Did Donald Trump get cheated out of the election? I don’t know. I really don’t. And you don’t either.
My friends, we live in a world where fiction festers into fact quicker than you can add a hashtag and re-tweet it.
The media, of which I am one, is a big part of the problem. Ever since President-Elect Biden was declared the winner my brethren in the TV world commonly say things like, “President Trump falsely claimed that . . . ”
What’s the problem with that? The problem is they are not reporting facts, they are reporting opinion. Did Trump get cheated? I don’t think so . . . but I don’t know. All I know is that the standard for “knowing” has changed quite a bit.
That’s not the journalism I grew up with.
We used to have a poster in newsrooms. If your mamma tells you she loves you . . . get a second source.
Back then, journalists weren’t in the business of facts. Sound odd? Not really. It was our job (I’d contend it still is) to give both sides an opportunity to answer questions, make their statements and put it into a balanced and orderly news story that gave readers a complete picture. It wasn’t our job to draw conclusions.
We used to have a highlighter test. We would grab two different colored highlighters. We would color every paragraph that had info from one side with one color, and use the other color on every graph that had info from the other. When it was done the colors should be about even.
When did that change?
Back to today’s mixed up world. To be fair, a lot of courts have listened to Trump’s legal team. A lot of those chose to not listen very long. What does that mean? Well, it means a lot of things in legalese that us non-lawyer types wouldn’t understand . . . even if an awful lot of folks who never took a bar exam – no, not THAT kind of bar – are now self-appointed experts. But in short, you and I know that the claims made by Donald J. weren’t sufficient enough to convince the folks wearing robes.
That means something to me.
And I hope it does to you as well.
Because when we decide that it doesn’t, we’re lost.
I’m reading and hearing that today there will be this plot or that plot. It seems there’s a lot of talk about taking up arms and all sorts of nonsense – some of which even comes from folks like County Councilman Mark Davidson.
Let’s reason this out. Some are going so far as to say we’re heading for another civil war. What’s that look like? It’s conservatives vs. socialists, right? Hmmm. Is there a Mason-Dixon line somewhere that divides them? No? I Could it be that in a housing addition with 30 houses, 12 might be on one side with 18 on another? All mixed up together? You bet.
That’ll be messy, huh?
So maybe it won’t be neighbor against neighbor. Maybe the folks up in arms will strike out against the federal government. After all, these folks have been stockpiling their weapons and ammunition.
Yeah, OK. Good luck with that AR-15 against an F-22.
Seriously, it’s time to dial down the rhetoric. If the election really was rigged, then stay after your elected representatives until they do something about it. If you don’t like the Biden-Harris team, work like hell to find someone better for 2024. If you think we’re losing personal freedoms, hold your local, state and national representation accountable.
The alternative isn’t just unacceptable. It’s stupid. We have an awful lot of citizens who claim they are patriots – well fellow patriot, remember this. The U.S. has always been a multi-party system. And when the other side wins, we don’t take our ball and go home. And we sure as hell don’t start threatening war.
The system ain’t perfect – but it beats everything else.
But hey, what do I know? I’m just a child of the ‘60s who turned into a newspaper vagabond that got lucky enough to work from one coast to the other. And along the way I remember a line from a Buffalo Springfield song – there’s battle lines being drawn. Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.

Two cents, which is about how much Timmons said his columns are worth, appears periodically in The Paper. Timmons is the publisher of The Paper and can be contacted at ttimmons@thepaper24-7.com.