The Overton Window

The Overton Window isn’t a frame of ideas; it’s a mirror of what we’re willing to excuse.

I learned about the Overton Window today. Yesterday, Charlie Kirk was killed and a school in Colorado was shot up. Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered a few months ago. These events are different, but they sit together in my head now and I can’t separate them. The Overton Window is how people explain what is acceptable at any given moment. It is not fixed. It slides depending on where culture drifts, who is shouting the loudest, what the media feeds us. Politicians don’t set it, they chase it. What was once unthinkable becomes normal. What was once normal gets shoved aside and treated like it never existed.

That sounds academic when I say it, like something you might hear in a college lecture, but you don’t need a textbook to understand it. You can feel it in your gut if you’re paying attention. You can see it in the reactions to what is happening right now. Kirk is dead and the outrage is immediate. Conservative voices are pointing, blaming the left, turning him into a martyr. If you flip on right wing media, you’d think the Left stayed silent, maybe even cheered. That is a lie. Democratic leaders condemned the violence immediately. They said it was wrong, they said it could not be tolerated, they said it was an attack on democracy itself. But you would never know it if you only watch the echo chambers. They erase that part of the story because it doesn’t serve the outrage machine.

Compare that to Hortman. She and her husband were murdered in their own home. A political assassination. There were statements, sure. Some leaders spoke with conviction. Others barely said anything. Misinformation about the shooter spread fast, then it all faded. The story slipped away like it was just another bad headline in a country full of bad headlines. The imbalance is obvious. Kirk becomes a rallying cry. Hortman is a footnote.

And while all of this is happening, kids were murdered in their school in Colorado. That should stop the country cold. But it barely gets coverage. No endless outrage cycle. No wall to wall demands for accountability. Just another tragedy tossed into the background because the Overton Window has shifted so far that school shootings hardly register anymore. It used to shake us. It used to shut everything down. Now people glance at the headline and keep scrolling. That is how fucked up this has become.

This is why I feel hopeless. It is not just the violence; it is the reactions. Outrage is no longer about truth or decency. It is about advantage. It is about whose team benefits. Leaders wear character like a cheap costume, putting it on when it fits the moment, ripping it off when it doesn’t. Values are props. Truth is pliable. Decency is optional. Outrage is a tool you swing when it works for you. And the more people accept that, the more normal it becomes. That is the window sliding, day after day, until we wake up inside a culture where hypocrisy isn’t shameful, it is expected.

Baseball shows this same pattern. Jackie Robinson was once impossible. Owners and fans said no Black man would ever play in the majors. That was the window. Then he stepped on the field, carried the abuse, played his heart out, and forced the game to shift. Now segregation in baseball is unimaginable. Pete Rose was once the poster boy for gambling as the unforgivable sin. He was banned for life. That was the window. Now Major League Baseball cashes in with sportsbook partners, betting lounges, odds on the screen, while Rose stays in exile. Bill James was a joke to the old guard, then the numbers became gospel and scouts who trusted their eyes lost their jobs. Instant replay was mocked as a gimmick, now we can’t imagine the game without it. The window always moves. Sometimes toward justice. Sometimes toward money. Sometimes toward cynicism.

Politics works the same way. January 6 used to be unthinkable. A mob storming the Capitol, smashing windows, hunting politicians. It happened. People died. Most politicians condemned it immediately, but others on the Right excused it, spun it, and defended it as patriotism. Now election denial is just part of the political landscape. Book bans used to sound like something from another century. Now entire states are pulling titles off shelves and calling it virtue. We used to laugh at strongman rhetoric in this country. Now millions cheer for it. That is the Overton Window sliding in real time.

The sick part is how quickly people adjust. What should be shocking becomes normal in a week. What should be unacceptable gets absorbed into daily life. A school shooting. A political assassination. A media echo chamber erasing facts and replacing them with blame. We are living in a moment where the window has shifted so far that madness is treated as ordinary. It really is stranger than fiction. If you wrote this twenty years ago in a novel people would have said it was too far-fetched. Too dark. Too cynical. Yet here we are.

Baseball at least gives me hope that windows can move back. Robinson and Rickey shoved the window open and paid the price, but the game was better. That didn’t happen by accident. It happened because people were willing to risk something. That is what I don’t see right now in politics. I see people cashing in on chaos. I see people building platforms on division. I see people screaming when it suits them and silent when it does not. I don’t see anyone with the courage to shove the window back toward decency.

That is what scares me the most. The Overton Window explains too much. It maps our hypocrisy. It shows us how we got here. What should be unthinkable becomes acceptable. What should be unacceptable fades away as just another Thursday. Sitting here the day after Kirk was killed and kids in Colorado were murdered, I can’t shake how normal it feels for people to accept it. And that feeling of normal is the most dangerous part of all.