If there's one lesson we should learn from the last decade, it's that mockery is no way to build anything. I laughed with Jon Stewart, along with the rest of my cohort, but boy did that - that conception of what "winning" looks like - lead us all down a dead end.

I wrote satire back when the Onion was cool. I appreciated how good satire meant to really understand the internal logic of an idea, and to expose its fundamental inconsistencies. But to understand the logic so well is to *misunderstand* the emotional and social context...

If you don't try to understand *why* people believe in stuff, and only fixate on why it's wrong, you're never going to change their minds. And if your only tool is mockery, you're never even going to have a conversation. You're sealing that door shut.

And it really saddens me to see how many of our conversations are still going down this path, the ultimate consequences of which we are seeing now.