For most of my life, I thought I knew Jesus. My image of Him came from pop Catholicism, Easter sermons, and Hollywood movies where He looked untouchable, glowing, and serenely above it all. I imagined Him like Superman in sandals, tossing miracles around as easily as a magician pulls rabbits from a hat. He seemed immune to doubt, unaffected by the atmosphere around Him. But after a year of listening daily to the Gospels on the Hallow app, I started meeting a very different Jesus: a Jesus who is deeply human, relational, and, most shockingly, vulnerable.

The scene that changed everything for me is in Nazareth. Matthew 13:53–58 describes how Jesus returned to His hometown synagogue to teach. The people were amazed but sneered, “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son?” Their familiarity blinded them. The passage concludes: “He did not do many miracles there because of their lack of faith.” Mark 6:5–6 is even more stark: “He could not do any miracles there, except lay His hands on a few sick people and heal them. He was amazed at their lack of faith.” Luke 4:28–30 shows their hostility escalating until they drove Him out and nearly threw Him off a cliff.

The Gospels are crystal clear. This is not Jesus deciding not to waste His power. This is Jesus unable to act because the atmosphere itself suffocated His miracles. The room’s disbelief severed the connection. Divine power flows only where faith breathes life into it. Without faith, there is no circuit, no current, no oxygen. He came ready to give, but the air was dead.

That realization floored me. Jesus wasn’t punishing anyone. He wasn’t holding back out of pride. He entered Nazareth wide open, prepared to heal, but the faithless atmosphere rendered Him powerless. Like a flame starved of oxygen, the miracles simply died. This doesn’t make Him less divine; it makes His humanity even more real. Even knowing who He was—the Messiah, the Son of God—He felt the sting of rejection. He healed a few, then walked away, not because He was offended, but because there was nothing left to work with.

Faith here isn’t about earning God’s favor. It’s the medium through which His power moves. In Nazareth, the room was barren, and so the miracles stalled. Where faith existed, the current flowed. The disciples provided that faith, breathing life into His mission. They amplified His power, and He poured authority into them to heal and preach. His divinity was never hoarded; it multiplied where belief made space.

This moment also reframes His thirty hidden years. Pop culture makes it seem like Jesus simply appeared at thirty and started tossing miracles. But those decades of study, prayer, and humility were preparation for this: a ministry completely dependent on relational power, not raw force. Even after all that, Nazareth still saw only Joseph’s boy. Their disbelief blinded them to who stood before them.

Nazareth is not just a story; it’s a warning. If the disbelief of His childhood friends could hobble the Son of God, how much more does unbelief drain us? We need people who keep the current alive, who breathe faith into our lives. Jesus needed that. So do we.

This scene should be central to how we understand Him. It shows a Messiah who bleeds emotionally, whose power dies in dead rooms, and who walks away not out of anger but because the grid is down. The Gospels don’t sanitize this. They show us a God whose power is not over us, but with us—power that only lives where faith gives it breath.

Maybe that’s the miracle. And maybe—just maybe—He’s still walking into rooms today, searching for oxygen.

After surviving the werewolf ambush on the Old Svalich Road, the adventurers reached Kresk, the last settlement before the mists swallow the valley. The guards at the gate opened only when they saw the Martikovs’ wagon of wine. But their allies’ patience was thin; the severed head of Henrik, the coffin maker, and the party’s haggling over wine had soured trust. One barrel was given to Burgomaster Dmitri Krezkov. He warmed slightly, explaining Kresk survived by not provoking Strahd. He offered one path to shelter: the Abbey of Saint Markovia. His warning was clear—when its bells toll, screams echo across the village.

The party climbed the 800-foot switchback to the abbey. Mists choked the valley below, frost lined the stone. Scarecrows posed as false guards along the walls. Inside, they met Otto and Zygfrek, mongrelfolk sentries—patchworks of man and beast—who bickered until Sören demanded to see the Abbot. Reluctantly, they led the party into the courtyard, where locked pens held howling mongrelfolk, the twisted remnants of the Belview family.

A chained bat-winged woman hissed as Sören approached. From the well, another creature—spider-eyed, frog-handed, crow-footed—lunged at Daermon. The rogue’s rapier struck true; Traxidor’s radiance finished it. The courtyard erupted in cries of “Murder!”

Inside, they found the Abbot—handsome, serene, with the bearing of someone more than mortal. Beside him sat Vasilka, a pale, scarred woman in a red dress, mute and unnaturally perfect. The Abbot welcomed them, but his sadness deepened when told of the slain mongrel. He explained: the mongrelfolk were the Belviews, lepers he healed but could not cure of madness. They begged for animal traits, and he gave them their desires. Now they breed, fight, and rot in cages.

He revealed his greater purpose: Vasilka. Crafted from corpses, refined by his hand, she is to be Strahd’s bride.

