#overton window

[bicokun]

Totally. You can insist that you only want the people who are most principled, dedicated, and unflappable to external pressure in your movement and have a very tiny group of loyal foot soldiers, or you can be accepting to anyone who generally has the right idea even if they have their flaws, praise them even when maybe it is just the bare minimum, and have a veritable army of allies to overwhelm the regressive forces at our doorsteps.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

[xclowniex]

It's crazy how the overton window for antisemitism has shifted.

The overton window describes the concept that there is a window of what is considered socially acceptable. This window can shift over time in either direction if more people start to believe more in policies from one side

I can't be bothered making a proper graph so I've typed it out going from unthinkable on the red to unthinkable on the blue side, with the ideal overton window in purple with the middle one being the most ideal. (((Zionists))) represents when people say zionist but either directly or indirectly mean jews and is a play on an antisemitic dogwhistle

Killing all jews

Putting all jews in prison

Restricting movement of jews

Restricting jewish businesses

Disliking jews but not doing anything about it

Being against all forms antisemitism

Disliking Israel but not holding jews accountable for Israel's actions

Boycotting (((zionist))) businesses

Preventing (((zionists))) from accessing places

Destroying Israel

Killing all (((zionists)))

The overton window should be the purple I coloured. But unfortunately it has shifted lean so that "disliking jews but not doing anything about it" is pushed into the red and "boycotting (((zionist))) business is now purple and in the overton window. And it is even sadly starting to shift further to push "being against all forms of antisemitism" out and include "preventing (((zionists from accessing places"

Ideally the window should only cover "all forms of antisemitism is bad" but to be a realist, what I typed out should be what it is. It should not be shifted towards any side

[odinsblog]

One About The Atmosphere: Want to change minds? Stop trying. Change the atmosphere instead.

Donald Trump in 2016 greets a screaming horde of ecstatic white christian nationalists

Minivan was a nice enough guy. He was easygoing; a happy guy with a frequently deployed smile. I don’t recall much anger from him, nor many strongly held opinions. I wouldn’t call him a philosophical type. No deep late night talks with Stove Minivan is my recollection.

This is the sort of dude I’d hang out with at a party, if there were a party we were both at, but not one with whom I’d maintain a relationship if we both graduated and then moved to different places—which I know for a fact, because that’s what happened. We drifted.

So then what happened is twelve years or so later I got on The Facebook, and Stove Minivan was there, too, and before long, we were friends again, he and I, and so were me and my other college friends, and them with him, and … look, you know the drill. It was The Facebook.

Minivan was no longer a pre-med student at a small northern liberal arts college. He was a doctor—a general care practitioner, if memory serves—in a smallish plains state town, very much like many other towns in the great plains or elsewhere in the country, I imagine.

Anyway, before long I noticed something about Minivan. Even though his feed was full of pictures of him and his lovely family, and he was smiling in them just the same as he always had in college, he was angry.

He was *enraged*

What was he angry about? The Demonrats.

Minivan was absolutely enraged about everything the Demonrats did. He also was out of his mind angry about Killary, and Obummer, the leaders of the Demonrats—or at least they were the front for the real leader of the Demonrats, who even back then I believe was George Soros.

What did the Demonrats do? Oh my heck, what *didn’t* they do? Mostly they hated America and American security and American economic strength, it seems. They engaged in corruption and bowed to foreign powers a lot. They shredded the dignity of the presidency, that’s for sure.

Minivan’s worldview wasn’t particularly coherent, if you want to know the truth.

I couldn’t help to notice that the Demonrats weren’t actually doing many of the things that Minivan thought they were doing.

And I noticed other things.

For example, I couldn’t help but notice that a lot of the policies Minivan supported were directly *causing* the sorts problems that made Minivan so angry.

And I couldn’t help but notice that well-sourced information enraged him more than pretty much anything else.

There was a lot of linking to sites I’d never heard of, like Breitbart and Newsmax, and of course plenty of Fox News. There were a lot of memes. There were a lot of conspiracy theories (a big birther, was Minivan).

Some of his posts contained subtle bigotry. Most of the rest contained not-subtle bigotry. Several of them contained slogans and statements that were, very simply, neo Nazi and white supremacist memes and shibboleths.

