There is wet paint on the wall. And a disturbing number of us seem perfectly happy to hold the ladder.
It’s Tuesday, November 3rd. I’m on my very first double espresso, watching a hesitant, tired Normandy sun struggle through the autumn leaves of my apple tree. Across the Atlantic, Americans are voting for all 435 House seats, 35 Senate seats and 36 governorships. Yesterday their president delivered a 54-minute excursion through his achievements and the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, including a gloriously detailed description of its renewed piping system. The pipes! The joints! The algae! The bubbles! A politician, plumber and builder like no statesman before him. The biggest, boldest, best, ad nauseam. This followed his recent campaign fixation with asses, notably the muscular posterior of Ohio Senator Jon Husted. America has elections, wars and a cost-of-living crisis, but its president is busy assessing the plumbing and buttocks of the nation. Meanwhile, his administration tried to stop California from counting more than 20,000 disputed mail-in ballots. The Supreme Court told it no.
On my side of the pond, France has endured a third weekend of demonstrations over living costs and public services, with students, trade unionists and ordinary citizens taking to the streets. Most marched peacefully; others preferred petrol bombs and the opportunity to violently rearrange a policeman’s anatomy. Far-right squads and ultra-left groups have been prowling cities including Rouen, which is an easy drive from my house. My morning croissant-and-coffee expedition to the Café du Pressoir is becoming a rather strange exercise in pretending the German 1930s are safely behind us.
I’ve been thinking about George Orwell lately, way too often. Especially about a broken ladder, a pot of white paint, and a window invented by an old conservative think tank in Michigan.
Remember the barn wall in Animal Farm? After the revolution, the animals paint seven commandments in enormous white letters. Whatever walks on two legs is an enemy. Whatever walks on four legs, or has wings, is a friend. No animal shall wear clothes, sleep in a bed, drink alcohol or kill another animal. And, most importantly, all animals are equal. Seven simple, non-negotiable principles, the foundation of their new and supposedly better world.
Then the pigs (it’s always the pigs) move into the farmhouse, discover beds, alcohol and political executions, and quietly, at night, improve the commandments. Sleeping in a bed is forbidden with sheets. Killing another animal is prohibited without cause. One moonlit night, the animals find Squealer, the regime’s chief propagandist, sprawled beside a broken ladder, a brush and an overturned pot of paint. Soon the alcohol prohibition has acquired the words to excess. The other animals have seen the evidence with their own eyes. Still, perhaps their memories are playing tricks. The pigs are educated, after all. And the sheep are particularly helpful, bleating slogans whenever someone tries to ask a question.
Which brings me to the Overton window. Joseph Overton, working at Michigan’s Mackinac Center in the 1990s, described the range of political ideas a society considers acceptable. Inside the window, politicians can propose something without committing electoral suicide. Outside it, ideas are dismissed as dangerous, absurd or unthinkable. And the window moves. Rapidly, without remorse, without holding back.
Movement itself is no sin. Belgian women couldn’t vote in national elections until 1949; people had to fight to push that right into the realm of political possibility. Plenty of freedoms we now take for granted were once considered outrageous: homosexuality, same-sex marriage, IVF, euthanasia. Thank heaven for dangerous troublemakers. But the same process that makes a society more humane can move it quickly in the opposite direction. Once you understand that, today’s political circus becomes considerably less amusing.
You float an outrageous suggestion. Opponents howl, supporters cheer, television invites a fanatic and a constitutional lawyer to debate it as competing brands of toothpaste. Somebody conducts a poll. A politician says it was merely a joke. Then you repeat it. And repeat it. Eventually outrage becomes familiarity; familiarity becomes something worth discussing; the next, slightly less deranged proposal suddenly looks like a sensible compromise. You haven’t necessarily convinced anybody. You’ve changed what people are prepared to tolerate. The window can resist and move back, of course. But organized manipulators understand the value of constant repetition considerably better than most of the public does.
Take women. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a woman choosing to stay home, raise children and become an Olympic champion at sourdough bread. Her life, her choice. I’ll even defend her right to post fourteen Instagram reels about the starter’s emotional development. The trouble starts when personal preference is repackaged as the natural order, female submission becomes wellness content, and a collection of testosterone-soaked cretins announces that civilization collapsed the moment women were allowed careers.
