Chris Abraham

Punk was not love. I was there—not as a punk, I want to be clear about that, because enough people from my Hawaii years are still on Facebook to call me out. I was a new wave kid. Smiths obsessive. New Order, The Cure, Depeche Mode, pastel oversized button-down, home-bleached jeans, black Converse. But Hawaii had a small scene and the nights were long and I ended up orbiting the punks by proximity—leather jackets in eighty-degree heat, homeless or close to it, moshing in 7-Eleven parking lots, fighting regularly because plenty of people wanted to fight them just for how they looked.

What I saw was not love. It was nihilism, anarchism, and the circle-A spraypainted on everything. Anti-government, anti-police, anti-authority in every direction simultaneously—not Democrat, not Republican, anarchist. The Doc Martens had a lace code that told you what someone was willing to do before they opened their mouth. Some colors had to be earned through violence. Johnny Rotten got knifed outside a pub. People died in the pits. Suicidal Tendencies got banned from playing all of Los Angeles. This is what it actually was.

The second generation showed up later and brought the community organizing, the benefit concerts, the mutual aid, the feelings. Real and valuable—but downstream of a first generation that made the space by being genuinely dangerous. The second generation kept the aesthetic and replaced the content. Their children put it on merchandise.

John Lydon going populist nationalist isn’t a betrayal. Punk’s target was always whoever sat at the top of the institutional pyramid telling ordinary people what was acceptable. In 1977 that was the Crown and the conservative establishment. In 2026 it’s the media class, the credentialed gatekeepers, the cultural institutions that decide which opinions are permitted. He’s still pointing at the pyramid. The pyramid moved.

I just bought the “Punk Is Love” mug for $20. It’s mine. It’s wrong about everything. I drink out of it every morning and think about those kids sweating through leather jackets in paradise, who would have found the entire concept so funny they might have actually hurt someone.

My micro SD player has 5,000+ episodes shuffled and cycling—Art Bell and Ian Punnett from Coast to Coast’s golden era, every Yours Truly Johnny Dollar, every Gunsmoke, The Saint, and whatever else I could pull from Archive.org. It spans the 1920s through the 2000s and it never stops.

I’ve spent more time inside American radio across eight decades than most media scholars, and I’m not a scholar. I’m just someone who figured out that dipping directly into the media of a specific moment tells you more about that moment than any history book written afterward. The history book tells you what happened. The radio show tells you what people were afraid of, what they were being sold, what their government needed them to believe, and how much persuasion it actually took to get there.

The ads are the best part. Swan soap. Oxydol. Jell-O. The host’s dog has a gimpy hip and this new kibble changed everything. It’s intimate, specific, and completely unashamed of being commercial—because the commerce and the content were never pretending to be separate things.

What strikes you listening back is how much respect those broadcasts had for ordinary Americans. Not reverence—respect. The assumption was that a regular person driving home or doing dishes was worth talking to seriously, worth entertaining properly, worth the craft. Nobody had decided yet that the audience was either a demographic to be flattered or a problem to be managed.

That shift—from audience as participant to audience as target—is traceable. You can hear it happening decade by decade if you have enough episodes shuffled and nowhere important to be at 3am.

Art Bell understood this better than almost anyone. So did Ian Punnett. I miss them both.

Let me be clear upfront: this is fabrication. Fabulism. Fantasy. I made this up. Hold that in mind as you read, because it’s going to feel uncomfortably plausible.

Here’s my favorite conspiracy theory, and I’m furious nobody thought of it first.

Every time a society gets devastated by war—genuinely, catastrophically, demographically devastated—it’s the women who keep the lights on. Not as a surprise. Not as an improvisation. As the only option left standing. Post-WWI. Post-WWII. Every regional conflict that chewed through a generation of young men and spat out widows and rubble. The women went to the factories. The women ran the farms. The women held the economies together with wire and will and no preparation whatsoever. Every single time, humanity got lucky. Every single time, it was chaos first, competence second.

Someone, somewhere, ran the numbers and decided that was unacceptable latency.

Because here’s what the history actually shows: you can survive losing enormous numbers of your men if your women can immediately, competently, step into every economic role required. You cannot survive it if they can’t. The economy doesn’t pause for grief. Supply chains don’t wait for retraining. Cultures that couldn’t make that transition in time didn’t make it at all.

So the theory—my beautiful, ridiculous, unfalsifiable theory—is this:

The global push to educate women in Africa, India, Southeast Asia, Latin America, everywhere that still runs a hard gender division of labor—it isn’t ideological. It isn’t about justice, though justice makes a fine cover story. It’s actuarial. It’s logistical. Somewhere in the long-range planning apparatus of people who think in decades and casualties, someone looked at the projections for resource conflict, climate war, and great-power confrontation and said: we need every woman on earth cross-trained and economically load-bearing before the next one hits.

Not liberation as philosophy. Liberation as surge capacity.

