The Matt Walsh Show - Why Are American Accents Disappearing? The Reason Is WEIRDER Than I Thought

Episode Date: July 6, 2026

American culture and accents are disappearing, and here's why. - - - Today's Sponsors: Dose - New customers can save 35% on their first month subscription by going to https://DoseDaily.co/WALSH or entering promo code WALSH at checkout. Ethos - Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get up to $3 million in coverage in as little as 10 minutes at https://ethos.com/WALSH Application times may vary. Rates may vary. Medi-Share - Go to https://medishare.com/matt or text the word MATT to 70246. Grand Canyon University - Find your purpose at Grand Canyon University. Visit https://GCU.edu to learn more. - - - Click here to join the member-exclusive portion of my show: https://dwplus.watch/MattWalshMemberExclusive - - - DailyWire+: Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: https://dwplus.watch/RealHistorySubscribe 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. 📜 Real History with Matt Walsh is available ad-free, exclusively on DailyWire+ https://dwplus.watch/RealHistory 👕 Get your Matt Walsh flannel here: https://dwplus.shop/MattWalshMerch - - - Socials:  YouTube — https://youtube.com/@mattwalsh Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/mattwalshblog Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/mattwalshblog TikTok — https://www.tiktok.com/@mattwalsh_ X — https://twitter.com/mattwalshblog - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you've spent a lot of time traveling in America, you may have noticed that people are starting to sound the same regardless of where you go. A bus driver in Charlotte has roughly the same accent as a guy at a Brooklyn Beer Hall, who in turn sounds the same as a salesman at a car dealership in Boston or a cashier in Grand Rapids. Of course, anyone over 35 years old knows that it wasn't always this way. Until recently, there was a huge difference in how people talked, and it was not always regional in nature. Accents were also class distinguishers. People would adopt accents to seem more sophisticated, including famous TV personalities. One of the most elite mid-century accents was Locust Valley Lockjaw,

named after an extremely wealthy Wasp enclave in Long Island, New York, which sounded something like this. Listen. We counted it up the other day. We had 16 live-in help in this house. Not counting the show fizz. Nothing. Not counting the show fizz.

aside from all the help we had in the Tuxedo Park House and the Southampton House as well. But those days are gone forever. If you recognize that accident, it might be because so many mid-century public intellectuals used it like Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr., debating in this clip, listen. You must realize what some of the political issues are here.

And many people in the United States happen to believe that the United States policy is wrong in Vietnam, and the Viet Cong are correct in wanting to organize their country in their own way politically. This happens to be pretty much the opinion of Western Europe and any other parts of the world. If it is a novelty in Chicago, that is too bad.

But I assume that to the point of the American democracy is you can express any point of view of fancy. Shut up a minute. No, I won't. Some people were non-Azzi, and the answer is that they were well-treated by people who ostracized them, and I'm for ostracizing people

who egg on other people to shoot American Marines and American soldiers. I know you don't care. As far as I'm concerned, the only is a pro-Kipto-Nazi I can think of as yourself, failing that, I would only say that we can't have the right of assembly. Now, listen, you, stop calling here of crypto-nats. Let's stop you in your goddamn face, and you'll stay plastered.

Gentlemen, let's be used. Let me ask you. I go back to his pornography and stop making any illusions of naturalness. I beg you to... I beg you to... Infantry in the last war. You were not of infantry. By and large, these accents have been totally replaced on TV by a certain kind of fake newscaster voice that no one would use, of course, in real life.

From ABC News World Headquarters in New York, this is World News Tonight with David Muir. Good evening. We begin tonight here with several breaking stories that... Tonight, the East Coast struggles to recover from Hurricane Sandy. Before we go tonight, a word about me. So what we see is that the way that Americans talk, for the most part, has been homogenized. The monoculture is dead, as we've discussed at length, and yet we all speak the same way, ironically enough, paradoxically enough. The most common explanation is that regional accents died because of the proliferation of TV and the Internet, and that's true, but it's only part of the story. Now, we'll show throughout this video that there are other more complicated reasons as well.