There was a lot of commentary accompanying these posts from Minivan, who was saying shocking stuff for a small-town family doctor … the sorts of things that it seemed to me would make people not want to use this person as a doctor, or or sit next to that person on a bus.

I hadn’t heard of Alex Jones, yet, but Minivan sounded a lot like Alex Jones, word for word and beat for beat. He’d even start his posts like a right-wing radio host: Sorry folks, but you can’t even make stuff like this up—ironically, accompanying things that had been made up.

This was all pretty distressing to those of us who had known Minivan back in the day, before he had become so obsessed with Demonrats.

So, a lot of us, myself included, did exactly what The Facebook wants.

We engaged with him.

At the time my belief was, you defeated bad ideas with better ideas, by confronting the bad ideas directly with the better ideas. Debate was for changing minds. You presented your ideas, they presented theirs, you countered, they countered, eventually everybody saw the truth.

But the intention was that I’d change his mind, with facts presented logically, delivered calmly and patiently.

This was my belief.

What happened confounded me, but perhaps you can predict it.

Minivan escalated any correction, however calmly stated or bloodlessly presented, into scorched earth territory. He rejected all proofs by rejecting the source outright as irrevocably tainted by bias, or he’d spiral into non sequitur, spamming our feeds with more misinformation.

He would claim he never said things he had just said, even though the statements were still there for anybody to read, one comment earlier in the thread.

He’d claim that I said things I'd never said, as anyone foolish enough to read through our conversations could discover.

He demonstrated a complete dedication to his ignorance and anger, and a total disinterest in anything like observable truth that contradicted his grievance.

It was confounding and unfamiliar behavior to me, at the time.

At the time.

All of it was larded with grievance, a sense that people like him had never wronged anybody, and everybody else had done nothing but wrong people like him.

The bigotry and authoritarianism grew.

And all the time, on Facebook, he and his family kept smiling their perfect smiles.

I’ll admit that over time my interactions stopped being polite and bloodless, and I’m not particularly sorry for it. I told him some things about himself he seemed not to know, but which I thought really ought to be said.

I have a bit of a penchant for sarcasm, which you may have noticed.

I employed this skill, and you can feel how you want to about sarcasm, but I think it helped convey the correct posture to take toward someone who says the sorts of things Minivan was saying.

The correct posture being "you have proved yourself to be a person who should not be taken seriously, and your positions do not deserve even a modicum of respect."

I found this a more healthy message to convey about Minivan to anybody watching, and I still do.

Eventually he blocked me, and he was out of my life forever. It was the right choice, and I'm very glad he did that.

I’ve pondered the incident since, as it’s become more and more relevant to “the way things are.”

A few things had become clear over time.

Minivan was not somebody whose intentions could be trusted. He was not operating in good faith, and I believe he well knew it, because many of his favorite sources of information have written instruction books on how to engage with people in bad faith.

Minivan was not debating; he was using debate to inject his counterfactual beliefs into the discourse, which were designed to further marginalize already marginalized people while simultaneously cloaking himself in self-exonerating grievance.

More, he was exerting an active effort to not know things that could be easily known, and to demand to be convinced out of deliberate ignorance, not because he was interested in having his ideas challenged, but because he demanded a world in which he got to decide what was real.

Further still: Minivan *learned* from me. The effect of telling him he was using one or another logical fallacy was not to sharpen his reasoning, but to teach him about the existence of logical fallacies, which let him (incorrectly) accuse others of those same logical fallacies.

So Minivan was deploying the language of logic, in ways that betrayed a total lack of understanding about what those fallacies were, granted, but in ways that likely made him seem more knowledgeable and reasonable to a casual or sympathetic observer.

He learned to ape our phrases and arguments, in much the way he’d learned to ape the style of Alex Jones and all the various Breitbart and Newsmax contributors he used to inform himself.

And these days it occurs to me: I hear a lot about "groomers."

We were not changing him by engaging with him thoughtfully.

We certainly weren’t changing him by engaging with him in kind.

Rather: we were making him better at what he was doing, and we were validating his world view—to himself and others—as one that merited engagement.

And week after week on Facebook, Minivan kept smiling and smiling and getting angrier and angrier, at us and Obummer and all the other Demonrats and liberals and every member of every minority group who dared to fail to ceaselessly assure him that he was right about everything.

