When I need my hair cut, I go to my local barber shop. My barber, Carol, is a lovely person and decent barber. She has better and worse days, but either way, my hair gets cut. She knows how I like my hair cut, and she doesn’t charge enough, so I always give her a generous tip. She doesn’t discriminate, and is more than happy to cut women’s hair for $14 too, but I can’t remember ever seeing a woman in her shop waiting her turn for a haircut.

In the back corner of her shop is a sink, one of those sinks with a cut out in the front to place the back of your neck so someone can wash you hair. I’ve never seen anyone use the sink. I’ve never seen anyone get their hair washed at the barber shop. I wash my hair before getting it cut. Carol doesn’t need to cut some guy’s dirty hair. Gross. Continue reading →

Ed. Note: This is a guest post by Guy Hamilton-Smith.

The last time I read something that made me feel quite this flavor of incandescent was a decade ago, in law school — it was Scalia’s dissent in Lawrence v. Texas. In fact, as I recall, I had to stop reading it before I finished I was so enraged, and the only thing that I could do to salve my anger was to comfort myself with the knowledge that it was, in fact, a dissent.

I’d been thinking about the idea for some time of doing this — finding someplace where I can write something in between long-form articles like law review articles or extremely short-form things like tweets. So, in a way, I’m grateful to USA Today and Josh Salman for giving me the kick I needed. But I am also very angry. Angery, even. Continue reading →

His unfortunate first name notwithstanding, there is probably no one who checks more right boxes for the Democratic Socialists of America than Adolph Reed, and still they took away his rose.

Adolph Reed is a son of the segregated South, a native of New Orleans who organized poor Black people and antiwar soldiers in the late 1960s and became a leading Socialist scholar at a trio of top universities.

Along the way, he acquired the conviction, controversial today, that the left is too focused on race and not enough on class. Lasting victories were achieved, he believed, when working class and poor people of all races fought shoulder to shoulder for their rights.

Continue reading →

Phil Ochs was scathing in his attack on what was then known as “Limousine Liberals,” the ones who gave money and held parties for the “right” causes in their Park Avenue apartments or Hamptons oceanfront home. They said the right words, voted for the right people and gushed in their support of the downtrodden, as long as they stayed a safe distance away. It later produced an acronym, NIMBY, to express the phenomenon, not in my back yard.

Yet, in one of the most progressive areas of one of the progressive cities run by one of the self-proclaimed most progressive mayors, the uber progressive people of the Upper West Side of Manhattan don’t let history or their claimed values concern them. The homeless have infested their streets and when it’s about their children walking to some private academy through the homeless, when they have to step over them to get to Whole Foods, the life they worked so hard to achieve is threatened and they’re not going to take it. Continue reading →

When my son was fencing in high school, most of the people he trained with were Asian. While the kids practiced, the parents talked. One of the benefits of being a smart student and top fencer was being recruited to good schools, and yet the mother of one fencer whose son was brilliant, hard-working, a great fencer and, on top of everything else, one of the nicest kids I ever met,* remonstrated.

Her: What are the chances he’ll get in, an Asian science nerd?

Me: About the same as science nerd Jewish kid from Long Island.

She wanted her son to go to Yale. I wanted mine to go to MIT. Mine got in. Hers did not (though he did very well, nonetheless). Yale discriminates. We knew it then, and the Department of Justice says so now. Continue reading →

No doubt he means well. They always mean well when they passionately push for righteousness, even if this time it comes from the college president of the University of Southern Maine, located in the other Portland. It’s not a well-known school. It’s not highly rated. But if Glenn Cummings has anything to say about it, it will be in violation of the law.

The University of Southern Maine has asked all members of the community to sign a “Black Lives Matter Statement and Antiracism Pledge.” The pledge cites Ibram Kendi, who popularized the concept of “antiracism.” Continue reading →

For decades, the fight on the side of criminal defense lawyers has been to break the public and judicial mindset that cops don’t lie.

Why would he lie? He doesn’t know the defendant and has no reason to harbor any personal animosity toward him. Why would he lie about him?

This was the common refrain from judges as you argued that the officer’s testimony was false, at least about a critical fact such as whether the defendant consented to a search or admitted an element of a crime or the “poignant” smell of marijuana emanated from the car. There was no video. There was no recording. It was a cop’s word against a defendant’s. Why would the cop lie? Continue reading →

It takes a special brand of twisted to indulge in the sophistry of justifying looting. And yet, here we go again.

Black Lives Matter Chicago warned Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Monday that the renewed civil unrest that’s gripped the city throughout the summer won’t end until “the safety and well-being of our communities is finally prioritized.”

Since when did breaking into stores equal “civil unrest”? Not rioting. Not looting. Nope. Civil unrest. And just how civil unrestful does Black Lives Matter Chicago threaten? Continue reading →

There will be a first round of commentary explaining what Joe Biden’s choice of Kamala Harris, the “1st woman of color on a major ticket” as the New York Times puts it on its front page, means, followed by a round of damning the commentary for taking a woman, and then a black woman, to task, when “no one ever challenges a male candidate for vice president” like that.

But is Harris, as Chryl Laird argues, finally the recognition by the Democratic Party of its most loyal constituents?

Yet the significance of this decision and its meaning for Black women, the most loyal members of the Democratic Party, cannot be overstated. Black women’s commitment to the party has often gone unacknowledged, but they have been tirelessly loyal to the Democratic Party for generations. Continue reading →

For a brief and shining moment, woke radicals decided that Hispanic people were being oppressed by the word “Latino,” and so they did as they’re wont to do, changed the word to the ingenious “Latinx.” It turned out there was only one flaw in the plan. Hispanic people overwhelmingly hated it.

A Vox ‘splainer made a typically comical pitch for why the word was “catching on” with everybody but Latinos, not that the 98% of them mattered. Probably just self-loathing Latinx, as the woke rationalization for why anyone wouldn’t do as they decided was fabulous goes. Continue reading →