Free Republic

Meet historical fascism’s true heirs.In the famous anecdote usually attributed to Bertrand Russel, a scientist lecturing on the earth’s position in the solar system is corrected an old lady who says the earth is actually supported by a giant turtle. When the scientist asked what supports the turtle, she triumphally answered, “It’s turtles all the way down!”Since the Twenties and the rise of Italian Fascism and German Nazism––which eventually become the main referent of the word––the term has become an all-purpose question-begging epithet so promiscuously abused in the Thirties that, as George Orwell said in 1944, “The word Fascism has...

A family fishing company, Loper Bright Enterprises, was being driven out of business, because they couldn't afford the $700 per day they were being charged by the National Marine Fisheries Service to monitor their company. The thing is, federal law doesn't authorize NMFS to charge businesses for this. They just decided to start doing it in 2013. Why did they think they could away with just charging people without any legal authorization? Because in 1984, in the Chevron decision, the Supreme Court decided that regulatory agencies were the "experts" in their field, and the courts should just defer to their...

When OHSA unilaterally mandated that tens of millions of private sector workers take the COVID shot or wear masks, appellate courts cited the Chevron doctrine for allowing it People don’t understand how important it is that Chevron deference is dead

The rush of end-of-term decisions from the Supreme Court, not to mention last night’s presidential debate, gives me many more potential topics to write about than I could ever get to. How to choose? On the subject of the presidential debate, I doubt that I have anything to say that a hundred others have not said in the past 24 hours. So then, which of the latest crop of Supreme Court decisions is the most important? On that last question, my vote goes to Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. This is the case that has rather emphatically overruled the 1984...

...The operational plan I propose in the book is reasonably straightforward. The reasons that I think we are driven to that plan speak to some complex realities facing the United States in the second decade of the twenty-first century. First, the operational plan: to make large portions of the Federal Code of Regulations unenforceable. I want to make government into an insurable hazard, like flood, fire, or locusts. The way I want to do it is through massive civil disobedience underwritten by privately funded defense funds. [....] That brings me to the ambitious proposition I want to defend tonight: we...

The Environmental Protection Agency is looking to tighten standards for the amount of harmful particles in the air, facing opposition from U.S. farming groups who call it an unrealistic attempt to regulate dust. (snip) In scientific terms, the EPA is looking to either keep the standards at 150 micrograms per cubic meter or revise it down to 65 to 85 micrograms per cubic meter. Environmental groups say these tiny elements could be harmful if not deadly for people, causing cardiovascular or respiratory problems. (snip) But for Kluthe, who lives a quarter of a mile away from any community, the health...