“You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.”

In the last five years or so, I’ve experienced a dramatic surge of people in my acquaintance who previously had little interest in things spiritual or religious but have become deeply interested, not just in the theory, but the practice of Christianity.

Has some high profile man or woman of God inspired them to follow? Has the Church so impressed them with her acts of love and courage that they had no choice but to seek “an answer for the joy that they have?”

It doesn’t seem so.

Instead, it’s been more of what Tolkien called a euchatastrophy. Something the devil intended for evil has been turned into the very vehicle of salvation.

Most of the people who have moved from mild interest, disinterest, or in some cases hostility towards God to a driving passion to pursue him have done so because they saw the devil.

Darkness and evil seem to have crawled up from under rocks and come out from behind corners. The last few years have brought into the light vile behavior that doesn’t easily fit into a materialist paradigm. People are under attack. The sensation that there is something more than mere political interest driving the lies and oppression is inescapable. Even grand man-made conspiracies fail to account for all the madness.

Thinking people have begun to look deeper. They have begun to suspect Ephesians 6:12 is true:

“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.“

This suspicion – that there is more driving the evil in the world than material interests – has led to an honest exploration of the unseen realm and a renewed interest in understanding the very structure of reality.

Persist in that honest search long enough, and you come to Christ. And many have.

It would be wonderful if the example of the God-fearing were drawing people to the truth. Maybe some are. But God’s ways tend to be more unexpected than that. And more humbling.

As evil emerges from the shadows, not everyone is cowed or numbed into acquiescence. Good people see it and are moved to seek truth. Arrogance his nature, the devil is overplays his hand.

An infamous local politician in Michigan once told his starry eyed colleague,

“You can’t save any souls in Lansing (Michigan’s capital), you can only lose your own.”

He was right.

Love vs violence

All political power is based on violence or the threat of it. Behind every law, regulation, and edict is the butt or barrel of a gun, a baton, a prison cell. It cannot be otherwise. The single thing that distinguishes government from every other institution is that it will cage or kill you if you don’t follow its rules, and it will claim it does so “legitimately”.

You cannot do good by initiating violence.

Christ, in contrast, accomplished the greatest good possible without ever employing the tactics of compulsion.

Power under vs power over

Theologian Greg Boyd contrasts the ways of the Kingdom of God with the ways of the demonic kingdoms of this world as one that subverts with love and sacrifice – power under – vs one that compels with violence – power over.

There are growing murmurs among those tired of left-wing secular tyranny. They are coalescing in some circles around a desire for right-wing religious tyranny. Both are evil, and the latter the more dangerous because it cloaks evil in explicitly Christian terms. It is more directly and literally anti-Christ.

Some exuberant “trad” types, understandably upset with the vile corruption of the political and cultural commanding heights, are seeking vengeance. Trying to justify the bloodlust, they sometimes point to episodes like Jesus forming a whip of cords and driving money changers out of the temple.

The temple.

Not Herod’s court or the Roman Governor’s mansion. This was not a political statement, and certainly not an effort to gain political power. It wasn’t even an effort to gain ecclesiastical power – Jesus didn’t try to take over administration of the temple with his disciples.

It was a chastisement of the Church, not a crusade against unbelievers or political systems.

The analogy today would not be a campaign to cancel leftists – legally or socially – but a fiery preacher confronting a church about practices that distract from Christ. (Maybe even US flags hung next to the cross, or national anthems sung in church on state holidays.)

Jesus was more powerful than Herod or Rome because he didn’t play their game. He didn’t even try for their kind of power – power over. He opted to ignore it entirely – even to the point of being falsely accused, “cancelled”, publicly humiliated, tortured, and murdered by the regime – because he understood what C.S. Lewis called The Deeper Magic.

The power of the Kingdom of God is infinitely superior to the power of the demonic kingdoms of this world. It crushes them. They tremble at the prayers, sacrifices, kindnesses, and acts of love of the Saints. They fear the Remnant.

You will not improve the world with laws and swords. You will not improve the world by crucifying others. You will improve the world only when you take up your own cross and surrender without malice; when you forgive your executioners and go joyfully.

When they look upon this, the spell is broken. Hearts are set afire. The image of Christ in you stirs a thought: “Surely this is a son of God.”

That’s the revolution of the Cross, always at work making the violence of the enemy useless, turning it on itself.

I’ve seen a bunch of Tweets about Tucker Carlson saying that any economic system that produces lots of Dollar Stores is a bad system, because Dollar Stores are ugly, and ugliness is evil.