“To redeem a soul as black as Strahd’s, he must first know love.”

The Abbot asked them to find her a wedding dress. When questioned why he would aid Strahd, he answered with rapture: Strahd must be redeemed, not destroyed.

Sören sensed the truth with Divine Sense—the Abbot is Celestial. When pressed, the Abbot unleashed his true form: wings of radiant fire, eyes without pupils, sword and lance of blazing light.

“Behold an angel of the Morning Lord. See me and know despair.”

The party collapsed under the weight of his divine presence. The light faded, but the judgment in his gaze remained.

The Abbot’s servant, Clovin—a two-headed mongrelfolk with a crab claw—led them to their quarters. There they met Ezmerelda d’Avenir, a Vistani monster hunter with a prosthetic leg. She packed to leave, unimpressed by their bravado.

“You’re reckless. Strahd will break you.”

She called the Abbot insane and departed into the cold night.

The bell tolled, and the mongrelfolk howled like a hundred beasts. At dinner, the Abbot dismissed his servants, served Red Dragon Crush wine, and cabbage stew. Sören refused to eat. The Abbot did not eat either—he patiently taught Vasilka to hold a spoon, coaxing her like a child.

Despite warnings, Sören, Radley, and Daermon explored the abbey’s upper floors. Traxidor stayed behind. They passed through rotted offices, into an infirmary with doors marked Surgery, Nursery, and Morgue. Shadows emerged—spectral undead that drained not blood but strength. Memories of the Death House returned as their vitality faded.

They fought, but the darkness pressed hard. At the last moment, Traxidor burst in, the Amulet of Ravenkind blazing. His Channel Divinity seared several shadows to nothingness; a Guiding Bolt destroyed the last. The party staggered back to their room, weak and shaken, collapsing into uneasy sleep.

The Abbot waits for a wedding dress. The mongrelfolk whisper “murder.” Ezmerelda hunts alone. And somewhere far above, Strahd smiles, patient as the grave.

Meritus Media isn’t just another digital agency. It’s not a growth hack lab, a content mill, or a stitched-together team of Upwork freelancers. It’s a convergence—a rare blend of what still works, what used to work, and what should work when it comes to visibility, credibility, and influence.

That’s why I joined.

It’s why I stepped behind the Meritus shield—why I aligned my decades of SEO, ORM, and digital strategy experience with a crew led by Mike Falkow and built on the legacy of Sally Falkow.

A Legacy That Still Leads

Sally Falkow is a name that belongs in any serious digital PR curriculum—if such a thing existed. I’ve known her for 20 years. She’s not a pioneer in the tech-bro sense. She’s a veteran of real PR: press releases by fax, journalist calls by phone, media earned—not bought.

She was ahead of the curve before social media had a name. She helped shape the Social Media News Release. She launched The Proactive Report in 2003 and wrote SMART News: How to Create Branded Content That Gets Found in Search and Shared on Social Media. She earned PRSA’s APR, trained 2,500+ execs, and was PR News’ PR Trainer of the Year.

Her legacy? Treating journalists as collaborators, not targets. Earning coverage through relevance. And blending the language of PR with the structure of search.

From Mizuno to Meritus

Sally and I first worked together at Social Ally. One of our first projects? A blogger campaign for Mizuno Running. Instead of paying for posts, we offered influencers shoes to test, run in, and review—if they wanted. No scripts. No contracts.

It worked. Real people wrote real things. Trusted voices moved the needle. That same spirit lives on at Meritus.

What Meritus Does

Meritus Media is full-spectrum. Not bolted-on services. Not a list of tactics. A strategic system where each part strengthens the next:

• Digital PR with a journalist’s eye

• Reputation Management that creates narrative

• SEO that’s technical, strategic, and brand-aligned

• Influencer Outreach built on relationships, not rates

• Web Dev & UX that marries story and performance

• Social Media with tone, not just timing

• Content Strategy that serves both people and platforms

From schema to storytelling, long-tail search to crisis response—everything is integrated.

The Falkow Factor

Mike Falkow, Sally’s son and now CEO, brings creative and technical fluency. Former surfer, art director, actor, and developer, Mike leads with instinct and insight. He’s growing Meritus’ footprint across LA, Tampa, and the UK. His brother Jonathan “Cokey” Falkow handles European development with the same mix of charm and clarity.

Together, they carry forward Sally’s DNA—updated for today’s world.

Why I’m Here

Because this model works. Because these people are real. Because Sally’s relationship-first, journalism-first, clarity-driven ethos isn’t a pitch here—it’s the standard.

Clients aren’t budgets. They’re collaborators. Success isn’t clicks. It’s momentum. Trust. Visibility with gravity.

The Future

Visibility now is hybrid: earned and owned, organic and engineered. Built with the heart of a journalist and the brain of an SEO.

