Chris Abraham

Probability isn’t magical and luck doesn’t build up over time. The world isn’t a slot machine that eventually pays out because your streak is due. Every spin begins fresh. The mechanism doesn’t remember what happened before.

What matters instead is the structure of the wheel.

Imagine a wheel with chambers. Some are empty and one holds the round. Each spin is independent, but the number of empty chambers determines how forgiving the system is. Risk mitigation is essentially the process of adding empty chambers.

A stable routine tends to do that. Going to work, coming home, eating dinner, walking familiar streets, living among known people. None of this eliminates risk, but it spreads the possibilities across more empty spaces. The wheel becomes more forgiving.

Other patterns compress the wheel. When life becomes unstable or unpredictable, the number of empty chambers shrinks. Addiction, chaotic environments, risky encounters, late-night unknowns. There’s no moral judgment in that observation. It simply means the structure of risk has tightened.

If the wheel only has five chambers, then four are empty and one is live. Every spin still resets. Probability still has no memory. But the system contains fewer safe spaces from the beginning.

When things go wrong, people often reach for supernatural explanations. They think fate is against them, that God is punishing them, or that the devil has lured them into a cursed path. But most of the time the explanation is simpler and colder. The structure of the wheel changed.

We all make choices that influence how many chambers exist in our own wheel. Five chambers, six, eight, maybe ten. The more empty chambers there are, the more forgiving the system becomes. The fewer there are, the tighter the odds feel every time the wheel spins.

That isn’t destiny. It isn’t cosmic punishment. It’s risk mitigation, and the geometry of the choices that shape a life.

A few weeks ago, when the Virginia gun bills floating around looked like they were going to impose a 10-round magazine limit with no grandfather clause, I discovered that I apparently had the soul of a revolutionary. I was extremely animated about liberty, property rights, constitutional limits, and the terrifying possibility that magazines I had legally owned for years might suddenly have to be disposed of. I had opinions. I had arguments. I had the tone of someone ready to climb a barricade while humming the Battle Hymn of the Republic. It turns out nothing awakens a man’s inner patriot faster than the idea that his own gear might become illegal.

Now the latest version coming out of Richmond appears to land somewhere closer to a 15-round limit with a grandfather clause for existing magazines, meaning that if you already own them you can keep them, and the restriction mainly affects future sales or imports after July 1, 2026. In other words, the specific apocalypse I was yelling about mostly evaporated for me personally. And in what political scientists will surely identify as a remarkable coincidence, my revolutionary energy evaporated at exactly the same moment.

The barricades are suddenly much quieter. The drums of liberty have fallen silent. The tricorne hat has gone back in the closet next to the Halloween decorations. If you look closely you may notice that the man who was previously giving speeches about freedom now appears to be gently backing away from the microphone while pretending he had somewhere else to be.

This is the moment where principled people usually say that a law is wrong regardless of whether it affects them personally, and that one must continue fighting on behalf of the broader principle. Those people are admirable and probably carved from sterner material. Unfortunately, I appear to have discovered that my political courage runs on a much simpler operating system.

When the proposal looked like it would force me to scrap my own magazines, I was apparently willing to bring a torch, a drum, and a wagon full of righteous indignation. Now that the compromise version leaves my own pile of metal rectangles alone, my passion for liberty has quietly taken a sabbatical. If there were a revolution forming, I would currently be the guy who showed up with clown shoes, realized the fight had moved two blocks away, and immediately wandered off to buy a sandwich.

So yes, if anyone notices that I was very loud when the bill looked like ten rounds with no grandfather clause and am now suspiciously calm now that it looks like fifteen rounds with grandfathering, that observation would be completely fair. I would love to tell you that my shift reflects some deep constitutional analysis, but the truth is much simpler and much less flattering. The threat moved away from my own backyard, and with it went my sudden burst of heroic principle.

Apparently my activism, my courage, and my revolutionary spirit all share the same magazine capacity. Somewhere between ten and fifteen rounds, they run out.

14 Jesus was driving out a demon that was mute, and when the demon had gone out, the mute man spoke and the crowds were amazed.

15 Some of them said, “By the power of Beelzebul, the prince of demons, he drives out demons.”

16 Others, to test him, asked him for a sign from heaven.

17 But he knew their thoughts and said to them, “Every kingdom divided against itself will be laid waste and house will fall against house.

18 And if Satan is divided against himself, how will his kingdom stand? For you say that it is by Beelzebul that I drive out demons.

19 If I, then, drive out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your own people drive them out? Therefore they will be your judges.

20 But if it is by the finger of God that I drive out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.

21 When a strong man fully armed guards his palace, his possessions are safe.

22 But when one stronger than he attacks and overcomes him, he takes away the armor on which he relied and distributes the spoils.

23 Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.”

17 Jesus said to his disciples: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.

18 Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place.

19 Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do so will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever obeys and teaches these commandments will be called greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”

Fascism is best understood as a third-position ideology that emerged out of the socialist tradition but broke with it in decisive ways. You can think of it as socialism stripped of internationalism and welded to nationalism. Mussolini himself came out of the socialist movement, and early fascism was in large part a dissident offshoot of that world: people who rejected universal class solidarity, rejected socialist pacifism during World War I, and instead argued for a nationally bounded form of social struggle and collective organization.

Its corporatist model was not simply laissez-faire capitalism with flags on it. It was closer to a system in which labor and capital were both organized into official bodies under state supervision, with the state acting as arbiter between them. In that sense, corporatism can look like an attempt to formalize class collaboration rather than abolish class conflict. It differs from both liberal capitalism and orthodox socialism, though it shares ancestry with several other attempts to chart a path between the two.

A concise way to describe fascism is this: it keeps the socialist impulse toward organizing economic life and subordinating private interests to a higher collective order, but rejects international class politics in favor of national struggle. Instead of workers of the world uniting, it imagines classes being reconciled within the nation under the state, while nations themselves remain in permanent rivalry, with force always waiting in the wings as the final referee.

That is one reason fascism sits closer to the broader family of third-position movements than to social democracy or democratic socialism. The real divide is not just economics, but power. Third Way politics generally accepts electoral pluralism, compromise, and the survival of independent institutions, even when it pushes redistribution and welfare expansion. Fascism, by contrast, tends toward the party-state, centralized authority, and the idea that political unity matters more than democratic contestation. Once that logic hardens, one-party rule is not an accident. It is the natural destination.

This is also why fascist systems so often become authoritarian in practice. Any regime that wants to subordinate economic life to political goals, while keeping labor, capital, and civil society under unified national direction, requires a state powerful enough to discipline them all. Even when private owners or managers remain in place, they do not operate as fully autonomous actors. They operate within a political order that sets the terms. In that respect, fascist and national socialist economic arrangements can look different on the surface from Soviet command systems, but they share the conviction that the economy ultimately serves the state, not the other way around.

Where fascism and national socialism part company most sharply is in how they understand the nation itself. Fascism tends to treat the nation as something politically made: shaped, unified, and even created by the state through myth, education, discipline, and common identity. National socialism leans much more toward the nation as an organic, inherited reality rooted in ancestry, blood, and historical continuity. One is more statist and civic-mythic in its nationalism; the other is more racial and ethnocultural.

And if you want to be precise about the old left-right terminology, the true historical far right was not originally defined by fascists at all, but by monarchists and counter-revolutionaries. The language comes from the French Revolution, where defenders of throne, altar, and inherited hierarchy literally sat on the right side of the assembly. In that older sense, the far right begins with those who wanted to preserve or restore monarchy, not with every later movement people now stuff into the same drawer.