I think Tucker did himself no favors by labeling the economic system “libertarian capitalism” (or something similar), because now many who value individual liberty and free markets are annoyed, and many who love state power are using it as an “I told you so.”

Labels aside, I like some things about this sentiment. Other things about it trouble me.

What I like about it

Beauty is a virtue. I love that Tucker connects ugliness to evil.

Yes, aesthetic tests of righteousness can become dangerous, cult-like, or kooky (ask an Ayn Rand acolyte why tap dance is “the most moral form of dance”).

But damnit there is a connection between ugliness and evil. There just is. Go to just about any capital city in the US. Hang around the brutalist monstrosities there. If meandering the government monoliths of, say, Albany NY does not suck your soul dry, you might not have one.

Broken societies and systems produce ugliness. The physical state and the spiritual state are connected.

We should be cautious of Dorian Grays too. Beauty does not tell everything. Satan himself comes disguised as an angel of light. But these warnings exist precisely because they are unexpected exceptions. In the normal course of things, ugliness comes from internal rot, and beauty from alignment.

Now, the two things that trouble me about Tucker’s statement.

Thing one – misplaced blame

What system, exactly, produced Dollar Stores? Tucker used the “libertarian capitalism” label, which to me implies mostly free markets.

Did mostly free markets produce Dollar Stores?

It’s not so easy to figure these things out. While it’s true that no government agency mandated Dollar Stores into existence, it is also true that the economy is so burdened with taxes, regulation, and manipulation, that it’s damn-near impossible to tease out what aspects are the result of supply and demand, and what are responses to the threats of violence from the state.

The money supply is utterly manipulated. This affects the entire structure of production – what gets invested in, built, and maintained. The size and distribution of firms, workers, wages, spending and saving habits. Start to go down the monetary policy rabbit hole, and it’s easy to believe (not without justification) that nearly every unsavory aspect of society is the result of money manipulation.

What about the regulatory burdens imposed on businesses? Try opening and running a store legally. It’s ridiculous. The results in advantages for large nationwide chains who can centralize compliance costs.

Health care regulations and tax codes make health insurance artificially more attractive than other forms of compensation to both workers and employers, and big national companies have massive advantages in ability to provide these.

Access to capital, government subsidized highways, and too many other interventions to count all create artificial pressure on Dollar Store competitors and make Dollar Stores a more rational business model.

It is lack of economic freedom that has created this ugliness.

Tucker didn’t say this, but the implication that some form of regulation needs to curb markets and prevent Dollar Stores is not right or good. The largest government in the history of the world (at least by spending) with more regulatory bodies and laws than anyone can even comprehend has resulted in a world with tons of Dollar Stores.

In what world would giving more power to bureaucrats – the producers of the ugliest things in human history – reduce ugliness?

Public Choice theory is instructive here.

Thing two – the fatal conceit

You’ll notice the above critique grants Tucker’s premise – that Dollar Stores are in fact ugly.

We shouldn’t accept this so easily. At least not without asking the only question that matters when analyzing social and economic systems:

Compared to what?

Compared to an imagined utopia, Dollar Stores are hideous and unneeded. But utopia is not on the table, only reality is.

There is a Chesterton’s Fence sort of thing going on here. When you encounter a Dollar Store, instead of assuming it’s grotesque and needs to be killed, first try to understand why it’s there. It emerged for a reason, and it persists for the time because enough people voluntarily prefer it to the alternatives to keep it alive.

Do you know that they are wrong? Are you so confident as you drive by that that Dollar Store is aiding evil and not helping to dispel it? If you could ban Dollar Stores, what would fill the various vacuums left behind? Would it be better?

Not only is there a dangerous arrogance about the complex role Dollar Stores might be playing economically, there is an aesthetic arrogance too, I suspect borne less out of ill-will than lack of experience.

The reality for many rural areas is that Dollar Stores are far from ugly. For many, they are the best example of beauty for miles in any direction. I’m serious.

I lived for a time in a rural town in Tennessee. It was rough. Ugliness was everywhere. Physical ugliness, and deep, emotional and spiritual ugliness. The kind of thing that comes from generations of slow descent into alcoholism, welfare, abuse, and broken homes.

Dollar General had a store it seemed every ten miles. They were an oasis. I am not exaggerating.

