It Is Not A Reality Show

Thursday, April 23, 2026

Everybody with any common sense whatsoever knows that there is nothing real about “reality television.”  It may be unscripted, but that does not make it real in any reasonable meaning of that word.  It is produced, staged, edited and packaged.  It is made far more interesting, far prettier, and far more engaging than reality will ever be.  Even a reality show featuring raw footage, like “Cops,” culls hundreds of hours of recording to get a 30 minute program and the encounters are heavily edited.  But I wonder if people can tell the difference anymore?

Yesterday’s revelation that the SPLC was funneling money to the groups it opposes just to keep the fight going – AND THE MONEY FLOWING – is right from the pages of a professional wrestling instruction manual.  (Wrestling is the original reality TV.)  As they say in wrestling, “A face is only as good as his heel.”  Without a good bad guy, the good guy just isn’t that good.  The SPLC is charged with fraud and that is exactly what it is – fraud.  And yet we pay to be defrauded every time we watch “reality TV” so is it really that surprising?

But then, if we are being completely honest, the Biden administration was deeply fraudulent for at least some part of its tenure.  Joe Biden was clearly incapable of fulfilling the duties of the position yet they kept propping him up, trying to make it look like he was.  It clearly indicated that they thought if he looked good on camera then all was well.  Towards the end, that administration had a very distant relationship with reality.

What makes people think they can get away with this stuff?  Seriously?  It was not that long ago and the idea was played for comedy.  And yet, what was once considered absurd is now considered an option.  And not just an option for some idiot on social media – an option on the geopolitical stage, where things are supposed to be very, very real – a stage that can produce real wars, real starvation and real calamity.

The easy answer is, of course, smartphones.  Most people now enjoy a media intermediary for virtually all of their relationships – an intermediary that provides them with the opportunity to “spruce things up” a just a bit.  Whether it’s that filter to remove that annoying blemish or making sure we are taking the picture from the most flattering angle – we all endeavor to some extent to look better on our phones than we actually are.  And since we now conduct most of our relationships through that medium it is not hard to imagine things getting a bit out of hand.  But how do we get from trying to look good to get a date to defrauding the world with a non-functional POTUS?  That’s a leap not so readily explained.

To answer that question we have to look much deeper.  To answer that question we have to acknowledge just how broken we are.  We have to stare squarely at the fact that we are not nice people looking to love our neighbor.  We are people who operate out of avarice and are willing to go to deeply fraudulent lengths to fulfill our desire.  We are not nice and we are not good.

But we don’t want to face that ugly fact, and so comes the ultimate fraud.  We defraud ourselves into thinking we are good and we are nice.  And so the world descends every deeper into the sort of fraudulent chaos we started with.

God loves us, in spite of our faults.  But we cannot fully experience that until we acknowledge those same faults.  Before you can fix something you have to know its is broken.