The Chris Abraham Show

My guru recently sent me an email that expanded on his earlier teaching about suffering. In his first message, he explained how most suffering comes from only a few things—what he called THE SHIT —and how modern life makes these easy to handle. That teaching ended with the idea that Nirvana, the state of peace the Buddha described, is already here for anyone willing to step into it. But this time,...

Introduction: What Does It Mean to Be an Occupier? An occupier is an authority that controls a place where the people under it feel the power is not legitimate. In wars, it is the army that holds foreign land. In colonies, it is the empire that rules without consent. When some communities in America call the U.S. government an occupier, they are expressing how it feels to live under laws and polic...

How America’s Two Realities Collide and Eventually Snap America lives in two mental dimensions. In one, defiance against authority—whether at a protest, during a traffic stop, or in the streets—is noble resistance. In the other, the same act is dangerous chaos that must be contained. These two realities rarely intersect except when they crash into each other through viral videos, social media, or...

My guru sent me an email that I can’t stop thinking about. It was simple, almost blunt, but it explained why most of the suffering we experience today is unnecessary. It wasn’t a long teaching or a sacred text—just a reminder of how easy peace can be if we understand what’s really going on. Buddhism, he wrote, is one of the oldest spiritual paths in the world. It started with the Buddha, a man who...

America is not just a country—it’s the world’s casino. Not the polished Vegas floor where the house always wins, but a sprawling, chaotic hall where volatility is the product and chaos is the currency. Every four years, our presidential cycle spins the wheel, markets quake, and the rest of the world places its bets. A tweet can erase billions, a rumor can trigger a stampede, and the constant swing...

When Open Intelligence Becomes Entertainment There was a time when intelligence was secret, locked away in dossiers and government vaults. Today, the cameras never stop. Data streams from satellites, drones, traffic cams, and smartphones. Open Source Intelligence—OSINT—once meant careful analysis of public data. Now it’s something else. Intelligence has turned into entertainment. OSINT has become...

If American socialists were real, they’d love tariffs. They’d be screaming for tariffs, because tariffs are the only way to fund the utopia they claim to want. Tariffs don’t chase billionaires who vanish into tax havens, and they don’t raid the paychecks of workers. They’re collected at the border, unavoidable, clean. You want to sell in the biggest market in the world? You pay. That revenue goes...

War, Propaganda, and the Spectacle of Suffering The war in Gaza is not only fought with drones, tunnels, and rockets; it is fought with cameras. It is fought through livestreams, tweets, and NGO reports. This is no longer HUMINT in the traditional sense. HUMINT—human intelligence—once belonged to the world of spooks, agents, secrets, and whispers. Today, human intelligence is filmed on smartphones...

How corporations ally with movements only to drain them, discard them, and return to what they have always been Corporations often look like allies when social movements rise. They adopt slogans, release campaigns, and revise policies to align with whatever cause dominates the moment. To the public, they appear progressive. To activists, they seem to stand with the movement. But this is not true a...

Afghanistan has long been called the “graveyard of empires.” Powerful nations have marched into its mountains with plans to conquer and reform it. They built schools, sent aid, and installed new governments. For a time, the changes seemed to work. Yet each empire—British, Soviet, American—eventually left defeated. Afghanistan absorbed their energy, took what it needed, and when the invaders left,...

In physics, entropy measures disorder. Without energy, order breaks down. Culture behaves the same way. Without steady effort, values decay and systems drift back toward what is easy and familiar. This is cultural entropy: the slow pull that undoes progress. Modern anti-racist America often sees its enemy as open hate—racists and extremists. These groups exist but are small. The greater threat is...

In physics, inertia is the tendency of objects to resist change. A body at rest stays at rest unless acted upon by force. Culture works the same way. Societies prefer to stay as they are. They resist change unless energy is applied over time. This resistance is not dramatic. It is quiet, persistent, and hard to overcome. It is cultural inertia. Modern anti-racist America often frames its struggle...

The phrase “as American as mom and apple pie” once described something wholesome and unquestioned. It evoked family, community, and tradition. Today, critics recast those same images as coded language for oppression. The cultural consensus of the 1980s and 1990s is no longer neutral. Under the modern lens, it is marked as racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and even fascist. When normal life...

