Josh First's Blog

Take-aways from Trump’s historic WIN

Some take-aways from President Donald Trump’s historic win last night:

ONE: “Too Big to Rig” turned out not to be only a campaign slogan, but a very real and measurable goal. In swing states, including my own Pennsylvania, registering new Republican voters (hero Scott Presler registered something like 110,000 Amish) and getting them to vote made the difference between winning and losing. Getting regular “super voters” and new voters alike to bank their votes before Election Day via absentee and mail-in ballots also helped hugely. That way, when the Democrat Party tried to cheat, as they did last night with secret ballot dumps in Philly and Detroit, the votes were already in and counted, and …

TWO: Staying on top of the battlefield, so to speak, with hundreds of lawyers and poll watchers everywhere documenting everything across Pennsylvania (and other swing states) prevented the “enemy” from doing sneak attacks. Too many eyes and cameras watching in 2024, something we lacked in 2020.

When Centre County tried to stop vote counting last night, with promises to come back in the morning and pick up again, Republican National Committee lawyers were present and threatened to sue if Centre County violated state law. And so Centre County staffers put on their big boy pants and continued counting votes like every other professional polling place is supposed to do. This prevented Centre County (where I grew up, and which is home to Penn State University’s bazillion communist faculty and spoiled brat students) from sneaking in a bunch more secret ballots hidden somewhere and padding the vote results in favor of their preferred candidates, which happened a lot with the stolen 2020 election.

THREE: Mainstream legacy corporate media e.g. Reuters, ABC CBS NBC NPR PBS NYT CNNLOL WaPo MSNBC etc are now on the losing side of the info wars. No matter what these outlets say now, a majority of Americans do not trust them. Rather, a majority of Americans openly mock them because of their patently false and easily disprovable assertions and narratives. A big indication of how weak MSM sources have become is that they ALL have deleted their comment sections. No way for their readership or viewership to fact-check them!

For decades these establishment fake news disseminators of malinformation, disinformation, and misinfornation have been the supposed “go-to” sources for accurate information. But as everyone now sees so clearly, these are not fair-minded arbiters of accuracy and truth. Rather, all of these outlets are plugged into one particular and very politically partisan source, probably Media Matters, from which these giant networks take their daily talking points and narratives. Watch one compilation of all the MSM personalities saying the exact same things on the same day, and you have seen all of the compilations done for decades now.

FOUR: As a result of the MSM’s willful if suicidal media malpractice serving as the open propaganda arm for the Democrat Party (and serving as the Kamala Harris campaign), the rise of the citizen journalist and alternative media is really just beginning. New they may be, these people are really effective, and they gave Trump a pathway to get around the MSM blocks and attacks on him.

Go to Rumble and meet some of the many political refugees kicked out of YouTube or FaceBook for the simple acts of violating leftwing political orthodoxy. Rumble’s political ecosystem is super rich and diverse, and you will hear a hundred or a thousand different opinions about the day’s events from funny people, smart people, scary people, people in their underpants, people wearing their underpants on their head, but frankly, any and all of them far better and much more honest and interesting and accurate than anything you will hear on CNN or ABC or NPR.

And don’t forget all of the bazillion podcasts on Apple, Spotify, etc., and all the talk radio shows, and the new newspapers like Epoch Times. Or Breitbart or Gateway Pundit.

In sum, the rise of the citizen journalist directly correlates with the fall of corporate media. I will bet the R2 of these two axis are probably 99% correlated. By consumig alternative sources of information in a free market place, Americans are showing their belief in the old Thomas Paine adage about the best antidote to bad information is not to shut it down, but to get more information, so that a person can make up their own mind about what is true, and what is false.

And for all the MSM lovers out there, if the MSM had simply done their job of reporting just the facts and all the facts, regardless of where they fell, then there would have been no need or demand for talk radio, or citizen journalism, or podcasts. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the New York Times is one gigantic, ridiculous, embarrassingly buck naked vacuum.

Truth is like water, it will keep moving around to find the lowest place, no matter how much you try to dam it up.

FIVE: Working polling places is effective. For many years I have compared the polls that I worked at on Election Day to other polling places, especially those with no one working, to see if my friendly outreach to voters coming in to vote has any real effect. It does, and I encourage everyone of any political party or interest group to participate in Election Day as a poll watcher. Not only does it give more information to prospective voters, it also brings more eyes to the polling place, which is the number one way to prevent vote fraud on Election Day.

SIX: Kamala Harris was not a compelling candidate when she ran in the primary last time, and she was not a compelling candidate yesterday, either. That she was hand-picked by party elites without one vote being cast for her by one citizen indicates a huge problem with American party politics. Do not kid yourself this is only the Democrat Party’s problem, this need for elites’ control is also big among the GOP. I.e. note how Trump was treated by the GOPe right up until a couple days ago, when it became clear he was going to win. They STILL hated him, for being his independent self.

SEVEN: Americans do not trust their government. For good reason. When your own government has abandoned you the lifelong taxpayer, in favor of flying in and letting in tens of millions of unvetted illegal aliens, and telling the truth about this invasion is treated harshly by the government created to protect you, the citizen, your government has become your enemy. Everyone sees it now.

And so, my own decision to abandon the US EPA in 1998, after seven years in Federal service there, becomes even more understandable to me now. Back then, I did not like what I was seeing, hearing, writing, saying, but I could not really put my finger wholly on the problem. Now, we all see the problems in both federal and state governments, and buddy, the meat cleaver must fall hard on the gangrenous parts. This was a big part of yesterday’s vote results.

EIGHT: Never underestimate the strength of well intentioned people determined to correct wrongdoing. When Elon Musk turned Twitter/X into a pretty free market of ideas and information, a huge pathway around the MSM and Silicon Valley tech media chokehold on information flow was disrupted. The rest of that is beautiful Robin Hood history. And when Scott Presler decided that he could not allow the stolen 2020 election to go unanswered, he devoted himself to tirelessly registering Republican voters in Pennsylvania and other swing states. The outcome of his incredible work bore obvious fruit last night.

Moral of this story: Fight, Fight, Fight for what you believe in. Never relent, never stop, never give up, no matter how sad or demoralized you might feel at any point.

America is worth building, and it was worth saving yesterday, whatever the cost.