Free Republic

Your next new home air conditioner could set you back $12,000 or more, with federal regulators contributing to the rising cost of staying cool. Before 2020, buying and installing a new residential central air conditioner typically cost well under $10,000. Many jobs, including both purchase and installation, fell in the $6,000 to $7,000 range—about half the current price—says Martin Hoover, a co-owner of Atlanta-based Empire Heating & Air Conditioning. While many factors, including rising material costs, have contributed to the increase in prices, regulations have played an outsize role. The Energy Department in January 2023 issued a new efficiency standard...

Since the COVID scare worked so well for the left, could a climate lockdown be next? We all vividly recall the absurd COVID lockdowns. While they had no effect on the spread of illness, the imposed restrictions certainly proved that a large segment of the population was easily compelled to come to heel and submit to the government’s outrageous demands. Given the facts I provide in my new book, Climate Cult: Exposing and Defeating Their War on Life, Liberty, and Property, such a scheme should come as no surprise, especially given that the Biden administration and Congressional Democrats are priming...

On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee released an 800 page report on the Biden White House censorship regime. The report included numerous times the Biden regime threatened social media companies to censor, silence and take down information on the COVID origins and the COVID vaccines. Here is the full 800 page report released by the House Judiciary Committee on the Biden Administration’s Censorship Industrial Complex. On Thursday, investigative reporter Mike Benz revealed “10 flaming examples” Facebook, YouTube and Amazon explicitly said they only passed censorship policies because they were threatened by the Biden government. Here are 10 flaming examples of...

America First Legal (AFL) is celebrating a victory in its lawsuit on behalf of former Ambassador Ric Grenell against the Biden Administration's “Homeland Intelligence Experts Group.” The Biden Administration has agreed to dissolve this unlawful group and hand over its records to AFL.

The Biden administration hasn’t hesitated to rule by fiat, especially when it comes to environmental regulations. Separation of powers? Who cares? Why worry about constitutional processes when you can ramrod your agenda through the bureaucracy? Congressional Republicans are taking on the Environmental Protection Agency’s latest rule that seeks to govern greenhouse gas emissions for heavy-duty trucks. The rule is set to take effect on June 21. Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) and Rep. Russ Fulcher (R-Idaho) introduced a resolution in their respective chambers on Wednesday that would invoke the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to allow Congress to vote to nullify the...

The Biden administration has saddled the U.S. economy with more than $1 trillion worth of final rules and regulations thus far in 2024, according to analysis conducted by the American Action Forum (AAF).The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) final emissions regulations for light- and medium-duty vehicles, which some have characterized as an electric vehicle (EV) mandate, pushed the costs of the Biden administration’s regulatory agenda over the $1 trillion threshold for 2024, alone, according to AAF’s analysis. Across all agencies and regulatory actions last week, the federal government published regulations imposing $103 billion worth of total costs and 11.6 million annual...

The California Department of Water Resources (DWR) last week released its next five-year plan for the State Water Project—Update 2023. After years of meetings, California’s premier water agency has decided to focus on “three intersecting themes: addressing climate urgency, strengthening watershed resilience, and achieving equity in water management.”Lake Shasta Dam in Shasta Lake, Calif., on Feb. 14, 2023. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)Water supplies for California’s 40 million people and the planet’s most productive agriculture have third- to fifth-level priority.There is nothing new here, except to publicly admit to betraying the public trust. Really?Over several decades, the public has been deceived...

A group of six Republican state attorneys general filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration’s Department of Education on Tuesday over what they said were “radical and illegal” changes to Title IX rules.The lawsuit, led by Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman and Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky.In their legal filing, the GOP attorneys general argued that the department overstepped its authority when rolling out new updates to Title IX rules that expanded protections to students by incorporating gender identity into the legal text.They further claimed the changes...

If you are having trouble keeping track of all the major regulations President Joe Biden has issued recently, you’re not alone. In just the past two weeks, the Biden administration has functionally banned all coal power plants, forced college women to accept men in their locker rooms and dorm rooms, and empowered government regulators to set price controls on internet services. That is all on top of previous Biden regulations banning the sale of cars with internal combustion engines, banning the sale of new gas stoves, and making refrigerators far more expensive than they currently are. Biden is radically transforming...

The left says there’s a civil war brewing, a conflict whose roots it finds in parents angry about LGBTQ indoctrination in the schools, pro-life protesters and the Jan. 6 fiasco, but not in the orgy of Black Lives Matter/antifa violence of 2020, chaos at the border, anarchy in the streets of our cities or the pro-Hamas mobs swarming over college campuses. The fact that “Civil War” is the most popular movie in the country shows that audiences will swallow any absurdity as long as it’s sufficiently coated with graphic violence. “Civil War” is about a future conflict that pits secessionist...

Canada has fallen. It’s become the North Korea of the West, and it’s getting worse every single day. This new bill they’ve introduced is the cherry on their tyrannical sundae. It’s called the Online Harms Bill C-63, and it would make even Stalin blush. As a matter of fact, tyrannical dictator Kim Jong-Un would look at this bill and feel an instant rush of communist inadequacy. With this new bill, Justin Trudeau is fueling those online rumors that his real father is actually communist dirtbag Fidel Castro. This new bill is supposedly aimed at safeguarding the masses from online “hate...