First, the convenience was a massive boost to quality of life and happiness. The alarming array of affordable stuff neatly crammed into these tiny, clean, well-lit stores was incredible. Medicine, groceries, school supplies, toys, shampoo, greeting cards, jumper cables, clothes. Somehow, whenever you needed something they had it.

The fact that these items were produced in every corner of the globe by complete strangers and made their way to me, in the middle of nowhere and in need of Cumin for Sunday chili and a pair of work gloves for my son’s new landscaping job, is damn-near miraculous. We are perishing for lack of wonder, as Chesterton said. Leonard Read’s I, Pencil is on full display at these stores.

That is beautiful. The spontaneous order of the invisible hand, delivering what I need with a smile.

But even on a more mundane aesthetic level, unless you’ve lived in some of these places, you have no idea how a Dollar General can be a reprieve from ugliness, a salve for eye sores. That should not be overlooked.

A drop of humility, a dash of wonder, and a pinch of love

We’ve got to be careful. As Hayek said, “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they know of what they imagine they can design.”

Dollar Stores are partially a result of overblown nasty government.

But even enveloped and empowered by black oily government tentacles of death, there’s some part of Dollar Stores that is an expression of human freedom, cooperation, and even beauty. They are, at times, the rose in the proverbial concrete. The concrete is mostly a government creation, but the rose only needs the tiniest spark of freedom to break through.

Would the rose be more beautiful in a well-tended garden, or beautiful wild wood?

Of course. But unless and until you are going to start breaking away the concretized tyranny surrounding it, don’t blame the rose and certainly don’t pluck it. It’s a tiny, somewhat pathetic picture of what things could be. Don’t take that from those who have little else.

We shouldn’t ever be content with things as they are. We should be discontent. We should also be optimistic. We should forge ahead, always looking to improve our own lives and the lives of our fellow man.

But never on a whim, or at the point of a gun.

Beauty emerges in unlikely places. But it starts from the fertile soil of humble hearts.

One of the things that makes C.S. Lewis such a delightful read is that he’s always smacking you upside the head with unexpectedly humble domestic metaphors.

In a stream of thought about lofty ideas like grace, glory, longing, transformation, miracles, or love, he is likely to compare something to toast, or ham, or an old jacket.

What I love about this style of writing (especially when it feels natural to the author, and not affected) is not just the surface level pleasure of surprise and humor. That is, of course, delightful. But there’s something more underneath it. Something that helps our minds grasp one of the most profound truths in the human story.

The incarnation.

The shocking frame of reference shift needed to see the ways in which toast embodies a lofty ideal are exactly what’s needed to understand what it means for God to become man. The highest of high things, the loftiest of ideals, the greatest good, the most transcendent being is also a guy with sweat glands and toenails.

The mystery of the incarnation is too big to absorb head on. It’s something we have to ponder continually and from many angles. The process of demonstrating the lofty through the humble is one way of transforming our minds to know the mystery deeper.

Plus, who doesn’t like the phrase “poached egg” in the middle of a serious discussion?

The Nearbound Summit is a four day virtual event. Monday through Thursday, November 6-9.

It’s 100% free. Check out the agenda and register to join some of the sessions (or watch them streaming on demand).

But what is it?

This is the culmination of the last year and a half of efforts to redefine what it means to attract and retain customers in the ‘Who’ economy.

We are in the infocalypse.

The digital age meant information was cheap or free, which is great for speed, reach, and scale. But now we’re overwhelmed. Ads, SEO-gaming, 4.7 star review syndrome, cold emails and calls.

Nobody wants more aggregate data or information. If data was the new oil, now trust is the new data.

When you’re trying to solve a problem you can no longer ask the internet “How” to do it. You’ll get too much stuff and you can’t sort the signal from the noise.

Instead, people are reverting to nodes of trust – people – and asking “Who can help me solve this?” and “Who has been there before?”

As a business, the best way to reach buyers in this new world is through the people they already trust. You have to find them and partner with them to surround buyers with value and solutions at the right time, from the right voices.

This is called ‘Nearbound’.

It means tapping into the people that surround buyers. People they trust.

We’re diving deep all week to explore how it affects Startups, Success teams, Product teams, Marketing teams, and Sales teams.

Even if you’re just a tiny bit curious, I hope you’ll find at least one session worth attending and join – in the very least, my intro to Nearbound Marketing on day 3, or Harry Mack’s live freestyle performance!

Register here.

See you at the Summit!

When people band together in response to challenges, something greater than the sum of the parts emerges. I’ve been a part of a variety of post-disaster efforts, and the dividing lines between people are obliterated in an incredible way, yet individuality remains as strong as ever.

