The Chris Abraham Show

This episode is about the end of our Curse of Strahd campaign, and more specifically, about how I ended it. Not Sean Scanlon, our excellent Dungeon Master. Not Strahd. Not just the dice. Me. In what I can only describe as a perfect storm of stupid, I managed to take a campaign that probably still had another 18 to 24 months of life in it and drive it straight into a wall in about sixty seconds. Th...

In this episode of The Chris Abraham Show , Chris revisits an argument he first made more than two decades ago—an argument about American foreign policy, intervention, and the strange persistence of what John Quincy Adams once warned against: going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. The conversation begins with the latest escalation in the Middle East. Following a massive U.S. and Israeli st...

In Season 10, Episode 5 of The Chris Abraham Show, I lay out a theory for why Donald Trump pivots to Iran. This isn’t an episode about Iran’s internal politics so much as it’s an episode about incentives, momentum, and what happens when a leader needs an economic and narrative engine and the preferred domestic plan hits a wall. About a year ago, I wrote a Substack post arguing that Trump’s big ide...

The Ellisons Prepare to Expand Their Media Empire The Century-Long Capture of U.S. Media In Season 10 Episode 4, Chris Abraham swerves away from the day’s obvious headlines and instead reacts to an On the Media segment on WAMU about “media capture” and the role of public broadcasting in a healthy democracy. He frames himself as an NPR/WAMU lifer with a complicated relationship to the institution:...

Welcome back to The Chris Abraham Show. This episode collects Sessions 27 28 and 29 of our Dungeons and Dragons campaign The Curse of Strahd and turns them into one continuous descent into Castle Ravenloft. If you are not a D and D person, here is the simple setup. Our small band of adventurers is trapped in Barovia, a mist locked valley ruled by Strahd von Zarovich, an ancient vampire lord with t...

Session Twenty-Six picks up at a moment where survival has stopped feeling temporary. By now, the party understands that Barovia doesn’t reset between victories. Vallaki, once a place to rest and resupply, has become hostile ground. We’re no longer visitors. We’re trespassers. The objective is narrow and urgent: recover the Amulet of Ravenkind. Losing a relic capable of harming vampires in Strahd’...

Barovia does not kill you all at once. It lets the mountain do the arguing. Sessions Twenty Four and Twenty Five began with the kind of fragile optimism that only survives when everyone is too tired to argue with it. We had stew at the Wizards of Wine. We had candles. We had a plan. Urihorn had no shadow, having traded it for a mist-token in one of Barovia’s quiet, transactional horrors. Nobody li...

I didn’t come to Meshtastic with a plan. I bought a cheap purple device off Etsy for about fifty-five dollars because I’d heard the word a few times and vaguely understood it meant LoRa mesh messaging. I wasn’t a prepper. I’m not a ham. I didn’t have a scenario in mind. The buy-in was low enough that curiosity won. I live on the 8th floor in Arlington Heights, with windows facing southeast. From t...

This episode of The Chris Abraham Show is an unscripted, exploratory monologue that circles a single question from multiple angles: what happens to large war-oriented systems when they no longer have an obvious external war to fight? Rather than arguing for or against specific policies, this episode looks at structure, scale, and inertia. For much of modern American history, war has functioned not...

After a long hiatus from live, human-voiced podcasting, Chris Abraham returns with the unofficial kickoff to a new season of The Chris Abraham Show . Call it Season 10, or just call it “one more than whatever came before.” This episode is less a formal broadcast and more a fireside check-in. No hot takes yet. No grand thesis. Just Uncle Chris catching up, taking inventory, and letting listeners ba...

Today, I want to talk about a claim that shows up every Christmas season, especially online: the idea that Jesus, Mary, and Joseph were refugees — that they were undocumented migrants escaping a hostile government, and that the Nativity somehow maps onto modern U.S. immigration politics. It’s an idea repeated so often that it feels unquestionable. But once you look at the world they actually lived...

Welcome back. Today we’re taking on a Christmas claim that resurfaces every year: that Jesus, Mary, and Joseph were refugees, undocumented migrants, or ancient asylum-seekers. It’s emotionally appealing, politically useful, and completely incompatible with the world the Nativity took place in. To understand why, we have to put aside modern nation-states and step into Rome. Rome wasn’t a patchwork...