The latency problem is real. You cannot wait until the men are gone to start the training. By then it’s too late—economies seize, supply chains collapse, the recovery curve is brutal and slow and people starve in the gap. But if you’ve spent thirty years quietly, persistently, ideologically-seeming-ly getting women everywhere into skilled work, into management, into trades, into technical roles—then when the catastrophic, unthinkable, absolutely-being-planned-for war arrives, you don’t lose thirty years of economic output. You lose the men. You keep the machine.

It’s been proven. Again and again and again. Nobody prepared for it. Every time, improvisation saved what planning should have guaranteed.

My fantasy is that this time, someone is preparing. That behind every NGO pushing girls' education in rural Bihar, behind every program training women welders in Lagos, behind every quiet policy nudge toward gender parity in skilled trades—there’s a spreadsheet. And on that spreadsheet are casualty projections. And next to those projections is a column labeled economic continuity risk. And someone is trying, for the first time in human history, to get that number down before they need it.

That’s my fabulism. That’s my fantasy conspiracy.

The part that keeps me up at night is how little of it requires fabrication.

Europe is celebrating like Orbán’s Hungary just got exorcised. But take a breath.

Péter Magyar wasn’t some dissident writing samizdat in a basement. He was inside the tent—deep inside. Married to a cabinet minister. A true believer who became, very dramatically and very publicly, a convert. And converts make the most convincing revolutionaries precisely because they know the liturgy.

Magyar means Hungarian. Not metaphorically—literally, that’s the word. The man who just swept away the Orbán era is named after the thing Orbán spent 16 years claiming to exclusively represent. That’s either a beautiful accident or a very tidy piece of political theater.

The Soros-money crowd will say Western intelligence bought this election. That’s the lazy version. The more interesting read is that this wasn’t a foreign intervention—it was a succession. A baton pass. Orbán exits with 2.5 million loyal votes still banked, Fidesz survives as opposition, and the guy taking the keys already knows where every body is buried because he helped dig some of the holes.

Revolutions that produce 138 parliamentary seats on the first try, with a 79.5% turnout, with the outgoing strongman calling to concede before 30% of votes are counted—those aren’t usually revolutions. They’re handoffs.

Magyar has promised to break from Russia, cozy up to the EU, unlock frozen billions from Brussels, restore judicial independence. All the right words in the right order. But so did a lot of people before him, in a lot of countries, who then found governing considerably more complicated than campaigning.

The hope in Budapest last night was real. The crowds were real. The exhaustion with Orbán was absolutely real. None of that means Magyar is the antidote rather than the next chapter of the same book, written by many of the same hands.

Wait for the first budget. Watch who gets the ministerial appointments. See whether NER gets dismantled or just redecorated. That’s when you’ll know whether this was a revolution or a very well-executed pivot.

In August 1990, Iraq invaded the neighboring country of Kuwait. The United States and its allies had to decide whether to send military forces to push Iraq out. American public opinion was divided and the congressional vote to authorize force was not certain.

On October 10, 1990, a fifteen-year-old girl testified before a congressional caucus in Washington. She gave only her first name: Nayirah. She said she had volunteered at a hospital in Kuwait during the Iraqi occupation and witnessed something terrible. Iraqi soldiers, she said, had entered the maternity ward, removed premature babies from their incubators, and left them on the cold floor to die.

The story spread immediately. Television news ran it repeatedly. President George H.W. Bush cited it in public speeches. Senators referenced it from the floor during the war authorization debate. The Senate passed that authorization by five votes.

After the war, journalists and human rights investigators went to Kuwait and looked for evidence. They interviewed hospital staff and reviewed records. No one who had actually been at the hospital confirmed the story. Amnesty International, which had initially repeated similar claims, later retracted them.

Then the full picture emerged. Nayirah was not an ordinary Kuwaiti teenager. She was the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the United States and a member of the country’s ruling family. That had never been disclosed. Her testimony had been arranged and her appearance coached by Hill & Knowlton, a private American public affairs firm that had been paid by the Kuwaiti government to build support for U.S. military intervention. The front group they created for the campaign was called Citizens for a Free Kuwait—it sounded like an American grassroots movement but was almost entirely funded by the Kuwaiti government.

No charges were filed. No formal congressional investigation followed.

This episode is now studied as one of the most documented examples of how wartime public opinion can be shaped through organized campaigns. It is not a story about any one country being uniquely dishonest. It is a reminder that during conflicts, governments and their representatives have powerful incentives to influence what the public believes—and that private firms can be hired to help them do it.

When my mom was in Catholic girls school they had little boxes in church: donate your coins to save the pagan babies. Actual boxes. Printed label. Handed to eight-year-olds as a virtue exercise.

That’s not a metaphor. That’s the ideology made physical.

Nobody defends that framing anymore. Missionary colonialism, white man’s burden, noblesse oblige—we recognize those as paternalism dressed as generosity. The hierarchy was explicit: we have the truth, you don’t, your job is to receive salvation gratefully and not have inconvenient opinions about it.

The secular progressive version runs the same transaction with better branding. The Catholics became atheists but kept the bone structure. We care more about people than you do. We want things on your behalf because you don’t fully understand your own situation. It’s self-sealing—if you agree, you’re enlightened; if you disagree, that just proves you need saving.

Pagan babies got older. The box got bigger. The coins are now policy.