The Chris Abraham Show

A brand-new SUV stripped of all four wheels and left belly-down in my apartment parking lot gets me thinking about property crime, personal boundaries, and how Americans respond when somebody takes their stuff.

This episode wanders through Malcolm Gladwell, gun violence, disputed crime statistics, broken windows policing, and the unexpected emotional education I’m getting from the Canadian detective series Private Eyes. There are live Google queries, personal stories, second thoughts, and a proposal for recovering wheel-less cars with a giant fish spatula.

I explore the argument that Americans react to theft with a particular in...

“The First Amendment is not a force field against the Second Amendment.”

The world doesn’t owe you a trust fall. In this episode of The Chris Abraham Show, I explore the distance between how we believe people should behave and what actually happens when fear, ego, adrenaline, weapons, and conflicting convictions enter the picture.

Starting with protests and confrontations with police and federal agents, I question the assumption that having rights, good intentions, or the moral high ground guarantees physical safety. My Russian roulette metaphor asks how each additional risky behavior can raise the stakes...

Welcome back to Season 11 of The Chris Abraham Show! In this season premiere, host Chris Abraham dives headfirst into the fierce philosophical and cultural debate surrounding gun ownership, policing, state power, and personal responsibility in modern America.

Spurred by a recent episode of Oprah Winfrey's podcast—Why Is America Different Than Every Other Country When It Comes to Guns?—Chris reflects on why American attitudes toward crime and guns are fundamentally different from those in Europe and other developed nations. Drawing on his experience living in Berlin under ubiquitous law enforcement, Chris contrasts Europe’s high-trust, collectivist cultur...

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. That sounds melodramatic until you hear the story. Then it starts sounding annoyingly accurate.

We were deep inside Castle...

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 strike campaign against Iran that targeted military infrastructure and senior leadership, the region once again finds itself at the edge of a wider war. Markets convulse, shipping lanes tighten, and the familiar ar...

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 idea wasn’t necessarily invading countries abroad. It was building a domestic “make work” machine: a deportation industrial complex that functions like a WPA-style spen...

The Ellisons Prepare to Expand Their Media EmpireThe 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: nostalgic for the old public-radio mix, aware of how it shaped him, and also increasingly allergic to how it can feel like a status-enforcing machine rather than a shared civic utility.

Chris...

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 the patience of a spider and the manners of a king. We have been trying to protect Ireena Kolyana from him, recover the Amulet of Ravenkind, and stay...

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’s domain isn’t a setback. It’s a liability. Lady Fiona Wachter, newly installed as Vallaki’s burgomaster, is the most likely person holding it. Her family predates Strahd’s rule, and in Barovia...

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 liked that, but nobody said no. That is how corruption enters a party. It doesn’t knock. It waits for exhaustion.

Ur...

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 that height, there’s a clear line of sight over a golf course and across low-rise terrain toward the G...

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 only as foreign policy but as an organizing principle for labor, industry, logistics, and federal spending. The Global War on Terror normalized enormous budgets, standing emergency authorities, and sprawling institutional ecosystems that extended far...

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 back into the workshop.

Chris opens by reflecting on a year spent experimenting with AI-assisted writing and audio. Substacks fed into NotebookLM. Podcasts assembled more like orchestration than performance. He likens hims...

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 in, the analogy collapses instantly.

To understand the Flight into Egypt, you have to understand Rome. Not Rome as a distant city, but Rome as a system — the political world the Ho...

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 of countries. It was a unified imperial world, more like a continental-scale United States than anything else in antiquity. Judea and Egypt were not separate nations. They were Roman jurisdictions. Moving between them was like moving...

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 status as defined by law, borders, and international recognition.

In the first century, the Eastern Mediterranean was not divided into nation-states. It operated under one imperial authority: Rome. Judea, the birthplace of Jesus, was ruled by Herod...

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 often used to provoke empathy or social concern, it is historically inaccurate and incomplete when measured against the political and legal realities of the ancient world.

In the first century, the Eastern Mediterranean...

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 purpose. The American model disperses power by design, not tradition. The firearm is not symbolic here—it is structural.

