I was getting ready to post today on America’s “silent majority,” and then I read the column below by former Chicago Tribune colleague and columnist John Kass. John left the Tribune in 2021, the victim of “cancel culture” primarily because he wrote a column that was critical of socialist billionaire George Soros and his efforts to elect leftist prosecutors in cities such as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

The Chicago Tribune Guild (a left-leaning journalists’ union) accused Kass of using an anti-Semitic expression in his column about Soros—a ridiculous and unfounded charge. Kass was the lone conservative voice in a vociferous choir of mostly leftist journalists at the Chicago Tribune and was, to some, a thorn in their leftist flanks. To his credit, Kass didn’t back down and preferred to leave the Tribune on his terms rather than kowtow to the liberal mob.

Kass joined the Tribune in 1983 and was promoted to columnist in 1997 after the death of Pulitzer-Prize-winning columnist Mike Royko. It was a tough act to follow, but John did an exceptional job of it for 24 years.

Today, Kass writes a popular blog https://johnkassnews.com/ and produces a podcast https://johnkassnews.com/category/podcasts/

Here is his column:

 The Fed-Up Americans

By John Kass

You see them every day, the people who don’t call attention to themselves. They don’t preen or lend themselves to hysterics. They don’t scream or demand their enemies’ heads be put on pikes.

And their numbers are growing.

Here’s what they really care about: Their families, their kids, and keeping their jobs.

They don’t really care about political talk. But with the price of gasoline at an all-time high and inflation higher than it’s been for more than 40 years and food prices higher every day, taking care of what’s important is difficult.

Their anguish is mostly silent, unspoken, and wordless, but it is real.

So, they wait. They watch. They see. They take notice. They remember.

Since they don’t call attention to themselves, it’s been easy for some to miss them. But though they’re low-key, they’re out there. As their numbers grow, they reach the horizon.

They’re Independents, Democrats, and Republicans. They’re of all parties with deep interests in issues and ideas, but many more don’t care anything for politics. The political class treats them as livestock to be herded, but they are not livestock. They’re not fools.

They’re not stupid. They’re not chumbolones. They don’t much like being treated as fools. And now they’re angry.

So, what do you call them?

How about if we call them exactly what they are?

They’re Americans. They’re the Fed-Up Americans. If you doubt they’re Fed-Up, just look at the president’s disapproval ratings. Joe Biden’s approval ratings are so low now that he makes Jimmy Carter look like an epic hero.

They seek restoration to how things were when we could have a different opinion, but it didn’t have to end on scorched earth. Some of them remember the days when couples didn’t require fealty to some political ideology to fall in love and raise a family.

All they had to do was swear fealty to each other before God, in God’s house.

Now all are struggling. Many are cutting back, unable to afford the rising price of gas to get to work. If they live in the cities, they worry about taking public transportation where in some cities, they could be attacked, beaten, robbed, or worse.

They can’t afford to buy the fancy electric cars the president and his administration want them to buy to wean them off gasoline. Political talk doesn’t fill the gas tank. They feel real pain now. They don’t live in some failed banana republic. They don’t live in the so-called socialist paradise of Venezuela, where the people were reduced to slaughtering zoo animals for meat. They don’t live in some old Eastern Bloc nation, where the party apparatchiks got what they wanted through political connections.

They live in America. And this is happening in America.

If they live in a big city like Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, they worry about becoming a crime statistic, floating away in that urban river of violence. If they live in rural areas, they’re forced to balance the need to pay for gas and a long drive to work with the need for food.

They know something has gone terribly wrong with their country. But there is no other place for them to go.

They’re not all that active on social media. They don’t share their opinions publicly because they’ve seen what happened to friends and others who spoke their minds freely, the way all Americans were encouraged to do, once, when speaking one’s mind in America was permitted, even encouraged.

What they know is that legacy corporate media and politicians would like to herd them into a group, a party, with banners and slogans, the easier to push them along down the chutes to process them as votes. They feel the goad pushing them along.

