Chris Abraham

There’s only one Jesus and he would absolutely show up at Burning Man. He’d be in the dust with everybody, eating the food, talking to the people nobody else was talking to, making the most broken person in the camp feel like the most important person in the world. That part the Burning Man crowd got right. What they left in the desert is what came next. Repentance. And sin no more.

Because every single encounter in the gospels follows the same pattern. Full presence first—he sits with sinners, touches lepers, talks to Samaritans, climbs into Zacchaeus’s world without being asked. And then the call to repentance. Every single time, without exception.

The woman caught in adultery. Mob wants to stone her. Jesus disperses them and turns to her: neither do I condemn you, now go and sin no more. In 2026 that’s victim blaming. You don’t issue behavioral directives to a survivor. Jesus issued the directive. The non-condemnation and the call to repentance arrive in the same breath because they are the same thing. The love is not complete without the direction.

The woman at the well. Five husbands, living with a sixth. He already knew. He brought it up anyway. Not to shame her—she becomes the first evangelist in the gospel, runs back to town saying come see a man who told me everything I ever did. You don’t get the living water without the accurate accounting of your life and the willingness to turn from it. He saw her completely, loved her completely, and called her to repentance completely. All three at once.

The rich young ruler. Kept all the commandments his whole life. Jesus looks at him and loves him—Mark records it specifically—and then calls him to total repentance: sell everything, give it to the poor, follow me. The man walks away sad. Jesus lets him go. Doesn’t chase him. Doesn’t negotiate. The love was real. The call to repentance was real. The man’s choice was real. Jesus honored all three by softening none of them.

The paralytic at the pool. Thirty-eight years sick. Healed instantly. And later Jesus finds him and says repent and sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you. Something worse. That’s in the text and almost nobody preaches it.

Burning Man Jesus and tent revival Jesus are the same Jesus. Full presence, full love, call to repentance, sin no more. He’d show up in the dust and love on everybody and then call them to turn from their lives and follow him. Not as punishment. As the completion of the encounter. The repentance isn’t the punishment. The repentance is the point. The love has a direction. That’s the whole gospel whether you’re at Black Rock City or a Wednesday night Bible study. Repent and sin no more. He said it every time and he meant it every time and he’s still saying it.

There is a sentence that gets deployed with tremendous moral confidence every time a Western military—or Israel—does something that produces dead civilians on camera. It goes roughly like this: *But the babies. But the mothers. But the children.*

It is delivered as though it were an argument. As though the speaker has just said something that, if heard clearly enough, would cause the bombs to stop.

It never has. It never does. And if you watch what actually happens rather than what people say, the conclusion is unavoidable: in the operational calculus of every serious military power on earth, civilian casualties are a cost, not a stopper.

*This isn’t cynicism. It’s just reading the record honestly.*

**The proportionality myth**

Americans, of all people, should understand this most intuitively—because American self-defense law is built on the explicit rejection of proportionality. Castle doctrine. Stand Your Ground. The reasonable-person standard. None of it requires you to match force with equivalent force. None of it asks you to consider the attacker’s welfare. The only question is whether a reasonable person in your position would have feared serious harm.

*You come into someone’s house with a knife, you might leave in a bag.* That’s not monstrous—that’s the law, and most Americans think it’s correct.

Scale that up and you have Israeli doctrine. You’ve been rocketed thousands of times. Your enemies have stated, in writing and in speeches, that your elimination is the goal. You respond with overwhelming, disproportionate force—and you’re transparent about it.

The **Dahiyeh Doctrine** isn’t a secret. It’s a policy, openly articulated: the cost of hosting weapons pointed at Israel is the destruction of the infrastructure hosting them. The civilian population is notified. Then the Apaches come.

The “but the babies” crowd finds this monstrous. What they don’t engage with is the alternative: proportional response means you’re willing to absorb rockets indefinitely in exchange for international approval. *That’s not a peace strategy. That’s just losing slowly while looking respectable.*

**America wrote this playbook**

Tokyo. Dresden. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. None of these were proportional responses to Pearl Harbor. They were terminal deterrence statements. The message was architectural: *the cost of continuing this war is that you cease to exist as a functioning society.* It worked. By any military-outcome measure, it worked.

The firebombing of Tokyo killed more people in a single night than either atomic bomb. You don’t hear much about that one. The “but the babies” machinery was not yet fully operational, or the babies in question were the wrong nationality, or—most likely—the outcome justified the accounting in retrospect, *as it always does for the winner.*

Obama ran the most expansive drone program in American history. Wedding parties. Funeral processions. American citizens abroad, killed by executive order, without trial. He accepted a Nobel Peace Prize in year one. He spoke beautifully about dignity and international norms. *The Predators were already in the air before the acceptance speech was finished.*

George W. Bush—Andover, Yale, Harvard MBA, son of a CIA director and a president—built a brush-clearing ranch persona and took America into Fallujah. What happened in Fallujah would make the Dahiyeh Doctrine blush.

Hillary Clinton watched Gaddafi get killed and said, on camera, *we came, we saw, he died*—and laughed. Unguarded. Authentic. The mask slipped and what was underneath was something old and feral. Libya became a failed state with open slave markets. Nobody was held accountable.

The “but the babies” brigade was present for all of this. Op-eds were written. Protests were held. Candlelight vigils occurred. *The bombs continued.*

**The honest read**

If civilian casualties in Gaza or Lebanon or Iraq or Yemen were actually, operationally, a red line for Western governments—if “but the babies” were more than a ritual performance of concern—something would have been done. **Not said. Done.**

The sanctions that materially constrained behavior. The military aid with real conditions attached and enforced. The alliances severed. The ICC referrals followed through on. Something with teeth.

None of that happened. What happened was statements. Grave concern. Calls for restraint. *And then the next weapons shipment.*

This is not a left or right observation. Trump doesn’t perform the grief. Previous administrations performed it exquisitely. *The outcomes were identical.*

What “but the babies” actually functions as is a release valve—a way for observers to register moral discomfort without requiring moral action. It lets everyone feel like they said something, which is apparently sufficient.

**The deterrence logic nobody wants to say out loud**

The reason disproportionate response persists—across Israel, across America, across every serious military power—is that it works as deterrence in a way that proportional response does not. If attacking Israel costs you thirty for one, the calculus for the next attack has to include whether you can absorb thirty for one. If attacking America costs you your country’s entire infrastructure, as Afghanistan and Iraq learned, the message transmits even if the execution is catastrophic.

*Bad optics don’t bury your kids. UN resolutions don’t stop rockets. Grave concern issued from Geneva doesn’t reconstitute a city.*

The nations and people actually facing existential threat have looked at the “but the babies” argument and made a calculation: the opinion of people who are safe, and who will remain safe regardless of our choices, is not a variable we are optimizing for.

*That’s not a bug in their reasoning. That’s the whole point.*

*The “but the babies” argument would be the most powerful moral force in modern geopolitics—if it had ever once actually stopped anything. It hasn’t. Which means it isn’t an argument. It’s a feeling. And feelings, however sincere, don’t win wars or end them.*

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.