Much of this structure is invisible precisely because it functions without activation. A half billion firearms are not mobilized agains...

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 government, shadow authority, or federal power—from assuming uncontested monopoly over civilian life. The Second Amendment was not written for hunting or nostalgia. It was written for parity—citizens maintaining access to contemporary tools comparable to those used by the state...

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 punishment, protection, and paychecks. They build their own justice without courts and their own economies without banks. They step in because someone must.

In this episode, we explore the phenomenon most people pretend no...

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 or simply stops caring. The line between freedom fighter and terrorist, protector and predator, patriot and criminal, isn’t drawn by ethics. It’s drawn by legitimacy — and legitimacy is an asset backed not by universal...

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 between the trees. Cut to: pine forest, heavy mist, silhouettes moving around a ritual circle. Urihorn scouts ahead and finds a scene straight...

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 home: the Wizards of Wine Winery. A place with warmth, family, and maybe even joy, if the mist isn’t listening too closely.

But Barovia never lets you walk in peace.
At dawn...

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 only a tabletop camera can. The dice roll in frame. The players’ faces shift between tension, humor, and awe. You see every movement of the miniatures on the...

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 Fullthorn, a human Eldritch Knight balancing sword and spell; Traxidor, a cleric of light carrying the last fire of the Morninglord; and Daermon Cobain, an elf arcane trickster who fights with precision and wit—re...

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 trapped. Rockefeller couldn’t just move Standard Oil to Singapore. The state had leverage. That’s why we could run top tax rates near 90 percent in the 1950s — and stil...

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 what economists call capital flight.

It’s the quiet migration that rewires everything. Cities still pretend they control wealth, but wealth learned ho...

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 told to wave it. The same pundits who said “America was never great” are now workshopping how to make patriotism sound inclusive.

The Great Patrio...

Every few generations, America forgets how to argue and starts to dance instead. This time the excuse is the 250th birthday — the Semiquincentennial, a word that sounds like it was cooked up by a government subcommittee. But behind the bureaucratic branding, something strange is happening. The same cultural class that once rolled its eyes at patriotism is now rediscovering flags, fireworks, and the word “Republic.” The same people who called the Founders colonizers are suddenly quoting them. It’s as if the left decided to go on a national Rumspringa — to step outside its echo chamber and see how the rest o...

“You become what you pretend to be, so be careful what you pretend to be.” — Jean-Paul Sartre

In The Great Patriotic Heist, I argued that the American Left has begun performing patriotism — not feeling it, performing it. The same institutions that once mocked the flag now wrap themselves in it, speaking solemnly about “our Republic” and “the unfinished promise of 1776.” It’s not rediscovered affection — it’s narrative survival. The populist Right took the flag hostage, so the only way to reclaim it was to start waving their own. My warning then was simple: performance has a half-life. It either c...

“You become what you pretend to be, so be careful what you pretend to be.” — Jean-Paul Sartre

In The Great Patriotic Heist, I argued that the American Left has begun performing patriotism — waving flags, quoting Jefferson, rediscovering “our Republic” — not from love of country but from narrative panic. The populist Right had taken ownership of rebellion, freedom, and 1776’s mythic energy, leaving progressives with a choice: mock it or mimic it. They chose mimicry. My warning then was that performance can’t last forever; it either collapses or becomes real.

This episode asks: what happens if it becomes real...

This immersive, long-form audio edition gathers every commentary, Notebook LM segment, stitched reaction, and post-production note from The Great Patriotic Heist project. Think of it as part documentary, part Socratic salon: a living conversation about how America swung—from self-flagellation to flag-waving—in less than two years.

Across two hours of unfiltered discussion, analysts, AI narrators, and invited voices trace the strange metamorphosis of the American Left’s rhetoric. We rewind to the statue-toppling days of 2020, revisit the “God-damn America” sermons of the previous decade, and then fast-forward to today’s sudden outpouring of managed patriotism. The same crowd t...

