Welcome to Douglas Wilson's The Plodcast, presented by Canon Press. Yes God, God don't never change.

Welcome to the

the podcast. My name is Douglas Wilson. This is episode 312.

episode 312. So I want to talk to you today about an insight that I got from my son-in-law, Ben Merkel.

We were talking the other night and he made an observation that I think needs to be developed much further.

I'm going to use the construct of the Overton window to talk about this,

but this idea that Ben suggested to me riffs off of that.

The Overton window, if you don't know, is the acceptable frame for public discourse.

So if you move the Overton window to the right

or to the left, what you're doing

is sliding the window such that discourse that used to be acceptable

is no longer acceptable because you move the window such that certain expressions are now

outside the window and other things if you move the window to the left

things that were on the right side of the window have now moved out of frame and are

no longer acceptable and things that were to the left of the window are now in the frame.

It used to be unacceptable to talk about those things, but now it's acceptable to talk about

those things.

This applies to words, this applies to generalizations, this applies to arguments, this

applies to positions.

It used to be acceptable, for example, to be an employee of a major American corporation, and to say things like, you know, I don't think surgery should be granted to boys who want to become girls, or granted to boys who have been told by people that they ought to want to become girls.

Now today you can lose your position as an employee of a major company simply by affirming some politically

incorrect sentiment like that.

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