Of course, some people still have accents and there are holdouts, like whether you call your soft drink pop, soda, or Coke. Often depends on what part of the country you grew up in, though that's starting to fade also. But people with strong accents today have accents that would have been considered very weak accents just a few decades ago. And for the most part, there is a pervasive, increasing sameness in how we talk. Surprisingly enough, there's a large volume of data on these shifts. Researchers who study linguistics at major universities have devoted a substantial amount of time to the topic. And what's remarkable is that, as far as I can tell, this is the only major area of social science research that isn't totally corrupted by politics. Normally, when you ask college professors to explain the decline of any aspect of American culture, they'll talk about white supremacy and police brutality.

and, you know, they'll say, you know, we had it coming. But when it comes to the disappearance of American dialects and accents, for whatever reason, academics are generally honest about what's happening, which is rare, and honest about the reason why it's happening. So with that in mind, we'll start with an excerpt from a 2005 documentary called Do You Speak American, which is about a major exception to this trend. This is a segment about something called the Northern Cities Val Shift, which is a way. which was first documented in the late 1960s. It's a rare case of the American language becoming less concentrated and more regional from the last 50 years.

And it happened in cities in the Great Lakes region. All the experts, including researchers who had been spending decades studying American accents, were shocked by what they were seeing. And to understand their findings, first you might need a quick refresher on the vocabulary. So a long vowel is a vowel that sounds exactly like the letter. So, for example, the A in cake is a long vowel because it sounds exactly like the letter A. Another example of a long vowel would be the E in tree. Sounds exactly like the letter E.

So it's a long vowel. On the other hand, a short vowel is a vowel that doesn't sound like the name of the letter. So for example, the A in cat. It's a short vowel. So is the I in pig. Now, the really big finding from researchers was that around 1969, for the first time in a thousand years, people stopped pronouncing short vowels in the same way. As a species, we've been pretty consistent on how we pronounce short vowels. Until one day, everything changed.

So this is from the documentary's interview with a linguist named William Labov. Watch. What we'll be looking at is this mass of cities around the Great Lakes. Here we have Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, and Cleveland, Detroit. How many people is that? It's about 34 million people. This era used to be the closest to network pronunciation. It was what the NBC standard was based on.

And today, it is moving further and further way. This is spectacular. Bosses. Everybody writes down what? Bosses. Right. The guy. Yeah.

The bosses with the antennas. Now you begin to wonder, what are these bosses with the antennas? I can remember vaguely when we had the bosses with the antennas on the top. So buses has become bosses. buses has become bosses. Right. Yeah. So black became block and buses became bosses.

The vowel in the word cat raises and becomes kiat. The vowel in the word cot then moves and starts sounding like the A and cat used to sound, and on and on and on. It's like a game of musical chairs. The short vowels are getting shifted around. Once one vowel changes, then by necessity, the other vowels have to change as well so that people can tell, you know, them apart from one another. This emerging accent became so ubiquitous that S&L created a skit mocking it.

Take a look. I'm Bob Sworsky, and I want to thank everyone for sending those cards to my brother, Bill, who recently had another heart attack. We are coming to you live from Dickas here on Thanksgiving Day, a day for giving thanks for or taking punishment from a team that is known as Stopbers. Stop bears. This phenomenon was isolated to a very specific area of a very specific area of the country. By 2005, this particular linguist had mapped out the geographic boundaries of the

shift. It encompassed cities like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Syracuse. And there was no clear explanation for why this was happening. A lot of people think getting healthier means making some huge changes, a brand new diet and intense workout plan, or even a complete overhaul of their routine. Truth is, most long-term progress comes from small habits you can actually stick with. That's why I've been interested in dose for cholesterol. If you're already trying to eat a little better, stay active and generally take better care of yourself. Dose is an easy way to support efforts. It's a clinically backed cholesterol support supplement made with the ingredients like turmeric, ginger, and pomegranate.

We've had a few people on our team using dose as part of their regular routine, and they've been encouraged by what they've seen in their blood work. Taking dose is about as easy as it gets just a daily two-ounce shot, no capsules, powders, or complicated routine to keep up with. The cholesterol formula tastes like mango. They also have a liver support formula that tastes like orange juice gets delivered right to your doors. So once it's part of your routine, it's easy to stay consistent. If you'd like to give it a try, new customers can save 35% on their first month subscription by going to dosedaily.co slash wals or entering promo code walsh. At checkout, that's D-O-D-I-L-Y dot CO slash Wals for 35% off your first month subscription.

There are some purchases that don't require much research before you buy a toaster, maybe a pair of socks. Life insurance is not one of the things. them. You're making a decision that could affect your family for years. So before you commit to anything, you probably want to know whether other people actually had a good experience. That's one reason ethos stands out. Ethos has 4.8 out of five stars on Trust Pilot with more than 4,000 reviews. One of the reasons people love ethos is that they keep the process simple. It's 100% online. You can get a quote in seconds, apply in minutes, and even get same-day coverage. There's no medical exam.

