Category Archives: Atlas Shrugged

The election of Dattatreya Hosabale as the new Sarkaryavah or General Secretary of the Rashtriya Swyamsewak Sangh (RSS) marks a generational shift in the organization and also heralds closer ties with the ruling BJP government.

Hosabale, 65, replaces Suresh Bhaiyyaji Joshi (73), who became the general secretary in 2009, when Mohan Bhagwat took charge of the RSS as the Sarsanghchalak. Bhaiyyaji Joshi completed four terms and the decision to replace him with Hosabale was takenafter an internal election in Sanghs Akhil Bharatiya Prathinidhi Sabha the annual meeting of the top RSS functionaries in Bengaluru.

The general secretary is number two in the RSS hierarchy but for all practical purposes, he controls the actual functioning of the organisation. As per the RSS constitution, the RSS chief functions as a guide and philosopher. It is the general secretary, who appoints central office bearers and presides over the formal meetings of the RSS, assisted by four sah-sarkaryavahs or joint general secretaries.

Hosabale, popularly known as Datta ji in the RSS, belongs to a small village in Shivamogga district in Karnataka, from a family associated with the Sangh Parivar. Erudite and an effective orator, Hosabale has a post-graduate degree in English Literature with a keen interest in foreign affairs. In fact, in a bid to unshroud the RSS, he was fielded to interact with the foreign media last year where he spoke about the selfless and equitable seva of RSS workers across the country during the lockdown.

Joining the Sangh in 1968, he was associated with the students wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), and served as its general secretary for 15 years. Interestingly, Hosabale is the first general secretary to come from the ABVP, and not directly from RSS shakhas. This fact had been a subject of serious debate within the organisation. According to sources, this also seems to have delayed his elevation to the powerful post of sarkaryavah.

His predecessor Bhaiyya ji Joshi was known to maintain a distance from the BJP but this may change now. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Datta ji have a good working relationship. Datta ji is likely to be more actively associated with the functioning of the party. He had played a very important role in the last UP Assembly elections in 2017, shifting his base to Lucknow one year before the polls. He was involved in all aspects of election management, says a Sangh functionary.

Hosabale is also known to be an avid reader and was active in literary activities from his days as a student. In fact, during the lockdown, he had put out an eclectic list of 15 must-read books as part of #StayHomeIndiaWithBooks, that included Fritjof Capras Tao of Physics, Thomas Friedmans The World is Flat, Yuval Noah Hararis 21 Lessons for the 21stCentury, Leon Uris Exodus and Ayn Rands Atlas Shrugged.

He is believed to have enjoyed proximity with almost all writers and journalists of Karnataka, notable among them being Y. N. Krishnamurthy and Gopal Krishna Adiga.

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Election Of Dattatreya Hosabale As New General Secretary Heralds Closer Ties Between RSS And BJP Govt - Outlook India

At last, its here. After years of online campaigning, messages plastered across the sky or Times Square and a LOT of hashtags the Snyder Cut of Justice League is finally out in the world, released on HBO Max in the US and on Sky/NOW in the UK as a kind of event miniseries.

Will this re-edit of 2017s Justice League be the world-conquering, quasi-religious experience that all the build-up has led fans to expect? At time of writing, its hard to know, but there is one thing we know for sure.

Zack Snyders Justice League is not the Snyder cut. Because you see, in many ways the Snyder cut isnt something that ever existed.

When Snyder departed Justice League, its not like he had a film ready to go that evil executives cruelly cast aside, cackling as they drew up their destructive plans for Josstice League instead. Rather, he had an awful lot of footage that was unfinished and unfit for release (no CGI or colour grading not a quality judgement, dont write in), which he locked away in a cupboard somewhere and never expected to revisit.

The largely reshot Joss Whedon version of Snyders film was released instead, didnt do that well and left fans disappointed and keen to see what might have been, fans started to call for Snyders original vision. This directors cut campaigning has a long history in movies, perhaps most prominently in the various cuts of Ridley Scotts seminal Blade Runner (with or without the voiceover or the weird ending? You decide!), but with Justice League it combined with the growing power and influence of online fandom to create a massive, and often toxic, campaign.

The fact that Warner Bros. eventually decided to bow to this pressure is nearly unheard of the fact that they gave Snyder millions of dollars to shoot new scenes and finish the CGI is unprecedented. But the end result is that the fans got what they wanted, or at least what they thought they wanted Zack Snyders cut of Justice League, as it would have been in an alternate 2017.

