Left Jabs

  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 ...

  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...

  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 ...

  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...