You just answer a few simple health questions online. And it's that simple. You can get a up to $3 million in coverage, which with some policy starting as low as $30 a month. Life insurance isn't exactly something people look forward to shopping for, but it's one of those responsibilities that's worth taking care of. And Ethos makes it a lot easier than most people expect. Take 10 minutes to get covered today with life insurance through Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com.com slash walsh. That's eth-h-o-s-com slash wals. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. Trust pilot rating as of June 1st, 2025. One place to start, of course, is to look at what was happening in the 1960s.

Millions of black people were moving to northern cities, bringing their own dialect with them. So there's a theory from one sociologist that white people, as a subconscious way to distinguish themselves from the new black arrivals in their cities, began slightly altering how they spoke. As we discussed in our real history documentary, white people were leaving urban areas in large numbers during this period as a way of avoiding rampant black crime violence. or as Michelle Obama puts it to avoid black culture and the wonders of diversity. So maybe as white people were trying to distance themselves physically from black people, their brains were rewiring themselves to avoid speaking like black people as well. That's the theory. Now, admittedly, I'm no expert in linguistics, but it seems like a stretch,

you know, kind of a way to shoehorn racial politics into a topic where it doesn't belong. Another theory, which makes a lot more sense, is that the shift had been going on for quite some time in creation. from one generation to the next and was only noticed by researchers beginning in the 1960s when American universities were exploding and becoming far larger and much more numerous. On this theory, as I understand it, thousands of people in the early 1800s traveled west from New England and settled along the Erie Canal corridor, which was an isolated area. Plenty of immigrants arrived to help build the Erie Canal, and over time, separated from

the rest of the country. They came up with a unique way of pronouncing a single vowel, and then every other vowel changed accordingly. Whatever the case, the northern city's vowel shift, the great linguistic quirk that perplex researchers for very long time, and a counterpoint to the great homogenization of American English, and which gave millions of Americans a unique way of speaking, is now coming to an end. This is research from Indiana University, and to understand this quote, you need to understand the word trap. In this context, trap refers to the short A vowel in words like cat, and realization just means how a person actually says it. As we've already covered, people in northern cities had a unique, raised way of pronouncing this vowel. So with that

in mind, here's the latest finding. Quote, recent acoustic analyses examining English in the Northern American Great Lakes region, show that the area's characteristic vowel chain shift, the northern city shift, NCS, is waning. Attitudinal analyses suggest that the NCS has lost prestige in some NCS cities such that it is no longer regarded as standard American English. Results show that trap realization is conditioned by gender and birth year such that women led the change toward NCS realizations into the middle of the 20th century and then away from them thereafter. These findings reflect the backdrop of de-industrialization during this time of linguistic reorganization in Lansing and shows that as the regional industry auto manufacturing

loses prestige, so does the regional variant raised trap. So this particular finding states that as the automobile manufacturing industry declined in the Great Lakes, the unique accents started to disappear as well. People, particularly women, were very attuned to their perceived social status, didn't want to be associated with a dying blue-collar industry anymore. It stopped being prestigious to talk like the auto workers. Additionally, for workers, particularly young people who were trying to, get an office job, it didn't help to sound like a factory worker. There were all kinds of

prejudice against hiring somebody like that, as you might imagine. So young people on the job market began talking more like people from other parts of the country, subconsciously or not. And when they had kids, they taught them to speak in the new way, not the shifted way of speaking. Instead, Midwesterners are now talking more like Canadians and Californians. It was class, not just TV and YouTube, that killed. an emergent regional accent. That's the point. Now, did you have any idea that this was going on? Have you drawn a connection between the decline of the auto industry and the way millions of Americans speak? It's extraordinary to think about for several reasons. How we speak is a direct reflection of how we think. It really matters. It's one of the first things we notice about a person,

in addition to their appearance. We pay very close attention to what they say and how they say it. And while we tend to think that accents and dialects originate in mostly random and unpredictable ways, that's simply not true. Government policy can have a major impact. Economic events can have a major impact. And I've only talked about one case study so far. There are many other examples of similar changes in language all over the United States. It's not just happening in the so-called northern cities. So let's take a look at an island in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, about 20 miles off the main, off.

the mainland. This was historically a very isolated area. The island didn't have electricity until 1938 or a ferry service until 1957. And because of their isolation, the locals started speaking in a distinctive manner. Their dialect is called Hoytoiter, which got its name because that's how these people pronounce high tide. So this high tider dialect has roots in early modern English dialects that were spoken in Britain in the late 1600s through the mid-18th century. It's not strictly confined to North Carolina. It's been observed on Smith Island and Maryland, although as far as I can tell, it hasn't traveled to any other state. This is a recent BBC segment from the region, just to give you an idea of how these people talk. Watch.

