The Chris Abraham Show

Why Surrender Is Still the Only Endgame

There’s a brutal truth people forget when they throw around words like genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing. Those words do mean something — but they lose meaning when they’re wielded like hashtags during an ongoing shooting war. Once you’re in the fight, the moral shield only works when you put the knife down.

War is chess with live ammunition. You have pieces, you have power, you have moves that escalate. The moment you advance a pawn, you’ve agreed to the possibility it will be taken. The moment you swing a punch, the counterpunch is fair game. That’s not moral or legal — it’s the physics of force.

In chess, resignation is civilized. You see you’re outflanked; you tip your king. Good game. In wrestling or Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, you tap out before your arm snaps or your windpipe closes. It’s the grown-up way to say: I know I’m beaten. I’ll take my lumps now, live to fight again.

But modern states — Ukraine, Hamas, proxies everywhere — think they can bend this rule. They escalate, they provoke, they swing, and when the bigger bear or the muzzled wolf responds, they shout unfair. They wrap themselves in the flag of victimhood, hoping a hashtag will do what the rifle couldn’t.

It doesn’t work that way. The bear — Russia — spent 30 years tolerating the cheese wire of NATO expansion, buffer states lost, missile silos inching closer. It murmured the same line: Don’t take Ukraine. That’s the red line. When the noose was almost tight, the bear lunged. Inevitable. Ugly. Not nice, but predictable to anyone who reads the chessboard.

Israel — same logic. It wore the moral muzzle for decades, letting the world watch every checkpoint, every stone thrown. It let itself be painted as Goliath while expanding settlements inch by inch. But the rules of engagement were always simple: Respond only to lethal force with lethal force. The moment Hamas paraglided into that festival, the contract flipped. The wolf took off the muzzle, and now the panopticon watches the claws do what they were always ready to do.

Meanwhile, these players made themselves indispensable. Russia didn’t just hibernate — it built BRICS into a real counterweight to the dollar bloc, bonded itself to China’s energy hunger, and kept India and the Global South just friendly enough to shrug off sanctions. Israel, humiliated daily in the press, quietly fused itself into Western security, tech, and intelligence. You can hate it — but good luck cutting it loose without sawing your own nerves in half.

And the backers? Ask any student of revolutions: you don’t win without a patron. The US didn’t beat Britain on pluck alone — France footed the bill and sailed the fleet. Ukraine survives because NATO bankrolls the fight. But patrons hate throwing good money after bad. The moment the math says you can’t win, they count their chips and walk away.

The resignation clock. The tap out. The white flag. If you’re losing — badly, hopelessly — you accept that you’ll probably lose territory, sovereignty, credibility. You might get a Versailles, a new border, a blockade. It’s humiliating — but it’s survival. You don’t get mercy while you’re still swinging a hidden knife. You don’t get pity from the bear or the wolf until you truly drop the blade and stand down.

It’s not fair. It’s not moral. It’s just the savage contract under the chessboard: when the board turns red, you either resign or you bleed out. The rest is propaganda, and the pieces don’t care.

Cry uncle before your king topples for you. War doesn’t end because you lose — it ends when you admit it.

So what’s left?

A quiet bird can’t be shot. A hidden fish can’t be netted. A calm suspect cannot be tagged and fed into the system. This is older than any badge or slogan. Force survives by flushing what hides, tagging what flushes, and feeding on what shows itself. Everything else is theater.

Any enforcement system needs visible prey. No visible crime or defiance means the budget shrinks and the dogs stay in the kennel. But a pond stocked with performative rage and careless bravado keeps the hunters fed. That’s why the same body cam footage repeats the same lesson: the people who flap their wings keep the machine alive.

The Matrix gave us the allegory. There, human bodies power the system. Here, it’s your behavior. Every unnecessary word, every challenge posed like a dare, every “What did I do?” shouted when silence would have served you better — that’s the charge that lights the trap. It doesn’t matter if you’re a billionaire’s daughter in a Range Rover or a kid with no shoes — once you flap, you’re visible.