But will this really be the film they wanted? Im not so sure. Zack Snyders Justice League isnt necessarily a re-do of the original film instead of seeing what Snyder would have made to be released in cinemas, fans are being given a four-hour-plus miniseries which would never have been released (and is only being done so now to help sell HBO Max). The real Snyder cut would have been shorter and snappier, and the daunting length of whats being released instead feels almost like too much of a good thing even if you are a huge fan of Snyders vision.

And perhaps thats true more generally of this entire project. Last year when this re-release was confirmed, the satirical YouTube channel Screen Junkies created an entire response video to the finished Justice League, which apparently included every plot hole fixed, a Darkseid origin story, a heartfelt apology from the cast of Ghostbusters 2016 and a 20-minute interlude where Jeremy Irons Alfred reads Atlas Shrugged over the intercom, concluding with the revelation that the film was so good, so seminal that it ended the comic book movie genre for good and pre-emptively cancelled the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Its a funny riff, but it also highlights just how ludicrously high some expectations are for this movie and raises the question over whether this Justice League will be as good as the hazy, unlimited potential version that has hovered in peoples imaginations for the last three or so years.

At time of writing, I havent seen the Justice League re-edit, and neither has any other member of the general public. It could be that it actually fulfils every expectation fans have had for its release, converts everyone to the DC cause and actively forces Warner Bros. to return to the original Snyder plan for their shared superhero universe (rather than the new Batman and Superman movies in the pipeline).

Zack Snyders Justice League Warner Bros.

But somehow, I feel like this Snyder cut wont be as good as the version people have been carrying in their heads, untouched by reality or the harsh realities of filmmaking. How could it? Your mind has limitless budget, an all-star cast and an extremely generous audience. The real world isnt like that, and I could imagine Zack Snyders Justice League inspiring at least some disappointment when it finally arrives.

Maybe it doesnt matter. In some ways, the true story of the Snyder cut isnt about the film itself its what it represents. Depending on your opinion, that could be the toxic pressure of fandom and social media crushing originality and new ideas out of the industry, or an inspiring tale of how loyal fans managed to push back against apathetic, nervous executives to protect the artistic expression of a director.

The Snyder cut is the journey, not the destination. And whether youre thrilled to see Batman punch some parademons or not, you cant deny its been quite a journey.

Zack Snyders Justice League is available to view or stream on NOW and Sky Cinema read our Snyder Cut review and check out the latest on Justice League 2

Want something else to watch? Check out our TV Guide or our Sci-Fi page for all the latest news.

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What if the real Snyder Cut was the friends we made along the way? - RadioTimes

On March 2, online publication MusicRadar covered a report released by the University of East Anglia detailing independent musicians dwindling incomes. The report stated two major factors are at play.

First, artists who belong to major labels have a distinct advantage over independent musicians when it comes to earning potential from streaming. Platforms like Spotify and Apple favor major labels for several reasons. The main reason is that major labels have a ton of money invested in streaming platforms. Naturally, companies are going to give perks to those who offer them the most capital. Hence, its no secret that major labels like Sony and Universal (two of the four major labels left) own streaming.

But theres another reason for shrinking incomes thats mentioned in the report. Artists receive measly earnings from streaming. Even major artists admit streaming doesnt pay the bills.

So where does this leave independent artists sandwiched between an industry still held captive by gatekeepers, and products with earnings that dont even begin to cover investments?

Despite the mystery and secrets of the industry, much of the confusion can be solved by understanding the sound laws of Austrian Economic Theory. For those artists whove never had any interest in picking up an economics book, nows the time to get interested because free market economics is the single most important driver of your business. And whether you like it or not, whether youre a musician, writer, or painter, youre a business if you take in income.

The Subjective Theory of Value comes from the father of Austrian Economics, Carl Menger, who stated that individuals value things at different prices at different times for all different kinds of reasons. This went directly against the Labor Theory of Value, a popular economic theory which states products should be priced according to labor put into them.

While subjective values are often talked about purely from the consumers point of view, it is important to understand this economic law plays just as important a role for an entrepreneur.

As business owners, musicians are constantly investing in their work. Studio time for recording, new instruments and equipment, and travel expenses are just a few goods and services musicians buy on a regular basis.

