You know that saying "cheaters never win"?

It's just that — it's just a saying.

Cheaters win all the time.

Cheaters sit out part of their NFL season for PEDs and then win our Super Bowl MVP trophies. Cheaters bash record-setting home run numbers.  Cheaters make backroom deals and insider trade in business.  And cheaters win elections.

Cheaters never win — it's one of those truths you hold dear and slowly discover to be patently and utterly false, like "life is fair."

Last week, a college classmate of mine died after a 15-year battle with melanoma.  I watched her funeral on a video live stream in the era of COVID.  She was 37.

Life is most certainly anything but fair.  Indeed, I have heard it said that "fair is where you go for French fries and cotton candy."  And at the risk of being labeled a conspiracy theorist — or worse — by people who banged on and on about Russian bogeymen and nonexistent collusion for four years — what is this?

What did we just witness?

They censored — strike that — right now they are actively censoring one side.

They controlled the media messaging, the stories, and the polls for one side.  Our media, because somehow that's their job now in this Orwellian, kangaroo-court, dystopian era we find ourselves in, called certain states for one side early — and not others.  Then five battleground states and the city of Philadelphia, with Trump leading, called a weird "time out" in the middle of election night — for one side.  Sent people home.

Yet, somehow, they tallied or found votes in the dead of night, as if the "ballot fairy" had visited them with batches of seemingly statistically impossible Biden-only votes.

Big Tech, corporate media, pollsters manipulated the vote for one side.  This is factual.

Twitter and Facebook picked the winners ahead of time — as if they knew better than all of us and as if it were for our own good.  They plainly and repeatedly interfered with the election.

All of this is just in the last 30 days.

I watched a video from one of the Navy SEALs who allegedly killed Osama bin Laden, Robert O'Neil, where he said, "It baffles me that half the country won't admit they're cheating.  Just say it, man."

Most discouraging of all — half the country do not care because it helps "their" team.  Just say it.

Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid, and others told you every night for four years, "Orange man bad" —regardless of what you saw him doing with your own eyes.

Right now, straight partisans, members of the media, and a large swath of Americans do not care that predominantly conservative voices are being stifled and having their free speech rights totally trampled.

At a Senate hearing with tech CEOs a week before the election — Democratic senators advocated that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook head honcho Mark Zuckerberg censor more.  Twitter and Facebook, which held so much promise and potential for good, have been politically weaponized.  Indeed, we may begin to see the most censorship efforts now — after the election, as things apparently enter a long legal fight.

People who complained of a fascist in the Oval Office are currently policing thought and censoring words or ideas as a political strategy.

In the end, if this is how it all goes down, I am just grateful someone didn't kill him.  Honestly.  I literally said that out loud to a neighbor.

The "silent majority" is a failed strategy — this idea that the wild fringes can pontificate or push policy, and then a huge chunk of the country comes out and votes, or "speaks," so to say.  Respectfully, it is time to speak up — regardless of whatever absurd or patently false label people want to heap on you.

Under the threat of name calling-or worse, people shut up and listen.  So the conversation that takes place is anything but honest or open — out of fear.

It's time to speak up — because they are training people not to, by practice, through shaming and shouting down a viewpoint that isn't their own and heaping on grotesque labels.  Or by law with authoritarian censorship.

We can never have an election like this, ever again.

Voter ID, advocating in-person voting, substantially more checks and balances on mail-in voting — perhaps uniformity across states for a federal election — that is not voter suppression.  It's voting integrity.

This is shrouded in anything but that.

It's not racist, or whatever label you want to throw around as a political strategy or silencing tool, to strive for those things in an election for the most important office.   A fair, transparent, and legal election seems like a unifying or common goal for every American.

This whole thing wreaks of impropriety.  This is precisely the opposite of what our country needed, and it's going to be a long drawn out process.

Buckle up.  The lawyers are about to handle it — which, in a weird way, is one sad shred of Americana we're maintaining in this whole thing — this charade.  This farce.

Count every legal vote.  Uncover, expose, and discuss all of it.  And maybe these are discussions we've been needing to have.  Honest conversations.  Open ones.  Conversations where we do not tiptoe around issues out of fear of censorship, labels, or being "canceled" — where we acknowledge the gray areas that nearly all issues have and refuse the temptation to see things always in absolutes and the media's tendency to paint every issue as "either-or."

For right now — just don't tell me cheaters never win.