It always begins small. A broken taillight. An expired sticker. If you stay calm, polite, and small, you slip back into the brush. But if you puff up, if you make it about pride, the dogs come closer. The stop becomes a search. The search becomes resisting arrest. A fine that could have cost you an hour now stains your record for life.

Many believe status will protect them. They believe the net knows bloodlines. But when the shark’s eye goes blind, everything moving is meat. The dash cams prove it daily — a bored princess can be chewed up as easily as a trap baddie when they run their mouth.

This cycle isn’t accidental. Even the slogans that claim resistance — “F*** the police,” “Defy or you’re a bootlicker” — keep the pond stocked. The system doesn’t need you to win; it needs you to flap enough to be worth catching.

The hardest truth is that once you’re in the net, you’re not solving a logic puzzle — you’re rolling dice you can’t control. Gun owners know this: never draw unless you must, because you can do everything right and still lose the roll. One angle of video, one DA looking to make a name, one jury with a grudge — that’s all it takes.

No trap is fair. It is not cowardice to stay small. It is not betrayal to comply. It’s survival in a world run on force. Obscurity is the shield. Defiance is the bait. The machine does not care who you are. It cares only that you’re big enough to catch.

When the net tightens, stay small. When the dogs flush the bush, stay still. Pride feeds the trap. The bird that never flaps is the one that lives.

Date: June 29, 2025
Players: Sean D. (Sören Ironwood – Aasimar Paladin), Chris (Radley – Human Fighter), Carey (Traxidor – Half-Elf Cleric), Trip (Daermon Cobain – Half-Elf Rogue)
Filed Under: Curse of Strahd, Gothic Horror, D&D Recaps

Twelve days in Barovia and each dawn feels like dusk. At the Blue Water Inn, a messenger arrived with a letter sealed in wax — Strahd von Zarovich’s invitation to dine at Castle Ravenloft. Radley, their sardonic Eldritch Knight, joked about wine with the Devil. Traxidor, cleric and conscience, argued no. Sören, the Aasimar Paladin, nearly growled at the thought of bowing to Strahd’s civility. Daermon Cobain, rogue and blade, said little — his coin flicking through the shadows.

They refused. There would be no supper with monsters — not yet.

Morning brought nails hammering declarations into timber. Lady Fiona Wachter now called herself Burgomaster of Vallaki by the will of the mob that strung up the old Baron. Her orders stripped the last hope from the town: worship of the Morning Lord forbidden, a curfew enforced, all must bow to her Reeve. And every young woman? Inducted into her “Society of Vallaki’s Maidens” — loyalty by marriage or worse.

They walked the scorched town to the crackle of funeral pyres, then turned into Blinsky’s Toys, where horrors wore porcelain smiles. Gadof Blinsky, a jester with a monkey named Piccolo, sang his eerie line: “Is no fun, is no Blinsky!” They found a doll identical to Ireena Kolyana — Strahd’s stolen love. Blinsky confessed he made dozens for Izek Strazni, the Baron’s monstrous enforcer, who always wanted more. The party left with the doll and an unease that clung like a damp shroud.

At the looted manor, they found the Baron’s son Victor’s hidden attic lab. The door’s Glyph of Warding nearly dropped Sören, but inside they found more grim trophies: animated cat skeletons, mannequins facing the wall, and a broken teleportation circle — an escape gone wrong. A dead end — yet the footprints in the scorch marks said someone had tried.

Next, they dug up Miloj’s grave and learned the bones of Saint Andral had been sold to Henrik van der Voort. At his coffin shop, they found the crates cracked open, dirt scattered — and Henrik himself, torn to ribbons, his entrails smeared across the walls and ceiling. They cut off his head like a butcher dressing a pig and took it as proof, though no bones remained.

At dawn, they rode with the Martikovs’ wine wagon to Krezk. Sören, ever devout but unhinged, flayed the flesh from Henrik’s skull on the road. The Martikovs threatened to dump the barrels if the barbarity didn’t stop — until three peasants begged for silver to fight werewolves. In moments, they revealed their fur and fangs. The Martikovs fled with the wine, yelling for the party to run. But the adventurers stood their ground: blades flashed, holy power sparked, and two beasts fell before the last vanished into the mists.

