I was born in 1970—the same cultural moment, almost to the year, that NPR emerged. My parents were daily drinkers and secular humanists who raised me in Hawaii with Carl Sagan, PBS, and an FM radio dialed to All Things Considered. Garrison Keillor. Click and Clack. Terry Gross. Diane Rehm. Kojo Nnamdi. This wasn’t politics—it was affection. NPR was calm, elite, literary, but with warmth. A sherry-glass liberalism. A voice that loved America while nudging it gently forward.

For decades I was the cliché NPR listener. WAMU 88.5 was always on. I attended events. I gave money. I listened from sunup to sundown. Even when I moved to Berlin from 2007–2010, I tuned into NPR Berlin on 104.1 FM—the only place in Europe where you could still hear that comforting cadence.

NPR didn’t just report the world. It modeled how to be in it. It embodied curiosity, restraint, and thoughtful compassion. Sure, it was Ivy League-adjacent, but it didn’t perform its politics. It offered a kind of humanist moral imagination that didn’t shout.

But over the last decade, it began to shout.

The slow turn started with Trump, but it accelerated under COVID. What once felt like public radio for the curious became a strategy hub for the perpetually aggrieved. On the Media went from fascinating to hectoring. 1A became sanctimonious. The programming seemed less about informing the public than scolding the noncompliant.

It wasn’t just the politics. NPR has always leaned left, and I’ve always been fine with that. What changed was the tone. It stopped being about persuasion and started being about purity. I started waking up not to gentle reporting, but to emotionally loaded moral litmus tests disguised as headlines.

And let me be clear: I was a lifer. I lived on Capitol Hill for nine years and in Arlington for 15. I studied American literature. I taught writing. I read postwar fiction in Berlin. I’ve attended Big Broadcast tapings. I’ve seen Garrison Keillor and David Sedaris live. I once flirted with Diane Rehm on Twitter. I should have been locked in until death. But if you’ve lost me—you’ve lost the plot.

I should’ve been paying a tithe to NPR and PBS for all 85 years of my life. Instead, I wake up listening to Your Morning Show with Mike DeGiorno, a warm, funny, right-leaning host who loves his audience and doesn’t perform ideological trauma theater every five minutes. He makes me laugh. He reminds me more of old NPR than NPR does.

And that’s the saddest sentence I’ve ever written.

Public media made a fatal gambit in 2016. They believed Trump was an aberration, a glitch, and if they could just signal hard enough—he’d vanish. But when he won again in 2024, after 34 felonies, after billions in judgments, after being called Hitler daily—they were shocked. Because they had stopped listening. They didn’t realize his supporters saw the media itself as the enemy. That “they’re not coming for me, they’re coming for you” landed. That Trump, for many, isn’t a savior but a middle finger.

NPR had become Tokyo Rose, broadcasting at its own people from a bunker of moral superiority.

Meanwhile, I’m streaming old Coast to Coast AM episodes. I watch Gutfeld!, not because it’s smart but because it’s stupid in the way old late night used to be. Colbert? I was a disciple. But since COVID, he’s turned into a high priest of performative grievance. I can’t even watch him interview celebrities anymore. If I want celebrity joy, I turn to The Graham Norton Show—where nobody cries about the state of the world before asking about someone’s rom-com.

Even The Daily Show knows what it has become. They joke about “TDS”—Trump Derangement Syndrome—because they know. It’s not satire anymore. It’s affirmation.

What I miss is what radio used to be. Sweet. Surprising. Curious. Gently skeptical. What it did best was model how to be open in a closed, chaotic world. And now that voice is gone.

I miss the voice in my kitchen.

And I’m still grieving.

At first glance, the idea of deporting 30 million undocumented immigrants sounds logistically absurd. It seems politically suicidal, morally grotesque, and economically unviable. And that’s precisely the point. For years, the unspoken strategy among progressive immigration advocates and Democratic administrations has been to overwhelm the system. The assumption was simple: if you allow enough people in, undercut enforcement, delay asylum proceedings, and stretch ICE past the breaking point, the machine will collapse under its own weight. Amnesty—if not by law, then by inertia.

But this strategy misread the nature of the American state. It assumed that cost would be the limiting factor. It assumed that there was some point where the budget said “no.” But America doesn’t fear large-scale expenditures—it industrializes them. Just as the military-industrial complex learned to turn every war into a jobs program, the deportation-industrial complex is now preparing to turn mass removal into its own domestic surge.

This isn’t about politics. It’s about procurement. The logic of wartime spending, redirected inward. If there are 30 million people to remove, then every law enforcement agency, detention facility, border town, federal contractor, and software vendor just found itself a 10-year growth plan. The more people there are to deport, the more money gets spent trying. And when there’s money to be spent, there’s power to be built.