Boy, to tell it on the side of the way, last night, the water fire night moonshine, no feast. It's the only dialect in the United States. When you play it for people from outside of the United States, England do not identify it as an American dialect. The Eauker-Cook dialect and several of the island dialects of the Atlantic seaboard really began in the late 17th century. There was a settlement on the island in the first decade of the 18th century, so in about 17, 9 or 10, the people presumably came from the southwest of England there to Virginia and settled on islands. And people from those islands traveled by boat to these islands in North Carolina and settled

them. Once they settled them, of course, they had no way to access the mainland other than by boat, which is still the case. And so it was isolated, isolated for centuries. There are certainly retentions of English. There are words that we can find in the plays of Shakespeare, like a word like Mamick. Mammock, oh, that means when somebody gets you playing, and they get hold of you, and they're mad ask you about something in the game,

and they, you know, try to shake you up a little bit. They're on the box with you. Mammock's like to irritate somebody or tick on somebody, you know. There are also things that they, uh, simply created in the United States, we play a game hide and seek. Well, on Oaker Coke, the term is called me honky. Because when they're hiding, what they do is they imitate the sound of a goose. Me honky, me honky.

Just hiding and finding and running through the bushes and hide somewhere else and hollering, mehawking, they know you and where they got that name now, I don't know. Israeli doesn't know the name before. Like, Hygiddley-Sate and you choose to. Now, in case you're curious, the term dingbatter comes from the sitcom all in the family. The people living in the outer banks of North Carolina got television in the 1970s,

and they heard Archie Bunker call his wife a dingbatter because she didn't have any common sense and seemed like an appropriate insult for all the outsiders who were coming into their communities and getting their trucks stuck in the sand and so on. So the word dingbatter came to mean outsider. And because of these outsiders, this distinct way of speaking is dying out.

By some estimates, only around 200 people speak this dialect anymore, and it's happening because of an influx of dingbatters. Watch. There are only about 150 speakers of the Okra Kroke Brog now, and they all live on one end of this barrier island on the coast of North Carolina, which is basically an enlarged sandbar. Within the next 50 years,

the brogue will disappear. Hoytoid on the sands away, latte-night water, farted night moonshine, no fish. The dialect on this island is sometimes referred to as Hoy toyters, which is their pronunciation of high tide. Hoytoid on the same side, high tide on the side. In the United States, the Okrakoog brogue is probably the only dialect that is not identified

as being from America. I do, I have a lot of people who think I'm from Australia or Ireland, yeah. Then you could say we'd be in my mind. You also find here lots of terms for outsiders. You all are dingbatters. My wife is from Maryland. We've been married 43 years. She's still a ding batterer.

That's not a bad thing, okay? It was basically the ding batters who changed the dialect because so many people came in, even today, there are more off-island who live here than on liners. Now it's changing. Within time, we're all going to lose it, you know, because of so many people came in here.

It's a part of heritage that I'm proud of. This is one of the few areas of our culture where everybody, even the media and academics, is willing to say that demographic change is the culprit. They'll admit that these people are losing their dialect because the demographic makeup of their community has changed. changed. As the BBC reports, quote, with each generation, the dialect is starting to disappear. The world is coming to the island through television and the internet, as well as with the long line of tourists who show up

every summer. There's also more people from the mainland moving in. What's happening is that some of these small dialects that thrive on isolation are dying because isolation is a thing of the past, said North Carolina State University professor Walt Wolfram. They still pick up terms of vocabulary, but when a kid from the island retains a strong dialect, that was the norm, and now it's an exception. In the past, kids adopted the dialect because that was the only version they heard. Now, there are hundreds of dialects and languages that most will encounter before they graduate high school. In fact, as of 2024, on this island of 676 people, fewer than half actually speak with the full Hoytoiter Brogue. Within one to two generations, it'll be gone, said Dr. Wolfram, it's dying out, and we can't stop that.

