Arizona state Rep. Wendy Rogers released a new campaign ad Tuesday in which she declared that her embrace of right-wing conspiracy theories such as the “Big Lie,” which baselessly claims that rampant voter fraud stole the 2020 presidential election from former President Donal Trump, is part of an ongoing effort to change the narrative and move “the Overton Window.”
The Overton Window is a theoretical framework for conveying which opinions or policy positions on a given subject are politically acceptable at any given time. An effort to move the Overton Window generally involves introducing seemingly radical ideas into the mainstream political or cultural narrative repeatedly in order to desensitize the population, thus making once radical ideas more mainstream and thereby broadening or shifting the range of acceptable opinions or policy options.
In just one term in office, Rogers, a 67-year-old grandmother, has catapulted onto the national stage and raked in record donations thanks not only to her embrace of Trump, who has endorsed her bid for reelection, but also the far-right extremes of the white nationalist America First movement.
Rogers’ new ad is predictably heavy on Big Lie rhetoric and demands to see “arrests” and “perp walks” of those allegedly responsible for supposedly stealing the election.
“If you told me two years ago that, ‘Wendy Rogers, you’re going to be in the limelight on election integrity issues, election corruption for the nation,’ I never would have imagined it,” Rogers said. “We’ve collected all this data to arguably show widespread corruption in our voting system. … I want to see arrests. I want to see perp walks. I want to see everything out in the open. Elections have consequences. Stolen elections have far worse consequences.”
“We’re on defense all the time as state legislators fighting against the vaccine mandates, fighting against the mask mandates, fighting against medical tyranny,” she continued. “This is a long, protracted battle, and as much as the left gets away with changing the narrative, there is what’s called ‘the Overton Window of political acceptability’ and we have to move it inch by inch, day by day, and call out the fraud, call out the communist influence that is infiltrating this country.”
“We have to wake up and take charge,” Rogers declared. “We are the plan.”