Proxy wars are the modern state’s perfect crime. They allow powerful nations to pursue strategic goals without the domestic consequences that traditionally forced wars to end. During Vietnam, American soldiers died in large numbers. Draft notices landed in every community, and the war’s human cost was unavoidable. Protests carried weight because every household had skin in the game. My mother marc...

“Should be the norm” doesn’t really mean anything in the real world, though, does it? People say it as if declaring it makes it true, as if a strong enough moral proclamation could bend the arc of reality. But the world doesn’t bend to what should be. It bends to what’s believed by enough people to fight for it, enforce it, and pass it down. Norms are not natural laws—they are contested, fragile,...

For most of my life, I thought I knew Jesus. My image of Him came from pop Catholicism, Easter sermons, and Hollywood movies where He looked untouchable, glowing, and serenely above it all. I imagined Him like Superman in sandals, tossing miracles around as easily as a magician pulls rabbits from a hat. He seemed immune to doubt, unaffected by the atmosphere around Him. But after a year of listeni...

After surviving the werewolf ambush on the Old Svalich Road, the adventurers reached Kresk , the last settlement before the mists swallow the valley. The guards at the gate opened only when they saw the Martikovs’ wagon of wine. But their allies’ patience was thin; the severed head of Henrik, the coffin maker, and the party’s haggling over wine had soured trust. One barrel was given to Burgomaster...

Meritus Media isn’t just another digital agency. It’s not a growth hack lab, a content mill, or a stitched-together team of Upwork freelancers. It’s a convergence—a rare blend of what still works, what used to work, and what should work when it comes to visibility, credibility, and influence. That’s why I joined. It’s why I stepped behind the Meritus shield—why I aligned my decades of SEO, ORM, an...

There was a time when being a member of the ACLU meant defending the speech of people you despised—not because you endorsed them, but because the principle of liberty mattered more than comfort. I joined for that reason. I wasn’t virtue signaling. I was pledging allegiance to the Constitution, the real one—not the cosplay version people wave when it suits them. Now? The ACLU defends speech selecti...

The Tortoise and the Hare: How Strategic Patience Lets Conservatives Win While Progressives Burn Out In the culture war, it’s not ideology that wins. It’s tempo. Progressives operate in existential now-or-never mode. Conservatives move like tectonic plates. One sprints. The other strategizes. One demands transformation overnight. The other sits silently, waiting for the overreach—and then strikes....

This is not just another crackdown. It’s not even just another culture war. It’s a full-spectrum economic and psychological operation, aimed not only at the undocumented population but also at America’s industrial stagnation, its working-class despair, and its hunger for purpose. With no global war to stimulate GDP and no appetite for new foreign interventions, the Trump administration has reverse...

I was born in 1970—the same cultural moment, almost to the year, that NPR emerged. My parents were daily drinkers and secular humanists who raised me in Hawaii with Carl Sagan, PBS, and an FM radio dialed to All Things Considered . Garrison Keillor. Click and Clack. Terry Gross. Diane Rehm. Kojo Nnamdi. This wasn’t politics—it was affection. NPR was calm, elite, literary, but with warmth. A sherry...

At first glance, the idea of deporting 30 million undocumented immigrants sounds logistically absurd. It seems politically suicidal, morally grotesque, and economically unviable. And that’s precisely the point. For years, the unspoken strategy among progressive immigration advocates and Democratic administrations has been to overwhelm the system. The assumption was simple: if you allow enough peop...

We talk a lot about racism in America, but what we’re really contending with today isn’t just race—it’s culture. It’s not about the color of your skin, but the code you speak. Not the blood in your veins, but the dialect on your tongue. It’s not whiteness that gets punished—it’s acting white. It’s not blackness that’s rejected—it’s betraying the culture. This is not racism. This is cultural aparth...

I didn’t plan to write this. It started with a Thread, sparked by a conversation with someone who spoke as if identity was destiny, and belonging was determined by pain. They spoke in the voice of certainty—about who could speak, who couldn’t, and who owed what to whom. But it stirred something old in me. I grew up in Salt Lake, Oahu. Subsidized garden apartments near the airport. I was six. A hao...