Saint Andral’s bones are lost. Lady Wachter rules in Strahd’s name. The Count’s invitation still waits on a table set for guests who haven’t yet come. And the mists? They watch everything.

Subscribe to follow every step deeper into Barovia’s throat. 🦇

In “Will We Tolerate Concentration Camps and Slave Labor?”, Steven Beschloss warns that America may be on the verge of something monstrous: mass deportations, labor camps, and forced work that echoes the worst shadows of our history. But the real horror is simpler: these camps already exist. They never went away. And they’re not some accidental glitch of the system — they are the system.

The truth is that the U.S. economy has always needed an underclass it could threaten, cage, or bind in debt. The plantation did not vanish in 1865; it changed its paperwork. The overseer’s whip became the convict lease, the sharecropper’s debt ledger, the prison time sheet, the coyote’s contract. Each new generation simply renamed what it could not live without.

Today’s migrant laborer does not wear shackles — he carries a coyote’s debt and a cartel’s threat. She picks strawberries under the eye of a labor broker who knows she will never report wage theft, because ICE is more terrifying than any labor law. And when these families are caught, the children are separated not because cruelty is new, but because the state never keeps kids in cages with parents. This is not a glitch — it is the design.

America’s “labor shortage” is the overseer’s confession. Half our farmworkers are undocumented. Most owe thousands for smuggling fees. They do work Americans can’t or won’t do at that wage. Remove them, and the fields rot. Legalize them, and the price of produce skyrockets. You don’t want to see the cage because the real cost of opening it is higher than you’re ready to pay.

Beschloss calls for CEOs to pledge not to buy forced labor. But every grocery aisle already is. The real pledge would be to pay a wage that makes the debt chain break — to pay more for fruit, meat, roofs, and roads. We could do it. But we do not. And so the invisible camps persist: the fields, the processing plants, the basement kitchens, the prison workshops. Slavery by any other name.

The “decent Americans” Beschloss invokes want to protest the visible camp — the fence, the cage, the children on the floor. But they do not protest the debt, the fear, the cartel’s hold, or the loophole in the 13th Amendment that lets prisoners work for pennies. The chain has never broken. It just runs deeper underground every time we promise we’ve outgrown it.

The next time you hear that the deportations will cause a “labor crisis,” remember what that means: a plantation owner admitting he cannot run his fields without bondage. We can break it. We can pay the real price. But you have to say it out loud: cheap food, cheap labor, cheap freedom — these things cost someone else everything.

The question is not “Will we tolerate the camps?” The real question is: What will you do when they’re gone? Will you pay the price you owe? Or will you rebuild them, behind new fences, with new names, and pretend again they are someone else’s problem?

All your camps are belong to U.S.
They always have been.

So much modern talk about policing rests on a wish: that the officer showing up at your worst moment is a hybrid — therapist, social worker, priest, and protector — who can fix every chaotic life story with infinite patience. But the reality is older, harsher, and simpler: the officer is a guard dog, not a Saint Bernard with a cask of mercy.

The old “beat cop” we romanticize — the Irish Bobby tipping his hat on a city stoop — was never your confessor. He was there to keep the reckless few from turning your street into an alley no one trusted after dark. “Protect and Serve” never meant protect the one swinging fists at strangers; it meant protect everyone else from him.

That basic truth is why every cop calls himself what the badge says: LEO — Law Enforcement Officer. Not Law Negotiation Officer. Not Neighborhood Mediation Officer. He carries the law the broader public agreed to — imperfect, sometimes unjust, but not your private code or your street’s whispered deals.