This episode is a visual-audio walk-through of the Notebook LM “deck” for The Great Patriotic Heist — a multimedia explainer on how America’s political left abruptly rediscovered the flag. In 1976 the Bicentennial turned Main Street into a Norman Rockwell carnival of belief. In 2026, the same symbols are being curated from boardrooms and NGOs as marketing assets. The presentation moves through five scenes:
1️⃣ Whiplash Patriotism — from “colonizer nation” to “USA! USA!” in 18 months.
2️⃣ The Heist Playbook — linguistic capture: redefining “freedom,” “bravery,” and “revolution.”
3️⃣ The Handlers — the managerial class that packages emotion as optics.
4️⃣ The Real Ethos — a sink-or-swim nation whose faith is self-reliance.<...

Hey Jason,

First, thank you. Your reply to America = Afghanistan was what debate used to be — informed, generous, and disarmingly human. You didn’t just argue; you elevated. You said America isn’t a graveyard of movements but a battleground that keeps evolving. That progress doesn’t die, it sediments — layering itself into law, language, and culture. And you’re right, at least partly.

My essay argued that Afghanistan defeats empires not through power, but patience. It takes their money, their systems, their slogans — and outlasts them. I claimed that America does something similar with its own moveme...

Hey Jason,

First, thank you. Your reply to America = Afghanistan was what debate used to be — informed, generous, and disarmingly human. You didn’t just argue; you elevated. You said America isn’t a graveyard of movements but a battleground that keeps evolving. That progress doesn’t die, it sediments — layering itself into law, language, and culture. And you’re right, at least partly.

My essay argued that Afghanistan defeats empires not through power, but patience. It takes their money, their systems, their slogans — and outlasts them. I claimed that America does something similar with its own moveme...

Each victory in Barovia costs a soul. Sometimes, it’s your own.

The party’s story in these twin sessions begins in ash and ends in resurrection. After the execution of Traxidor, his companions refused to leave his body on display in Vallaki’s square. Lady Wachter had expected their sentimentality. When they came for him, she unleashed hell.

Literally.

A Barbed Devil pursued them through Vallaki’s backstreets, flanked by smaller spined fiends that shrieked from above. Radley carried Traxidor’s corpse, stumbling under the weight; Daermon darted ahead through fog; Urihorn fired arro...

In Barovia, every escape leads to another trial. Salvation, when it comes, is never free.

The night after the gallows of Vallaki, the survivors of the party—Radley, Daermon, and Urihorn—refused to abandon the body of their fallen cleric, Traxidor. His corpse hung publicly as a warning, a final cruelty from Lady Fiona Wachter. When the adventurers slipped through alleys to steal it back, they walked straight into her trap. The air split with screams and sulfur as a Barbed Devil burst from the mist, followed by smaller winged Spined Devils, summoned by the Burgomistress’s infern...

Fascism, Normies, and the Generational Divide

“Idealism increases in direct proportion to one’s distance from the problem.” Or as I like to say, your ability to put up with a problem is your distance from it.

If you’re over 40, you probably think fascism means Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany — a corporatist system where state and business fused into a one-party authoritarian project. That’s the old poli-sci definition I learned back at GWU in 1988.

But ask someone under 40 and you’ll get a different answer. For them, “fascism” covers almost anything patrio...

“Idealism increases in direct proportion to one’s distance from the problem.” Or as I like to say, your ability to put up with a problem is your distance from it.

If you’re over 40, you probably think fascism means Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany — a corporatist system where state and business fused into a one-party authoritarian project. That’s the old poli-sci definition I learned back at GWU in 1988.

But ask someone under 40 and you’ll get a different answer. For them, “fascism” covers almost anything patriotic or traditional: flags, borders, religion, even just opposing soc...

The killing of Charlie Kirk in Utah this September didn’t just extinguish the life of a polarizing activist. It set off a cascade — an implosion in the civic square whose blast radius is still expanding. To make sense of it, we should borrow metaphors not from politics but from physics and history: Sarajevo, Versailles, Oppenheimer.

A nuclear bomb is not powered by TNT. It’s powered by the precision of small charges — explosive lenses — that compress a fragile core until it becomes supercritical. A spark, carefully timed, unleashes apocalypse. Politics often works the same way. In 1914, a 19-year...