The Chris Abraham Show

There is a curious bravery in staying quiet. A paradox of power in invisibility. In the theater of reform, those who script the act are rarely the ones who survive its performance. We have, on one side, the conceptual vanguard—architects of utopia, fluent in white paper and panel discussion. On the other, the vulgarian proletariat, kinetic and uncontainable, arriving late to the table and eating w...

There Is Nothing Outside the Text: Poppy, Derrida, and the White Cube Where I’ve Lived My Entire Working Life I am 55 years old, and I was today years old when I finally grasped what should have been obvious the moment I read Of Grammatology at 19: my entire career — every late-night site map, every Google Business profile, every crisis press release, every SEO audit, every mercenary ORM gig — has...

Real Violence Waits for No One’s Speech People raised in safe places believe every fight has a referee. They think there will be time to puff up, to circle, to monologue like a Bond villain or a protest poet. They believe words can protect them from what happens when fear becomes action. But real violence is not a schoolyard. It is not a protest with polite arrests. It is not an argument online. R...

A meme flickered across feeds this week: South Carolina stacked up against California like a balance sheet for how well you can cage chaos. Homicide rates, GDP, life expectancy — by each measure California shines as the model: safer, wealthier, longer-lived. South Carolina looks rougher, poorer, more violent, a reminder that for some Americans, freedom means a shorter, riskier life. Beneath the nu...

Same Swamp, Different Brood The DC Madam & the Secret That Still Hums Close your eyes: DC, late ‘90s into the 2000s. Suits at the Mayflower, steakhouse hush-hush deals on K Street, the kind of power that smells like dry-cleaned wool, stale cigars, and cheap cologne. There was no Tinder. No casual fling on a swipe. If you wanted vice, you went through the shadows — or you called Deborah Jeane P...

It is often said that every modern welfare system, from the Roman grain dole to the SNAP card at the grocery store, carries the seeds of its own discontent. These systems promise that the collective will carry the burdens of the vulnerable. But they are haunted by a tension older than any bureaucracy: the uneasy craving to see helplessness displayed. To give freely feels good; but to give freely t...

Why Surrender Is Still the Only Endgame There’s a brutal truth people forget when they throw around words like genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing. Those words do mean something — but they lose meaning when they’re wielded like hashtags during an ongoing shooting war. Once you’re in the fight, the moral shield only works when you put the knife down. War is chess with live ammunition. You have p...

A quiet bird can’t be shot. A hidden fish can’t be netted. A calm suspect cannot be tagged and fed into the system. This is older than any badge or slogan. Force survives by flushing what hides, tagging what flushes, and feeding on what shows itself. Everything else is theater. Any enforcement system needs visible prey. No visible crime or defiance means the budget shrinks and the dogs stay in the...

Date: June 29, 2025 Players: Sean D. (Sören Ironwood – Aasimar Paladin), Chris (Radley – Human Fighter), Carey (Traxidor – Half-Elf Cleric), Trip (Daermon Cobain – Half-Elf Rogue) Filed Under: Curse of Strahd, Gothic Horror, D&D Recaps Twelve days in Barovia and each dawn feels like dusk. At the Blue Water Inn, a messenger arrived with a letter sealed in wax — Strahd von Zarovich’s invitation...

In “ Will We Tolerate Concentration Camps and Slave Labor? ” , Steven Beschloss warns that America may be on the verge of something monstrous: mass deportations, labor camps, and forced work that echoes the worst shadows of our history. But the real horror is simpler: these camps already exist. They never went away. And they’re not some accidental glitch of the system — they are the system. The tr...

So much modern talk about policing rests on a wish: that the officer showing up at your worst moment is a hybrid — therapist, social worker, priest, and protector — who can fix every chaotic life story with infinite patience. But the reality is older, harsher, and simpler: the officer is a guard dog, not a Saint Bernard with a cask of mercy. The old “beat cop” we romanticize — the Irish Bobby tipp...

How America’s Godless Made a Thunder God Out of a Mortal Clown I saw someone on Reddit shrug: “The thing is, he’s actually responsible for stuff. He’s the president.” And that’s it, isn’t it? In a country that once thought presidents were just men in suits, we’ve built one who rains bunker-buster thunderbolts like Zeus. Not by accident — by hunger. By a god-shaped hole in a nation that told itself...

