We know what Donald Trump’s game plan is — continually play the victim, race bait, and create one crisis after another. It’s all he knows how to do. And if he loses, count on him to claim again that the election was rigged against him. This suggests the best way to beat Donald Trump is to run up the score on him so much that he cannot reasonably claim that the election was rigged. Sure, Joe Biden won handily in 2020 with the most votes of any candidate. But the outcome was not certain (at least not for me) until the next day, when the votes by mail for Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin started coming in.
Back in 2004, when Howard Dean was running, one of the things he talked about was why the Democratic Party was not competing in all 50 states. Ever since then, there has been a lot of talk about the 50 State Strategy. However, it has been all lip service, with the party putting plenty of resources into battleground states, but neglecting the states that are noncompetitive.
We have to do it ourselves. We need to be like the old Pepsi commercial in which they were putting Pepsi machines wherever people went.
Sure, we probably won’t take places like Alabama, Alaska, or Wyoming, for instance. But if we can get 1 in 20 people to change their minds, vote for Joe Biden instead of staying home, or even to stay home instead of voting for Trump, then we can run up our totals to the point where Donald Trump cannot claim with a straight face that the election was rigged. The Democratic Party isn’t going to do it for us. The mainstream media isn’t going to do it for us; their purpose is access journalism. Places like the New York Times and the Washington Post sell papers because of their access to policymakers; there are some things they can print, but if they print certain things, they will lose their access. I hear people gripe about it all the time, but it’s a fact of life.
It all starts with local elections. Sure, a charismatic figure like Barack Obama or John Kennedy can galvanize the vote and turn people out, and we’ll take it. But when someone that is not as charismatic, like Joe Biden, then it has to be the other way around. Local elections are just as important as state and national elections. Someone might think that Joe Biden and Donald Trump are the two most juvenile actors on the debate stage and might otherwise not turn out, but if there is a local issue, like a race between someone who wants to ban books and spread chaos in the schools versus someone who is there for the common good, they might turn out. Or a race between some judge who wants to run things versus someone who just wants to uphold the law. Or someone who listens to the people versus someone who thinks they know better.
So what can you do? Go to your favorite state’s NPR page, like Alabama Public Radio, and platform their stories here and/or on your favorite social media sites, blogs, and other platforms. You can view a whole directory of US and worldwide public radio stations here. Also, the States Newsroom does strong journalism, with a presence in most states. The Missouri Independent is one such publication in my state. They are Creative Commons, which means there are a lot fewer restrictions on sharing than mainstream publications. Support your local alternative paper. I wrote about one, the Eugene Weekly, which is trying to come back after an employee embezzled tens of thousands of dollars from them. The Association of Alternative News Media has a whole directory of these papers. The National Newspaper Publishers Association has a directory of Black alternative papers. The advantage of these papers and sources is that they don’t care about access — they care about getting to the truth. There is a big difference.
The Institute for Nonprofit News Directory — a directory of over 425 independent websites.
Not all conventional sources are bad. Media Bias Fact Check seeks to review every single online news source out there. New sites are added every day. Their least biased sites are usually your local newspaper and your local TV station.
And we can be our own reporters. GovTrack helps you track bills that Congress is considering. The site grants.gov has a list of all the grant programs that the government is offering people. The Federal Register publishes everything different government agencies are doing in one place. Regulations.gov tracks the different regulations that are being proposed; you can leave comments and participate. The Congressional Record allows you to see what the House and Senate are debating and how your elected officials voted. Most statehouses have their own sites where bills are posted for people to read.
When I’m not plugging the Eugene Weekly, I’ll be doing a virtual journey across America and trying to push stories into the mainstream, with your help. Anybody can do this. Drudge was successful (unfortunately) because they were good at pushing local stories into the mainstream consciousness. I live in a rural community which has been neglected for over 100 years by politicians of both parties. Our population is declining, our buildings are crumbling into decay, rich people are hoarding buildings and letting them rot instead of fixing them up and putting a business in, banks are foreclosing instead of working with people, and bill collectors, including area “nonprofit” hospitals, are suing right and left if God (or Flying Spaghetti Monster) forbid you get sick and can’t pay your medical bills.
Donald Trump is constantly whining about how the media is the enemy of the people. So the following things can be considered acts of resistance if you have the money to do so:
1. Subscribe to your local newspaper;
2. Support your local public radio & TV station;
3. Support your local alternative papers that are not owned by corporations;
4. Donate to any outfits that are in trouble. Axios just did a disturbing piece about a study which found that by the end of 2024, one third of the newspapers that existed in 2005 will go under. The closure of local news sources has helped fuel the rise of Donald Trump. If we are to eradicate Trumpism once and for all, we have to reverse that trend.
