Today’s world offers two kinds of “reality”: political reality, or the reality polite society is allowed to consider, and observable reality, or what really, truly is.
If Donald Trump has accomplished anything at all, he has managed to push the Overton Window to a place where the “elephants in the room”—observable realities—can at least be mentioned, even if he and his people can’t necessarily be the ones to bring all of them up.
Because there are some topics that a majority of Americans simply cannot discuss rationally; some positions that, no matter how logical, sound, and even morally correct, cannot be taken without risking your livelihood in public or even private life.
Oh, but Donald Trump can get away with anything, you say. If anybody can say it, he can! In fact, he’s gotten away with saying more than any other politician has been able to say in the past 30 years. Most of Trump’s “gaffes” have been along the lines of the personal, crude, and obnoxious, and not usually the ideological variety that approach dangerous truths, trigger social justice warriors, and put careers in jeopardy.
But he has come close, ever so close—and perhaps that’s why the powers-that-be hate him so much and why they are afraid of the loose cannon he is. Because what Trump does say, what his words dance on the peripheries of, is emboldening many of his supporters who do know the truth to speak out in a way they haven’t felt comfortable to before.
Enter Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables,” those “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic” folks who support the Trump campaign and even show up for his rallies. While the vast majority of Trump supporters likely just know something is wrong and want to try a different course to fix our country, many others, thousands for sure and possibly millions, support Trump because they’ve in effect been “red-pilled” in areas mainstream society dare not trod.
Oh, they’re not racists, sexists, homophobes, or even Islamophobic—not in any real sense. But they are those things in Hillary’s SJW-tinted eyes simply because they see and acknowledge observable reality. They may not even like the reality they see, but they acknowledge its existence, and these days that’s a big step.
So when Hillary was talking about her “basket of deplorables,” she wasn’t talking about just the couple hundred looney and completely irrelevant KKK or neo-Nazi groups, David Duke, or even her old U.S. Senate pal, Robert Byrd. She was talking about people who recognize that the Overton Window isn’t where it used to be and have finally been emboldened to speak the truth because of Trump—even if not sanctioned by Trump himself.
Consider the vice-presidential debate between Republican Mike Pence and Democrat Tim Kaine, particularly on the issue of immigration. This in fact was one of the few issues Kaine managed to exploit because he knew that gentleman Pence had to “play by the rules” and ignore observable reality. Kaine, being a good social justice warrior, knew that Pence wouldn’t be able to deliver an effective counter. He had plenty of leeway to taunt Pence on the issue without any real danger of being hit with too many pesky facts.
When it all boils down, the only technical difference between the two candidates—beyond whether or not a Mexican immigrant has ever committed a rape (apparently Kaine thinks none have)—ended up being the question of when along the road to “fixing” our immigration system are we going to implement border security. Trump and Pence want it first. Clinton and Kaine say they want it third, or 16th, or something.
Those of us who understand observable reality know that border security must come first if we are going to save our country. So we support Trump. But it goes further than that, much further than where the discussion of political reality—the discussion sanctioned by the powers-that-be—could go during that debate.
I’m making no assumptions about what Pence does or doesn’t know about “observable reality,” but even if he did know the truth, he wouldn’t have been allowed to make perfectly sound, perfectly logical, perfectly true arguments that happen to be politically incorrect.
For example, Pence certainly could not point out that since the vast majority of post-1965 immigrants come from places with cultures that don’t value free markets, liberty, and transparent constitutional government, these immigrants tend to be left-wing and vote Democratic in overwhelming numbers. Pence couldn’t say that this has continued and show no signs of turning around, despite the best efforts of pandering Republicans such as Lindsey Graham, Bill Kristol, and Jeb Bush.
Pence couldn’t say that it’s possible to not hate Hispanics and yet acknowledge that admitting millions of unassimilated immigrants from Latin America will change the country politically and culturally in ways we may not like. (See California for a real-life example.) Even Democrats who speak of a “permanent Democratic majority” acknowledge this, but the Right isn’t allowed to go there for fear of being labeled racist or something.
Consider, too, Hillary Clinton’s plan to increase dramatically the number of Syrian refugees we accept. The only “approved political reality” argument against it is the one Pence brought forward in the debate by contending “we can’t know for certain who these people are coming from Syria.” It’s the same argument you see most Republican talking heads making.
The problem is, the Democratic response is easy. “Yes, we can,” Kaine said, “and when we don’t know, we don’t let them in.” Kaine actually repeated himself on this point when Pence tried to veer to something else. As usual, he was lying but using standard, accepted, polite, politically correct logic: logic to which today’s society by-and-large is bound, and so the point was unassailable. It assumes that if we did know who they were, that they weren’t outright criminals or terrorists (at this point), we’d let them in in a heartbeat.
The moderator even took it a step farther when she called the Orlando shooter a “homegrown, American terrorist,” as if Omar Mateen were somehow as “American” as granny, Johnny Appleseed and Beaver Cleaver, and as if his parents weren’t America-hating immigrants from a place—Afghanistan—that appears completely at odds with Western values.
Understanding the absolute folly of admitting any population that has a known affinity for extremism and terrorism and would very likely prey on the host population should be a mic-drop argument, and it has been met with some success by the likes of Ann Coulter and others, but even that doesn’t take it far enough.
Enter observable reality, or the reality we observe throughout world history anytime Muslims become the majority in a nation. We may not know exactly what percentage of American Muslims want to impose a caliphate on the rest of us (best estimates are somewhere between 5 and 20 percent), but it is more than reasonable to assume that as that population of Muslims in America grows through immigration, so, too, will the percentage of those who favor such schemes.
One need only observe the impact large influxes of Muslims have had in other Western nations to see the folly of these well-intentioned but poorly considered policies.Yet, it is still considered out of bounds to consider the argument in polite society.
None of this, of course, means that these arguments aren’t taking place on the peripheries of “polite society”—at the dinner tables of thousands and even millions of American homes.
There are countless other issues like this, of course, from race relations to the welfare state and the eventual, inevitable collapse of our economic system and the ramifications that portends.
But the Overton Window is shifting, in no small part thanks to Donald Trump. We can only hope it shifts fast enough to save our nation, our freedoms, and indeed the Western world.