I don’t miss Minivan's black-hole-sun smile. I think of it as my first hint of MAGA: politically overrepresented, socially coddled people, often living outwardly happy privileged lives, while seething inwardly that other people might be getting anything, anything at all.

Indeed, soon enough, another figure would come on the scene, whose behavior matched that of Minivan almost exactly, a perfect avatar for this spirit of aggrieved bigotry and supremacy that seemed to be moving through my former friend.

And sure enough, as I saw, there were millions and millions of smiling seething people who loved him.

And that guy became president.

Nobody believed he would. And then he did.

Because Stove Minivan, it turns out, wasn’t some weird outlier.

He was part of a growing new normal, a group of people who had been offered a chance to immigrate from observable reality and enter a dark world of constant hostility, misinformation, and self-loving grievance.

It's an invitation they leapt at, to which they cling even now.

It's a constituency immune to proof, angered by equality, cheered by cruelty, who blame others for the foulness of the shallow puddle of reasoning within which they have demand to be seated, even though we can all see them fouling it themselves, every day.

And afterward, a huge number of those shocked by this development decided the proper reaction was to accommodate it, in the name of unity—a belief, it seems, grounded in the idea that what you choose to get along with isn’t as important as getting along no matter what.

I’ll finish with the question that all of Minivan’s former friends would eventually ask, whenever they gathered together long enough for the subject to arise.

"What the hell happened to Minivan?"

Here’s the answer, I think: nothing.

Nothing happened to Minivan. Nothing at all.

He was always that guy, and he always thought the things he thought.

What changed was that he was given a lot of language with which to express those ideas, and access to enough other people who thought that way too, that it created a critical mass of permission.

The permission allowed him to change his attitudes and actions, and created a lot of other people willing to accommodate and normalize his antisocial anti-reality behavior, rather than reject it out of hand.

In college you could be pretty conservative, honestly. It was a pretty conservative place. But you couldn't behave like Minivan later would.

You’d be understood to be a far-right extremist, and people would then treat you like a far-right extremist.

Which is what you'd be.

I think it just wasn't possible for Minivan to be what he later became, because the atmosphere wasn't conducive to the possibility.

But then the atmosphere changed.

If we want to change it back, it's worth thinking about how atmospheres change.

(source)

[kaydub80]

And now, they're on the verge of joining the Federalists and the Whigs--16 years after they could have solidified a long-lasting majority. It's time to let the Democrats die on the vine.

ultimately the democrats chose to lose - they would rather lose without a ceasefire than win with a ceasefire, because their party and their donors have legitimate class interests aside from being the party in power. it was made clear that biden's policies were deeply unpopular even among his base, but harris refused to budge on them - or, rather, she budged quite hard to the right, but would not and could not make concessions that would materially harm the position of her party, class, and empire, such as cutting off support for the genocide. trump got 3 million votes less votes this year than he did against biden and still won, because 20 million less people voted for the democrats

[olena]

The firehose of falsehood, also known as firehosing, is a propaganda technique in which a large number of messages are broadcast rapidly, repetitively, and continuously over multiple channels (such as news and social media) without regard for truth or consistency. An outgrowth of Soviet propaganda techniques, the firehose of falsehood is a contemporary model for Russian propaganda under Russian President Vladimir Putin.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

(fuck that guy 🇺🇦🖕)

+

A big lie (German: große Lüge) is a gross distortion or misrepresentation of the truth primarily used as a political propaganda technique.

The German expression was first used by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf (1925) to describe how people could be induced to believe so colossal a lie because they would not believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously". Hitler claimed that the technique had been used by Jews to blame Germany's loss in World War I on German general Erich Ludendorff, who was a prominent nationalist political leader in the Weimar Republic.

According to historian Jeffrey Herf, the Nazis used the idea of the original big lie to turn sentiment against Jews and justify the Holocaust. Herf maintains that Nazi Germany's chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi Party actually used the big lie technique that they described – and that they used it to turn long-standing antisemitism in Europe into mass murder.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie

+

Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage coined in 2013 by Alberto Brandolini, an Italian programmer, that emphasizes the effort of debunking misinformation, in comparison to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. The law states:

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.