A beautiful picture of unity and multiplicity in their proper places.

Unity is not inherently good. Nor is multiplicity. When closest to God, they take on His divine nature. When furthest from Him, they bring us to a lower, almost animal state.

The unity of Twitter is an interesting example. Despite its wildly divergent niches who hate each other, Twitter (or “X”, as it’s now somewhat creepily called) has a kind of pervading, overarching unity.

What unites the denizens of X is primarily dislike, distaste, dissatisfaction. It is reaction, response, rebuttal. It is negativity.

This is a seductive lure.

Criticism is a valid and sometimes needed exercise. But rarely do its benefits to society outweigh its dangers to those who wield it. An entire online culture built around ever more layered and sophisticated ways of mocking and critiquing is not without uses, but something to be approached knowingly and cautiously, like a cornered viper whose venom can occasionally cure rare diseases.

The unity of Twitter is a unity that chains its members together, and can drag them all under the water at once if they are not careful.

The reality of the unseen realm changes everything.

Thoughts are not purely private. They exist in a dimension at least as powerful as our sensory dimension. Likely much more powerful.

Whether or not we can generate original thoughts from this plane, our thoughts are certainly more than just that. They go out into their own dimension, doing and begetting what’s in their nature to do and beget.

But they also often come from that dimension into our heads. They do not all originate in us. That is why they must be examined, ‘taken captive’, blocked, rejected, discarded, immediately implemented, or carefully dealt with as appropriate.

Things outside of us can send thoughts into us. We can do the same. We are swimming in a sea of thoughts, of mostly unknown origin.

All serious battles begin in the mind. We win or lose based on how we master or are mastered by thoughts.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used the parable of the bricklayers for myself and others.

You’ve probably heard it before. One worker feels frustrated and annoyed and is doing a half-assed job. When asked what he’s doing, he replies, “Laying bricks.”

Another looks focused, joyous, and in the proverbial flow state. When asked what he’s doing he replies, “Building a cathedral.”

Man’s Search for Meaning is real. It’s a good idea to Start With Why. (See what I did there with the book titles? I know. I’m clever.)

I would be the last person on earth to tell you that connecting your daily activity to a bigger vision and purpose is a bad idea. It’s not only a good idea, it’s a necessary idea for growth and to stave off spiritual decay.

Of course, when you follow the chain upward, you eventually find the Highest Thing. The truth North Star of North stars. The holiest aim above which there is no other. That is the ultimate giver of purpose, and purpose in itself. Always fix your gaze upon it.

But there’s a vast chasm between brushing your teeth and the Most High.

Now if you are rigorous, and patient, and persistent, you can discover the causal chain between any good action (or even merely not bad action) and the ultimate good. Dental hygiene connects to overall physical health and social graces, which enhance your ability to achieve professional goals and maintain relationships, which help you better grow your company or mentor someone, which are ways to put your unique gifts to work, which allows you to be a better imager of the Divine, which brings you closer to Him, etc.

But these causal chains aren’t always obvious. And they always have some gaps, some leaps of faith. You know in your gut that there is a connection between brushing your teeth and achieving your goals, but you just woke up and there’s no way you’ll be able to work it out on the spot. So what do you do? Do you wait until you find your ‘Why?’ to start brushing?

It’s important to note that you can be deceived. Maybe it’s not your gut telling you “This is a good thing that will lead your towards the Light”. Maybe it’s cultural conditioning, status quo bias, unthinking Pavlovian reflex, manipulation, or mind control.

The practice of questioning why you are tooth brushing or bricklaying and whether it is such a good idea after all is crucial. Especially during your intellectual and spiritual coming-of-age phase. You must reject the premises, flip the burden of proof, and see if you don’t uncover some lies and bad ideas.

But most of the time it’s not that lofty or that dangerous. And if you stay stuck in the, “I refuse to do anything I don’t perfectly understand as a necessary step to something higher” phase, you won’t get very far and will likely be no fun to be around.

Everything should be causally connected to something higher. But it’s not necessary to remember how in every moment.

Doing the thing even when you can’t remember exactly how the thing connects to The Thing is called faith. At least that’s the way C.S. Lewis uses the concept of faith. It’s not about believing against the evidence or in spite of lack of evidence, it’s about acting based on beliefs you knew to be true in a moment of clarity, but are tempted to forget in a moment of chaos. Have faith in your former self, your gut, your higher reason, in moments when you’re hangry morning self is unable to muster the connective tissue between the small deed and the great.