Yet look closer and you’ll see the paradox. Pick up a battered police trade-in Glock: the slide and frame are scarred from thousands of holster draws — a sign that deterrence is the point. But inside, the bore is nearly pristine. Most officers fire fewer live rounds in training than a hobbyist does in a single weekend class. They are underfunded, undertrained, yet asked to stand as the last line between the quiet majority and the wolf at the door. In DC, accidental self-inflicted shots are so routine they have a name: “getting bit.” It’s not just sloppy — it’s the proof that we expect perfect control without paying for the discipline that makes it possible.

If you want a softer response, remember this: the guard dog’s bark only works because the teeth are real. Take that away, and the wolf sniffs the fence and climbs right in. Even your comic book heroes get it: Spider-Man doesn’t chat up a purse-snatcher about childhood stress — he webs him up for the cops. Even in fiction, we know that law must draw a line.

From the 1930s beat cop learning by rumor, through the riot-trained 1970s patrolman, to the post-9/11 “homeland security” officer, the role has always been the same: protect the majority from the chaos-makers when all else fails. Some places have improved. Many haven’t. The average American cop still trains fewer hours than a barber’s license requires.

So be clear-eyed. A police officer is not your paladin or savior. He is not your redemption story. He is the state’s answer when the social fabric frays. If you want him to bark less, build a world that needs him less. Until then, do not be shocked that he carries a weapon he barely fires — or that when he does, the bite is real. Better to know what the guard dog is — and what he is not — than to stand unguarded when the fence gives way.

Field note closed.

How America’s Godless Made a Thunder God Out of a Mortal Clown

I saw someone on Reddit shrug: “The thing is, he’s actually responsible for stuff. He’s the president.”
And that’s it, isn’t it? In a country that once thought presidents were just men in suits, we’ve built one who rains bunker-buster thunderbolts like Zeus. Not by accident — by hunger. By a god-shaped hole in a nation that told itself it didn’t need a god at all.

It started as a joke. A clown descends the golden escalator — half Golem, half carnival barker — forged out of the flyover states’ raw clay. A tulpa of every grievance that polite America forgot about: open borders, closed factories, global wars fought by kids from nowhere towns. His people breathed him into being like villagers summon a protector. Not a god — just a hammer.

But the other tribe, the self-anointed rationalists, the coastal priests of data and democracy, never understood that you don’t banish monsters by screaming at them. You feed them. Every headline, every effigy, every “literally Hitler” chant was fuel for the fire. The villagers marked their lintels and said, “At least he’s ours.” The priesthood went blind with eclipse fear. A scapegoat is a trickster until he grows too big to burn.

Now it’s July 2025. He’s the 47th president — swing states by landslide, electoral and popular votes. He walks the West Wing like a man wronged, spending four years in exile plotting every bunker plan, every drone fleet sortie, every wall and raid and black budget operation. He doesn’t ask permission — he asks forgiveness later. Or never. He knows the fear in your bones, the one that says, “What if he really can smite me from 8,000 miles away?” And you’re not wrong. With the Patriot Act still humming, with post-9/11 tools still sharp, the Zeus we built can flick his wrist and the century trembles.

It’s not just tulpa magic. It’s not just a paper god. This is a real empire with 800 bases, an 800-billion-dollar defense spigot, a thousand little Caesars running cover. And the “Never Trumpers” keep screaming, “He’s poopy pants! He’s senile!” while he stands there naked and radiant, thunderbolt in hand, saying, “You know exactly who I am.”

Every mural, every “Never Forget” wall, every daily exorcism is supposed to shrink him back to mortal size. But old magic knows: burning an effigy keeps the flame alive. The villagers built a quarterback, a Champion — not a savior. They know he’s a clown. But they also know the crops grow behind the golem’s wall. And the other side? They keep howling that the sky god wants your firstborn. Maybe they’re right. Or maybe they’re feeding him with every scream.

When the plague hits or the flood comes, they point up at Olympus: “Trump did this. Trump killed them. Trump broke the world.” And so the trickster tulpa — the clown golem — ascends the storm clouds, pulling the old sun god’s mask over that famous hair. Zeus the Trump. Smiter of cities, ruler of the surveillance state, king of the village circus.

