So someone has ghost-written another Hillary Clinton memoir. My biggest question when I picked it up was: Did Hillary stiff the writer out of the final payment as she did Barbara Feinman, real author of “It Takes a Village?” You don’t have to read any further than the cover of the book to answer the question posed by its title: What Happened: Hillary Clinton. Glutton for punishment, I took a masochistic dive into its dark pages anyway. More

What are we supposed to make of Coates’ statement near the end of his essay that the election and presidency of Trump is “as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, ‘If a black man can be president, then any white man – no matter how fallen – can be president”?

Coates doesn’t mean all white Americans, though he certainly could have made more of an effort to make that clear.  Midway through his essay, he writes that “though much has been written about the distance between elites and ‘Real America,’ the existence of a class-transcending, mutually dependent tribe of [U.S.] white people is evident.”  I agree, though here I would use the phrase “cross-class,” not “class-transcending,” for class divisions live on within (and beyond) white America, deepened in fact by the ancient ruling class game of racial divide-and-rule. More

The rise in national attention to the “alt-right” and fascist-white supremacist protesters has raised questions about the parameters of free speech in America. When can free speech be limited, if ever? What are the implications of attempting to limit controversial speech? And what precedents has the Supreme Court set regarding free speech? I address these questions below via an exploration of historical Supreme Court cases, which show that there’s no legal pretext for a blanket ban on far-right protests. More