They’re worried, upset, and angry. They know that something has gone terribly wrong with their country. But they know there is no other country for them now. There is no place for them to go.

For the most part, they’re wordless. Their emotions remain largely unspoken. They see the tens of thousands marching toward the wide-open Southern border. They know about the more than 100,000 young Americans who died from fentanyl overdoses last year.

They take notice. They wait. They watch. They see what the politicians are doing. And they bide their time.

In the great cities of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, they’ve seen the rise of lawlessness, chaos, and anarchy. The hard political left that has seized the Democratic Party has installed prosecutors who won’t prosecute, exacerbating the collapse of public safety and the rule of law. The lack of prosecutions encourages the most violent criminals, who are not afraid. Much of the media ignore the horror stories from the courts, the allegedly violent with criminal records released on low or no bail to make other victims. The people are afraid, exhausted by the lawlessness.

Dozens and dozens of these permissive prosecutors were installed by leftist billionaire George Soros, who spent tens of millions of his dollars to elect them. Journalists who dared warn the people of the lawlessness brought by the Soros prosecutors were hounded by leftists in their newsrooms. Some were defamed. I personally know this to be true.

Now we’re seeing the people begin to push back. In San Francisco, the most leftist city in America, the people of the Democratic town voted last week to recall and rid themselves of Soros-backed Chesa Boudin, the District Attorney there. The public’s antipathy to lawlessness is growing in Los Angeles, too.

But in New York, two attorneys from Brooklyn convicted of trying to firebomb an empty police vehicle during the Black Lives Matter George Floyd riots had their charges reduced. Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman faced 10 years in federal prison. Yet sentences were drastically reduced down to 18-24 months.

So much for lawlessness when the left is lawless.

As Chesa Boudin was bounced, a man with a gun was arrested in Washington near the home of Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh. He was charged with attempted murder. He had a gun, a knife, restraints, and implements of torture in a bag. He reportedly told authorities he was concerned about the conservative Kavanaugh voting on gun rights and abortion and allegedly said he wanted to kill Justice Kavanaugh.

The New York Times and much of the left-leaning corporate media buried the story. But  Fed-Up Americans took notice.

Perhaps some of you remember NY Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer, then-Senate Minority leader, publicly threatening conservative judges.

“I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price,” said Schumer. “You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

There has been no apology. So much for threats to achieve political when the threats are made by Democrats.

Democrats and media weren’t eager to discuss the reported Kavanaugh assassin. They didn’t want to spend time on the ouster of Soros prosecutor Chesa Boudin by Democrats in San Francisco. They don’t want to talk about the Democrats and Biden Administration’s role in spending that added to inflation or the White House’s refusal to increase domestic oil production.

Instead, they wanted to change the subject to Republican lawlessness in the January 6 riots in Washington on behalf of former President Donald Trump.

The riots were ugly and frightening. It was sickening. It was ugly. I said so at the time that Trump “owns this.”

In wrongly saying the 2020 election was stolen, Trump sounded remarkably like Democrat Hillary Clinton blaming the fantasy Trump Russia collusion after she lost in 2016. You could say he also sounded like Georgia’s Stacey Abrams, the Democrat who refused to concede after losing the governor’s race.

But the media and the Democrats are horrified about Trump. Not Clinton. Not Abrams. Not the “intelligence community” and federal security forces, and influential Washington media aligned with Clinton that pushed the Russia collusion hoax that we now know was untrue.

It is logical that a democratic republic cannot survive long if the losing side refuses to concede.

But can the Republic long survive if the losing party refuses to concede and, as in 2016, marshals its allies in the state-run security services and corporate media to demonize and destabilize an incoming administration and feed a big lie to the people, day after day, year after year, about the White House colluding with Russia?

Isn’t that what Democrats did?

Political force, lawlessness, and violence are indeed frightening. It’s almost like burning American cities, costing billions in damage, destroying businesses, and assaulting cops (including killing some) in order to gin your voters up before an election.

