’ve already lost the free speech battle. It has to be this way, or we don’t have meaningful free speech.
If someone in Lewiston read The Sun Journal (in business for over a century, now owned by a Soros nonprofit), listened to Maine Public Radio, read The Economist, and watched network news, they would not be informed of what Democrats have actually done.
That’s why so many people get REALLY uncomfortable when you try to explain a city like Lewiston. There’s so many facts out in the open now that legacy media simply doesn’t report, and they are SO significant, that people simply cannot believe they would go unreported by their trusted sources.
As far as the Overton Window goes, Gramsci’s Cultural Marxism explains what has taken hold in the USA. Republicans haven’t really changed much at all in my lifetime, and as @SkyzykS pointed out, Trump is still a 1990’s Democrat when it comes to public policy. Nothing in his platform would have been out-of-place in a Bill Clinton campaign.
Here’s a great primer on Gramsci, which explains the ideological basis of the “long march through the institutions” that is playing out today.
They’ve been thumping that drum that “he’s gonna declare martial law” for soooo long.
They worked so hard to create a self fulfilling prophecy, and he sidestepped them with a little bit of leverage applied in exactly the right place.
Hahahahahahahaha!
Yeah, for the sake of decorum, they definitely had to.
Honestly though- that dude was a fucking dildo.
Yeah-2A, yadda yadda. I don’t care. Its like my attorney told me when I got arrested for telling a cop “Fuck You!” (Cuz he was blocking the road!).
He said “You do have the right to freedom of speech. That doesn’t mean you have to use it though.”.
Theres a big difference between prudent gun ownership and what he was doing.
I would never have imagined in my lifetime that I’d see the shit we have recently. Like rule #1 has always been “Don’t fuck with the feds.” Thats how you get buried UNDER the prison.
You see the issue though, don’t you? General policing is not the job of the federal government in the united states. That falls to the state and local governments. Federal agencies have a a somewhat narrow scope of duty. If we play this stuff out to its logical conclusion
People riot and say the president is a dictator.
Mayor and Governor allow it and have the police stand down.
Riots get out of hand, federal agents get put in situations they shouldn’t be in and violence escalates.
President says mayor and governor need to get things under control or he’s sending in the military.
People see president sending in the military and call him a dictator.
Mayor and governor double down and refuse to use police.
violence escalates until president sends military.
President is a dictator.
So on and so on. This is actually right out of the old Democrat playbook. Very similar to the hissy fit they threw when the south was desegregated.
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I guess this applies to all information.
This what makes the situation interesting.
But I’m not solely talking about ICE etc. I was talking about how things have evolved for the past 10-15 years. You guys blame the “left” from this development, but I think it’s more complicated.
I still think we use Overton differently.
I don’t know what you’re referring to, you’ll have to be more specific. Or if I missed it in a previous post, I apologize.
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It’s alright. The conversation quickly turned to Minneapolis anyway.
Yeah.
So, you’re going to have to let us in on this big secret narrative or what ever, cuz none of us are clarivoyant.
It always does.
I don’t think so. I’m simply saying that Cultural Marxism is what has shaped the Overton Window we have today more so than anything else.
Contrary to woke left orthodoxy, racism wasn’t cool in the 1980’s, either. What changed is the definition of racism, achieved in no small part by Cultural Marxism and related schools of academic thought like Critical Race Theory.
While true that the 1980’s had more cultural artifacts that would be interpreted as racist today through a Critical Race Theorist’s lens, it had FAR less actual race-based public policy. DEI, which is explicitly race-based public policy based on Marxist ideas, was confined to the halls of academia and studied by affluent social science students who either didn’t need to get a real job or just planned on teaching, working at a NGO, or some other activist profession.
That’s how we ended up with the concept of microaggression in the first place, which was mostly racial in the beginning. Cultural Marxism is how the idea of microaggressions were expanded to things like sexual orientation and now gender identity.
The clear goal of Cultural Marxism - which has been largely successful - is to shrink the Overton Window to the point where only woke leftist ideas are acceptable to express. That’s why free speech is so important and why X is such a media revolution (or really counter-revolution).
All the events “left” has called “right” nazis, fascists or dictators. Or when people were publicly stating that Kirk “had it coming”.
All the events rascist or misogynistic slurs are thrown publicly by politicians.
Every time Trump has said something that has no connection in reality or is wayy exaggerated.
Every time Trump has openly made other politicians, journalists or political opponents ridiculous by calling they with insults or making lies about them.
I guess that is a start. And no, It’s not just about the Trump. But there’s difference in saying stupid things in some internet forum, than doing it from a position of authority.
This ia what I meant when I said that Overton is shattered. But maybe it’s always been like this in US. The amount of hostility in politics just feels disturbing from my perspective. It might be that my culture is just so much about behaving in public, that this whole mess in US seems unreal.
It’s a possibility. I can’t say definite answer to that yet.
Depends on what we mean though. Criticizing illegal immigration has never been taboo here.
I’ve said this before, but I kind of feel we had the same situation, but with milder symptoms few years ago. Now it’s more settled down.
Really the same thing they were saying right up until 2012.
Oh yeah, its completely crazy. No doubt.
We have trillions of dollars of tax money allotments in our nations budget, and every single politician on our entire continent thinks it belongs to them.
I’m actually glad its much more public now. Now we get to see these disgusting ugly pigs in all of their greedy and pride driven glory.
That stuff used to be behind closed doors. Now it travels across the continent at the speed of light.
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I can, because I lived through it here in the USA and received an education largely free from Marxist thought. It all happened (at least in public institutions) after I was an adult. Traces were present before and of course there were Marxist feminists and Marxist Black Liberation types on college campuses the whole time, but I saw all of those ideas march through public education, through mass media, through culture like sports and entertainment, and through private institutions like businesses.
We’re also not settled down at all here in the USA, but still careening towards further internal conflict. Democrats are doubling-down on Democratic Socialism, which is really a giant melting pot of neo-Marxist thought encompassing roughly two dozen academic lines of thinking, all brought to the forefront by Cultural Marxism’s successes, especially over the last decade.
It won’t go away unless the public funding gets pulled, which it has been to a large degree already, and that’s a big reason why so many Marxists are screaming “fascism!” and, of course, the old stand-by of “racism!”.
Despite all of their successes, Americans rejected their ideas in pretty dramatic terms in 2024 and they aren’t coping very well. Useful idiots are presently engaging in levels of useful idiocy unseen since all of the bombings in the 1970’s. We aren’t seeing that right now, but the idiocy we are seeing is much more widespread and much more culturally entrenched. It isn’t “fringe” people with these ideas anymore, it is mainstream, which is why the Overton Window has changed shape so dramatically in the last decade.
Here’s an example of a very anti-capitalist, left-leaning comedy show called Wonder Showzen that aired on MTV2 roughly two decades ago. It was very subversive and used a lot of shock comedy to get its point across. The whole show was making fun of the white establishment in the USA, corporatism, and other established power structures of the time. Now it is a source of “right-wing” memes, precisely because it operates outside of today’s Overton Window as the left sees it.
It was uploaded to YouTube 5 years ago, complete with a trigger warning. It was clearly poking fun at self-absorbed white people who purported to be against racism but still embraced racist stereotypes to justify their politics.
Here’s another example from that leftist subversive comedy that now lies firmly outside the Overton Window.
