Davis - Upside down: how the left turned right into wrong, truth into lies, and good into bad

Table of Contents

I n any book I am honored to write, my first gratitude goes to God, who truly makes all things possible. He made it possible for my parents to meet, marry, and raise me. He gave me the path to my incomparable wife and two wonderful children. Lisa makes every day a joy, Regina makes me so proud as she works her way through her twenties, and Ethan now leads us with his bright spirit on the adventure into teenagerhood. I love you guys so much, and everything I do is for you.

Professionally, my home is the Salem Media Group, which gives me stability and satisfaction in a radio industry often known for neither. Four years in with the Salem family, and I have come to appreciate even more deeply the vision of its co-founder and CEO, Ed Atsinger, and the California-based team that guides our individual stations, the Salem Radio Network, and the various print and online platforms the company has acquired.

Ive worked for a lot of radio companies, usually enjoying complete creative freedom. Salem offers me that in addition to the fulfillment of being on a team with a mission. We have a lot of talk stations, Christian music stations, and faith-based talk stations. I have come to know many of my corporate colleagues at every level, and I am proud to be striving alongside them in pursuit of various earthly and spiritual goals.

One of Salems acquisitions has been Regnery Publishing, a company kind enough to have worked with me on 2014s Lone Star America: How Texas Can Save Our Country. We struck up a relationship before their company joined with mine, and now that were all kin, its an even greater pleasure. From the management of Marji Ross and Harry Crocker to the editing friendship I have been fortunate to forge with Tom Spence, I hope to enjoy their companionship for a long time.

I enjoy the constant company of my daily radio family led by the always encouraging General Manager John Peroyea. Producer Ronda Moreland, Technical Director Shane Bell, and News Director Gordon Griffin not only make the show what it is, they make my working world what it is: a delightful and engaging place where I get to sling hot topics not just with listeners but with my friends. I could not be more grateful to share my mornings with them.

In honing a list of things to address in these pages, Ive been enlightened and inspired by the hosts of the shows that appear alongside mine on 660 AM The Answer in DallasFort Worth. They include the familiar Salem Radio Network programs hosted by Bill Bennett, Hugh Hewitt, Michael Medved, and Dennis Prager, whom I am now proud to call friends as well as colleagues.

Also in that lineup is Mike Gallagher, whom I have known far longer. We speak often, on and off the air, and I tell him what a gift our relationship is every day. Weve been through a lot together, in radio and the real world, and it is a blessing to be his friend.

It is still a delight after twelve years to share my thoughts in the Dallas Morning News, as well as at Townhall.com, another outpost in the growing Salem empire. I thank them for letting me rant in column form. Thanks also to the two DallasFort Worth TV stations that allow me to share thoughts on a weekly basis: Fox affiliate KDFW and ABCs WFAA.

On the rotation through a daily radio show and its various offshoots, beginning and ending each day in the happy home I get to share with my family, I cant possibly count all of the friends and co-workers I get the pleasure to share lifes path with. We cherish a worship home at Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Texas, under the joyous guidance of Ed and Lisa Young, who provide the constant message that no matter how off-track the nation and the world may get, we are all under Gods care and called to be obedient to his plan. It is that clarity that completes the happiness I can bring to every task, large and small.

Writing this book has been a busy road trip through just about everything I talk about on the radio for a living. Distilling it into book form was alternately invigorating and daunting. Man, do we have a lot of work to do!

Thanks for consuming my work. Maybe it will inspire you to devote part of your life to the repairs suggested here. Maybe it just helps kill time on a flight. Either way, I deeply appreciate your time.

The Founding Fathers are overrated.

These are tough times for the reputations of our nations architects. Cynical journalists and academics treat the Founding Fathers like relics of the dark ages, even villains, rather than visionaries who laid the foundations of our freedom.

When did the flavor of American history change in our public schools? My parents, teenagers in the 1940s, were taught about the courage of the settlers, the sacrifices of the colonists, and the genius of the very concept of America, a beacon for liberty around the world. By the time I was swimming through adolescence, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we still caught glimpses of that America, but slavery was becoming a consuming theme of U.S. history classes, and Vietnam dominated the headlines.

Any rendition of U.S. history must address slavery, obviously, but I recall hearing more about the horrors of slave auctions than about the courage of the millions of Americans who fought for emancipation. It did not occur to me when I was twelve, but our schools were being infected with the historical fallacy of viewing the past solely through the lens of our own sensibilities.

Seen through that lens, Columbus is not a courageous trailblazer who made the miracle of our nation possible. He is a European devil who victimized the indigenous peoples he found upon his arrival. For their execrable slaveholding and failure to extend voting rights to all, the Founding Fathers are the targets of similar derision from the ungrateful inheritors of the greatest nation in history.

No one suggests American history is free of blemishes. But our children and, far more oppressively, our college students are taught that our nation deserves some long overdue comeuppance. Our universities host departments whose purpose is to define America as racist and misogynist, placing the blame on the attitudes of the heroes who launched us on our journey.

Todays political battles are often between those who interpret the Constitution as originally written and those who wish to reshape it according to their preferences. If the Constitution is the product of exceptional genius, then the case for disregarding the intent of its designers is more difficult to make. But if it is nothing more than the handiwork of long-dead oppressorsthe One Percent of the eighteenth centurythen the Framers opinions are more dismissible.

True, the Founders did not unite around an agenda of equality for all races or for women. This makes them seem fatally unenlightened against the backdrop of our century, where criticizing a black president draws catcalls of racism and opposing abortion is a war on women. But if the passage of time is supposed to bring wisdom, it is worth noting that we have tossed aside some of the prudent judgments of 240 years ago in favor of the twaddle of current political correctness and faddism.

The minds beneath those powdered wigs devised a federal system that maximized freedom by keeping government authority as close to the people as possible while guaranteeing the rights of free expression, worship, and self-defense. Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and their peers had no concept of a government so overweening that it would lure citizens into a lifetime of dependency on it. They knew immigrants would strengthen the new nation, but they would never have imagined a debate over whether the new arrivals should obey American law. They could not have foreseen the federal governments attempt to vitiate the right of the people to keep and bear arms that they enshrined in the Bill of Rights.