That’s why I joined Meritus.
That’s why I’m building with this team.
And that’s why, if you’re tired of duct-taped digital and tired ideas, you should be watching.

Let’s get to work.

There was a time when being a member of the ACLU meant defending the speech of people you despised—not because you endorsed them, but because the principle of liberty mattered more than comfort. I joined for that reason. I wasn’t virtue signaling. I was pledging allegiance to the Constitution, the real one—not the cosplay version people wave when it suits them.

Now? The ACLU defends speech selectively. The Human Rights Campaign operates more like a branding arm of one political party. And free speech? Somehow that’s been redefined as violence. Ironically, actual violence is often written off as passion or protest.

I’m not saying this in a red hat. I’m saying this as someone who remembers when progressives stood for open discourse. I grew up in Hawai‘i surrounded by every possible kind of person—different skin, different languages, different politics. They were still mine. I worked with Frank Burns, the general who wrote “Be All You Can Be.” I was close to his son, Scott. I loved Hope O’Keeffe, a brilliant constitutional lawyer. These people weren’t footnotes. They shaped my beliefs.

Someone once said I was trying to get myself on the SPLC watchlist. It hurt because it felt a little true. I’ve been next to too many counternarratives for too long—from New Media Strategies to memes.org to spelunking rabbit holes on forums nobody talks about in polite company. I don’t think I’m flagged. But I’m filtered—soft-shadowbanned, algorithmically sidelined, quietly removed from the conversation without anyone needing to tell me so.

And the language—God, the language. I watched “racist” morph from describing segregationists to being tossed like a beer can at people like me: 55, white, straight, Christian, gun-owning, ex-ACLU donor. “Fascist” now applies to suburban parents who speak up at school board meetings. These words used to be magic spells. Now they’re wallpaper.

And when every act is fascism, when every opinion is white supremacy, the terms lose meaning. The public square becomes a theater of accusation. And many of us? We quietly walked away. The left won the culture war, sure. The right didn’t argue. They built something else.

While the activist class raged on TikTok and MSNBC, the right unplugged. They stopped donating. They stopped attending. They didn’t march. They starved the beast. Defund NPR? You don’t need a vote—just stop the grants that trickle in through CPB, NEA, USAID, and other soft-funding channels. NPR says it only receives 2% of its budget from the federal government. But insiders know better—those streams run deep.

Same for universities. You can’t shut them down outright—it would look authoritarian. But redefine their worst excesses (and many now qualify) as violations of civil rights law—like antisemitism—and you can cut off Title VI funding. You don’t need bayonets. You need bean counters.

The left made everything sacred: identity, language, tone, even silence. The right made nothing sacred except autonomy. The right didn’t want to control cities. They wanted to starve them—cut off food, fuel, infrastructure—and watch the bloated coastlines retreat. The right doesn’t dream of invading blue cities. They plan to outlast them.

And still, the same spells are being cast: bigot, fascist, hater, Hitler. But the spell is broken. Because I see the restaurant going dark. I see the check left unpaid. I see the waiter backing away. And I see the activists arguing about the pronouns on the dessert menu.

I’m not here to storm anything. I’m not calling for a new party, a movement, or revolt. I’m just the watcher. I was here when speech was sacred. I was here when dissent wasn’t pathology. And I’ll still be here when the lights go out and the last credit card gets declined.

The Tortoise and the Hare: How Strategic Patience Lets Conservatives Win While Progressives Burn Out

In the culture war, it’s not ideology that wins. It’s tempo. Progressives operate in existential now-or-never mode. Conservatives move like tectonic plates. One sprints. The other strategizes. One demands transformation overnight. The other sits silently, waiting for the overreach—and then strikes.

Progressives are the hare. They lurch forward, propelled by urgency. Climate catastrophe. Trans suicide rates. Racism. Abortion. Every issue is a crisis. Every delay is violence. So they sprint ahead, sure of their moral position and shocked when the rest of the country doesn’t keep up.

Conservatives are the tortoise. They rarely push forward. They don’t need to. Their goal isn’t to change the world, but to preserve it. So they wait. They accept setbacks—like the 1994 assault weapons ban—with stoicism. They don’t riot. They buy bolt-actions and wait 10 years. When the ban expires, they don’t just reclaim their rights. They expand them. Since 2004, constitutional carry has spread to over half the country. Patience, rewarded.

Nowhere is this clearer than the post-Roe abortion fight. The Right spent 49 years quietly building the legal scaffolding to reverse it. Meanwhile, the Left treated Roe as settled. When it fell, progressives wailed—but had no fallback plan. No state-level fortifications. No legal infrastructure. The tortoise had already passed them.