That happened through the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. Democratic politicians and their agents fed the cities and businesses to the mobs. And though left-leaning media insisted the riots were “mostly peaceful protests,” Americans weren’t fooled. It was all about political force to engineer the outcome they wanted.

Was the 2020 election stolen from Trump? No. It was not stolen.

But was it rigged?

It’s a fair question. Was it rigged through blatant media manipulation in which corporate legacy media served as the Democratic Comms Shop carrying the Clinton’s water?

Was the election rigged by Big Tech through social media censorship of critically important news about Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s questionable, corrupt foreign business dealings and that laptop from hell that broke just weeks before the presidential election?

Was it rigged by the political prostitutes of the “intelligence community” telling Americans through compliant left-leaning media that the laptop find was likely “Russian disinformation,” even though it was no such thing?

Was the election rigged by $400 million donated by powerful Democratic donor Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg? He didn’t donate directly to Biden but offered grants to local government election offices in key swing states to deal with post-COVID-19 election issues.

I’d long said I thought Trump’s policies worked, that he was the street fighter his voters wanted after all the years of the left’s influence on culture, the justice system, and politics. I also wrote that I believed he lacked the temperament for the job. Unfortunately, as he lost the election, he reacted as the Democrats hoped he would.

And those Americans who didn’t like what happened to him and went to Washington to protest publicly on his behalf have been ruined and broken by the state.

Was what happened on January 6 an “insurrection?”

Was it a coup?

Only if you believe that the foolish Chewbacca Man with those ridiculous horns on his head was about to influence the taking of control of the government of the United States.

The odd thing about Nancy Pelosi’s January 6 Committee Hearings–with six more to go–is that they’re all about attacking Republicans, trying to prevent Trump from running again, and arguing that what happened on that day was politically motivated lawlessness.

But isn’t that what happened in the Democratic cities in 2020, politically motivated lawlessness, when liberal Democrat mayors and governors and other political hacks promoted the protests that became the BLM riots in order to prosecute their political case against the Republicans?

Some use of force and violence to influence political change are excused. And some uses of force and violence are not excused. It depends.

The Fed Up-Americans see this and take notice.

And isn’t lawlessness promoted by the Soros-backed prosecutors–from San Francisco’s Cheasa Boudin to Chicago’s Kim Foxx to all the others–when they refuse to follow the law and prosecute crime? There is a political component to this, too, no? The lawlessness brings anarchy and chaos, and history tells us that some have found these to be politically useful.

Yet, at the same time, the Democrats stay silent about the assassination attempt of a Supreme Court Justice while gathering media and the federal police to do their political bidding and hold public show trials to prosecute the lawlessness of the other party.

But here’s the problem. The ruling Democrats don’t hold themselves to the same standards they demand for others, whether it’s about mask mandates for all (unless you’re one of them) or using violence and force. And the people see right through it.

Watching the January 6 Committee, I don’t think that Europeans and South Americans, Africans, those of the Balkan states, Turkey, the Middle East, and others are all that surprised. They’ve seen this kind of thing for years: One party using their political power of the state against the opposition.

They’ve seen all this before, the state using muscle to exert control and meet out political revenge, with media loyalists supporting the purges, gushing on about virtue,  even as biddable fools go out on social media to babble and scream about authoritarianism.

The Fed-Up Americans are not as preoccupied with politics as the corporate media that detests them. They have lives. But the Fed-Up Americans can see inflation destroying what they’ve built, with gas and food prices rising. They sniff the air and can smell a collapse in the housing market.

But to change the subject, the Biden White House and the Democrats, their media minions, and a few Trump-hating Republicans wave those the shiny January 6 objects to distract them. I get the politics, as do you.

This is a shell game like find-the-pea, where the sharpie takes the rube’s money in some old newspaper cartoon.

But the people aren’t clueless rubes. They notice. They bide their time. As they wait, they seethe.

From today forward, from Sunday, June 12, there are 149 days until Tuesday, November 8,  And November 8 is Election Day.

On Election Day in November, the Fed-Up Americans will have their say.

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