Even though these goods and services appear to be from different industries, they all have one thing in common. Their prices are directly tied to what consumers are willing to pay for them. If you are touring and need a hotel room, you will search for the cleanest one at the best price. Find one with tons of amenities but too steep a price, and youll move on. Find a dingy one with a killer rate, you may move on from that too. The winner will be the hotel with the price which makes the troubadour think, I value this hotel room more than the hundred dollar bill in my pocket.

This same process goes for music stores. Ive seen time and again customers and store owners haggle over numbers until they come to a price that suits them both a price which reflects that the store owner values the $1,000 dollars more than the guitar hes selling, and vice versa.

Things get confusing when you step over to the realm of music production and distribution. Artists are often so emotionally tied to their end product, they fail to make wise investment choices from the start. While its great for the recording studio who gets $10,000 from an independent artist for an EP recording, its not so great for the artist, who even after recording still has to pay for distribution, physical CDs, vinyl, and touring expenses to promote the album. With streaming services like Spotify paying an average of $0.003-$0.005 per stream, this doesnt seem like a justifiable investment.

Because books and music are all around us now, available for our immediate consumption, the prices consumers pay for the products have been significantly reduced.

The Subjective Theory of Value came into play with my music business not too long ago when my band had new music to record but the recording studio wed been recording at for years had gone up in prices (good for them for increased demand). When I ran the numbers against what we generally make each year from music sales, I had to make the hard decision to pass and come up with a new plan. Due to competition, I have options. I could go find a new studio to record at with better rates (and hopefully no sacrificed product quality.) Or I could even take the time to build my own studio and learn the ins and outs of music production (the most cost-effective).

Not only did I come to the conclusion that I valued keeping the money I would have to pay for the recordings more than the recordings themselves, but I also understood I could take that money and invest it in other resources that had more potential to grow my business and directly generate income.

But many musicians dont realize taking a continued loss on investment project after project is not a sustainable way to run a business. They get caught up in the novelty of recording in Nashville. Or they think more expensive means youll be taken more seriously by industry professionals.

Couple this business model with myriad artists who have operated this way for years and its no wonder musicians are having to take day jobs just to pay the bills.

Another economic theory Carl Menger coined is the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility. This economic theory can be clearly seen everywhere in the entertainment industry. An article published by Electric Lit stated in 2019:

[Books] used to be much more difficult to obtain; you couldnt flip through Monets or read some Robert Frost poems while standing in line at the grocery store, and as a result we did what we do with many rare things we intellectualized them and tried to ascribe them meaning.

Because books and music are all around us now, available for our immediate consumption, the prices consumers pay for the products have been significantly reduced. This goes in line with the example often used when explaining the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility. People often ask why diamonds are so much more expensive than water when water is a critical need and diamonds are a luxury.

It wont be some union that saves musicians. It definitely wont be outdated entertainment law written during the 1920s music landscape.

The Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility states that the more units of something someone has, the less value they ascribe to it. If Farmer Bob has one apple, that apple will have the highest price compared to the second, third, fourth apple and so on as he obtains more.

This not only solves the water-diamond dilemma, but it plays a direct role in artists earnings as well.

The easier it is for consumers to get their hands on more books, music, and cinema, the less they will value it from an economic standpoint. Therefore, they are willing to pay less for it.

The arts industry can be predatory. Artists are a different kind of entrepreneur because their products are deeply rooted in their emotions and psyche. Industry professionals know this and have figured out many ways to take advantage of this vulnerability.

Because of this, its important to hold Reason at the forefront of each business decision we make. This can be the hardest lesson to learn as a creative entrepreneur and one we have to work at mastering our whole life.

If we continue approaching the issue of dwindling arts incomes from the standpoint of emotionalism, of blaming capitalism, or the industry, or streaming services, we are leading the charge for an irrational battle cry.

For if there is more tragic a fool than the businessman who doesnt know that hes an exponent of mans highest creative spirit its the artist who thinks that the businessman is his enemy.

Though consumers determine prices, its important to understand we have to say no when the investments we make in our products are continuously greater than our return. We say no by taking advantage of all the market has to offer. Many artists are already doing this. Theyre recording their own albums. Theyre taking advantage of live streaming. Theyre foregoing 360 deals with record labels that result in them losing rights to their music.

These smart business decisions dont solve the overall problem overnight. But its a step in the right direction.

As the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises once said, All rational action is in the first place individual action. Only the individual thinks. Only the individual reasons. Only the individual acts.