The rise of easy popularization of ideas through the internet has greatly increased the relevant examples, but the asymmetry principle itself has long been recognized.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

+

The Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by abandoning formal debating principles, providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments and that are impossible to address adequately in the time allotted to the opponent. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper's arguments at the expense of their quality.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

+

The Overton window is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. It is also known as the window of discourse.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

[rainbowpopeworld]

It is always time to move the Overton window as far to the left as possible. Do not compromise with fascists. Let’s reverse this bullshit violent trend.

[girl-with-bones]

Look. I hate all of The Discourse as much as anyone, but let's not pretend that leftist (online) politics got into this state on its own - not after literal decades of conservative power. Globally.

I mean, it's no wonder that we're squabbling amongst ourselves trying to decide which stripy flag is Good and which is an Evil Virus of Satan when the pressure to be this picture perfect model of morality is so... overwhelming.

Hate is so everywhere, hell, so encouraged, at this point. We all have our guards up. All the time. It feels like it's everyone for themselves, and thats done none of us any good.

Propaganda. Everywhere. All the time. Everywhere we turn at this point we find ourselves demonised, dehumanised, or just disregarded entirely. And our collective coping mechanism, it seems, is scrambling amongst ourselves to make ourselves, again, the most "perfect", "pure", "presentable" community.

This is not even just about the extreme examples. That's all been applied to terfism, acephobia, whatnot, but honestly it applies to all of us.

I'm tired. I'm so tired. Of having a "take" every time. Of having to have one.

I can't help but feel like our movement is so fractured because we're entrenched in conservative ground. It reminds me of two things: that one comic about the werewolf that doesn't get angry, can't get angry, because people will only see a monster; and that one tweet about people thinking it's better to do nothing wrong rather than something right.

Of course we feel like we can't do anything wrong, being "one of the bad ones" is something we've all been taught to desperately avoid - from those that hate us all anyway and from all of us with our guards up constantly.

Of course there's no space for compromise, there's no use for compromise. Not without a solid, dedicated, unified, practical movement. All the big options are just... awful. Democrats? Terrible. Labour? Spineless.

It's divide and conquer at every level. And we're super fucking divided right now.

Anyway, all that to say, while there is plenty to be negative about and there are a lot of problems with how we handle our ideas, the more that fascism is fought against, the easier it becomes.

Yes, Labour had to pander to tories to win this election. Yes, it was barely even a vote for Labour at all.

But, if this goes well over the next few years, and if public opinion finally shows the first signs of turning, then maybe, just maybe, we can start to have this discussion more on our home field. We can slowly, gradually, pull back the discourse and Actually Get Shit Done.

There is death in this world. There is pain. There is oppression. There is genocide.

There is also hope. There is also a future.

If. Maybe. Hopefully.

It's possible.

[shinobicyrus]

Listen. I'm not foolish enough to expect the Democratic nominee to proudly proclaim some socialist stance. That's just the state of American politics and its terminally myopic two-party system.

This need to appeal to the capital "M" Moderate, though? It's just the steady shift of Democratic policies further to the Right. It's how you get six Republicans speaking at the DNC, but not a single Palestinian-American speaker. It's how you get, for the first time in 12 years, no trans speakers at the DNC during a time when the GOP have put transphobia and anti-queer policies at the forefront of their platform.

Rather than dismiss or ignore the tired Socialist/Marxist/Communist accusations that Republicans fling at everyone to the left of fucking Sauron, Harris feels the need to tell people in an official public speech: "Look, I'm a capitalist."

This is a thing that no one asked or even thought about except for the most terminally online far-right trolls that weren't gonna vote for her anyway. Yet, she felt the need to reassure everyone she isn't some "radical." Whatever that means. This is how you have Harris promising to pass that failed bi-partisan immigration bill that Donald Trump sabotaged. Which, in case everyone forgot, would have been one of the toughest and harshest to date. Can't look weak against immigrants and asylum seekers!

This is how you have the Democratic Nominee for President promising to keep the US military the "strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world."

This is how you have the Democratic Nominee for President's economic policies compared to Mitt Goddamn Romney's.

Anyone remember the Romney's presidency? No, of course not, because he lost.