Welcome to the manosphere, where alleged alpha males sell courses, protein powder and contempt for women to boys who still can’t organize their laundry. A business model based on manufacturing resentment and collecting subscription fees. Toxic masculinity comes with a referral code. In July 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced testosterone screening for older military personnel; subsequent guidance focused on men aged 30 and over. There are legitimate medical reasons to diagnose a deficiency. But marketing a military program as a High-T Department of War is a bizarre way to discuss national security when you have satellites, stealth aircraft and actual military strategy to worry about. Somewhere, a silverback gorilla is rolling his eyes.
The White House has entertained genuinely extraordinary pronatalist proposals. In April 2025, advisers considered a $5,000 childbirth bonus; activists Simone and Malcolm Collins submitted a proposal for a National Medal of Motherhood for women bearing six or more children. Neither was enacted as proposed (yet). Encouraging families through childcare, healthcare and housing is perfectly legitimate. Awarding medals according to the productivity of a woman’s uterus has a rather less reassuring historical resonance: Nazi Germany had the Mutterkreuz, the Soviet Union its Mother Heroine. Different systems, different intentions, yes. Still, somebody might have noticed the company this particular idea keeps. More interestingly, notice how quickly the argument shifts from what the hell? to a polite policy debate about the medal’s merits. Another centimeter of window, pushed.
Immigration provides an even uglier illustration. An October 2026 Migration Policy Institute analysis counted roughly 980,000 US deportations and border returns from January 2025 to July 2026. Those categories should not be confused; not everyone was a long-settled resident. But turning deportation into political theater is another matter. The people reduced to a frightening collective noun cook your lunch, clean your office before your important executive ass arrives, look after your parents, build your houses and drive you home. Others happen to be surgeons, engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs. Governments must manage immigration. They needn’t abandon their humanity, or their arithmetic, while doing it.
In 2025, 231 Fortune 500 companies, 46.2% of the list, had been founded by immigrants or their children. Apple, Amazon, NVIDIA. Jensen Huang came from Taiwan as a boy and now sells the computational shovels for the AI gold rush. Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, which apparently becomes an endearing biographical detail once your fortune contains sufficient zeroes. And here’s my favorite statistic: immigrants won 40% of the Nobel Prizes awarded to Americans in chemistry, physics and medicine between 2000 and 2025. America attracted extraordinary talent and built a scientific superpower. An excellent competitive advantage, apparently in need of being fixed. The Overton window doesn’t require everybody to become racist. It needs enough people to stop objecting when racism is packaged as common sense.
There’s a supporting cast of conspiracy entrepreneurs, billionaire Iron Men and political mountebanks. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., responsible for US health policy, has promoted the scientifically unsupported chemtrails conspiracy. A fantasy that once belonged to the sweaty corners of the internet now consumes official attention. Scientists have to disprove nonsense, journalists have to explain why it’s nonsense, and the original lunatics celebrate because their nonsense has finally been taken seriously. In January I joked about armed penguins guarding the ice wall around a flat Earth. That same day, the White House posted an AI image of Trump strolling toward Greenland with a penguin. Where there are no penguins. Satire now has the shelf life of supermarket sushi in a hot car.
And who owns the paint? On X (and through Starlink), Elon Musk controls a frighteningly powerful distribution platform. In France, Vincent Bolloré’s reach across CNews, Europe 1, the Journal du Dimanche and publishing has even generated a word: bollorisation. After Grasset publisher Olivier Nora’s departure, Bolloré defended his position in his own newspaper. Convenient to own both the controversy and the explanation. Jeff Bezos blocked The Washington Post’s presidential endorsement in 2024; the newspaper subsequently cut about a third of its workforce. None of this makes every journalist a billionaire’s puppet. It does make the concentration of editorial, financial and distribution power alarming. Corruption needn’t come in a brown envelope. Sometimes it comes with a board seat, a budget, and the means to decide which questions become economically inconvenient.
Steve Bannon’s strategy was to flood the zone with shit. Deepfakes, conspiracies, manufactured scandals, AI-generated garbage and outrage merchants achieve something more corrosive than merely spreading lies. They exhaust the very capacity to distinguish important truth from entertaining rubbish. When everything is outrageous, outrage depreciates. When everybody is called corrupt, real corruption becomes just another headline. Repetition is not evidence, but on an algorithmic platform it often arrives wearing evidence’s clothes.
