Chris Abraham

I was born in 1970. I didn’t live through the ’30s or ’40s, and I was too young to meaningfully experience the ’60s and ’70s as they happened. Everything I “know” about those eras came secondhand—school, parents, movies, television, books, documentaries, and later, prestige journalism. I absorbed history the way most people do: as a finished story.

What’s changed is living through a moment where I can see the narrative being built in real time—watching events unfold on the ground, inside cities, inside conversations, under full digital surveillance. The distance between experience and story has never been clearer.

If this were the 1940s, my entire understanding of World War II would have come from radio broadcasts, newspapers, and newsreels—much of it explicitly propagandistic. I listen weekly to radio from the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, and the tone is unmistakable: noble boys, righteous war, mythic heroism. It wasn’t hidden. It was nation-building through story.

The same pattern exists in later decades. We talk about the ’60s as if radicalism erupted out of nowhere, but it didn’t. Allen Ginsberg wrote Howl in 1955—long before the Civil Rights Movement became mainstream history. The tremors precede the earthquake. By the time history notices, the culture has already shifted.

What’s unsettling now is realizing that once you start questioning one cornerstone narrative, the others wobble. If World War II—the moral foundation of modern American identity—turns out to be more sculpted than remembered, then what about World War I? The Civil War? The War of Independence? These aren’t just events; they’re load-bearing myths.

This isn’t denialism. It’s discomfort with certainty.

Once you see how stories are enforced—how dissent is framed, how counter-narratives are marginalized, how complexity is sanded down—you can’t unsee it. History starts to look less like a clean sequence of truths and more like a stage full of actors wearing masks, or puppets animated by unseen hands, repeating the lines that survived power and time.

That realization is destabilizing. It doesn’t tell you what didn’t happen. It forces you to admit how little you can be sure did. And once that scale falls from your eyes, inherited history stops feeling like knowledge and starts feeling like something closer to folklore—meaningful, powerful, but curated.

This is the first time I’ve seriously reconsidered how much of what I believe about America’s past is lived reality versus narrative inheritance. And I don’t think you can go back from that.

When societies respond to conflict by over-legislating, it’s important to remember that law is a two-sided blade. Statutes created to restrain one group or behavior do not permanently belong to their original target. As political and social power shifts, the same legal tools can—and often do—cut in the opposite direction. Laws designed to punish or deter “the other side” rarely stay pointed in only one direction.

Public discussion of protest often treats the First Amendment as an absolute shield, but U.S. law has never worked that way. The First Amendment protects speech and assembly, but it does not protect conduct that crosses into threats, intimidation, obstruction, or interference with the lawful rights of others. After the Civil War, Congress passed enforcement statutes—later codified in civil-rights laws—to address violence and intimidation that deprived people of constitutional rights.

During the 1960s, additional civil-rights and hate-crime statutes were enacted. These laws do not criminalize speech or political beliefs. They focus on conduct: using force, threats, or intimidation, or intentionally obstructing protected activities such as voting, travel, or religious worship.

A critical but often ignored point is that these laws are written to be facially neutral. They protect categories of rights and protected characteristics, not political ideologies. Courts do not ask whether the accused is progressive or conservative; they ask whether the statutory elements are met. If conduct satisfies those elements, the political motivation behind it is legally irrelevant.

Because of that neutrality, civil-rights and hate-crime laws are not one-way protections. A statute designed to prevent discrimination or intimidation against one group can, under different facts and enforcement priorities, be applied to others. This has happened repeatedly in U.S. history with civil-rights laws, public-order statutes, and national-security legislation.

The more a law relies on intent, motive, or subjective interpretation—rather than purely objective acts—the more flexible and powerful it becomes. That flexibility cuts both ways. It allows the law to address real abuses, but it also means the same legal framework can be used against actors who originally supported it when circumstances change.

This does not mean such laws are illegitimate. It means they are tools, not moral guarantees. In a legal system built on neutrality and precedent, no group permanently owns a statute, and no protection is immune from future reinterpretation or application.

Radical Chic complicates any serious attempt to assess whether America is approaching genuine collapse or merely experiencing a period of heightened rhetorical extremism.

When revolutionary language is expressed most loudly by people whose material security, social status, and physical safety are effectively guaranteed, it introduces a credibility gap that cannot be ignored.

This doesn’t mean warnings of instability should be dismissed outright. It means they must be evaluated differently.

Historically, revolutionary rhetoric coming from insulated elites has often functioned as moral signaling, aesthetic rebellion, or social positioning rather than as a reflection of imminent systemic failure.

That pattern makes it reasonable—necessary, even—to question whether today’s rhetoric is driven by clout, conformity, and status within elite networks rather than by concrete indicators of collapse.

At the same time, dismissing everything as performance would be reckless. Societies rarely announce their breaking points cleanly, and cultural elites have sometimes sensed instability before institutions acknowledged it.

The difficulty lies in separating genuine risk assessment from symbolic posturing, especially when both use the same language of urgency, inevitability, and moral absolutism.

Skepticism here is not denial, and caution is not complacency.

It is an attempt to read signals accurately in an environment saturated with incentives to exaggerate. When revolution becomes fashionable, discernment becomes harder—but also more important.

When people wrap themselves in “constitutional rights,” there’s often an unspoken assumption that those rights are supposed to guarantee safety or eliminate risk. The Constitution doesn’t make that promise.

At its core, the document is about limits and structure: limits on what the government can do to individuals, and a structure designed to prevent the concentration of power. Most constitutional rights are negative rights — protections against government interference — rather than guarantees of protection, security, or comfort. They define boundaries for state action, not outcomes for everyday life.

Nothing in the Constitution says that exercising a right will be safe, free of danger, or insulated from bad actors or unintended consequences. Speech can provoke backlash. Assembly can be risky. Due process does not ensure justice in every case, only a fair procedure. Even rights that feel closely tied to personal security stop short of promising protection from harm.

This isn’t a flaw or oversight. The framers understood that liberty and risk are linked, and that a system designed to eliminate danger entirely would require a level of centralized control they viewed as more dangerous than uncertainty itself. The Constitution chooses restraint over guarantees, process over outcomes, and freedom over safety assurances.

So when constitutional rights are invoked, it’s worth being precise about what they are — and what they are not. They protect space for individual action and limit state power. They do not promise safety, nor do they remove risk from a free society.

You are not a sheriff, deputy, or officer of the law, and you are not responsible for enforcing rules, intervening in public conflicts, or acting as “civilian resistance.” Training for legally licensed concealed carry is explicit about this boundary.

Your responsibility as a concealed carrier is modest and disciplined. Avoid danger when possible. Do not provoke, encourage, or exacerbate situations. If you can disengage, you disengage. If you can cross the street, take another route, or leave early, you do. Those choices aren’t weakness—they’re exactly what responsible carry training teaches.

The “sheepdog” idea is often misunderstood. In a legally licensed concealed carry context, it does not mean seeking threats, inserting yourself into chaos, or acting as informal enforcement. It means protecting yourself and those immediately under your care when there is no safe alternative and a clear, imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm—and nothing more.

Carrying a firearm comes with restraint, not authority. Deadly force is a last resort, not a strategy, and every decision leading up to it will be scrutinized later. Legally licensed concealed carry exists for personal self-defense—not intervention, not enforcement, not heroics. The real responsibility is judgment, humility, and knowing when to walk away.