Will Harris defeat Trump in 2024? There's a good chance that she might win - or perhaps more accurately - that Trump will lose. I truly hope for this outcome.

But what about 2028? 2032? What about when someone less personally offensive than Trump but every bit as fascistic inevitably tops the GOP ticket? One a little more disciplined in speech, less prone to inane ramblings, and lacks dozens of indictments? How can the Democratic Party, ostensibly the "left wing" of American politics, supposed to stay competitive and distinguish themselves in a political arena when they're constantly ceding ground to the Right on immigration, military spending, the economy, guns; trying to hush controversial issues like "human rights for queer people," or "being a party to genocide" in a desperate attempt to appeal to some shrinking "moderate" demographic?

What do they have left, when all they can say is "well at least we're not weird like those guys"?

When NBC News of all organizations asked about the DNC's lack of trans speakers this year or the scaling back of discussions about queer rights, it was met only with silence:

"The DNC and the Harris campaign declined to comment."

Cool.

[chlochette-sunde]

Let's talk about the Overton window

What is the Overton window?

It’s a sociological concept that represents the range of policies considered politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.

This range can widen, narrow, or shift over time, depending on the political discourse presented to the public.

For example:

If a person of influence suddenly starts publicly endorsing far-right ideas, like suggesting the police should be allowed 'one really violent day, one rough hour,' then the notion of mass deportation of migrants may start to seem more acceptable, and the Overton window shifts to the right.

If multiple influential people begin calling for mass deportations, the Overton window shifts further in that direction.

If influential voices stop discussing far-left ideas, such as anti-colonialism, then the Overton window broadens in a way that pushes topics like health coverage for immigrant populations to the ‘far-left’ and thus to the margins of acceptability.

According to this concept, if you want socialism to be heard again, you first need the more radical leftist voices—anarchists, anti-colonialists, communists, and others—to speak up loudly. These voices help stretch the boundaries of the window and make more moderate leftist ideas, like socialism, part of the mainstream conversation. From there, it’s crucial for all leftist ideas to be as vocal and visible as possible to continue shifting the window and expanding what is seen as acceptable.

The concept explained in other words:

[contemplatingoutlander]

The Overton Window: How Trump and the MAGA movement normalized autocratic, theocratic, and neofascist ideas 

According to Vox: 

There’s a concept in political theory developed by Joseph P. Overton which suggests that there’s a “window” of acceptable ideas and policy proposals in public discourse. Everything inside the window is normal and expected, while everything outside the window is radical, ridiculous, or unthinkable. And Overton argued that the easiest way to move that window was to force people to consider ideas at the extremes, as far away from the window as possible. Because forcing people to consider an unthinkable idea, even if they rejected it, would make all less extreme ideas seem acceptable by comparison -- it would move the “window” slowly in that direction. [emphasis added]

I thought I would share this old video from Dec. 2017 that looks at how Trump’s first year in office moved the Overton Window much farther to the right than it had before Trump became president. 

The video is well worth watching, because in retrospect, it was prescient of the huge right-wing shift in today’s political discourse and policies in which:

Election deniers came very close to becoming secretaries of state and governors in swing states.

Red states have passed numerous bills that prevent the discussion of racism, sexism, and LGBTQ+ issues in schools.

The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and numerous red states passed draconian laws banning abortion.

The Supreme Court is poised to support the discredited Independent Legislature Theory that could decimate the ability of the American people to elect a president of their choosing.

The Supreme Court has crippled the Voting Rights Act and red states are passing numerous voter suppression laws.

The gun lobby (and their acolytes in the Supreme Court) have created a nightmare where open carry laws are multiplying and gun control laws are being overturned.

Red states like Florida are legislating (or pushing to legislate) the teaching of a distorted, whitewashed history of the U.S., that emphasizes its founding as a “Christian” nation.

The Supreme Court has made it much harder for the Environmental Protection Agency to do its job at this critical time when the disastrous effects of climate change are accelerating.

Republicans are openly talking about dismantling programs like Medicare and Social Security.

The Supreme Court seems poised to overturn affirmative action in universities.

Some republicans are openly talking about banning birth control and same sex marriage and reinstituting sodomy laws.

