Author, columnist, speaker
Americans Have Nearly Zero Trust in Government
By Robert Knight
Recent surveys show that Americans have very little faith in government.
The Pew Research tracker poll, conducted since 1958, found that only 2% of Americans trust the government “just about always” to do what is right.
Another 15% say they trust it "most of the time."
I wonder where those trusting folks are getting their news?
The 17 percent figure is a deep drop from the combined trust rate of 73 percent in 1958, back when Ike was president and things were relatively normal.
That was before the government began wasting money by the trillions, telling sweet lies about the benefits of welfare, enforcing false pronouns, welcoming millions of illegal aliens, and coordinating with a corrupt media to censor unwanted views.
The Trump administration is working hard to restore trust via transparency, particularly at the FBI, the Justice Department and the federal health agencies, but it’s going to take a lot more.
A big decline in trust occurred during the COVID pandemic, when authorities gaslit us over and over and told us not to believe our lying eyes.
So, it was not surprising that the government’s—and the media’s—alarm over recent measles outbreaks was met with skepticism.
In Pennsylvania, two people died from measles, officials initially reported. On Aug. 25, Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, seized on the fact that neither person had been vaccinated. He launched into an attack on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a vaccination skeptic, effectively blaming him for the deaths.
“There's real-life consequences to spreading misinformation," Shapiro said.
Well, yes. But one of the victims was a newborn infant who had a ruptured spleen that the coroner ruled was not due to measles.
The other person turned out to be another newborn with a severe congenital condition. The coroner later said measles was the official cause of that infant's death.
Kennedy shot back that Mr. Shapiro’s staff may have “fabricated” the victims and accused the governor of engaging in a “replay of the Democrats' COVID playbook."
Both deaths occurred in Lancaster County, prompting at least one blogger to write, “Well, it looks like they’re coming after the Amish now.”
The community of “plain people” largely avoids vaccinations, although it is not a tenet of their faith. The MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccination rate is 25 percent among the Amish, contrasted with around 90 percent of Lancaster County as a whole.
In an editorial lamenting the spat between Mr. Shapiro and Mr. Kennedy, the Washington Post observed, “It’s unclear why federal officials should be trying to adjudicate the immediate cause of these deaths.”
Well, perhaps it’s partly because of all the gaslighting during the COVID pandemic.
Trust in government was severely tested under the Biden administration, which also lied about the open border and ginned up two absurd impeachments. Nobody ever paid a price for any of this.
Former COVID czar Anthony Fauci, who authorized taxpayer funding to the communist Chinese virology lab in Wuhan and pushed the wet market bat theory of COVID’s origin, lied to Congress under oath.
He still faces no accountability.
Someday, I’d like to see Dr. Fauci emerge from his bat cave and drive off in his Batmobile, waving his autopen pardon before being pulled over and arrested.
A new Gallup institutional confidence poll found that 89 percent of U.S. adults say government corruption is widespread, part of a downward trend in trust since 1979.
Minnesota is awash in billions of dollars of fraud through its welfare programs, mostly in the Somali community.
Congress is engaged in non-stop insider trading. Half of the members are millionaires, and some have eight-figure fortunes. Most came in already well off, but many got very rich while in office.
The Trump family is making billions in cryptocurrency. It’s legal, but it may give off bad vibes to the working stiffs who pay taxes and whom the Republicans need to turn out to vote in November.
Unlike his predecessors, however, Mr. Trump does not accept a public salary, and the much-needed White House ballroom is reportedly financed without taxpayer money.
Americans have less trust than ever in our government. This is actually good, to a point. A free people should never conflate government with God.
But nonstop cynicism is corrosive.
It might be worse in Canada, where the government-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation told affiliates not to use the word “terrorist” when recounting the 911 attacks. That was reversed after an outcry.
But the suggested wording spoke volumes about 1984-style revisionism:
“The hijackings led to passenger jet crashes.”
Led to? The planes just happened to go down after being hijacked?
We need to restore trust in governments by shining a light in the darkness and keeping public officials accountable.
The first order of business is to shore up election integrity with the SAVE America Act and keep the socialist/Islamist Democrats, who excel in gaslighting, from taking Congress.
Robert Knight is a columnist for The Washington Times. Please copy and click on the link below, and if you feel like it, leave a comment.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/sep/6/americans-trust-government-collapses-weight-lies/
Illustration by Linas Garsys / The Washington Times.
