Framing the Episode: Incivility in Public Discourse

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Since we’ve got the Thanksgiving holiday at the end of the week, I’m releasing the first half of the conversation to everyone today instead of this Friday. For access to the entire conversation, including the Q&A, become a full subscriber.

This episode's central topic: the vulgarity of our present discourse. Though “vulgarity” doesn’t quite capture what we’re talking about on this show. It’s not news to say that the tenor of public speech has coarsened over the decades—words and phrases that would have been utterly taboo in the media of the 1960s hardly give us pause today. But what does seem new is the sometimes shockingly racist, sexist, and homophobic sentiments that have become a part of “ordinary” political debate.

The Overton window is shifting, and it’s not doing it on its own. One force moving it is surely the wide availability of online platforms. Everyone has a camera and a microphone, and as more and more people avail themselves of the communication tools available to them, views that were once filtered out by mainstream and legacy outlets are finding their way to the center of the conversation. But another force moving the window is what’s going on in the world. While I may roll my eyes when, for example, Nick Fuentes touts the virtues of Jim Crow, he’s responding to items in the news, like violent crime committed by black youth, that do need to be taken seriously.

Then it’s on to our subscriber-only Q&A session, where John and I took questions about God and morality, the Democrats’ electoral prospects, Black English vernacular, China’s outpacing of American economic growth, AI and education, Looney Tunes, and socialism vs. social democracy, plus questions from the YouTube chat.

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