Mike Royko in his Daily News corner office when old school ethics ruled journalism. (Tribune file photo.)

My initial post defending John Kass against the Chicago Tribune Guild’s bush league attack on him is here.

After being attacked by the left-wing, cancel cops on the staff of the Chicago Tribune, columnist John Kass didn’t fold. He didn’t go along–like so many Republican politicians–and suck it up, afraid to hand out a well-deserved whomping on those who attacked him.

He wrote a beautiful column that appeared in today’s Tribune, “What happened to an America where you could freely speak your mind?” He correctly called what the executive board of the Chicago Tribune Guild wrote in an open letter about a previous column “defamation” in that they falsely accused him “of religious bigotry and fomenting conspiracy theories.” He then proceeded to do what real journalists do, dissecting the criticism with careful research, destroying the accusers’ bolloxed case that Kass had engaged in a wild conspiracy. In other words, pointing out that billionaire George Soros was funding left-wing causes and politicians was a matter of fact.

The profession once called journalism needs more John Kasses. More reporters, copy editors, assistant city editors, photographers, graphic designers, editorial writers, fact checkers, librarians and others to stand up to this assault on journalistic integrity.

Where, I wonder, are the derisively called “old school” professionals that I admired and who were

John Kass

my colleagues and friends to stand up to fight this scourge? Are there none left? I know that some of them don’t particularly care for Kass, not only because they don’t like his conservative politics, but also because they thought he tried to be another Mike Royko, the legendary Daily News/Sun-Times/Tribune Page 2 columnist.

I don’t know what style and tone Kass was trying to achieve, but he wrote in a genuine voice, reflecting his own background and experience in an immigrant, two-flat Chicago family. If he sounded like Royko, more power to him.

I’d remind Royko’s many fans that he did not bend to the wind of popular opinion. When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. marched into segregated neighborhoods on the Southwest Side, Royko went after the “punk” stone-throwers with a furry. When a renegade crowd of self-appointed progressives, including a young Jesse Jackson, successfully displaced the duly elected Illinois delegation at a Democratic convention, he spared no words about the anti-democratic coup. When the head of the abortion industry’s association finally admitted that partial birth abortion was practiced, and widely so, despite denials by the pro-choice crowd, he spared no words of condemnation for the crowd’s lies and hypocrisy, in consecutive columns, as I recall. That was later in his career, when the emergent progressive cabal said that because Royko was taking a stance like that he was “losing it.”

John, don’t give up. Your many readers* are behind you. We admire your courage and your insight. I dare say that you are one of the few, if not the only one, who has the balls to call your own shots, free of the peer and lunatic pressure that seeks to cancel voices they despise.

You are the only one deserving to fill Royko’s shoes.

*Check out John’s Facebook page for plentiful statements of support.

Related: “When ‘j’accuse’ is just a smear.”