Now, the reason mainstream media outlets are willing to say all this is that, in their view, accents and dialects are no big deal. Just kind of a curiosity. So they're comfortable saying that, yeah, accents and dialects will change when an isolated community is flooded with outsiders. But it's not merely a sentimental issue. And we're talking about the loss of a shared history, vocabulary, an oral tradition that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world. We're talking about a fundamental part of humanity, how we communicate. And white people in particular are losing their unique methods of communication. It's not just happening in the Great Lakes and remote islands off North Carolina.

It's happening everywhere. Even large swathes of the American South. Watch. Then there was a tsunami. It's the southern accent heard around the world. I'm a southern, but I know I'm a southern as part of. Parker Posey's character, Victoria on White Lotus season three. Please.

Even sparking this viral moment. Like, Piper, no. Between White Lotus star Parker Posey and our own Carolina guy, Craig. Tsunami. Boots is on. The moment. Piper, no. Setting social media on fire.

Piper, no. Oh God. That was kind of spot on. But in real life, experts say that I can. iconic southern drawl, marked by elongated vials and a slower pace, is actually disappearing. Y'all, what happened to southern accents? Research shows a diminishing accent in regions across the south, from Georgia, which saw the biggest shift between baby boomers and Gen X and cities like Raleigh and New Orleans. The reason? Increased migration to the South, which in the 2020s alone is already more than four times greater than the other three U.S. regions combined.

causing younger generations to lose that distinctive southern twang. Looks like two pigs. The southern accent doesn't sound like that today. There are still people who speak with these very, very strong accents. They'll tend to be much more isolated places or they'll be much older speakers. But yeah, the younger generation, it's shifted. This is a study published in the summer of 2023 out of Georgia Tech. There's a decent amount of technical jargon here.

But the takeaway is clear, quote, The late 20th century in the United States marks the decline of regional vowel systems like the northern city shift and the southern val shift, or SVS, replaced by supra local systems like the low-back merger shift. The SVS is most advanced among Georgians. Born in the mid-20th century, in Generation X, retraction of front lax vowels begins leading toward the LBMS. These results, which hold across genders and education levels, support finding. that regional vowel systems decline precipitously following a Gen X cliff, raising questions about how such language changes are rooted in demographic transformations of that time period.

So in other words, the accent that the boomers had, the southern vowel shift, is dying out because Georgia has become much more urban and less rural. It was a much larger black population and white people are coming into the state from very far away. So previously, southerners might pronounce Ride as R as, I guess Rha, or time as Tom. Basically, they would flatten words, so they sounded like one big syllable. And now that's changing. They're starting to sound exactly like, not exactly like everybody else.

This is from the website Big Think, summarizing the findings from the same researchers, quote, linguists at University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, and Brigham Young University reported that white Georgians seem to be losing their classic southern accent, analyzing vocal recordings of 135 native Georgians born between 1887 and 2003, they found that a few of the distinct vowel pronunciations that define the southern accent have been disappearing over the generations. For example, words like prize and fit, once pronounced praz and fiat, are now more open, more often spoken as pries and fight, fit, I don't know. The shift was greatest between baby boomers and Gen Xers and is continued with millennials and Gen Ziers.

NPR spoke to a linguist, linguistic professor at the University of Georgia named Margaret Renwick about the reasons for the change. And here's what they reported, quote, The major driver of this phenomenon is demographic change in Georgia and throughout the South. Before World War II, Georgia received very little migration into the state. But beginning in the 1960s, Georgia saw increasing migration from other areas of the U.S. And by the 1980s, is one of the top destinations for interstate migration, and the Atlanta metro is still one of the fastest growing in the U.S. So these population movements mean that Georgia speakers growing up after the 1960s were in a very different linguistic environment than speakers from earlier generations. Little kids don't learn language from social media.

Kids acquire language from their parents, from their caregivers. And so that is our earliest linguistic input that helps us learn our native language. Then once kids get into school and enter adolescence, they emulate their peer group. And so we think that's where language change from generation and generation really takes hold. In the Today Show report, you heard that people are even losing their accents in New Orleans, which historically has been one of the most distinctive accents in the entire country. Elsewhere in Louisiana, the distinctive Cajun dialect is also dying out. One of the biggest mistakes people make is assuming that just because something has always been done a certain way, it's the only way to do it.