[edited]

[correctopinionhaver]

not now kitten daddy's busy shifting the overton window

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Christopher Mathias at HuffPost:

There’s a quote often attributed to Sinclair Lewis that has gone viral again and again since Donald Trump first ascended to the White House, fodder for liberal memes on Facebook and reposts on the platform X: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.” There’s no evidence that Lewis, the early 20th-century novelist, ever said or wrote that sentence — its origin remains unknown — but it’s understandable why people think he did. Lewis, after all, wrote “It Can’t Happen Here,” the widely read 1930s dystopian novel depicting an Adolf Hitler-like figure rising to power in the U.S. — the type of fascist who eschewed the word “fascist” itself but “preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty,” and who “could quote not only Scripture but Jefferson” — and setting up concentration camps for members of certain marginalized groups, as well as for his political enemies.

The book’s sardonic title has served as the genesis for innumerable op-eds and magazine features in the decades since it was published, with headlines like “Could It Happen Here?” and “Did It Happen Here?” musing whether the horrors of 1930s and 1940s European fascism might be arriving on America’s shores. These musings, of course, sometimes elided the fact that many Americans, especially Black and Indigenous people, were already living under a type of fascism: white supremacy. Still, with the 2024 election victory of Donald Trump, there’s a very good argument that the particularly virulent strain of fascism imagined in Lewis’ novel, and the destruction of whatever semblance of democracy this country has enjoyed, are on the cusp of happening here and now. Like the apocryphal quote said, it is wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.

Trump’s connection to Christianity has always been tenuous, with critics speculating whether his faith was authentic or crafted out of political expediency, especially after a 2015 interview in which he was asked to name his favorite Bible verses and repeatedly demurred. But since his initial ascent to the White House, and especially after a July assassination attempt this year, his religious rhetoric intensified.

“My faith took on new meaning on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, where I was knocked to the ground, essentially, by what seemed like a supernatural hand,” Trump said last month, suggesting that divine intervention saved him from a would-be assassin’s bullet. “And I would like to think that God saved me for a purpose, and that’s to make our country greater than ever before.” While Trump’s rise to power in 2016 instigated an explosion in fascist groups — the Proud Boys, Identity Evropa and so many more — many of those organizations have since collapsed, falling to infighting and scandal, their members arrested or doxxed. These groups, in many ways, served as shock troops for the “Make America Great Again” agenda, sacrificing themselves to open the Overton window — that is, the spectrum of acceptable political discourse — so wide that Trump frequently parrots their words and ideas these days, openly talking about “remigration,” for example, a well-known euphemism for ethnic cleansing.

Yet the most enduring fascist formation, the one that has survived and thrived out in the open over the past eight years, counts millions of members among its ranks. As HuffPost has reported extensively, they gather at a loose confederation of churches on Sunday mornings, speak in tongues, perform faith healings and are led by self-described prophets and apostles who claim to have a direct line to God. Their revealed word always bears a striking resemblance to the latest MAGA or Republican Party talking points you might hear on Fox News, and contains prophecies that Trump is destined to rule over the U.S., returning to the White House to implement a reign of terror and vengeance over those who ever dared oppose him.

Trump has repeatedly threatened revenge, lashing out at the “enemy from within,” calling the press “the enemy of the people” and promising “retribution” and to be a “dictator” on day one of his next administration. His work will begin in earnest this January. And he’ll have the support of churches in the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR — a burgeoning movement of charismatic evangelical churches that are characterized by a belief in the supernatural, in modern-day miracles and in modern-day apostles and prophets, as well as an embrace of Christian dominionism, the idea that America was founded as a Christian nation and should be governed with an ultraconservative interpretation of scripture. This latter belief is articulated in something called the Seven Mountain Mandate, which states that Christians must conquer the “seven mountains” of societal influence — the financial system, the church, education, arts and entertainment, family, media and government — to form a perfect world. Once that is accomplished, the prophecy goes, Christ will return to Earth.

It is a movement that is fundamentally hostile to the type of democracy required for equal governance in a diverse and pluralistic society like the U.S., which is why it’s no surprise that NAR prophets and apostles played such a fundamental role in fomenting the antidemocratic Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, and why they’ve found a home in the highest reaches of a Republican Party increasingly beholden to a politics of outright domination.

