Life is full of surprises. We knew that the GOP only cares about holding onto power no matter what, and if democracy falls by the board, oh well. Shit happens, right? But even the most cynical amongst us didn’t suspect that the proselytizers of some of the most far out right-wing nonsense out there are doing it on purpose, because they know that only by normalizing bizarre theories can the envelope be pushed for yet more bizarre theories to come.
Wendy Rogers is as far out as you can get. You can’t get too much to the right of where she is. And she’s doing it on purpose.
She freely admits here that she’s playing her constituents and anybody who wants to send her donations (and she gets a lottt of small donations from other states, make no mistake) because affecting the Overton Window is her goal.
Arizona state Rep. Wendy Rogers admits to pushing the Big Lie and other right-wing conspiracies in order to move "the Overton Window" in an effort to make her radical right-wing views more mainstream. https://t.co/coqu42cUuF pic.twitter.com/GcbnmFnLuK
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) February 16, 2022
The dumbing of America has been going full bore since the 1980’s. Now we’ve got a generation of Americans who don’t find it odd that some of the neighbors believe that the earth is flat. There’s great fun to be found these days in watching conspiracy theories on YouTube or Bitchute or wherever they show up.
Likewise, ignoramuses appear in the halls of Congress like never before. The likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Madison Cawthorn and the rest would have never even been there in the first place in the era before Trump.
When Trump came on the scene he was recognized as the disaster that he was, but Barack Obama called the shot early on when he said that Trump was the “symptom, not the disease.”
Trump was the living breathing manifestation of what H.L. Mencken declared, “On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts’ desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
When Trump was elected Americans cried out, “This isn’t who we are.” No. The sad truth is that Trump does represent who this country really is. There are plenty of MAGAs out there and he got plenty of votes. This is indeed who we are. But the current administration also represents who we are as well. We are both Americas. That’s the tragedy of life in this day and age. The fringe splinter crazy niches in the GOP are now running the party. Conservatism, as that word was once understood, crawled off in a corner and died long ago.
Wendy Rogers and her ilk want to drag down the existing sane America into the America that represents them more accurately and they want to make the MAGA crazies, crazier still. At least she makes no bones about it. And frankly? I’m impressed that she’s even heard of the Overton Window. It’s a cinch Marge Greene hasn’t. Greene probably thinks that that’s the window you jump out of when you’re so depressed from making a fool out of yourself over Jewish space lasers and gazpacho police squads that you just decide to pack it all in one day and leap.
Go ahead, Marge. Maybe the Overton Window is located on Joe Biden’s doll house/movie set of the Oval Office and when you jump out you’ll just sprain your wrist.
“Draw them pictures and they eat the pictures” said some missionary in an undeveloped third world country (like MAGA-land).
At least the third worlders figured out, likely after the first bite, the pictures were not edible. Magats are unlikely to ever learn how they’ve been duped, lied to, stolen from, etc.