My commentary on the government’s arguments and the Justices’ interrogations of the government’s lawyer regarding the first day of the Supreme Court case of Murthy v. Missouri, our free speech case challenging government censorship. The government’s opening argument attempted to characterize their behavior as friendly persuasion toward the social media companies, not overt coercion. Justice…
My initial reaction to the oral arguments in our Murthy v. Missouri (a.k.a. Missouri v. Biden) case on Monday follows below. As many of you are aware, on we had oral arguments on Monday at the Supreme Court in our free speech case challenging government censorship. The arguments have generated a lot of commentary in…
During the COVID-19 pandemic, public health authorities—once relatively obscure government agencies—were given unprecedented power to manage citizens’ lives in the name of public safety. Some critics have argued that this situation brought into focus a number of long-standing trends of modernity: trends toward medicalization, scientific rationalism, and state surveillance in liberal societies. Any plausible analysis…
The Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce, who came of age in the 1930s and observed with horror the emergence of Mussolini’s Fascist regime in his native country, warned that “the widespread notion that the age of totalitarianisms ended with Hitlerism and Stalinism is completely mistaken.” Del Noce explained: The essential element of totalitarianism, in brief,…
The New Atlantis—On June 9, 2016, a law permitting physician-assisted suicide went into effect in California. The same day, Dr. Lonny Shavelson, an emergency medicine physician, opened the Bay Area End of Life Options clinic to provide the newly legal service. A longtime activist for the cause, Shavelson’s interest began in adolescence. In an interview…