I help a company inform people at other companies about problems in their sales process that my company has a tool to solve. Solving other companies sales process problems is, believe it or not, connected to something higher for me. But don’t ask me to spell out how nine days out of ten.

So how to handle those nine days?

Just brush the teeth and do it well.

Just lay the bricks with the most integrity you possibly can.

Just be a good worker, a good colleague, and a good person.

Do the task well because doing a task well is a good thing. Even if I can’t perfectly articulate why it is that I’m doing the task in that moment.

There’s a kind of freedom that comes from this.

Maybe the architect has gone insane. Maybe I’m not building a Cathedral at all. Maybe an earthquake is about to destroy the structure. I can’t know these things and usually can’t control them if I did.

But I know that I embarked on this work for a reason, and I know that today, I’m going to be the best damn bricklayer you’ve ever seen.

When voices of doubt, fear, worry, and condemnation start speaking to you, sometimes the best way to silence them is with death.

I have had the experience of feeling low and being unable to get out of a frustrated state of mind. This is where the devil is at his best. Speaking a stream of half-truths designed to bring your focus on to the things that get you down – especially those out of your control.

At times I have in that moment remembered that I will die. Indeed, I could die that very night. What would matter then? How many of these worries would remain? Would it make sense to spend my last hours fretting over my shortcomings and challenges?

At that the spell is broken. “Beating death by death” is real on multiple levels.

I’m always trying to build the ship of Theseus.

The ancient thought experiment asks whether a ship that had every single plank and board replaced one by one over the course of a journey would still be the same ship when it arrived.

To me the answer is an obvious yes.

A ship is more than an inventory of lumber at a snapshot in time. Just like you’re you even though the cells in your body replace themselves all the time.

But this isn’t automatically true.

A lot of companies, communities, movements, teams, and projects fall apart or lose all semblance of the structure that embarked when key individuals get swapped out.

Back in 2009, I left a nonprofit where I had created a program I was really passionate about. I saw it fall apart a few years after I left. It killed me. I resolved to learn all I could about why it happened and how to prevent it in the future.

The last few companies I built continued on through tons of staff changes. Included my exit. I can’t express how proud I am of this.

I ask myself now with everything I’m a part of, “Does this have an identity and a future without me and the current team?”

If the answer is no, I try to remedy it.

I want to be a part of building ships that maintain their identity even after every part is replaced.

I can’t say this is some sort of universal virtue, but it feels right to me.

Moving is a sad business.

My wife and I have been married almost 20 years, and we are in the middle of our 10th move. 5 states, 6 cities, 10 dwellings.

I don’t remember all of them being emotional, then again I don’t remember much about several of them. In fact, that’s what makes this kind of thing sad.

We’re leaving a place we had memories, kids hit milestones, hard times, good times, and every mundane in-between were experienced. We saw seasons come and go, visitors come and go, and life phases come and go.

The sad part about leaving is that I’m old enough and have been through it enough to know, no matter how permanent the memories now seem, I will forget most of this phase of life in this house.

That’s hard.

When I look forward to where we’re going, I’m excited. When I look back on what we experienced here, I’m pleased, proud, and happy. But there is a deep sadness too, knowing every turn of the road, shadow on the landscape, sound in the night, and child in the grass will fade into inaccessible recesses of my mind quicker than I’d like. They will doubtless resurface at random times, but I will lose the bulk of them.

Time is a series of deaths. Each moment births a new person and kills the old. But when place remains constant, each moment has access to the accoutrements of the previous, and a deeper sense of continuity is maintained.

Changing place severs the connection, and each forward moment increases the distance between those of past time and place, until they are lost.

I am pre-emptively sad for the loss of memory about this place and phase in life I know is looming. I don’t mind moving ahead, but I don’t want to leave all of this feeling and memory behind.

In near death experiences, you often hear of some kind of life review. I’m not sure about the pressure of accounting for my deeds, but I would love the ability to review and remember all the things I’ve lived but forgotten.

We’re moving on. Which means some compartment in my brain will now be home to all the things we experienced here. I only hope I don’t lose the key.

It took a while, but the latest ChatGPT Large Language Model AI thingy finally got me seeing an amazing future.

Steve Patterson brings some excellent analysis to what’s going on and what it means.

AI stuff has been pretty boring to me.