This isn’t about intelligence. Progressives often mock conservatives as yokels—NASCAR fans, Jesus freaks, dip chewers. But a man who loves monster trucks may also have a 140 IQ, a 30-year plan, and a long memory. He doesn't waste time arguing online. He runs for school board. He takes the sheriff’s seat. He teaches his kids to shoot, pray, and vote. Then, when the time comes, he acts—methodically, relentlessly.

The hare laughs until the tortoise wins.

There’s a second metaphor here, and it must remain distinct: the frogs in the pot. These are not the activists. These are the normies. The moral majority. The 80% who tolerate change—until it starts to feel like a boil. Drag queen story hour. Pronoun policing. Puberty blockers for kids. Decolonized math. At some point, the temperature hits critical mass, and the frogs jump. Not toward the Left—but away from it.

Progressives don't seem to understand this dynamic. They confuse silence for consent. But most Americans are simply conflict-averse. They’ll tolerate the weirdness, up to a point. But the moment the cultural revolution starts targeting their children, redefining biology, or punishing dissent, they recoil. Then they vote Republican—not because they’re cruel, but because they want the heat turned down.

You cannot sprint people into transformation. You must shepherd them, carefully. The progressive movement acts like a sheepdog panicked by the slow herd. They bark louder. They nip at the heels. But push too hard, and the herd doesn't obey—it stampedes. The stampede tramples everything, including the cause itself.

If progressives want to win long-term, they must understand what conservatives already know: the real race isn’t won in viral moments. It’s won through patient, generational strategy. Through zoning boards, state legislatures, curriculum policy, and quiet legal warfare. It’s won by letting the hare exhaust itself in front of the cameras—while the tortoise lays the foundation for permanence behind the scenes.

In American politics, the tortoise doesn’t just finish the race.

He builds the track.

This is not just another crackdown. It’s not even just another culture war. It’s a full-spectrum economic and psychological operation, aimed not only at the undocumented population but also at America’s industrial stagnation, its working-class despair, and its hunger for purpose. With no global war to stimulate GDP and no appetite for new foreign interventions, the Trump administration has reverse-engineered the forever war—on American soil. Not to export democracy, but to deport illegals. And in doing so, it has built a bottomless pit of domestic war profiteering, wrapped in the language of law and order but fueled by the same contractors, consultants, and logistical profiteers that once gorged themselves in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Call it the Deportation Industrial Complex. But it’s not just complex—it’s beautiful in its simplicity. Thirty million people must go. That’s the mandate. That’s the scale. And in a country wired to believe that all problems can be solved with enough manpower, tech, and money, the answer is obvious: hire everyone. Equip everyone. Pay everyone. Give every red-state welder, ex-cop, off-duty Guardsman, and bored veteran a uniform, a badge, a contract, and a pension. Transform unemployed linemen into tactical apprehension specialists. Turn shuttered Walmarts into ICE logistics hubs. Repurpose municipal airports as detention corridors. America isn’t just making deportation possible. It’s making it profitable—deeply, addictively so.

What began as a promise to restore the rule of law has metastasized into an economic engine. Every dollar once earmarked for building democracies abroad is now funneled into controlling populations at home. But unlike Iraq or Kabul, there’s no need to ship gear across oceans or train interpreters in Dari. The war is local. The targets are domestic. And the contractors are finally working in their own time zone.

Trump understood something that few in the press corps ever grasped: wars don’t have to be fought to be funded. They just need to be declared. The war on terror taught a generation of federal agencies how to secure blank checks, build redundant infrastructure, and bill for metrics instead of results. That same playbook is now deployed along highways in New Mexico, suburbs in Georgia, and industrial parks in Ohio. Detention centers don’t have to be full to be funded. Drones don’t have to fly to be leased. Uniforms don’t have to be worn to be paid for. This is the genius of the domestic security economy: the appearance of effort is sufficient. And with every raid filmed for Facebook and every Alcatraz revival whispered in policy memos, the appearance becomes self-sustaining.

What the Pentagon did to the Middle East, ICE is now doing to middle America. The economy is no longer post-industrial. It’s para-industrial—anchored not in goods but in bodies: processing, moving, containing, intimidating. And just like every imperial project before it, this one needs both elite buy-in and grassroots sweat. So while the consultants rake in six-figure retainers, the MAGA base gets something better: dignity. Work. Uniforms. Authority. Meaning.

And that’s the real brilliance. This isn’t just a boondoggle. It’s a buffet. A Golden Corral of enforcement where everyone eats. From the billion-dollar contractor to the $23/hour transport tech, there is room at the table. The goal is not deportation efficiency. The goal is economic resuscitation, social stabilization, and narrative control—all wrapped in the spectacle of taking America back. It’s not clean. It’s not moral. But it is working.

The Gold Rush of Deportation is here. And for those who missed out on the last war, this one’s paying in cash, no passport required.

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.