A sitting American Vice President said yesterday what no Western European politician of equivalent weight has dared to say in decades. He said it from a podium inside the White House, without pauses, without hedging, without the careful newspeak packaging that political speech in Europe has been rehearsed and broken in to wear.
He said it was okay to want to defend your culture. That it was okay to want to live in a safe neighborhood. That it was okay to want your job to go to yourself and your neighbors, not to a stranger you don't even know. That it was reasonable for people in Western societies to decide who comes into their country - and who does not. And he pointed directly at the ones who have driven the opposite course - Wall Street bankers, corporate lobbyists, and government officials - the people who, on behalf of everyone else, have decided that the West needs more and more cheap labor.
The idea that prosperity comes from bringing in millions upon millions of unvetted people and dropping them into the citizens' neighborhoods - that idea he rejected outright. And to everyone in the West who rejects the same idea, he said one thing - keep on going.
These words are not coming from a far-right blog. This is not something that slipped from some back room. This is the second most powerful man in the Western world, speaking from the most brightly lit podium we have, saying aloud what ordinary people have known for twenty years - and what the language itself has been bent, trimmed, and renegotiated to make impossible to say.
Because that is what has happened in the years behind us. Not only the demographic shift. Not only the institutions that drifted away from the people they were set up to serve. The language itself. The words were emptied out. The concepts were redefined.
The self-evident - that a people will shape its own home - was turned into an accusation. Wanting to preserve what one has inherited was translated into extremism. Wanting to choose oneself was translated into hatred of others.
The language is coming back. Not slowly. Not as a trend. But all at once, and from above.
The Overton window is no longer being pushed.
It has been blown completely open.
The question is how long Danish politicians will go on speaking as if it were still 2015.
We'll see. If they really are oblivious. Or they only pretended to accept the current fabricated reality because votes could be won.
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[From the press conference yesterday]
"One of the problems that we have in all of Western societies is that we have a lot of people who've decided - Wall Street bankers, corporate lobbyists, and government officials - that what the United States and what the West need is more and more cheap labor. What we believe in this White House is what we need more and more of is high wages for American workers and investing in our own people.
What you see all over the West, and it's kind of crazy, is this idea that the way to generate prosperity is to bring in millions and millions of unvetted people and drop them into your neighborhoods, and we simply reject that idea.
So, to everybody in the UK who rejects that idea, I'd encourage them to just keep on going. It's okay to want to defend your culture. It's okay to want to live in a safe neighborhood. It's okay to want your job to go to yourself and your neighbors and not to a stranger who you don't even know. It is reasonable for the people in Western societies to want to control who comes into their country and who doesn't.
A lot of people, frankly, a lot of people in the media have tried to persuade all of those people that it's somehow racist to want to protect your borders, even though very often the very people who are most affected by low-wage immigration are lower-income black and Hispanic Americans, right here in the United States of America, and I guarantee you that's true in the UK. So, we believe in making America great again. You can't do that unless you protect your borders."
