Such a lovely little film. Still missing the lovely actress Michelle Trachtenberg. Rest in peace lovely lady.
The Kennedy Center mostly serves wealthy donors, elites, and people with money to burn. If we’re constantly told to hate the rich and stop catering to them, why is anyone upset that an institution built around elite cultural pampering is disrupted? newrepublic.com/post/2048…
Whenever I see anything about “the performative liberal male” I can’t help but my mind always returns to this classic SNL skit: www.youtube.com/watch
WOD: Boffo: (of a theatrical production or movie, or a review of one) very successful or wholeheartedly commendatory—I knew the word but I didn’t know the actual definition. The more you know.
There is a meaningful distinction between rare, targeted state violence against elite political dissidents and the routine criminalization of ordinary speech.
High-level dissidents such as exiled officials, influential journalists, or opposition organizers operate within power struggles that states treat as existential threats.
Violence against them, while indefensible, is exceptional rather than systemic.
By contrast, arresting everyday citizens for online speech represents a different and arguably more corrosive form of repression.
When speech laws are enforced broadly and bureaucratically, they reshape social behavior at scale. Ordinary people begin to self-censor not because they challenge power, but because enforcement is ambient, unpredictable, and normalized.
The existence of extreme cases of repression elsewhere does not justify expanding speech policing in liberal societies. Nor does elite political violence serve as a useful benchmark for evaluating domestic speech restrictions.
The danger lies less in rare acts of spectacular repression than in systems that quietly criminalize expression for everyone.
Dems: here’s a cheat code to win ‘26 & ‘28
How liberals paved the way for Trump youtube.com/watch
Antifa and similar street movements don’t work like clubs you join. They work like Hollywood. A script appears, money shows up, logistics lock in, and suddenly there’s a production. You don’t enlist. You get cast. Think less membership card, more SAG
Antifa and similar emergent street forces are misunderstood because people keep asking the wrong question: “Is it an organization you can join?” That’s like asking whether Hollywood is a club with membership forms.
It isn’t.
These movements function like movie production. First comes a script. A narrative of moral urgency, crisis, or resistance. Then comes funding, whether direct or indirect, legal support, transport, bail funds, media amplification, or institutional tolerance. Once the project is fully financed and the conditions are right, the cast assembles.
No one fills out an application. No one gets a membership card. People self-select into roles once the production exists. Some are repeat actors. Some are day players. Some just show up for one shoot and disappear. That doesn’t make the production imaginary. It makes it episodic.
Leadership in this model is not a chairman or a general. It’s whoever greenlights the project, controls resources, absorbs risk, and signals when and where to show up. That’s how coherence emerges without hierarchy. That’s how everyone involved maintains plausible deniability afterward.
This is why arguments like “there is no organized Antifa” are technically true and practically evasive. There may be no standing army, but there are recurring productions with familiar crews, tactics, and narratives. Violence and disorder are not commanded. They are incentivized, enabled, and later disowned.
So no, Antifa isn’t a club you join. It’s closer to getting your SAG card. Once the movie is funded, the extras always find the set.
Here’s a first edition of my spy novel!
Hill Mole: Life is But a Dream a.co/d/9cbMJB8
Here’s a first edition of my spy novel!
Hill Mole: Life is But a Dream a.co/d/9cbMJB8
Leaving a Purple Meshtastic Node in the Window How a $55 LoRa device stopped being a gadget and became infrastructure chrisabraham.substack.com/p/leaving…
Underinvested Commodities, Overhyped AI: Reading 2026 the Austrian Way
Delicious NPR J6 propaganda—yum yum!
Not a peaceful protest pca.st/episode/a…
My Meshtastic Journey—So Far So Good chrisabraham.com/blog/my-m…
Revisiting the Maidan Massacre pocketcasts.com/podcast/m…
Trump’s international policy doesn’t threaten liberal democracy it only threatens “liberal democracy,” which is Trojan horse global cultural imperialism. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/202…
Google Discover SEO: How Content Gets Found Before Anyone Searches for It chrisabraham.com/blog/goog…
“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” — 1 Corinthians 13:11 (NIV translation)
“When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” — Author C. S. Lewis
“Any man who is not a liberal at twenty has no heart; any man who is not a conservative at forty has no brain.” — Winston Churchill
In times like these, I hesitate to quote Lolita, but it’s hard not to notice the echo. Humbert Humbert constantly sneers at America: its pop culture, its teenagers, their mothers, its vulgarity and stupidity. That contempt isn’t incidental. It’s central to who he is.
Humbert’s posture is the familiar one of the displaced European aesthete: superior, wounded, endlessly scolding a society he depends on but despises. Nabokov makes that voice insufferable on purpose. Humbert isn’t meant to be a sage diagnosing American decline; he’s an unreliable narrator whose cultural disdain is part of his moral rot.
His endless sneering is one of the clues. We’re not supposed to agree with him. We’re supposed to recognize how intellectual contempt, when paired with self-mythologizing and grievance, becomes a way to excuse predation and cruelty. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/…