The GOP’s official party platform is rife with NAR-inflected language, including a call to “keep foreign Christian-hating Communists, Marxists, and Socialists out of America.” Such language can also be found in Project 2025, the sprawling fascist blueprint for a new conservative administration that was spearheaded by The Heritage Foundation think tank and depicts Christians in America as under siege by “woke” enemies. Trump and JD Vance, now the vice president-elect, have repeatedly courted the New Apostolic Reformation, including in September when Vance spoke at an event hosted by an apostle who believes that Trump was destined to save America from Kamala Harris, with the Democratic presidential nominee purportedly sent by the devil to “take Trump out.”

[...] Fascist movements often imbue their leaders with mythological, divine qualities, and the NAR is no exception. Trump was destined to rule for “such a time as this,” according to the movement’s prophets and apostles, who have at various points over the last eight years “made a hobby of connecting the famously profane, philandering, greedy real estate mogul to biblical heroes and quotable Bible verses,” wrote Matthew Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies and the author of “The Violent Take It by Force.”

With Tuesday’s destructively decisive win by Donald Trump, Christian Nationalists feel further emboldened.

See Also:

RWW: With Trump's Win, Lance Wallnau Says Christian Nationalists Must Tear Down 'The Gates of Hell' In Government

The Guardian: US Christian right celebrates after prophecy of Trump win comes to pass

[ramveins]

Whenever I see tweets like the one below, I get so confused because it feels like people just want to move the Overton window over but for... writing tropes? Instead of simply picking a less extreme trope to read from???

(Also the implication that people who read more "problematic" types of e2l stories must love oppressors and bullies in real life is a little... 😬)

^My badly done visualization for reference that does Not include all forms of (thing)-to-lovers just fyi lol

[odinsblog]

For a very long time mainstream media has been conflating the word “moderate” with the word “conservative,” and moving the Overton Window further to the right.

And at the same time, the words “leftist” and “radical” and “extremists” are also being conflated, but that’s a discussion for another time.

Liz Cheney is not a moderate. Chris Christie is not a moderate. Nikki Haley definitely is not a moderate. I guess it’s nice that they are finally calling out Trump, but they all voted for Trump (twice!) and none of them are good people. (How do I know they aren’t good people? Because they spent most of their adult lives and careers supporting harmful conservative policies that intentionally target women and poor/Black/disabled/LGBTQ people to harm.)

The same goes for pundits like Ana Navarro and the other MSNBC “former” Republicans and Republican strategists who don’t like Trump anymore, but are still “proud conservatives.” They support most of Trump’s policies even if they don’t support Trump anymore. And Nikki Haley has even said that if the choice in November comes down to Biden or Trump, she believes that it’s who is Biden the bigger threat to America. (source)

And Nikki Haley has repeatedly said that she would pardon Trump, so that’s another big NOAP for me.

Look, I understand that neoliberals and conservative leaning Democrats have a tendency to kick left + kiss right, but people have GOT to learn that just because a conservative might occasionally do something right, like oppose Trump, that does not magically transform them into good people™ worth elevating or supporting.

One last thing: I’ve seen a lot of Biden supporters get all caught up in their feelings because Jon Stewart made fun of (gasp) Biden’s age. Listen: WE are not the ones who are in a cult! It is 100% okay for voters to joke about and criticize people in power. It’s MAGA who cannot criticize their dear leader, remember? It's the other guys, THE CULTISTS, who cannot accept even the lightest of criticisms.

“But Republicans will use it against us”

Yes, Republicans will use anything and everything against us, whether we said it or not. That’s what they dO. They lie, make shit up and try to use literally anything—true or false, good or bad—against non-Trump supporters. Being good and honest and not saying anything Republicans disagree with will not gain you any votes with Republicans.

Look, Idgaf about what Republicans and other people on the right think. About anything. Idc. Their opinions don’t matter and they aren’t going to change who I vote for in November 2024. I’m not worried about trying to change their hearts and minds, because they’re heartless and mindless.

At the end of the day, I dO think that msm tends to run with rightwing narratives, but once again, none of that foolishness will change my vote.

Put your grownup pants on and don’t get caught up in the drama.

[rainbowpopeworld]

This and the Cassandra-like pointing out of where we are heading are the summary of my political existence