The Chris Abraham Show

Enlightenment Isn’t Loud. It Mops Floors. There’s a saying in Zen: “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” It sounds violent, but it isn’t. It’s a warning — against false idols, against ego, against brandishing your enlightenment like a badge. Because the real Buddha doesn’t announce himself. He doesn’t post about it. He certainly doesn’t go on speaking tours. The real Buddha might be mopp...

I Am Whatever Kind of Commie Kurt Vonnegut Was Am I a commie? Yes—but not the kind they warned you about. Not the doctrinaire type. Not the utopian. Not the bureaucrat. I don’t want to flatten everyone to the same mediocrity. I don’t want to abolish excellence, or demand purity tests, or see the world through the lens of enforcement and compliance. I believe in decency, not dogma. I believe no one...

We act like the missiles decide their targets. As if the Hellfire drone strike has free will. But in modern warfare—and in modern narrative warfare—the target isn’t a target until someone paints it. Laser-guided munitions don’t wake up one day and say, “That guy.” They wait. For a signal. A beam. A blinking beacon hidden under the floorboards. The ordnance doesn’t think. It follows. And in our end...

You’ve seen the checklist. It’s been screenshotted, shared, color-coded, made into TikToks, and dropped into Reddit threads like gospel. “The 14 Signs of Fascism,” courtesy of Umberto Eco—saint of academic antifascists and patron thinker of Canva revolutionaries. And if you believe certain corners of the internet, Donald J. Trump has officially collected them all. Congratulations, America: you’ve...

Sources: Salon :  Deliberative democracy: Sounds boring — but it just might save us Stanford :  Could deliberative democracy depolarize America? Stanford scholars think so "Pedagogy or Programming? The Moral Case for Managed Consensus" Let’s imagine a generous reading of the deliberative democracy project—the one where Fishkin, Diamond, and maybe even Sommer Gentry aren’t scheming puppet...

The Supreme Court, the Rolex, and Why the Tallest Poppy Gets Cut There’s a meme making the rounds: a giant dust storm barreling toward a city, its face replaced with that of a fluffy dog. It’s labeled The Supreme Court . The city? A thriving modern society . It’s funny because it’s true. Or at least it feels true, which is how truth works now. But that meme is more than a punchline. It’s a warning...

Trump Isn’t the Disease—He’s the Cold Sore What if the bull in the china shop is just what 70% of the country asked for? I don’t know how “good” Trump is as a legislator. Doesn’t matter. What is real is the immune response he triggered. Millions of Americans who felt cowed—ignored, belittled, scolded—saw in Trump a signal flare. Not because he’s polished or wise. Because he’s not. His chaos mirror...

No Medics, No Press, No Mercy: Modern War Doesn’t Believe You Anymore In theory, war has rules: press badges, medics, the Red Cross, the Geneva Conventions. But in practice—on the battlefield, on the street, or online— those protections are myths, not shields . And in 2025, no one in uniform truly believes in neutrality anymore. Whether in Gaza, Fallujah, or downtown Los Angeles, one reality has t...

American Foreign Policy: In Search of Monsters to Destroy How meme warfare, judicial chokeholds, and moral exhaustion paved a runway straight to Tehran Donald Trump is not a shadow lurking at the edge of American democracy. He is the state. The 47th President. Elected—again—not by coup, but through ballots and blood sport. And when, in June 2025, he greenlit the B-2s to bomb Iranian nuclear facili...

America Does Not Go Abroad in Search of Monsters to Destroy — 2025 Remix By Chris Abraham A Republic, If You Can Drone It Original 2005 article: America Does Not Go Abroad in Search of Monsters to Destroy John Quincy Adams said we don’t go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. But he didn’t live in the age of drone feeds, weaponized hashtags, and TED Talk warfare. In 2025, we still claim the mo...

When Trump Couldn’t Deport, He Bombed Tariffs blocked. Deportations sandbagged. So he reached for the B‑2s. It’s easy to see Trump’s June 2025 bombing of Iranian nuclear sites as yet another episode of MAGA theater—rage, firepower, and a dramatic “message sent.” But this time, it wasn’t just for show. This was an act of geopolitical spite born from domestic paralysis. Trump, denied the ability to...

Trump didn’t come back to bomb Iran. He came back to slap tariffs on China and build a domestic economy around mass deportation. That’s not hyperbole—it’s his vision of American greatness: inward-looking, job-creating, and built on enforcement infrastructure rather than foreign adventurism. He never needed war to stimulate the economy. He needed ICE hiring sprees. He needed biometric tracking. He...