Don’t misunderstand. He won’t live forever. Champions break. Golems crumble. But the villagers know how to bury their dead. The priesthood does not. They’ll keep the ritual alive long after he’s dust, waiting for the next eclipse.
Amen.

There’s an ancient fear that always asks: Who did this? Who angered the gods? When storms crush fields or floods drown children at camp, our ancestors blamed Ba’al, Moloch, Ra — anything to put a face on chaos.

Modern Americans pretend we’ve outgrown this. We trust policy, science, data. But scratch the surface and the eclipse fear is still there, buried under hashtags and TED Talks. And the moment the river rises, the blame returns: “Trump did this.”

When a wall of water smashed Hill Country, the rational class didn’t just mourn or question zoning codes. They built the old altar: Trump cut the staff, Trump made the storm. The scapegoat logic never died; it just swapped robes. The “coastal priesthood” who mock faith became accidental sun worshipers — burning effigies, chanting curses, feeding dread into a single name.

The faithful have always spoken of a God-shaped hole — a quiet space in the heart for something larger. If you seal it up, it doesn’t vanish; it mutates. These modern apostles of reason filled that hollow with status and credentials but kept the animal dread. The hole stayed. And fear found its Trickster.

They made Trump into the Forrest Gump of their apocalypse — but reversed. Not the clueless bystander in every photo, but the hidden cause they see in every flood, every suicide, every riot. He’s the cosmic spoiler who ruins the final moral scene they rehearsed since their grandparents marched in Selma or liberated camps in Europe. They dream of being the vanguard who ends fascism forever — but the Golem of flyover country hijacked their Moonshot.

They hate him so much they keep the ritual alive. Giant baby blimps. Dart boards. Hashtags. The effigy burning never ends. But old magic knows: burn the doll long enough and you feed the thing you fear. Their constant dread turned a mortal buffoon into an accidental tulpa — a thoughtform, an egregore, fed by every “Trump did this.”

Meanwhile, the villagers who made him never saw him as a god. He’s a flawed champion — a clay battering ram to guard picket fences and potlucks while the coastal priesthood tries to finish the moral exorcism. He was never their savior. Just a stand-in while they hold on to their Groom, their faith, their leave-it-to-Beaver quiet.

In the end, it’s the so-called rational who keep the fire burning. They think they’re defeating a villain but they’re conjuring a Trickster sun named SOL — an orange eclipse they can’t look away from. What started in the head dripped down into the heart. They became accidental Jesus freaks for the very monster they swear they hate.

If it floods like a god, punishes like a god, devours like a god — it’s a god. Not for the villagers who built a clay champion, but for the ones who can’t stop worshiping the fear.

The Trump-shaped hole isn’t just in their heads anymore.

And they’ll keep the fire burning.

Amen.

Every protest sign you’ve ever waved, every petty theft you bragged about, every mask you wore — it’s all been scraped up, timestamped, and tucked in a file with your name on it. Doesn’t matter if you called it civil disobedience, harmless rebellion, or just youthful stupidity. You were noticed. America’s surveillance state isn’t a guard tower and barbed wire; it’s a mansion rigged like Willy Wonka’s factory — a candy-colored panopticon of bait and hidden cameras. The real prize isn’t catching you red-handed — it’s testing who you become when you think you’re invisible.

Broken Windows policing didn’t die with Giuliani’s New York; it metastasized. The idea that minor crimes signal bigger rot? Now it justifies a dragnet that hunts memes, phone pings, and moral slip-ups. Every unlocked door, every lootable Target, every liquor cabinet cracked during a riot — bait. See who steals, who doxxes, who brags. The walls watch. The house takes notes.

And this mansion is wired to your head. A real fence is expensive; an invisible one is cheap. Pavlov knew this: one zap and the dog learns the line. America’s shock collar is the same. Every Ring doorbell, Nest cam, loyalty card, smart TV mic — all hoovering up your data, freezing your worst impulses for the day you matter. That drunken riot you livestreamed at 21? It sits cold-stored, ready for quantum computing to revive it when you run for office, land a government job, or just get too loud. It’s not pre-crime — it’s permanent crime insurance.

