Chris Abraham

One thing the Lenten readings keep circling back to is pride. Not the cartoon version of pride that shows up as obvious arrogance, but the quieter form that sits underneath so many human problems. According to the tradition, the first sin in Eden wasn’t violence or cruelty. It was the belief that we could decide what is good and evil for ourselves. It was the temptation to step into God’s place.

That same pattern shows up again and again in the Gospel passages we hear during Lent. The disciples are already thinking in terms of rank, position, proximity to power. Who gets to sit at the right hand? Who gets the place of honor? It’s the most human instinct in the world. We want to be close to the throne.

And Christ calmly flips the entire idea over. “The rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them… but it shall not be so among you.”

In other words, the normal operating system of human hierarchy is not the one he’s installing.

Greatness, in the kingdom he describes, looks almost inverted. The one who wants to be first becomes the servant. The one who wants to lead becomes the one who carries burdens. Authority is not something to display, but something to spend on behalf of others.

That theme echoes in the other readings too. Don’t perform holiness for applause. Don’t judge so quickly. Reconcile before you worship. Love even your enemies. Measure generously, because the same measure comes back to you.

Taken together, it paints a picture of Christ that is easy to forget. He isn’t a warlord, a crusader, or a mythic king in armor. He moves through the Gospels almost like a quiet countercurrent to human pride. Wherever people try to climb higher, he points lower. Wherever people try to secure honor, he talks about service.

And Lent becomes a kind of mirror. Not a finger pointed at other people’s hypocrisy, but a small examination of our own reflex to climb, to judge, to be right, to be admired. The strange promise of the Gospel is that letting go of that climb isn’t humiliation. It’s freedom.

“Whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”

I’ve never been the person people praise for beautiful prose or a signature literary voice. That’s not my claim to fame, and it never has been.

What people actually engage with when they engage with me is the thinking: analysis, pattern recognition, connecting incentives to outcomes, and making predictions about where something is headed. Sometimes those calls are wrong. Sometimes they’re uncomfortably right. Either way, that’s the lane I’m in.

So I don’t treat writing as a sacred artifact or an identity test. I treat it as a delivery system. The goal isn’t to perform artistry for its own sake. The goal is to get the payload across: the argument, the model, the forecast, the point. If the writing is muddy, the idea arrives damaged. If the writing is clean, the idea can be evaluated on its merits.

This isn’t an either-or. I want both: stronger thinking and cleaner writing. I’ll keep improving the craft because clarity is respect. But my time goes first to the part where I actually have edge: the analysis and the call.

A metaphor that fits: I’m more interested in making good handloads than in forging a pistol from raw ore every time I want to shoot. The pistol matters, but the bullet is what hits the target. The writing is the vehicle. The thinking is the payload.

The West’s biggest noblesse oblige failure is confusing “refugee” with “helpless” and then patting itself on the back for a compassion cosplay that infantilizes people as fragile, needy babies or pathetic victims. And let’s be honest: there’s a special Western hubris layered on top of it, where we fancy ourselves some kind of noble wetnurse for the poor “foogees,” dispensing mercy like it’s a personal virtue project, a halo-polishing exercise, a morality play where we get to be the starring saints.

But displacement is not a vibe check. It’s a brutal filter. It doesn’t select for softness. It selects for survival.

If you made it out and made it here, you’re not a porcelain doll. You’re not a soft mascot. You’re not a morality prop. You are formidable. Adaptive. Hardened by pressure. You navigated chaos, scarcity, predation, bureaucracy, borders, and the simple physics of “don’t die today,” and you kept moving anyway.

So yeah: stop dismissing refugees as weak. The correct posture isn’t pity. It’s respect. Treat them like what they often are: concentrated capability forged under stress, people built from nerve, grit, brains, and sheer will. The sooner we drop the patronizing wetnurse fantasy, the sooner we’ll actually see what’s in front of us. Not weakness. Power that survived.

Here’s the extension of my spite theory. When Trump tells reporters he “doesn’t care about polling,” I don’t hear a man liberated from public opinion. I hear a man narrowing the definition of “the people” to “the people who are loyal to me.” That’s a big difference.

Trump isn’t a doctrinal true believer in the way Clinton-era Democrats were true believers about policy, institutions, and public persuasion. He’s an opportunist who follows leverage, applause, and dominance. His deepest grievance is betrayal, especially betrayal from inside the tent.

