Glenn Beck - The Overton Window

A security dialog popped up, and with a vocal sigh Noah entered his override password. If anyone ever checked to see who’d accessed these files and when, this would be another nail in his coffin. An hourglass indicator appeared, along with the message: Please Wait… Content Loading from Remote Storage.

“It’ll be a few minutes while this downloads,” Noah said. “We keep some of the more sensitive stuff off-site, to guard against the kind of thing we’re doing right now.”

Molly had left her seat and walked a complete circuit of the round room, looking over the various headings on the screens. She stopped by his side, pointing out a bracketed rectangle that enclosed part of the illustration on the slide in front of them.

“What’s that box?” she asked.

“It’s called the Overton Window. My father stole the concept from a think tank in the Midwest; it’s a way of describing what the public is currently ready to accept on any issue, so you can decide how best to move them toward what you want.”

“I don’t understand,” she said. She was looking at the screen related to national security and law enforcement. Except for the heading and the long thick line with an open box near its center, the slide was mostly blank. “How does it work?”

“The ends of this long line”-Noah walked up to indicate the starting point-“represent the extreme possibilities. At this end of the scale is the unthinkable, and all the way over at the other end is something else you can’t imagine ever happening, but in the opposite way. Too much good here, too much evil over there. If we were talking about government, it would be too much liberty at this end-which would be anarchy-and a complete top-down Orwellian tyranny at the other, so no liberty at all. Those in-between points are milestones along the way.”

Molly still looked a little lost in the concept, and she motioned for him to go on.

“Use airline security as an example,” Noah said. “Forty years ago people could pull up to the airport a few minutes before their flight, be treated with courtesy and respect, present no ID, just a ticket, and then get on the plane with just about anything in their pockets and their bags. There was some security, but it was almost invisible. Today that’s unthinkable, right? It seems like we could never go back to those days.”

She nodded.

“Now at the other end of the spectrum, let’s make the passengers arrive four hours early for the security line, allow no carry-ons, enforce a mandatory strip search, full-body X-ray, a cavity probe for everyone, and you have to stay in your seat the entire flight with a stun bracelet on your wrist in case you try to get up to go to the bathroom-which, of course, no longer exists.”

“They’re actually talking about doing some of those things,” she said.

“That’s getting to my point. If you suddenly had to go through everything I just mentioned you’d give up flying, correct? And with no security at all, you’d also never set foot on an airplane. So your Overton Window is somewhere in the middle, within this box. But my goal is to get you to accept more of those radical things over there, one step at a time.

“Let’s say tomorrow some idiot makes his way onto a flight with a little tiny homemade explosive of some kind. It’d be all over the news for weeks, whether the guy actually did any damage or not. You get scared, and the TV is telling you that all we have to do is buy some more expensive screening machines, hire some more of the same people who let that nut on the plane in the first place, and give up a little more dignity at the checkpoints, and we’ll be safe. That, of course, is a lie, but it has the desired effect.”

“It moves the window,” she said.

“Right. We put a false extreme at both ends to make the choices in the middle look moderate by comparison. And then, with a little nudge, you can be made to agree to something you would never have swallowed last week.”

“Why, though? Why would they want to do that?”

“The airline thing was just a random example, but I can think of a few reasons. If my client sold those X-ray machines, or had a contract for those extra security people, there’s quite a bit of money to be made there. It makes the government bigger and more involved in our lives, and that can justify higher taxes and fees, more bureaucracy, bigger budgets; it can build support for an unpopular military action, on and on. And who knows? Some of your friends last night might say that it’s all part of a program to condition the American people to put up their hands and submit to anyone in a uniform.”

“And this Overton Window, it’s used all the time?”

“All the time, everywhere you look. We never let a good crisis go to waste, and if no crisis exists, it’s easy enough to make one.

“Saddam’s on the verge of getting nuclear weapons, so we have to invade before he wipes out Cleveland. If we don’t hand AIG a seventy-billion-dollar bailout there’ll be a depression and martial law by Monday. If we don’t all get vaccinated one hundred thousand people will die in a super swine-flu pandemic. And how about fuel prices? Once you’ve paid five dollars for a gallon of gas, three-fifty suddenly sounds like a real bargain. Now they’re telling us that if we don’t pass this worldwide carbon tax right now the world will soon be underwater.

“And understand, I’m not talking about the right or wrong of those underlying issues. I care about the environment more than most, I want clean energy, I want this country to recover and be great again, people should get their shots if they need them, and Saddam Hussein was a legitimate monster. I’m saying opportunists can attach themselves to our hopes and fears about those things, for profit, and this is one of the tools they use to do that. The question to ask is, if they’ve got a legitimate case for these things, then why all the lying and fabrication?”

“So even if they can’t get us to accept everything at once,” Molly said, studying the diagrams, “they’re satisfied to move us a little closer toward the end.”

“Exactly. In fact, without some big earthshaking event, like a Pearl Harbor or a 9/11, that’s the only way it can work. Just little nudges in the right direction, and before you know it you’ve progressed yourself right into their agenda. It’s evolution they’re after, not revolution. And when I say ‘they’ I don’t mean some secret society out there. There’s always a prime mover behind these things, and it’s easy enough to figure out who it is. Just do a little research to see who stands to benefit; follow the money and power. You know who was one of the biggest lobbyists for this cap-and-trade business, right?”

“Greenpeace?” Molly said.

“Nope. Enron. A lot of powerful people are lining up to cash in on the deal if it happens, but back then it was a huge push at Enron right before the whole company blew up in America’s face. Carbon trading was going to be their biggest scam since they shut off the lights in California and held the whole state for ransom. They’d already started trading futures on the weather, if you can believe that, but this heist was going to be a thousand times bolder. Back then everybody thought they were joking.”

“Not quite everybody, I guess.”

“You’re right about that,” Noah said. “In fact, Enron was really just a huge diversion, like a Bernie Madoff, a patsy to throw to the wolves. Carbon trading moved forward anyway. The Chicago Climate Exchange is probably the best example, especially since it’s basically founded or fronted or funded by a Who’s Who list of environmental luminaries, like Al Gore and Goldman Sachs. But I can see why no one really cares-the Exchange’s founder thinks it’s probably only a ten-trillion-dollar-a-year market.”