This is the audio version of Onkar Ghate’s November 6, 2017, post, “The Anti-Intellectuality of Donald Trump: Why Ayn Rand Would Have Despised a President Trump.”
In my last blog post, I reported on how Greg Salmieri and I had done a special Atlas Project live broadcast from Atlanta, where we had both been attending the 2017 Ayn Rand Student Conference. The conference was exciting enough to warrant its own post.
In this wide-ranging episode of The Thinkery Podcast, Carl Benjamin (known on YouTube as “Sargon of Akkad”), interviews Yaron Brook. Among the many topics covered are: Why Adam Smith’s conventional morality undermines the case for capitalism; why Ayn Rand is not a “liberal” or a “conservative”; communism as the secularization of Christianity; the need for rational education; the essence of morality.
No one can speak for the dead. But as an expert on Ayn Rand’s philosophy, I’m often asked what Rand would have thought of President Trump, especially now, on the one-year anniversary of his election and in light of stories in the Washington Post and elsewhere trying to link Trump to Rand.
In this interview, originally published in the Jewish newspaper Új Kelet, Elan Journo comments extensively on the relevance of Ayn Rand’s ideas; the false alternative between faith-based certainty and moral relativism; the value of freedom, and other topics.
October 10 is the 60th anniversary of the publication of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. To commemorate that event, we asked Jeff Britting, curator of the Ayn Rand Archives, to supply us with images and text from one of the many exhibits he has mounted over the years, this one devoted to Rand’s handwritten notes and drafts for the novel, which was published in 1957.
Did you know that Ayn Rand kept a file folder called “Pictures I Like”? At our upcoming auction on September 28, 2017, you can win a beautifully framed reproduction of a postcard she saved, plus a replica statue of the artwork it depicts. Proxy bidding is available!
Odds are that you’ve never considered buying dish towels once owned by Ayn Rand. But here are three of them, including one with a cat motif and another in her favorite blue-green color. This set also comes with a gorgeously framed reproduction of two handwritten manuscript pages from Atlas Shrugged. (The majority of this material was cut from the final published book.) Hear our heroine, Dagny Taggart, reflects on the joys of fixing breakfast. Proxy bidding is available!
Up for auction on September 28, 2017, are three hardback books owned by Ayn Rand at the time of her death. All contain penciled marginal notes. Bureaucracy by Ludwig von Mises, Reason and Analysis by Brand Blanshard, and How to Think Creatively by Eliot Hutchinson can all be won even without attending our NYC auction in person (proxy bidding is available). Note: These books will be auctioned singly, not as a lot.