Orwell’s sheep weren’t the masterminds. They didn’t write the rules or benefit from the farmhouse. They made dissent inaudible. Ours have smartphones, university degrees, LinkedIn profiles and opinions they haven’t investigated. Some spend six hours researching the perfect air fryer but won’t devote thirty seconds to checking the terrifying video they’re inflicting on the family WhatsApp group. This isn’t exclusively a right-wing condition. The extreme left has purity warriors more interested in excommunicating allies than winning elections; the comfortable center has elevated disengagement to a lifestyle choice. And every tribe gets wonderfully flexible about principles when its own people break them. We rarely notice the Overton window moving when we like the direction.
That’s why journalism matters, despite its plentiful sins. I moderated five Belgian editors-in-chief at the Solvay Library in May. What struck me was how thoroughly unglamorous their craft is: checking, sourcing, confirming, correcting. Slow, expensive, sometimes boring. Exactly the work that the screaming idiot with a podcast microphone never does. The Committee to Protect Journalists counted 129 journalists and media workers killed in 2025. When the Pentagon imposed restrictive reporting rules in October 2025, dozens of reporters surrendered their badges rather than comply. Fox News walked. Newsmax walked. If Fox News is helping defend a principle of press freedom, perhaps civilization has a few functioning neurons left.
Before someone hands me a crown, allow me to return it. I’ve spent thirty years with one foot in technology and the other in the influence industry. We buy attention, optimize persuasion and finance the platforms flooding the public sphere. Our beloved brand safety sometimes means an advertiser’s shiny message can’t appear next to words such as bomb, dead or shoot. Try reporting a war without them. We reward sanitized clickbait, starve serious reporting, then assemble in elegant conference venues to discuss the collapse of trust. Lovely coffee. Beautiful slides. Pass the canapés.
Journalists get things wrong. The New York Times helped sell the Iraq war on weapons that weren’t there, and later acknowledged its failures. But good journalism has something that Squealer never offered: a correction, in public, under its own name. Imagine him climbing the ladder to explain exactly when and why the commandments had been repainted. Napoleon would have been delighted, I’m sure.
And the rest of us? According to the Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report, just 14% of Belgian respondents paid for online news. We’ll finance three streaming platforms, cloud storage and an AI assistant to write birthday greetings to our dog, but paying the people who investigate corruption seems an extravagance. The same citizens who distrust every institution enthusiastically accept PatriotEagle1776 as if Moses had descended from Sinai carrying an updated set of commandments and a testosterone discount code.
I can argue happily about taxes, immigration levels, pensions, climate policy or how many lanes the Brussels ring road should have. That’s democracy. But women aren’t breeding stock; immigrants don’t cease being human beings; lawful votes must be counted; journalists must be allowed to question power; and science isn’t decided by a show of hands. Those principles ought not to be renegotiated every bloody Tuesday because some ambitious politician has discovered an electoral market for cruelty.
The Overton window doesn’t shift only because villains push it. It shifts because we accept the small exceptions, repeat the convenient phrases, laugh off the latest outrage and tell ourselves we’re far too busy to intervene. No regime announces that next Tuesday we’ll be a little less decent. There’s a temporary measure, a necessary compromise, a special case. Surely the journalist had it coming. Surely the election was suspicious. Surely those people are different. By the time something monstrous has become a routine administrative detail, the original argument is almost impossible to remember.
At the end of Animal Farm, the animals peer into the farmhouse and can no longer distinguish the pigs from the men. But I keep coming back to the broken ladder. They had seen Squealer beside the paint pot. They had the evidence right in front of them. And most chose to believe the pigs anyway. We have photographs, records, independent reporting and entire libraries explaining what happens when rights are gradually eaten away. We even have a name for the window being moved: Overton.
The paint is still wet. The ladder is still there. Squealer has never had so many enthusiastic assistants, and every one of them thinks he’s the clever one. When somebody eventually asks how the wall changed beyond recognition, we’ll have the evidence, the warnings, the likes, the shares and our own meticulously reasonable excuses. Squealer will still be standing on that fucking ladder.
The depressing part is that we know exactly how the trick works. And we’re still paying for the paint.