Beware of the Wolves in Sheep's Clothing
By Robert Knight
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear appears to be readying for a presidential run in 2028.
The telegenic Democrat was on a speaking tour last year in early primary state South Carolina. In September, he has a book coming out entitled, “Go and Do Likewise: How We Heal a Broken Country,” a reference to Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan.
His publisher summarizes it this way: “By regrounding faith in compassion and kindness, he believes we can start to heal as a country.”
Compassion and kindness are God-given, but I thought we were in the midst of healing from the nightmare of the Biden years, with its promotion of atheism, illegal immigration, sexual anarchy, and attacks on Catholics and pro-lifers.
Mr. Beshear, like Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, identifies as a Christian and a moderate and gets priceless media cover while supporting the Democratic Party’s radical social and economic agenda.
In 2023, for instance, he tried to block a state bill protecting minors from “gender affirming care.”
The law prohibits doctors from subjecting gender-confused teens to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and irreversible, disfiguring surgeries.
The law also bans males from competing on girls’ sports teams. Most people think this makes sense.
Beshear insisted that such a law “would hurt kids and their families” and violate “parental rights.”
He claimed there was no evidence of widespread harm. To which I would say one butchered child is too many and that evidence of harm is voluminous, including the growing number of suicides and trans-related violence.
On the same day of Mr. Beshear’s veto, both houses of Kentucky’s Republican-controlled legislature overrode it. Naturally, a federal judge, Rebecca Grady Jennings, issued an immediate injunction halting enforcement. The case is still in litigation.
A year earlier, Ms. Jennings, one of President Donald Trump’s few clunker appointees, struck down a Kentucky law prohibiting abortions after 15 weeks and requiring medical oversight for abortion pills.
Gov. Beshear also vetoed that bill, and the legislature overrode him.
In South Carolina, which went for Mr. Trump by 30 points, Mr. Beshear emphasized his Christian faith while boasting that he was “a proud, pro-LGBTQ+ governor.”
This is a stance that ignores Jesus Christ’s clear restating of God’s creation of male and female and God’s marriage-based sexual morality from Genesis.
According to the Washington Post, Mr. Beshear said, “My faith teaches me that all children are children of God, and I didn’t want people picking on those kids.” How about protecting them from quacks who sterilize them and turn them into lifetime medical cases?
By the way, politicians love to haul out the term “children of God” like a magic amulet. The Bible says we’re all created in the image of God, but that we’re not children of God unless we believe in Him and submit to God’s authority. Until then, we’re on the other team, and I don’t mean the New Jersey Devils.
“But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name,” John 1:12 says. If we’re automatically children of God, we wouldn’t need to be, as Jesus said, born again.
Anyway, Mr. Beshear is not the only wolf in sheep’s clothing. Democrats have become quite adept at using Christianese and buzzwords to fool people. President Barack Obama often gave biblical scholars heartburn over his misappropriating Jesus’s words to justify sexual sin and confiscatory redistribution of wealth.
In Texas, state Rep. James Talarico is battling hard-left U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett for the Democratic nomination for U.S. senator. Like Mr. Beshear, Mr. Talarico touts his Christian faith while cleaving to a radical agenda.
“He delivers left-wing orthodoxy in centrist packaging and fights Christian nationalism with Scripture,” the Wall Street Journal explains.
If you’re a patriotic Christian, he’s talking about you and your family as a threat to America.
Much of his rhetoric revolves around Marxist class envy, such as, “Make billionaires pay their fair share in taxes.”
During remarks opposing a bill protecting kids from transgender treatments, he said, “Jesus never once condemned transgender people.”
Well, Jesus didn’t need to, and He welcomed all repentant sinners. The Hebrew Scriptures are crystal clear on sexual morality. Sexual confusion is the province of paganism, which historically often involved child sacrifice as well.
Any comparison to the pro-abortion, pro-LGBTQ Democratic Party inferred by readers at this juncture may not be coincidental.
In a 2024 interview with MSNBC, Mr. Talarico said, “Christian nationalism is dangerous. … When politicians use the Bible to push division and hate, they’re not following Jesus; they’re using His name for their own agenda.”
This is classic projection, accusing your opponents of exactly what you’re doing.
Illustration by Alexander Hunter / The Washington Times.