A compendium of the best reporting and commentary surrounding the pivotal 2024 elections in the United States. You won't find horse race coverage here, or the standard "both sides" BS that passes so often for political journalism. What you will find are links, with brief commentary, to work that I believe advances the conversation we should be having about America's – and the world's – future. Remember: Everything is at stake this year. (Unfortunately, some of the work I point to is behind paywalls.)
Trump’s detailed plot to overturn the results of the election was brazen and a major threat to American democracy. Because of it, even today, millions of Trump supporters believe the last election was stolen, and that primes the public for new attempts at subversion. Trump’s new running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, had to go along with the lie at Tuesday’s vice presidential debate, refusing to admit the incontrovertible truth that Trump lost the 2020 election. And now perhaps the most important case in American history may never get to a jury and the American public will never get a chance to learn about this evidence and a jury’s judgment of this evidence before they consider returning Donald Trump to office.
Jack Smith, the federal special counsel in the Trump Jan. 6 case (and Florida stolen classified documents case), has done his best to explain to the American people what kind of criminal occupied the White House from 2017 until early 2021. As Rick Hasen explains in this scathing piece (if you hit a paywall, try this), there is another culprit in what's shaping up to be a miscarriage of justice, which in this case means not a wrongful conviction but the prevention of reaching a rightful one. Actually, many culprits: the ever-venal Mitch McConnell; a tortoise-like Biden attorney general, Merrick Garland; but most of all the Supreme Court, which twisted history and the Constitution to invent king-like immunity for presidents and ex-presidents who led crime waves from the White House, at least ones named Trump. The only possible way to get the full details will be via a Harris win and continued prosecution, but don't discount this court majority finding a way to thwart justice anyway. Note: The Smith filing (pdf) is, as usual, well written and understandable even if you don't know anything about the law.
The most dangerous myth is that Trump’s bizarre rants are nothing to worry about because they won’t lead to actual policies. Nothing could be more wrong. A potential Trump 47 might never impose a National Day of Violence, but he has pledged to expand legal protections for cops accused of brutality on the job, and threatened other Orwellian actions such as sending troops into Democrat-run cities to fight crime. On immigration, Trump’s Hitlerian language is the precursor to his stated policy of mass deportation, which would turn America upside down with military call-ups, dead-of-night raids in immigrant communities, and mass detention camps.
It doesn't seem to matter what Trump says or does at this point, because Big Journalism has made it completely clear that it will not stop normalizing extremism. Our top media organizations, through their actions, believe the public is entitled only to occasional news-coverage attention to Trump's escalating rhetoric, which exudes fear, loathing, and direct promises – we passed threats a long time ago – of violence. Sure, Bunch and a few other commentators are on the case, as in this piece. But they don't have a prayer of moving the people who matter in our most important media companies – the bosses who are giving the orders – to insist on journalistic integrity. The bosses like the clicks and ratings they get from the horse race stories, the endless polls, and the rest of the ethically bankrupt political "coverage" their shareholders pay for. It's a better business model, apparently vastly better, than doing honest journalism. A few outliers like Bunch and his organization, the Philadelphia Inquirer, just can't compete. It's bad, bad news.
Dunn and Wilks want to slash regulations and taxes. Their endgame, however, is more radical: not just to limit the government but also to steer it toward Christian rule. “It’s hard to think of other megafunders in the country as big on the theocratic end of the spectrum,” says Peter Montgomery, who oversees the Right Wing Watch project at People for the American Way, a progressive advocacy group.
This superbly reported article shines a light on one of the most dismal trends in our politics: the growing ability of extremist right-wing billionaires to decide who will be in government and how they will rule. Texas is one of their laboratories of choice, partly because some of the most dangerous oligarchs live there. It's a state where the top politicians flaunt their cruelty and corruption, where social policies have reverted decades, where the oligarchs' legislative and executive pawns have done their best to rig elections, and countless other abuses have become the norm – all with the endgame of creating a Christian nationalist regime. The oligarchs and their allies around the nation are moving to make this the American way. Not my America, and probably not yours, but they plan to rule all of us their way – and they may get away with it.
With crypto pointing a $200 million gun at their heads, it makes sense that Democrats would seek détente. Yet it’s not clear whether they grasp the inherently extremist politics of crypto, with its seditious fantasies of sovereignty. In The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism, David Golumbia outlined how crypto projects like bitcoin are rooted in right-wing ideas. For example, bitcoiners largely accept the “pillar of extremist thought” that “government is inherently evil,” thus necessitating a shift to secretive digital currency. Golumbia further exposed how pro-crypto arguments often echo far-right conspiracy theories depicting the Federal Reserve as a nefarious force bent on world domination. This explains why so many crypto enthusiasts end up sounding like right-wing crackpots.
I don't think this article fully makes a case for one of its central assertions: that the scam-ridden cryptocurrency "industry" will "have a friend in the White House" no matter who is elected. While that's plainly the case with Trump, who reversed his position on crypto just before he and his family launched a new financial scheme based on it, it may or may not be true of Harris. But it's definitely true of some top Democrats, including Senate majority leader Schumer, whose obsequious pandering is an embarrassment. The author does make the case that politicians who support crypto are in bed with some terrible people. Not only has crypto been a playground for crooks – at enormous cost to the countless losers in their scams – but many of the most influential people in the game are right-wing extremists. They are a direct threat to our nation, and that hasn't gotten nearly enough attention.
Voting is just part of democracy, but it's the essential place to start. Make sure you're registered. Doublecheck in the fall, well before Election Day, because in some states Republican officials are removing people, mostly those who tend to vote for Democrats, from voting rolls.
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Richard L. Hasen
Will Bunch
Nick Surgey
Gil Duran