It wont be some union that saves us. It definitely wont be outdated entertainment law written during the 1920s music landscape.

It will be the individual artist, the writer, the musician, who understands and champions art as business, and makes rational, economically sound decisions to reflect that philosophy.

This understanding executed via the free market will ultimately be what corrects horribly low streaming payouts, incredibly high investment prices, and artists relying on the heart instead of the head to make art profitable.

Richard Halley, a character in Ayn Rands monumental novel Atlas Shrugged, said it best.

For if there is more tragic a fool than the businessman who doesnt know that hes an exponent of mans highest creative spirit its the artist who thinks that the businessman is his enemy.

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How Economics Helped Me Understand the Evolving Music Business | Rebecca Day - Foundation for Economic Education

In todays paper, readers will find an Opinion of the Readers entitled Atlas Shrugged, in which the author compares some lines from Ayn Rands book, which was published in 1957, to today.

While there may well be elements of Rands novel that appear in society today, the two references cited present a fictional antagonism toward journalism and facts a disingenuous and dangerous proposition.

Both the characters and comments made by them are fictional. They are not factual reports of what journalists said or did in 1957 nor today. In fact, these fictional comments are, generally speaking, the opposite of reality.

In the second reference, Rand writes that reporters were young men who had been trained to think that their job consisted of concealing from the world the nature of its events and to sling together words ... so long as the words did not fall into a sequence saying something specific.

Hogwash. In reality, reporters are trained to discover and reveal, not conceal. Journalists are trained to report what happens and ask questions. Journalism focuses on specifics: How many people died in a crash? What are county revenues and expenditures? How many physicians have left Transylvania Regional Hospital? Various media, if they have the financial resources, spend weeks, months and sometimes years investigating possible stories that political leaders, corporations or others in position of power have attempted to conceal. Cigarette companies adding nicotine to keep smokers addicted and New York hiding the number of deaths in nursing homes due to COVID-19 are just two examples of the thousands of times journalists have worked to reveal specific information. More than any other form of writing, journalism focuses on facts and figures, not flowery words or descriptions. It focuses on relaying specific information.

In the first reference, Rand writes that a famous editor said There are no objective facts... Every report on facts is only somebodys opinion. It is, therefore, useless to write about facts.

These fictional statements written by Rand are preposterous and dangerous, particularly if people believe them. There are trillions of objective facts. Two plus two equals four. Apples grow on trees. Millions of Jews were killed by Nazis. Mitch McConnell is a senator from Kentucky. Those are facts.

It is foolish and anarchistic to claim there are no objective facts. If there are no facts, then there is no need to have schools, courts of law or law enforcement. If there are no objective facts, then there are no facts for teachers to impart to students and no facts on which law enforcement and district attorneys can prosecute a crime.

If people believe there are no objective facts, they become a mindless mob, ripe for manipulation. Hannah Arendt, a German-born Jewish American political theorist, foretold the real problem: If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer . . . . And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and judge. And with such a people you can do what you please.

Arendt also wrote, Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts.

This is the trademark of authoritarianism, to attack the facts. It is one reason despots and authoritarians consistently attack not just the media, but also people who are professionals or those with a great deal of experience. If there are no facts, then degrees and experience are irrelevant. There are no areas of expertise. In such a scenario, statements about crime from a city councilman, county commissioner, governor or president are equal to that of a police chief, sheriff or attorney general because the latters experience is completely irrelevant. Government officials can give lucrative government contracts to unqualified personnel often family and friends because if there are no facts, then one is neither qualified nor unqualified. The denial of facts allows cunning leaders to manipulate their followers to believe all sorts of ridiculous things.

In the U.S., this is Sunshine Week, a time to celebrate the publics access to public information, to see what some want to conceal, to make government transparent and honest. It is founded on the belief that there are objective facts, that those facts matter and making those facts available to the public is essential to freedom, democracy and civilization.

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Ayn And Hannah - The Transylvania Times - The Transylvania Times

An important sale of rare books and incunabula is now open for bidding on http://www.igavelauctions.com through March 30th. Ranging from extremely rare 15th century texts to signed first editions of Ayn Rand's most popular titles Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, this sale encompasses six centuries of man's drive to record and share information. The 200 lots are expected to exceed their initial estimates of $83,000 to $162,500.

