When I look at our country today, I see a nation where everything seems upside down, irrational, and, frankly, dangerous.

It’s a woke country where men are women, and women are men; where you lose your job if you use the wrong pronoun; where we have a demented president, an open border, record inflation, and gas at $5 a gallon; where kids are taught in school to hate our country rather than love and respect it; where socialists and communists employing pseudonyms like Black Lives Matter and ANTIFA are ripping the social fabric of our nation to shreds; and where our erstwhile veneration for the rule of law has been upended by the lawless mob.

It’s a nation in which the police are dangerous, and criminals are faultless; where capitalism is evil and socialism is irreproachable; where free speech is too often constrained rather than encouraged; where the news media are controlled by one political party (Democrats) and only 16 percent of nation trusts newspapers and only 11 percent trusts television/cable news, according to a new Gallup poll.

This is no longer a country I recognize. This is NOT the America I know.

As a former journalist (though I am often ashamed to admit it), one of the most disconcerting issues in America today is the nearly complete collapse of responsible and trustworthy journalism. When I began my career at the Chicago Tribune in the early 1970s, the American public’s trust in the news media stood at 76 percent. Of course, that was in an era when journalists actually worked at keeping their political and social biases out of their stories—something that is almost unheard of in today’s hyper-biased newsrooms.

When polls show that 93 percent of all journalists are Democrats or adhere to leftist/socialist dogma, I am not surprised by the kind of biased coverage I see today.

Once upon a time, journalism prided itself on reflecting the communities it served. That is no longer the case. Journalists today tend to be elitists who view Middle Americans as the great unwashed who are too ignorant to grasp the complexities of the modern world. Instead of reporting news as objectively as possible and allowing readers, viewers, and listeners to make up their own minds about issues such as climate change, the economy, gun control, freedom of speech and religion, and the job our president is doing, journalists today choose to interpret and mold stories to fit Democrat Party doctrines.

Stories that might challenge those doctrines or narratives are routinely ignored and not covered. Consider the stories published by the New York Post during the 2020 presidential campaign that showed how Hunter Biden in particular, and the Biden family, in general, were raking in millions of dollars in suspicious disbursements from Chinese, Ukrainian, and Russian government sources.

Not one mainstream media outlet bothered to cover the story. Instead, they accepted Joe Biden’s explanation that the New York Post story was based on Russian disinformation and thereby ensured that the American public would remain ignorant of the Biden family’s questionable financial dealings during his campaign for the presidency.

Today, with the Department of Justice engaged in an extensive investigation of Hunter Biden and possibly others in the Biden family, we know the Post stories were on point and not part of some nefarious Russian fabrication. As much as they hate to do it, most of the mainstream media today are having to scramble and report what the New York Post reported two years ago.

Not a pretty picture for media honesty and quite possibly one of the reasons America’s news media is no longer trusted by the American public.

Another reason for the public’s mistrust of the media can be explained by the media’s wokeness in accepting hare-brained ideas about gender dysphoria when millennia of biological science validates distinct physical differences between men and women. That the media have inexplicably opted to reject biological fact and just plain common sense in favor of some ridiculous fantasy designed to appease one or two percent of humanity is beyond comprehension.

The fact that the mainstream media refused to acknowledge the destructive and deadly riots in the summer of 2020 or have refused to cover the chaos on our southern border created by Joe Biden’s destructive open border policies are also contributors to the public’s media mistrust.

As much as the media might prefer to think so, the American people are not stupid.  They can see through the old Nazi system of indoctrination that says, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

Nowhere is that big lie more evident than in the rising violent crime we are seeing all across our nation. Smash and grab thefts, street muggings, carjackings, assaults on buses and subways, home invasions, rapes, and murders are blatant as the police are defunded, and radical progressive prosecutors release violent criminals on their own recognizance.

I recall a prophetic song in 1989 that perfectly captures the state of our country today. It was titled a “Simple Man,” and it was sung by the Charlie Daniels Band. Its lyrics were relevant then, and they still are. Take a look:

“Simple Man”
I ain’t nothin’ but a simple man
They call me a redneck I reckon that I am
But there’s things going on
That make me mad down to the core.

I have to work like a dog to make ends meet.
There’s crooked politicians and crime in the street
And I’m madder’n hell and I ain’t gonna take it no more.

We tell our kids to just say no
Then some panty waist judge lets a drug dealer go
Slaps him on the wrist and then he turns him back out on the town.

Now if I had my way with people sellin’ dope
I’d take a big tall tree and a short piece of rope
I’d hang ’em up high and let ’em swing ’til the sun goes down

Well, you know what’s wrong with the world today
People done gone and put their Bible’s away
They’re living by the law of the jungle not the law of the land
The good book says it so I know it’s the truth
An eye for and eye and a tooth for a tooth
You better watch where you go and remember where you been
That’s the way I see it I’m a Simple Man.

Now I’m the kinda man that’d not harm a mouse
But if I catch somebody breakin’ in my house
I’ve got twelve guage shotgun waiting on the other side

So don’t go pushing me against my will
I don’t want to have to fight you but I dern sure will
So if you don’t want trouble then you’d better just pass me on by

As far as I’m concerned there ain’t no excuse
For the raping and the killing and the child abuse
And I’ve got a way to put an end to all that mess

Just take them rascals out in the swamp
Put ’em on their knees and tie ’em to a stump
Let the rattlers and the bugs and the alligators do the rest

You know what’s wrong with the world today
People done gone and put their Bible’s away
They’re living by the law of the jungle not the law of the land
The Good Book says it so I know it’s the truth
An eye for and eye and a tooth for a tooth
You better watch where you go and remember where you been
That’s the way I see it I’m a Simple Man

I don’t believe I could say it any better.

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