It’s easy to tell yourself this is just China’s social credit system — but the American version is more diabolical. Here, every tribe wants the fence. The Right wants it to crush anarchists and migrants. The Left wants it to snare January 6th rioters and trolls. Nobody wants to cut the wires — they just want the shock button. That’s how you get 340 million people to stay in line with four million cops, soldiers, and spooks: you make everyone their own warden, a hive of unpaid informants.

It’s old too. Hoover’s FBI had the prototype: COINTELPRO, secret files to blackmail MLK, Fred Hampton, the Panthers. The Stanford Prison Experiment, MKUltra, mind control ops — all real. That architecture didn’t vanish; it scaled up. Now it’s Palantir, Amazon Rekognition, “predictive policing,” a cold case lab waiting for your soul to weigh heavy enough to tip Ma’at’s scale.

Leaks didn’t kill it. Snowden, Assange, the WikiLeaks cables — they didn’t shut the machine down. They made you respect the fence. They showed you the collar. They broadcast the dragnet because a monster you can see is more effective than one you can’t. You start triple-checking your words, your DMs, your gait in an airport. You become your own surveillance op. They can’t post soldiers on every block — so they build the perimeter in your skull.

This is the real genius: you’re not the hero in a rebellion. You’re a lab rat in an open-air experiment. Every door you test, every moral slip you rationalize, every shiny bait you grab — logged. And when the moment comes, the shock collar doesn’t have to bark. It just zaps you back inside the fence you forgot was there.

America’s not a prison camp; it’s a behavioral panopticon humming quietly under your feet, its files never closing. You tell yourself you’re free because you can rant online. But the moment you act like you believe it — the file opens, the buzz hits, and you remember: the fence was always on.

When Silicon Valley and the CCP Start Speaking the Same Language

Let’s get real: the world’s two most powerful nations are building surveillance societies. The United States, under a new breed of techno-ideologues, is quietly constructing a digital control system that mirrors—sometimes eerily—the one perfected by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Pull back the curtain and you see the same machinery: data, algorithms, and the relentless drive to know, score, and shape every citizen. The difference? Only in branding and the stories we tell ourselves.

Peter Thiel: Architect of America’s Surveil-and-Punish

To understand this convergence, look at Peter Thiel—billionaire investor, PayPal co-founder, and intellectual godfather of the New Right. Thiel isn’t just a financier; he’s a philosopher-king for this era. His books, speeches, and investments have seeded a generation of politicians and policy architects who share his skepticism of democracy, faith in hierarchy, and obsession with managing human desire.

Thiel’s fingerprints are everywhere: from his early Trump support to his funding of “anti-woke” candidates and investments in the backbone of the American surveillance state. He bridges Silicon Valley’s monopolists and the populist Right—a connector of memes, money, and power.

Surveillance: The Water We Swim In

What we once imagined was only the CCP’s playbook is now American standard. The same tech used to track Chinese dissidents now monitors gig workers, protestors, immigrants, and minorities. Since 2016, US surveillance has expanded dramatically—not just at borders but in cities and online. Trump’s executive orders empowered DHS to scrape any “publicly available information”—tweets, Facebook posts, even private messages. The chilling effect was immediate: people self-censored, deleted posts, and warned each other that “anything you say can be used against you.”

The Memetic Engineering Complex

Social media doesn’t just sell ads—it sells influence. Its algorithms maximize engagement by amplifying outrage, envy, and tribalism. Since 2016, these platforms have become tools for both state and mob enforcement of ideological conformity. Predictive policing powered by social media data has monitored protests and flagged “agitators”—an approach straight from the CCP’s dissent-control manual.

State-Corporate Fusion

In China, tech companies must share everything with the state. In the US, the state contracts it out, but the effect is similar: a seamless flow of data from your phone to power. The “public-private partnership” is the new Leviathan—and it’s bipartisan. Thiel’s investments in Palantir and Facebook are the logical extension of his belief in hierarchy and the management of desire. Trump’s circle sees these tools as the way to restore “order” and “greatness,” even while railing against “big tech.”