We are delighted to offer such an important and diverse range of rare books, says Lark Mason III. Works like these can be found in the greatest libraries throughout the world and others sparked the minds of readers throughout the centuries.

The topics are varied and include religious and historic texts some with important provenance such as St. Bonaventures Paupers Bible by Nicklaus S. Hanapis, 1477 estimated at $2000-4000. This text bears the Bookplate of Syston Park, home of Sir John Thorold 9th Baronet (1734 - 1815), a British Member of Parliament from Lincolnshire 1779-1796. His main claim to fame was the magnificent collection of ancient books amassed by him and his son John Hayford Thorold. It also issigned and inscribed by the bibliographer and publisher William Herbert (1718-1795),"Wm. Herbert. Neither of these treatises mention'd by Maittaire." inscribed beneath, "collated perfect 1797".

Another incunabula of note-with a very conservative estimate of $1,000 to $2,000- isAusmo, Nicolaus de. Supplementum Summae Pisanellae, published in Venice: 1482.

Two important but equally decorative texts are a mixed set of Edward GibbonsThe History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 6 Vols. London: 1776-1781 estimated at $1000-2000. As well as, an extra-large folio edition ofThe Dramatic Works of Shakespeare, revised by George Steevens, 9v. London, 1802 (Estimate $1500-2500). This text was previously in the library ofDaniel B. Fearing (1859-1918) the mayor of Newport Rhode Island and was donated to the Grolier Club in New York.

Some of the more generally popular texts includeThe Original Works of William Hogarth, John and Josiah Boydell, London: 1790 (estimate $2000-3000);Kircher, Athanasius. Jesu China Monumentis qua sacris qua profanis, Amsterdam, 1667 (Estimate $1000-2000);John Drydens translation ofThe Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Aeneis, London: 1697; Sir Walter RaleighsThe History of the World, London: 1614, published in 1621; and Adam Smiths An Inquiry into the Nature & Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vol., Dublin: 1793. Many moreof the texts are very desirable first editions, and all fit seamlessly into the classic western literary canon.

All the books are on view at Lark Mason Associations, at 210 West Mill Street, New Braunfels, TX. The exhibition is open Tuesday-Saturday 10am-4pm, now until March 30, 2021.

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Rare Books and Incunabula Now Open for Bidding on iGavel Auctions - ArtfixDaily

William F. Buckley was a public intellectual, commentator, and founder of National Review, the magazine that arguably launched the modern conservative movement as we know it today. Would there even be a conservative movement without Buckleys leadership?

And if so, is he responsible for the Trumpist turn Republican Party has taken? Does Buckley bear some blame for the direction in which conservatism has developed?

Journalist and historian Sam Tanenhaus has spent years studying the life and legacy of William F. Buckley. He joins Vital Center host Geoffrey Kabaservice for a deep dive into how Buckley became the force that shaped American politics as we know it today.

Sam Tanenhaus: Willmoore Kendall said Bill Buckley was the greatest conversationalist alive. What he meant was he was the greatest listener alive. Willmoore Kendall did all the talking but Bill was a great listener and Wills says this, too, in his memoirs. He would listen to everything that you said.

Geoff Kabaservice: Im Geoff Kabaservice from the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the mighty muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events.

And Im especially delighted to be talking with Sam Tanenhaus today. Sam is a well-known journalist, historian, and author of several books, including his 1997 biography of Whitaker Chambers, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and 2009sThe Death of Conservatism.

Hes also been an editor at theNew York TimesandVanity Fair, and was editor of theNew York Times Book Review. He is working on an authorized biography of conservative leader William F. Buckley, Jr. And Sam hired me as an assistant on that project, doing research way back in the 1990s when I was a grad student at Yale. And now here we are in a pandemic, talking through some kind of computer app. So welcome, Sam!

Sam Tanenhaus: Great to be with you, Geoff. All my research assistants have far surpassed me. Youre only the first of them. Ive seen all your bylines in the newspaper all the time, beginning with yours.

Geoff Kabaservice: Im proud to be your first, Sam. So youve been a politically engaged commentator as well as a historian and biographer. And one benefit of the biographers work of extended reflection on figures like Buckley you notice how artfully I dont mention how long youve been working on this is that you have a kind of perspective that other people lack.