Health care is a good example. Most people assume their options are whatever their employer offers or whatever they can find on the open market. They don't realize there's another approach that's been helping families for more than 30 years. It's called MediShare. MediShare is a health care sharing program, and today more than a million Americans are using it. The reason it's growing is pretty simple. People are tired of paying more every year for a system that somehow keeps getting more expensive and more complicated at the same time. MediShare offers a different approach.

And for many families, that difference can mean saving thousands of debt. a year on health care. If you've heard about MetaShare, but never looked into it, now's a good time. Learning more doesn't cost you anything. Go to MediShare.com slash Matt. That's Metashare.com slash Matt. Or if it's easier, just grab your phone and text Matt to 70246. You get the information sent right to you again.

That's Matt to 70246. Matt to 70246. The people who change communities rarely start by trying to change the world. They start small. Over time, their small actions turn into meaningful work, which then turns into impact. A Grand Canyon University students are prepared for that journey through academically rigorous programs designed to help them grow professionally, personally, and spiritually. While many universities are raising costs, GCU has kept tuition rates steady on a traditional campus for 17 years, honoring their commitment by making higher education more

affordable and accessible. But they're not stuck in the past. 75% of GCU's programs and facilities have been built in just the last decade's summer. It's when a lot of people start thinking about what's next. If you're exploring your next step, Grand Canyon University offers hundreds of degree programs designed to help you move forward with purpose. Whether learning on campus and Phoenix or online from anywhere, students join a community committed to leadership, service, and purpose.

More than 132,000 students have chosen GCU for one reason. They want an education connected to real opportunities, real careers, and real purpose. Purpose isn't something you stumble into, it's something you pursue. Grand Canyon University helps students do exactly that. Grand Canyon University, private Christian, affordable, non-profit, learn more at gCU. This is from the Stuyvesant Spectator. It says, quote, most young people increasingly speak in amalgamation of American dialects that

lack regional nuances. In much of Louisiana, Cajun French was once spoken in nearly every household, even when it was illegal to teach in schools. Today, Cajun is faced with a slow, painful death as the majority of its native speakers reach the end of their lives. This is a pattern that pretty much everyone is noticing in their own communities. It's not limited to the Detroit or Atlanta or the Outer Banks or North Carolina or Louisiana areas as all. It's the single most widespread least talked about change in our culture. And it's tracking a much broader transformation, which is that regional culture in general.

is starting to disappear. Just like our speech patterns are becoming homogenous, so is everything else. Local newspapers have, of course, been closing, so we all get our news from the same place, no matter where we live. Major cities like Pittsburgh, Atlanta, New Orleans, and Youngstown no longer have a daily print newspaper at all. Local radio stations are dying out, certainly. Just a couple of weeks ago in Hermiston, Oregon, the radio station K-O-H-H-U. and its sister station KQFM went dark. They've been on the air since 1956, broadcasting high school sporting events

and local news to a mostly rural area. Now, they're gone. Then there's the remarkable collapse of KGO in San Francisco. They were a well-known talk radio station in the Bay Area for more than 80 years. And then just a couple of years ago, they fired their staff and made a pivot to full-time sports betting coverage instead.

In fact, in the middle of a broadcast, They abruptly signed off and immediately began airing ads for their upcoming gambling shows, along with various songs centered around the theme of money, including Pink Floyd's Money and Lady Gaga's poker face. And these songs and promos continued to loop for three days straight until the new sports betting coverage began on that Monday. Listeners and the broadcasters themselves had no idea what was going on. this is pretty surreal audio but it's it's all real listen it's also national doodle days you can combine those two into some garlic noodle love and that's well we have uh thank you kim i we have uh we have the day thing how do you think it's working kim do you like it you like doing the days every day

i enjoy special days is okay all right if you like it well it makes me like think about it later on too about what day it is i i don't know why but why not Yeah, yeah. The Herschel Walker issue only gets more complicated. It really has its own bizarre quality to it now. He claims he didn't know this woman who says that she had an abortion. She has the receipts. We gave you all that story yesterday.

But he also has a child with her, okay? So he clearly knows her. It's kind of a wild situation. Yes, go to that. As things transpire here in the studios. Yep. This is KGio, San Francisco, a cumulus media station. Coming Monday.

