We are the people, too.

In the dangerous, mythical and deliberate alternate reality that former President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Fox-ousted Tucker Carlson are trying to impose on America, the nation really has only one hope: the press.

Trump, suffering from grave legal jeopardy on multiple fronts as a result of his corrupt and criminal past, has turned to his familiar strategy of “fake news.”

It’s a meme that has been tried and true by despots in the United States and all over the world for generations: Attack and undermine the messenger.

Using Twitter and media outlets like Fox News, congresspersons Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert wield an army of social media trolls and right-wing propaganda websites in trying to groom Americans for their own nefarious purposes. These people have provenly and repeatedly outright lied regularly about critical and even trivial matters.

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It is a treacherous and vile scheme that presents nothing but danger to Aurora, to the state, to the nation, and to the world.

It’s a scheme so fraught with peril that the framers of the Constitution and the nation installed free press rights unlike any in history, and any elsewhere, to combat it.

The nation’s creators had seen despotism. They knew then, just as enlightened Americans know now, only the press can keep America free from corruption and autocracy by being allowed to keep citizens informed about what their government really does and what leaders really say.

Because the provable truth of what the mainstream American press reveals about Trump, he and his supporters, his collaborators in Congress and his regime label us “enemies of the people.”

Despite Trump’s marginal mastery of English and his tentative, corrupted grasp on reality, his message speaks loudly to a small but vocal group of Americans sympathetic to his message of selfishness, fascism, greed, intolerance and despair.

We’re speaking back here – not from the news pages of Sentinel Colorado, which every single day accurately, fairly and honestly gives a clear picture of what leaders in the world say and do – we’re beseeching you from the part of our publication devoted to our editorial opinions and yours.

The opinions of this newspaper and every American are protected by one of the most powerful parts of the Constitution, because savvy founding fathers knew there would be people like Richard Nixon, Sen. Joe McCarthy, and President Donald Trump who would rise to power and attempt to use it against America and its citizens for their own specious purposes.

Reporters are not the enemies of the people. We are the people. We are Americans who willingly take stressful, low-paying jobs and face grueling hours. We make endless personal sacrifices for one purpose: to accurately, fairly and unabashedly tell you about your government, your community and your world.

Reporters, editors and photographers hold personal beliefs about politics, government, religion, culture and science as varied and disparate as everywhere else in the nation, because we are the nation.

If there is one underlying motivation among every journalist that’s ever worked here, or at newspapers like ours across the country, it’s the demand for truth and justice. Journalists are bound to ensure that our work promotes justice for the poor, the rich, Jews and Catholics, atheists and zealots, victims and criminals, the right and the left.

We strive to allow justice to flourish by telling America what we see, what we hear and what we reveal. Only truth can ensure justice in a society, and only a free and unfettered press can offer a society truth.

That’s what we do. Not as enemies of the people, but as the people.

Sentinel Colorado Editorial Board

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