It will look familiar. Local police departments will get new funding under “immigration task forces.” Counties will expand jail capacity “for processing purposes.” Private contractors will bid to provide buses, surveillance software, interpretation services, and biometric tracking. ICE will become the new VA. CBP will get its own public relations office, veteran hiring initiatives, and branded recruitment campaigns. Every piece of the federal deportation puzzle will scatter across congressional districts—just like defense spending. Just like fighter jets built in 50 states to guarantee buy-in.

Even the intelligence community will find its place. The Five Eyes alliance won’t stop at terrorists—they’ll offer data-sharing agreements to help root out visa overstays, border jumpers, and cartel networks. Domestic surveillance, long a third rail, will find new life under the banner of “immigration enforcement.”

It’s not that the political class wants to deport 30 million people—it’s that someone told them they could. And more importantly, that there’s money in it. The idea that scale would act as a deterrent was always a gamble. But now it’s starting to look like an accelerant.

The deeper irony is that, in trying to overwhelm the system into mercy, open-borders ideologues may have instead created the greatest federal jobs program since the WPA. Not in green energy or infrastructure, but in the mechanized removal of the very population they sought to protect. And every mayor, governor, and senator who once cried about federal neglect will now see an influx of cash and contracts—just so long as they play their role in the machinery.

What’s coming isn’t just about law and order. It’s about full-spectrum mobilization. The same way the New Deal turned dams, railroads, and murals into work for millions, the deportation-industrial complex will do the same—with detention centers, court dockets, and field agents.

You thought mass deportation was impossible because it was too big? In Washington, that’s a feature, not a bug. When you give the federal government a problem too large to solve cleanly, it builds an industry around failing slowly. And it keeps the checks flowing.

We talk a lot about racism in America, but what we’re really contending with today isn’t just race—it’s culture. It’s not about the color of your skin, but the code you speak. Not the blood in your veins, but the dialect on your tongue. It’s not whiteness that gets punished—it’s acting white. It’s not blackness that’s rejected—it’s betraying the culture. This is not racism. This is cultural apartheid.

I learned this growing up in Hawaii, where being a haole (white) wasn’t the problem—it was acting haole that got you smacked down. The local Asian and Polynesian kids who studied hard, dressed preppy, or spoke standard English weren’t accepted. They were called Twinkies (yellow on the outside, white on the inside) or bananas. Brown kids were accused of acting white. It’s the same logic that calls Clarence Thomas the “Black face of white supremacy.” The attack isn’t about biology—it’s about betrayal.

My mother knew the code. She drilled it into me. Inside the house, I was to speak proper Manhattanite English—“NPR English,” she called it. She filled my mind with Sagan, Picasso, PBS, poetry, National Geographic. But when I stepped out the door, she expected me to speak local. Slippah talk. Braddah slang. "What, you? Stink eye, eh?" That kind of thing. Code-switching wasn’t optional. It was survival.

And here’s the thing: the people who don’t or won’t code-switch—who plant their feet and refuse—get culturally ghettoized. Not racially. Culturally. And then they’re told this isolation is empowerment. That rejecting the norms of so-called whiteness is resistance. But what it really is? It’s opt-in apartheid. It’s self-segregation dressed up as identity.

This isn’t just about dialect or diction. It’s deeper. It’s about creating pride around disconnection. It’s about rejecting opportunity because opportunity looks like assimilation. It’s about mocking Black excellence if it “sounds white.” It’s about labeling those who succeed outside the culture as sellouts. It’s a trap—and it’s being sold as virtue.

What’s happening isn’t that different from what eugenicists once tried to do through force—except now it’s happening through cultural manipulation. Back then, they sterilized. Now, they convince you to sterilize yourself. Back then, they built ghettos. Now, they convince you to build your own. Back then, they burned bridges. Now, you’re told burning bridges is bravery.

You want to know the wildest part? Even among white people, there’s a caste. I had a guy on Mastodon—a literal white supremacist—tell me I wasn’t really white. I’m Irish and Hungarian. That makes me untermench to him. Not Anglo. Not Aryan enough. Catholic, no less. Garbage blood. Slavic trash. So when you talk about whiteness, understand even the racists have tiers.

The people who think they’re resisting white supremacy by rejecting standard norms are actually reinforcing a deeper, more sinister system—a system that wants you contained, controlled, and culled. It wants you to choose self-limitation and then call it identity. It wants you to abandon the tools of success, then blame “the system” for failure. It wants you broke, isolated, and dependent—and convinced that’s freedom.

We need to call this what it is: cultural apartheid. Not class apartheid. Not even racial apartheid. Cultural. You’re judged not by your skin, but by your syntax. Your style. Your self-presentation. You’re either in the house, or you’re in the yard. And the tragedy? A lot of people are choosing the yard and calling it liberation.

So no, this isn’t about “acting white.” It’s about refusing to play the game that keeps you small. It’s about seeing code-switching not as betrayal, but as strategy. It’s about refusing to be a mule who plants their feet in defiance while the world moves on.

Speak every language you can. Walk in every world you can. Don’t let anyone shame you into staying small. The deck is open. The cockpit has a seat. Don’t chain yourself to the hold and call it pride.