What's Going On At The Overton Window?

WATCH: @JDVance flips the script on a New York Times reporter by pointing out that the government, media, and Big Tech rigged the 2020 election by teaming up to censor the Hunter Biden laptop, costing President Trump millions of votes.🔥 pic.twitter.com/2EO9Tl3v0a

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 11, 2024

It occurred to me yesterday that Sen Vance is suddenly forcing the Overton window, the range of potential policy subjects that are considered appropriate for polite discussion, wide open. His recent exchanges with highly respectable lady journalists on January 6 and Aurora have had the effect of asking why "deplorable" opinions shouldn't be just obvious, not disreputable. Here's his exchange with Martha Raddatz of ABC:

Raddatz: "The incidents were limited to a handful of apartment complexes... A handful."

Vance: "Do you hear yourself? Only a HANDFUL of apartment complexes were taken over by Venezuelan gangs and Donald Trump is the problem??"pic.twitter.com/6PlNAPur8y

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) October 13, 2024

Is this just Vance? Effective as he is, I think something else is going on. Last night I was watching a National Geographic series on Witches: Truth Behind the Trials. which in passing mentions witch hunts as a type of moral panic. This rook me back to the view I've expressed here that the 2020 phenomena of COVID lockdowns, masking, and Black Lives Matter riots were also a moral panic.

In fact, I've thought that COVID as a disease took on a metaphorical aspect, that it was a societal sickness that needed to be cured, at least in part, by canceling perfectly good and popular TV shows like Live PD and Cops -- but the real sickness was Trump, and that was behind his defeat in the 2020 election. The subtext of the lockdowns and masks was that, at least for the people who supported them, they fended off the Trump disease, and in fact, they might cure it in society at large.

But in reviewing other moral panics, from witchcraft to secret rooms with bad clowns at pre-schools, I've consistently found that they die out and end with a "morning after" phase, following which there's a final collective recognition that there were never witches, or there was never a secret room at the pre-school where the bad clown killed rabbits.

Let's recognize that over the past year, a general recognition seems to have emerged that things under Trump were better than they are now. In addition, the traditional 2016-2021-era objections to Trump -- that he paid hush money to a porn star, for imstance, or that he incited an insurrection on January 6, have not only lost their former effect, but in fact they had a contrary impact when court cases were brought against him for those prior allegations, and their actual effect was to improve his standing in the 2024 polls.

This says to me that not only is the 2020 COVID-BLM moral panic over, but even the "morning after" phase is also over. The Live PD producers, for example, were able to bring back the show with a duplicate studio look, the precise format, and two of the three original hosts on the REELZ channel as On Patrol: Live in 2022 after A&E canceled the show in 2020 at the height of the moral panic. If anything, On Patrol: Live, essentially the same show, has lost any controversy that ever attached itself to Live PD. This is how much the country has changed.

What's going on, I think, is a basic societal re-perception of Trump, in many ways equivalent to the much better established re-perception that a witch in the public mind is not only not a threatening or harmful idea, but is actually nothing more than a Halloween costume or a cartoon character.

This is what Vance has actually been exploiting -- the uber-respectable lady journmalists are trying to revive the peception of Trump as a social sickness, the cause of a moral panic, when the moral panic is in fact now long under the bridge, and by now we're even beyond the "morning after".