It's the biggest gamble in Bay Area radio history. Mommy. Now what happened to take home, I can take home, she could be 18, 18 with an attitude to 19, kind of smarty, acting real rude. But as long as you would. Now, what happened here, according to the LA Times, is that on the morning of October 5th, all of the station's employees, including the hosts, were summoned to a meeting where they were told that, quote, KGO, as we know it, will cease to exist. And they were informed that the station had lost more than $20 million since it was acquired by Cumulus,

and that changes would be coming. But there was no indication of what exactly those changes would be. Mark Thompson, who hosted a show on weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon, was told to go on the air, deliver the station's ID at 10, 15 a.m. and leave the booth. He wanted to tell his listeners what was going on, but the station's executives refused. I said, don't you think we owe the audience an explanation of what's happening? There are a lot of people who count on the station. They said, nope, this is the way we want to do it.

Well, the gambling promos and songs about money continued until the new sports betting station debuted on Monday to replace the old KGO. And the listeners, as you would expect, didn't take it well. This is from the LA Times quote, listeners of San Francisco's KGO radio station woke up to a shock on Monday. The iconic AM station's all-talk format was gone supplanted by a sports gambling format and a branding change to the spread with the slogan, the Bay's best bet on sports. Listeners had nowhere to go to express their dismay in public except the station's Facebook page. Corporate greed at its finest, wrote one listener. There's no sense of community anymore.

The station's host, their voices suddenly cut off, fielded questions and comments from their audience members through private emails and tweets. Just an avalanche of Facebook responses, says Mark Thompson, who held forth on KGO weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon. There's rage, incredulity, and this deep emotion associated. with being disconnected from what was clearly a relationship that transcended information and news. Call it community. People felt this immense connection. Thompson told me, you got me through COVID is what I've heard from more than anything. You were my daily connection. It's heartbreaking. That'd be a mistake to view all these different aspects of regional culture, our dialects, our newspapers, our radio stations in isolation. And it would be an even bigger mistake

to dismiss any of these elements as too insignificant to care about. As A.N. Whitehead wrote in science in the modern world, quote, men require of their neighbors something sufficiently akin to be understood, something sufficiently different to provoke attention, and something great enough to command admiration. He declared that a diversification among human communities is essential for the provision of the incentive and material for the odyssey of the human spirit. Now, he's not saying that we should embrace diversity.

for the sake of it or import cultures that have no compatibility with our own. But he is making a strong case that regional cultures, ones that are different enough to be interesting, but still harmonious with the rest of the country, are actually extremely valuable. In 1948, T.S. Eliot built on this idea when he wrote notes toward the definition of culture. And he began by pointing out that the term culture is incredibly broad and includes everything from the kind of cheese people eat to the sporting events they attend, to the holidays they celebrate. And all of it is significant.

Elliot also observed that England benefits tremendously from the regional cultures of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, and that friction among these cultures was important to maintain or else English culture itself would fall. It is an essential part of my case that if the other cultures of the British Isles were wholly superseded by English culture, English culture would disappear too. Many people seem to take for granted that English culture is something self-sufficient and secure, that it will persist whatever happens. While some refuse to admit that any foreign influence can be bad, others assume complacently that English culture could flourish in complete isolation from the

continent. To many, it has never occurred to reflect that the disappearances of the peripheral cultures of England, to say nothing of the more humble, local peculiarities within England itself might be a calamity. We have not given enough attention to the ecology of cultures. Now this phrase, the ecology of cultures, is what comes to mind when you hear about the very rapid decline of regional dialects and institutions in the United States. As Eliot puts it, it is the instinct of every living thing to persist in its own being. Any vigorous small people wants to preserve its individuality. And that individuality is threatened at the moment in ways that very few people are talking about. Now, for his part, Elliot hesitated to recommend any decisive way to fix this particular problem.

Culture by its nature isn't something you can dictate from the top down. But we can start by identifying what's happening and what's causing it. Rapid demographic change doesn't simply lead to social unrest and less cohesion and more violence, although very often those are the expected consequences, and they do happen. Demographic change can also lead to consequences that no one really really thinks about, side effects that slowly chip away America's various regional cultures, bit by bit, until one day there's not much left. You know, sometimes this demographic change comes from within the country.

More often, it comes from outside of our borders. And either way, by the time you truly realize the extent of the change, by the time no one can speak Cajun or tell you what a ding batter is, then it's probably too late to do anything about it. A terror warning in northern Virginia. Radical Islam has designs openly on the West. The FBI thwarted a terror plot on New Year's Eve. Violence attack over the Halloween weekend in Michigan. Protests on college campus is showing no signs of stopping.