Left Jabs

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Why We Drag Our Asses to the Protests

I don’t want to overstate the importance of protest demonstrations. Their immediate impact on the problems of the day is never likely to be more than negligible, while their long-term impact is unknowable. But I don’t want to understate their importance, either. I’ve now been to five protests — two aimed at a Tesla dealership, three aimed at the junta more generally — and I was ambivalent about all of them. Were it not for my wife’s strong feelings on the subject, I probably wouldn’t have gone. I realize I was being selfish. Surely I wasn’t the only one thinking there are better ways to spend a Saturday afternoon. But the ones who showed up pushed past that, so who was I to excuse myself from a civic responsibility? As it turned out, the simple act of showing up came with unexpected benefits. What the protests may have lacked in political effectiveness, they made up for in psychic income. Our collective mental health has taken a beating of late, and ther...

They Flooded the Zone, Now the Zone’s Flooding Back

F or nearly eight years, I have regularly ridden my bicycle past a house that has faithfully flown a Trump flag, right underneath Old Glory, without interruption in all that time. The flag has been refreshed over the years — from the original MAGA slogan, to “Keep America Great,” to “Trump 2024”— but the political commitment, and the willingness to proclaim it, have never wavered. I have frequently speculated about the owner of that house, with its large side yard and wooden privacy fence. In my mind, he’s a middle-aged man with a Webber grill, a riding mower, and grown children who don’t speak to him. He lives in a solid middle-class community, and he’s thinking about retiring someplace warm and gun-friendly. Obviously, this is stereotyping on my part, but let’s stay with it a minute. Because last week, on Day 94 of the second Trump presidency, I rode past that same house, and the only flag on that pole, waving in the wind, was Old Glory. I suppose the ...

First They Come for the Law Firms, Then They Come for the Law

I n classic fascist fashion, the Trump-Musk junta has launched a war on independent voices. They are actively engaged in suppressing free thought, and they’re putting serious pressure on the institutions that value it. The pressure so far has fallen on the mainstream media, who have largely cowered in the face of it, and on universities, who are still trying to figure out how to deal with it. But the most pressure — and the most immediate threat to the very concept of independent thinking — is being put on the legal sector. Lawyers, law students, law professors, and judges everywhere are feeling it. Large law firms especially are alarmed, ever since Trump started issuing executive orders that threaten to sink them, whether they comply or not. For some reason, I can’t stop writing about this. In the past month, some of the biggest firms have capitulated, reaching agreements with the junta to contribute pro bono work to “conservative” causes. These agreement...

What Sort of Pro Bono Work is Big Law Signing Up For?

B ig Law is on the hot seat. Major firms have unexpectedly been thrust into the front lines of the war against Trump, and all their options are bad. I wrote about this two weeks ago, and since then a slew of big firms have either made a deal with the devil or joined the side of the angels. On the minus side, all but one of the top twenty firms have either taken the “deal” or stayed silent. I personally think they’re playing a bad hand badly. On the plus side — beyond those top twenty behemoths — there are hundreds of very large firms who have taken a stand, of sorts, against the junta. If you’re interested in keeping score , you can do so, but the whole thing keeps getting weirder. As we watch these “deals” being made, the one common denominator — and the most publicized aspect — is the “pro bono” work these firms are committing to. About a billion dollars’ worth of lawyering is available to be used in “conservative” causes. What does this mean? What ...

Artists and Dictators Have Never Gotten Along

History records that the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 was much the work of one man, Mikhail Gorbachev, and there is some truth to that. But one could also argue that the fall actually began in 1962, with the publication of a single book, and the astonishing bravery of the man who wrote it, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The book was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and the simple fact of its publication was, at the time, seismic. Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Premier, was walking a tightrope. He needed to find a way to pull Russia out of the abyss of Stalinism, and restore some sort of normal life after three decades of hellish oppression and mass death. But he had to do this without allowing any meaningful change to the sclerotic system that had created Stalin, and given absolute power to the Communist Party. So, for a short time, there was what became known as the “Khrushchev Thaw,” a loosening of the totalitarian shackles — both physical and psych...

DEI-Bashing and the Battle for the Soul of Big Law

T here was a time, not long ago, when a major corporate law firm would look to burnish its “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” credentials in the marketplace. At which point that firm might hire a writer like, say, me. It was a given that Big Law firms needed to become more diverse, at least if they wanted to stay relevant in a work environment that was no longer male, white, straight, and old. Firms everywhere invested real money in the recruitment, training, and promotion of lawyers from widely varied backgrounds, and they paid people like me to brag about it to the world. Every firm needed a DEI page on its website. Some wanted printed brochures. Some wanted advertising. Most wanted the legal community, especially law schools, to know about their diversity efforts. Law schools were by then rating firms by their DEI “scores,” and the firms with the best scores were getting the pick of the litter from the graduating classes. What I liked about the work was...