Discussions about the birth of Jesus often include the assertion that Jesus, Mary, and Joseph were refugees fleeing persecution. This framing is intended to connect the biblical story to contemporary global crises and highlight empathy for displaced people. While the intention may be understandable, the historical circumstances of the Holy Family do not align with the modern category of refugee st...

The story of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph is one of the most recognized narratives in human history. During the Christmas season, it becomes a focal point of faith, culture, and reflection. In recent public conversation, a growing claim circulates that Jesus and His family were refugees or asylum seekers, meant to serve as a direct parallel to contemporary refugee experiences. While this comparison is...

This episode examines the United States as the only modern nation where privately owned firearms—hundreds of millions of them—form a silent, decentralized balance against the three visible layers of power: local government, shadow networks, and federal authority. We are told the Second Amendment is about hunting, recreation, nostalgia, and home defense, but those explanations describe utility, not...

The United States is the only modern nation where nearly half a billion privately owned firearms—most dormant, unseen, and unorganized—form an unspoken fourth layer of power within civil society. Public debate reduces guns to crime, culture wars, or personal safety, but the deeper structural reality is that private firearm ownership disperses consequence and prevents any single actor—local governm...

When governments fail — slowly, suddenly, or simply enough to be noticed — power doesn’t evaporate. Power reallocates. The world abhors a vacuum, and politics is physics with human consequences. Somewhere between the speeches and the streets, between the slogan and the morgue, new systems emerge to do what the old system can’t or won’t. They collect debts. They settle disputes. They hand out punis...

When people debate terrorism, cartel violence, insurgency, or the so-called war on drugs, they usually argue morality — who is good, who is evil, who is defending civilization, who is poisoning it. But morality, for all its emotional voltage, explains almost nothing. What explains far more is power — who has it, who wants it, and who steps in when the official architecture of governance collapses...

Barovia doesn’t believe in quiet mornings. The sun doesn’t rise so much as negotiate with the fog, and when the party left Argynvostholt—bruised, burned, and out of everything but sarcasm—they were just trying to make it to the Wizards of Wine without adding another ghost to their growing collection. But the Svalich Road had other ideas. As the grey dawn crept in, the flicker of a bonfire appeared...

In Barovia, exhaustion isn’t just a condition. It’s a worldview. And when Session Twenty-Three began, that’s exactly where we were—drained, bruised, and barely held together after ghosts, scarecrows, giant spiders, and one very opinionated abandoned manor. We left Argynvostholt like survivors crawling out of a collapsed mine, heading toward the only place in Barovia that still feels remotely like...

The screen fades in on mist. The remains of Argynvostholt rise like a broken cathedral above a grey valley. Then, faintly, the sound of boots, breathing, and whispered plans. This is Session 22 — a full visual chronicle of the night our party defied the ghosts, webs, and curses of Barovia’s most haunted ruin. The video podcast version of Fire in the Webs captures the energy of play in a way that o...

Step into Barovia’s haunted silence in The Mists of Argynvostholt , an audio journey through one of the most intense chapters of our Curse of Strahd campaign. This is Session 22 — an evening of peril, faith, and endurance that tested every spell slot, every saving throw, and every nerve at the table. Our adventurers— Urihorn Tenpenny , a halfling ranger with a loyal beast companion; Radley Fulltho...

Imagine watching a pot of water with frogs in it. The city adds a little heat — higher taxes, new regulations, moral lectures — and waits to see what happens. At first, nothing. The frogs get used to it. Then one day the temperature crosses a line, and they jump. That’s how modern economies lose their wealth. Not with protests, not with revolutions — but with relocation. In the past, money was tra...

I’ve been thinking a lot about how money moves — and how we still talk about it as if it doesn’t. It all started with a TikTok comment. Somebody asked, “When have rich people ever moved to avoid taxes?” I typed back a few examples — Eduardo Saverin to Singapore, the French actor Gérard Depardieu to Belgium, the wave of Californians to Texas — and before I knew it, I was deep in the rabbit hole of...

Every now and then, America drags its elites out of the faculty lounge and into the street fair. It doesn’t matter if the excuse is a war, a crisis, or—this time—the 250th birthday of the country. Eventually, the people who think they’re running the story are reminded that they’re just living in it. That’s what’s happening now: the same class that spent a decade deconstructing the flag is being to...