There’s an ancient fear that always asks: Who did this? Who angered the gods? When storms crush fields or floods drown children at camp, our ancestors blamed Ba’al, Moloch, Ra — anything to put a face on chaos. Modern Americans pretend we’ve outgrown this. We trust policy, science, data. But scratch the surface and the eclipse fear is still there, buried under hashtags and TED Talks. And the momen...

Every protest sign you’ve ever waved, every petty theft you bragged about, every mask you wore — it’s all been scraped up, timestamped, and tucked in a file with your name on it. Doesn’t matter if you called it civil disobedience, harmless rebellion, or just youthful stupidity. You were noticed. America’s surveillance state isn’t a guard tower and barbed wire; it’s a mansion rigged like Willy Wonk...

When Silicon Valley and the CCP Start Speaking the Same Language Let’s get real: the world’s two most powerful nations are building surveillance societies. The United States, under a new breed of techno-ideologues, is quietly constructing a digital control system that mirrors—sometimes eerily—the one perfected by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Pull back the curtain and you see the same machine...

TED Radio Hour: The State of Fashion TED Radio Hour: Supermodel Cameron Russell says she helped a 'grotesque industry' look beautiful I listened to Cameron Russell on NPR’s TED Radio Hour talking about her memoir — how she was scouted as a teenager, how she tolerated “grotesque” things: the S&M vibe, the creepy photographers, the being called “jailbait” at 16. She calls it what it is —...

The Trickster as 47th President by Chris Abraham Donald Trump was always easy to sneer at. He was a tabloid punchline long before he was the gold-plated game show boss my mother adored. The Apprentice was her favorite. I rolled my eyes. He was tacky, vulgar — a human golden toilet. We told ourselves he’d never be more than that. Yet here we are: he’s the 47th President of the United States. The on...

What We Forget When We Remember Ourselves Every Fourth of July I get this itch — not to dunk on the country I love, but to scratch at the paint and see what’s underneath. To lift the floorboards, find the roaches, and point out that this grand old house we celebrate didn’t get built by one guy with a hammer. The American story is the greatest solo act ever told. Lone hero, lone cowboy, lone genius...

It’s the Fourth of July and Congress just crammed through the Big Beautiful Bunker Buster Bill — 870 pages of fences and tax cuts, border walls and missile domes, detention dollars and pork for the same contractors that keep the monster fed. Some people scream it’s our Declaration of Independence from decline. Others swear it’s Auschwitz 2.0 with better branding. Maybe it’s both, maybe it’s neithe...

The Secret Safety Net We Pretend Doesn’t Exist You can live your whole life in this country without ever seeing the crawlspace you’re standing on. America has always flirted with the idea of a safety net — food assistance, cheap clinics, housing vouchers — but never enough to make it real in daylight. Try to codify a European-style welfare system here and you’ll run headlong into the one thing vot...

Foreign aid is dead — long live foreign aid. On July 1st, 2025, the U.S. Agency for International Development — USAID — shut its doors for good. An institution born under Kennedy to be America’s moral halo and Cold War firewall, it fed, healed, and built half the Global South for 60 years. Some say it saved 91 million lives; The Lancet says its closure could mean 14 million more deaths by 2030, a...

We always thought the real cultural coup would come from the ivory tower, the professors, the think tanks. Or maybe from the so-called “gay agenda” — whispered about by people who never once sat cross-legged in a high school hallway while the real conspirators held each other’s faces and wept over a monologue. But the truth is, it was never the tweedy wonks or the closeted cabal that would rewrite...

How old ghosts, new lines, and our hungry machines keep us replaying the same pain Some family stories hum so loudly through the floorboards you never need to tell them out loud. My pop-pop thought he could outrun a ghost when he moved my nana to the end of a dead-end road in Spring Lake, New Jersey — hoping she’d stop drinking if she couldn’t walk to the bar. But the bottle came anyway. The phone...

America’s exhausted — and not just from inflation, rent, or the nine-to-five that turned into a nine-to-nine. There’s another kind of exhaustion we don’t name out loud: the fatigue of paying for people you don’t trust, programs you think don’t work, neighbors you swear game the system. It’s called poverty fatigue . Not the poverty itself — the fatigue of living shoulder-to-shoulder with it, fundin...

Reference Source:   NPR Code Switch :  Dispatches from the living memory of trans people of color Identity, Stealth, and Staying Submarine When the Wolves Come Out I heard a line on Code Switch that stuck with me: “I’m staying in my lane. I can’t speak for you.” This is my lane. I’m not your hero or blueprint. I’m just a man with a few stories — potatoes in a rock soup — about how identity can be...