Now you’ve got a visible schism: the “America First” flank treating him like he’s been captured (by Israel, by the security state, by the foreign-policy machine, whatever the accusation is). At the same time, the deportation industrial push that was supposed to be his domestic momentum engine has run into friction and optics. It got too real. The public didn’t react the way the pitch promised. The energy that was supposed to look like strength started to look like chaos, cruelty, or incompetence depending on the viewer.

So he does what he always does when the audience stops clapping: he changes stages. Foreign escalation is the ultimate stage change. It creates a “serious” frame, swallows the news cycle, and kicks off massive spending rhythms: munitions, replacements, logistics, contractor surge, reserve activation, intelligence churn, the whole national-security weather system. It also produces the kind of volatility that markets and insiders can surf, while letting him claim he’s acting decisively regardless of what polls say.

That “I don’t care” line is the tell. It’s not that he’s above public opinion. It’s that he’s willing to burn relationships, even with parts of his base, if they stop feeding him the only currency he respects: loyalty and deference. If his original lane no longer delivers that, he pivots hard to the lane that can.

Momentum over consent. Loyalty over popularity. Spite over stability.

I’m skeptical of the way “democracy” gets used in media and academic circles like a gold star for countries whose voters behave correctly. Too often, “healthy democracy” is shorthand for “high trust + compliant + aligned with the approved narrative.” When the public opts out, shifts right, goes populist, or rejects elite consensus, it’s treated less like democratic feedback and more like a pathology. That’s a tell. If democracy only counts when the people agree with you, it’s not democracy. It’s compliance with better branding.

Public media is a perfect pressure test for this. In America, trust is the whole ballgame. We’re a suspicious country by design. We don’t automatically believe the state, the institutions, the credentialed class, or the “this is for your own good” voice. So public broadcasting can’t survive on moral authority alone. It survives on felt legitimacy. It has to earn consent by being obviously useful and broadly respectful.

That’s why the European comparisons often miss the point. In places like the UK or Germany, public media often delivers tangible value-add: education, culture, shared competence, and programming that doesn’t feel like it exists to punish half the population for voting wrong. If U.S. public media reliably felt like Mr. Rogers energy, it would be politically untouchable. People would defend it.

But when public media sounds like a permanent “whoop-whoop” alarm about one side, when it feels like narrative enforcement, when dissent gets pathologized, people don’t hear “public good.” They hear “weapon.” And once an institution is perceived as a weapon, it gets treated like one. Funding becomes a battlefield. Trust collapses. The backlash isn’t mysterious, it’s structural.

If you want public media to survive, don’t build it as a scolding machine. Build it as a civic utility that even your political opponents would defend, because they’d miss it if it disappeared.

Here’s my personal theory, updated in real time: this isn’t only about “Iran” as a target, it’s about finding an engine that creates momentum when your preferred domestic engine stalls.

Plan A was domestic. A deportation-centered enforcement buildout can function like a WPA-style jobs and spending program: hire at scale, expand detention capacity, contract transportation and logistics, staff security, medical, and legal processing, and build a whole support economy around the infrastructure. It’s not subtle. It’s expensive, labor-heavy, and politically tribal: the people most willing to take those jobs are the people already aligned with the project.

But that machine creates friction. Legal fights. Public outrage. Constant negative framing. Practical constraints. At some point, the effort stops being a smooth “we’re doing things” story and becomes a daily grind of resistance and bad optics. And when Plan A won’t run at full throttle, the need for a lever doesn’t disappear. Midterms don’t pause. Markets don’t wait. The attention economy doesn’t take a nap.

So you pivot to the lever that always works: foreign escalation. Air strikes instantly trigger procurement cycles and replacement orders. They spin up contractor logistics. They justify reserve activation. They bring back the whole national-security weather system: terror fears, proxy-war paranoia, emergency briefings, and wall-to-wall coverage. Whether you think it’s wise or reckless, it’s a narrative reset button with a very loud click.

And there’s an emotional accelerant people underrate: spite. When a leader feels blocked, mocked, denied credit, or refused the story they wanted to tell, “fine, then watch this” becomes policy energy. The subtext becomes: you could’ve let me do it my way at home. You didn’t. Now you get it my way abroad.

That’s my read. Not certainty, a theory about incentives, ego, and the eternal hunger of the momentum machine.