And the questions that we ask about Buckley now, given our knowledge of what has happened since he died nearly a dozen years ago in 2008, those are different questions from what they would have been years ago. So I think part of what we would like to know now is: How did he manage to keep together the often conflicting strains of traditionalist and libertarian style conservatism? And whether a conservative movement would have happened without Buckleys leadership, whether conservatism would have succeeded in taking over the Republican Party?

But I think wed also like to know now what is Buckleys responsibility for the conservative movement leading to Donald Trumps presidency? And given that Buckleys grand-nephew L. Brent Bozell IV was one of those arrested in the storming of the Capitol on January 6th, were the darker traits of conservatism encoded in it from the beginning and destined to be dominant someday?

Was conservatism wrong from the beginning? Does Buckley bear some blame for the direction in which conservatism has developed? And given that the Q Anon movement bears some real similarities to bygone extremist movements on the right such as the John Birch Society, are there lessons to be drawn from Buckleys attempt to marginalize the Birchers and to excommunicate them from the conservative movement?

So thats a bunch of big questions that I hope well get to in the course of this conversation. But I guess right now, for those readers who are not familiar with William F. Buckley Jr., what kind of overview of him would you give? And what was his significance, not just for conservatism, but really for American politics and history?

Sam Tanenhaus: Well, those are the questions. Those are questions Im wrestling with in the book. And as I mentioned to you, two-thirds of the manuscript are now in with a publisher. Ill get the next third in, which is all revision because Im now in a draft where Im turning an inchoate mass of material into what I hope is choate, but its still a mass of material.

And what I found, Geoff, is there were several Buckleys, as there often are with complex figures who are larger than life, and who are brilliant the way he was. So let me touch on a few points. And I hope your audience doesnt object if I call him Bill, for two reasons. One, I knew him quite well. My wife and I became quite close to him. He was instrumental in the writing of the first biography I did of Whittaker Chambers all those years ago.

And second, because people who were close to him And Ill give you two examples to show how wide his range was, because thats what we get to, how big the orbit of Buckley was. Two exceptionally brilliant figures who are very much with us still: the political thinker and analyst Michael Lind, and in many ways, an adversary of his the giant of thought, and criticism, and history, and religion, and many other things, Garry Wills, who was really the most important defector fromNational Reviewand from the Buckley world. [They] always call him Bill. Its always Bill.

And I think one reason they do that is they dont like the WFB, which is what is out there so often. When Im in touch with Christopher Buckley my subjects son, the very prominent writer, the brilliant humorist its always WFB, thats what we call him. He even calls him that.

But Bill is what people who were close to him called him. So thats what Im going to call him now and again. Because there are a lot of Buckleys out there now, and its hard to keep them all straight. So there are just a few things to think about that have been on my mind a lot the past, lets say, year or so, or in the Trump years even.

One is the book changed a little bit, and it became, as you kind of suggested I think pretty directly, it became a How we got here book. And if its a how we got here book, then the question is: Are we here because of Bill Buckley, in spite of Bill Buckley, or are we here partly because of and partly in spite of Bill Buckley?

And those are some of the complications, because he was really a protean figure. So you can look at different aspects of the conservative movement, of American political life, of American cultural life and see Bill Buckleys imprint. Without Bill Buckley theres no Rush Limbaugh. And you think, well, how can that be? Well, Bill invented, really, the modern media presence for a major conservative figure, in the most literal sense, through his program Firing Line. But he was also a mentor and sponsor of Rush Limbaugh, which is really surprising to many people.

So for instance, I was going back and forth with Garry Wills, who knows everything about the early Buckley because he was the first genius they discovered in the 1950s when he was very young and he really was a genius. Willmoore Kendall, one of Buckleys mentors, said This is a genius when he saw some of the early work.

And so Garrys a little surprised about the Bill Buckley and Rush Limbaugh connection. And he said, Limbaugh thats just the kind of vulgarian Bill hated.

And I reminded him, Well, Joe McCarthy was just the kind of vulgarian Bill hated until he took him up. And Bill became Joe McCarthys most articulate defender, in collaboration with Bills brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell. So theres that aspect of Buckley.

There is also the Buckley who was the peerless discoverer of talent. Garry Wills is one. George Will is another. My predecessor at theNew York Times Book Review, John Leonard, was a third who was a superb literary journalist and really the best editor by far in the history of theNew York Times Book Review. And I feel Im qualified to say that because I had the same job. But a brilliant writer and critic. And when Bill hired him, he was 19 years old. He was a Harvard dropout.