Targeting the Outsiders

The CCP’s surveillance of Uyghurs is notorious. In the US, ICE used social media monitoring to build deportation cases—even for US citizens with immigrant ties. The logic is the same: identify, isolate, neutralize. Only the branding differs.

Harmony vs. Order

The CCP talks about “harmony” and “national rejuvenation.” Trump and the New Right talk about “order” and “greatness.” Both are code for control—managing risk and channeling the violence of mimetic desire away from power. Thiel’s skepticism of democracy mirrors the CCP’s distrust of pluralism. Both see the crowd as dangerous, the individual as a threat.

Denial and Camouflage

The CCP is honest about its authoritarianism. The US cloaks it in “law & order” and “border security”—but the surveillance engine hums the same tune.

No Place to Hide

In the end, the line between “free” and “unfree” blurs. The only real question is who pulls the levers—and whether we can imagine a world where data empowers rather than imprisons.

• TED Radio Hour: The State of Fashion

• TED Radio Hour: Supermodel Cameron Russell says she helped a 'grotesque industry' look beautiful

I listened to Cameron Russell on NPR’s TED Radio Hour talking about her memoir — how she was scouted as a teenager, how she tolerated “grotesque” things: the S&M vibe, the creepy photographers, the being called “jailbait” at 16. She calls it what it is — an industry built to sell the male gaze, profit off young women’s bodies, and spit them out later.

My first reaction? Rage. The same feeling I’ve had since I dated a woman with Elite Petite in NYC. She was tough, beautiful, wild — we’d be out with a motorcycle club, or she’d head to 12-step conferences alone, so brave it terrified me. I felt brother, boyfriend, father all rolled into one. Because when things go bad for me, maybe I get a black eye. When things go bad for a woman, she might end up dead in the dirt.

So my gut says: Shut it down. Replace every real girl with a perfect AI avatar. They never starve, never get trafficked, never sue. Insurance companies would love it. The brands too. Problem solved.

But it’s not.

It’s easy to focus on the big runway names — Cindy, Naomi, Cameron. But modeling is a whole messy ecosystem. It’s showroom girls in Atlanta, local department store ads, cruise ship performers, Instagram micro-influencers, ring girls, OnlyFans, beauty pageants. There are actor-models, model-actors, TikTok stars selling bikinis from their bedrooms. You can’t “fix” that by swapping out the top layer with digital dolls. The hunger for beauty and attention just leaks sideways.

Plus, we keep forgetting the real tension: agency. These girls are brave as hell. They choose it — and they often know the cost. The world claps for 14-year-old gymnasts starving to make weight, chess prodigies living alone at 15. But a teen model? Suddenly we treat her like a helpless baby lamb.

Look at Sydney Sweeney. She’s one of the most objectified actresses alive — big boobs, big gaze, big deal. But she wasn’t groomed and clueless. She made a PowerPoint for her parents when she was a teen, explaining exactly how she’d become famous. Plan A, B, C. That’s a grown-ass woman in the making. Brave enough to out-hustle the wolves.

That’s what I come back to every time: She’s not my daughter, and even if she was, she’s not my property. If a young woman’s smart enough, savvy enough, and wants it badly enough, who am I to bubble-wrap her? The real fix isn’t deleting the humans — it’s guardrails, real consequences for predators, and respect for the ones who walk in eyes wide open.

AI won’t save girls from bad choices. It’ll just kill their shot at agency and earnings. Meanwhile, the same men cash the same checks.

I believe Cameron’s story. The industry is cruel. But the solution isn’t to erase risk — it’s to trust the brave and fix the system. Because when you swap real humans for perfect avatars, you don’t just protect the vulnerable. You erase the ones who’d risk it anyway — and sometimes win.

At the end of the day, that’s the messy, grown-ass truth. And I’d rather stand next to a brave woman with scars than a flawless doll that can’t say no — or yes.