Last night, America sent B-2 bombers into Iranian airspace, dropped massive ordnance, and reasserted a worldview that goes far deeper than current events. While analysts dissect escalation ladders and airbase footage, the real explanation isn’t on a map—it’s in our collective imagination. America doesn’t just support Israel. We identify with it. In our books, films, and foreign policy dreams, Isra...

Mahmoud Khalil spent over 100 days locked in a Louisiana detention center. Why? Not for breaking the law, but because the law—designed to protect people like him—was turned against him. He’s a Palestinian grad student, a green card holder, and he led pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University. For that, he was swept up under an obscure Cold War statute originally meant to keep Soviet spies ou...

Diversity, Equality , and Inclusion Under the Big-Ass Tent of the Second Amendment There’s a quiet but massive shift unfolding in America—one that doesn’t show up in headlines or viral clips, but in the background check logs, the sold-out CCW classes, and the slow, steady boom at local shooting ranges. The people buying guns now don’t fit the old stereotype. They are queer. They are trans. They ar...

What Happens When America’s Soft-Power Machine Loses Its Favorite Weapon For decades, shame has been America’s quietest form of governance. Not enforced through law, but diffused through institutions—academia, media, advertising, entertainment, HR departments, and NGOs. It worked not with batons or ballots, but through language, psychology, and reputation. You didn’t need to arrest people if you c...

When self-loathing stops selling, what happens to those who built entire empires on our shame? There’s a deep shift rumbling underfoot—and it’s not a political campaign or marketing trend. It’s cultural. Spiritual. Almost romantic. America, for all its bruises and betrayals, is on the edge of something dangerous: It might start loving itself again. Not the flag-waving jingoism of talk radio. Not t...

When the Grind Breaks You, the Soil Heals You — and Your Neighbor Probably Votes Different Let’s be honest: this isn’t about survival. Not really. Not for most. It’s about escape. Escape from the office. From Amazon delivery windows. From fluorescent lights and HR training and Slack threads about “alignment.” The farm fantasy—whether it’s a thousand acres in Idaho or six raised beds in your lawn—i...

There’s something quietly radical about a farmer’s market. Not in the kombucha-on-tap way. Not in the tote bag aesthetic. But in the unspoken overlap of two parallel universes that pretend they have nothing in common: the crunchy granola left and the spiritually defiant right. Each arrives—often in some open-air lot outside a gentrifying neighborhood—and both believe they’re escaping something. Ch...

There’s a strange place where the far left and far right nearly embrace. You’ll find it at farmers markets, homeschool co-ops, in YouTube rabbit holes, and in the quiet affinity between a Colorado ayahuasca mom and a West Virginia herbalist dad. It’s not the Horseshoe Theory as smug centrists invoke it — it’s a lived convergence of spiritual autonomy and revolutionary distrust. This isn’t speculat...

A Love Letter to the Base You Misunderstand Somewhere along the way, we mistook cleverness for clarity and moral style for moral truth. We turned politics into a seminar, and then wondered why the working class stopped attending. This is not an endorsement. This is a translation. We must understand that what we call “populism” today—often reduced to slogans or red hats—isn’t about cruelty, racism,...

Teenage Tantrums in Revolutionary Drag! Welcome to the episode where we say the quiet part out loud: most people screaming “fascist!” these days aren’t fighting tyranny—they’re just mad someone told them what to do. This isn’t about justice. It’s unresolved teenage angst with better fonts and worse posture. We trace the long, pouty arc of performative rebellion from interwar purity spirals to the...

The House, the Whistle, and the Basement: Explaining America to Itself America in 2025 feels less like a nation-state and more like a house mid-repossession. Not by banks, but by competing claims of ownership over what it means to belong, to obey, to resist, and to rule. Think of it like this: there’s an old multi-generational house — a Montauk-style sprawl. The parents live upstairs. The kids rul...

A Personal History of Regime Change, Memory, and the Myth of America the Liberator I’m against regime change—whether it comes by bombs, drones, NGOs, IMF leverage, or the velvet glove of democracy promotion. I oppose it when it’s loud and violent. I oppose it when it’s sly and nudged. Be it the softish regime change of Ukraine or the hard ones in Syria (won’t work), Libya (yikes), Afghanistan (nop...

What individuals perceive as "resistance" or "defiance" when interacting with law enforcement is consistently interpreted by authorities as "escalation", and this escalation leads to severe, predictable, and often irreversible consequences. Law enforcement agencies, whether local, state, or federal, are described as "retrieval units" or "operators"...