“We’ll certainly never forget the dark days of June 6– January 6th, excuse me.” — President “Joe Biden”. The plum blossoms are ready to pop here. You can feel your blood rising. The evening sun lingers a little longer every day. Normally you’d celebrate, but not this year of roaring portents and evil juju. History doesn’t stop to catch its breath for a moment. The tiny glowing diode deep in “Joe Biden’s” brain dims a bit more each day (pause) while low men and women in high places trifle with the fate of the nation. Everyone dreads what’s coming. Which,...

On Thursday’s broadcast of “NewsNation Now,” White House National Climate Adviser Ali Zaidi denied that the Biden administration is attempting to shut down the coal industry or slow any industry down, and stated that the issue is “about how do we speed up to a stronger economy, a more durable economy, and one that, frankly, puts less pollution into the sky?” Host Connell McShane asked, “[C]oal executives, for the most part, are coming out and saying this — we can’t meet this. So, the real goal here is to kind of shut our industry down. Is that what’s happening?” Zaidi...

Facing dire polling numbers and a lack of left-wing enthusiasm for his “re-election” campaign, Joe Biden is considering taking an extreme measure that should send chills down the spines of any American who values liberty. During an April 19 broadcast of the Fox Business Show The Bottom Line with Dagen and Duffy, co-host Sean Duffy revealed that the Biden White House told Fox Business that it is considering defying the Constitution and declaring a climate emergency. He then turned to his guest Marc Morano, a former Republican political aide who runs a climate change skeptic website called ClimateDepot.com, and asked...

We’re coming up on three and a half years into the Biden presidency — a presidency which from the outset promised an “all of government” regulatory onslaught to force a transition away from fossil fuels and to “green” energy. And the regulatory onslaught has indeed come forth. But how about the actual transition in energy use? Not so much. Let’s have a round-up of some recent data points. On the regulatory onslaught front, on March 7, 2024 Thomas Pyle of the Institute for Energy Research put out a list of “200 Ways the Biden Administration and Democrats Have Made it...

All hail King Deep State! That is essentially what we have now, is it not? An unelected, all-powerful, mercurial king — and certainly not a binding constitution limiting government’s authority and preserving Americans’ rights. Our First Amendment forbids Congress from restricting an individual’s free speech, but that hasn’t stopped King Deep State from conspiring with Big Tech to silence every voice deemed offensive to the realm. Our Fourth Amendment forbids nosy officials from poking around in Americans’ private records and communications without first securing particularized warrants establishing probable cause that a crime has been committed, but that hasn’t stopped King...

In a shocking revelation, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Dr. Hanna Nohynek admitted that COVID-19 vaccine passports may have been a scam. During a recent testimony in a Helsinki courtroom, Nohynek—a chief physician at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare and serves as the WHO’s chair of the Strategic Group of Experts on immunization— suggested that vaccine passports were part of a plan to advance the global vaccine agenda. She also claimed that the WHO knowingly endorsed the Covid mRNA jab despite being fully aware of their limited efficacy against the virus. She said the Finnish Institute for Health...

NEW: Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger says that Wikipedia has been ideologically corrupted, raises the possibility that Katherine Maher collaborated with U.S. intelligence, and says that, if NPR were committed to truth, it would fire her "right away."https://city-journal.org/article/wikipedia-co-founder-shocked-by-npr-chief-katherine-maherApr 18, 2024 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ransomnote: Christopher Rufo's related posts about Katherine Maher:@realchrisrufo | Katherine Maher says that she abandoned a "free and open" internet as the mission of Wikipedia, because those principles recapitulated a "white male Westernized construct" 4/18/2024, 6:34:17 PM · by ransomnote · 38 repliesX ^ | 4/18/2024 | Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ @realchrisrufo, Katherine MaherNPR's Katherine Maher: "the number one challenge" in...

In 2020, Dr. Scott Atlas was an advisor to the president and a member of the White House COVID-19 Task Force. He was shocked to see how powerful figures in Washington, including Dr. Fauci, were incentivized to politicize and monetize the response to the pandemic. In this candid conversation with PragerU CEO Marissa Streit, Dr. Atlas reveals that many Americans may have died because of censorship, dishonesty, and the demonization of medical dissent. Will Americans allow this to happen again?

As Brazil rapidly descends into authoritarianism, courting the favor of the world’s worst dictatorship (Chinese Communists), meanwhile, journalist Michael Shellenberger warns Americans that we, too, are heading down Brazil’s path. From allegedly aiming to criminalize “lying” to threatening to arrest those who exposed the country’s increasingly tyrannical judiciary, Brazil’s government under President Lula is trying to turn itself into a perfect Orwellian dystopia. That’s exactly why Shellenberger, who wrote the Twitter Files that exposed the corruption, is so concerned. Brazil might be more rapid in crushing rights and freedoms, but the US government is also blatantly violating rights while pandering...