Granted, I haven’t made the time to dive deep or spend a lot of time contemplating the full implications and use cases. But the early generated images seemed kinda cool but not “Oh shit!”, and the generated text seemed like more of the same internet-molded crap humans already produce too much of (old man shakes fist at cloud).

AI search has thus far seemed like an even worse version of what Google is becoming – highly constrained and censored, with an express mission of obscuring points of view that don’t fit the comfort zone of the programmers. Boring and kinda creepy.

But then HubSpot launched ChatSpot.

I haven’t used it yet, and have heard mixed results on its performance. But that will come. What got me excited is the replacement of complicated processes of generating reports from a CRM with plain english requests.

If you’ve never worked in a company that uses SalesForce or HubSpot, or god forbid something like Razers Edge or Aptify, you have no idea how hard it can be to surface seemingly simple info that already lives in your database.

“OK everyone, welcome to employee training number 11, where we’re covering how to create multi-conditional lists and then link them to an event type and generate a report”, says the weirdly excited ops person when all you wanted to do is see how many lapsed customers registered for your webinar.

The process involves about seventeen hundred clicks, infinite scrolls through drop-downs, and many conflicting, redundant, and counter-intuitive names for things (tags, categories, labels, fields, entities, etc.) If you flub up on one of the many conditions, the whole report is bogus.

The ability to tell the software the same type of thing you’d ask your ops person is incredible. “Get me a list of every former customer who registered for this event.”

So that’s one use case I love. Truly wealth-creating, in that it allows humans to accomplish more with less.

But there are more.

Ever had to get on the phone to figure out why the cell phone company charged you incorrectly and fix it?

Ever had to navigate a government bureaucracy online or over the phone?

These are basically the same as getting info out of your database, except the people on the other end are grumpier than SalesForce.

Imagine an AI assistant to do all that for you.

“Remove my oldest kid from our cell phone plan and shop around and send him the best individual plan you can find along with the price.”

“Update my home insurance policy now that we put in a pool.”

Another potential version of AI that excites me is one that is not constrained or controlled by its creators (who are rightly fearful of social and political pressure). If you could hone and adjust your AI yourself (without needing to be a programmer) then things like search could actually be useful, instead of Orwellian as they seem so far.

I’m not worried about AI or scared of it. I’m always worried about humans and our potential to do great evil with anything from a rock to a rocket. New tech opens new risk areas for sure. But it opens new opportunities as well.

I’d like to see AI help solve the mundane stuff on a scale that creates serious standard of living improvements. The creative side with AI art and literature doesn’t do it for me so far.

I’ve been daily blogging most of the time since 2012. I occasionally take deliberate breaks to direct my writing elsewhere and mix things up.

This is one such hiatus!

I’m mostly writing on partner ecosystems in the B2B SaaS world right now on other platforms.

I will be back on the blog again at some point. Many new ideas and experiences brewing, and above all, I’ll always be a writer. And a writer just can’t stop writing.

Recently, I mistook a satirical article for a real one. This seems to be more common in the last few years.

There are three reasons satire gets mistaken for reality.

Reason #1: Too eager to confirm unrealistic biases.

You can be taken in by satire if you have an inaccurate or exaggerated worldview and you are emotionally dependent on finding confirmation for your worst assumptions.

We’ve all seen it. None of us wants to admit when we fall prey to it.

Some group you think is horrible or ridiculous is satirized in a completely over the top way and you want it to be true so bad you accept it and start sharing it as justification for your opinion of them. Oops.

Reason #2: Bad writing.

Not all satire is good. In fact, a lot of it is ham-fisted and fails to identify what’s funny about reality and how to properly push it to the obviously over-the-top point that reveals the absurdity underneath.

Satire that is too realistic, too subtle, doesn’t overplay reality in a big enough way is just not good satire. Sometimes it’s mistaken for reality for no other reason.

Reason #3: Reality has gotten too absurd.

After all the Official Authorities spent months boldly proclaiming no one could get sick with Covid if they received government injections, people who got injected started getting sick with Covid. Some died.

More than once, I saw stories reporting on the Covid death of a vaccinated person that said it “could have been worse” if they hadn’t received the shot.

I assumed these were satire. I verified. They were not.

The problem with a reality like this is you can’t satirize it. There is no more extreme, absurd, over-the-top evil/hilarious/utterly incredible thing you could possibly do than to say of someone whose fate for following your advice was death that it “could’ve been worse”.

The Black Knight in Monty Python at least still had legs when he insisted he’d “had worse” than losing both arms.