Bill was a mentor to Joan Didion who never talks about it any longer, whom many think just kind of wrote occasionally forNational Review. No, she didnt. Go on Unz.com underNational Reviewand youll see the 20 essays she wrote on J.D. Salinger, on Norman Mailer No, she learned a lot atNational Review.

So you have this range of figures as intellectuals whom Bill discovered, nurtured, and groomed. And they come up to the present, Geoff, as you know David Brooks and Rick Brookhiser, theyre somewhat older now, but we remember when they were young, they were all discoveries of Bill Buckley.

But you also had Bill Buckley who was the early champion of Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats inNational Reviewgo back and look at it. This is the subject thats come up the most, I would say, in the past year or two, is Bill Buckley andNational Reviews relationship to race and civil rights.

What many dont realize is the unsigned weekly editorials inNational Reviewcan be identified. Theres a master list at the magazine, which Ive seen, but there are other ways of identifying them as well. Bill wrote most of them.

So when people wonder, Well, did Buckley write that editorial defending the South, when it said black people shouldnt vote? Yeah, the answer is yes. Not only that, and heres an interesting thing Probably the most controversial thing Bill Buckley ever wrote was an editorial inNational Reviewat the time the first modern Civil Rights Act was passed, the 1957 act, which as you know all about, the one that the watered-down bill that made possible the great bill that came in the 1960s. And Bill wrote the notorious editorial that said, the headline is: Why the South Must Prevail.

And so today we look at that and we think, How could he possibly have written such a thing? Well, you probably know he reiterated it word for word two years later in his bookUp from Liberalism. So why would Bill Buckley do that? Because in those days it was not so unusual a thing for a sympathizer with the white segregationist South to say.

Today were appalled and aghast by it. We are right to be appalled and aghast by this. But in those years, thats what people were saying. So then you can ask a question: Should Bill Buckley have known better? Should Bill Buckley have been more generous? Should he have been more available and more open to civil rights arguments?

And we would say, Yeah, he should have been. And then we leaf throughNational Review, and we can hardly find anybody else, any of his colleagues, who was more generous. Wills became so a few years later, and Wills really opened up civil rights and youth politics as a new dimension ofNational Review.

So heres another way of putting it. The simplest way of looking at Bill Buckley is to say he was the most articulate and protean and connected media promoter of whatever the most conservative line in the Republican Party was in his time. And he was not a philosopher. Theres this idea kicking around including at Yale now, which has a program at Yale which you know so well, the William F. Buckley Jr. Program that pretends, or they have deluded themselves, that he was some kind of political philosopher. He would be the first one to tell you he was not. He couldnt be bothered reading most of the books the philosophers wrote, much less to write one himself.

No, he was a journalist. He was an activist. He was a great connector of people. And you knew him He was absolutely enchanting as a person. You never met a person you liked more. Among famous people, of the famous people Ive met I havent met all that many, but of the great people Ive met, he was by far the kindest, the most generous, the best listener, the one who was interested in you rather than himself. He had those extraordinary qualities.

So, for instance, one of his very best friends, the writer he most admired among journalists, was the columnist Murray Kempton, who was very far on the left compared to Bill. Kempton wrote a book defending the Black Panthers and all that. Bill paid for Kemptons columns to be collected and published, because the publisher was not going to take the financial hit.

Bill paid for an editor at theNew York Review of Booksto publish them. And he said, Murray, theres so many great columns here. If you cant decide how many, lets do two volumes instead of one. Because you are the greatest craftsman among journalists of this time and your work should be preserved.

So when you see that book, its called, I thinkPerversitiesand something else theres another P in there, you probably know what it is youll see the dedication, and it says, To Bill Buckley, whose genius for friendship surpasses understanding. So thats the Bill Buckley we look at and we think, Why couldnt there have been more of those around now?

Why couldnt we have someone who would invite an adversary onto his great program,Firing Line? which people now watch just for kicks. They go on YouTube to watch these interviews of Norman Mailer and others. And you think, Well, why cant somebody else just be like him? And the answer is there was never anyone like him before, and theres unlikely to be anyone similar afterward.

You can find people who were smart, who were smarter than he was, who wrote better books than he did, who thought better. Some of his mentors were far better thinkers than he was. Willmoore Kendall, and James Burnham in particular, were far better theorists and spellers-out of principles and arguments than Bill was. But they didnt have Bills genius for living.

Its like the Yeats line: genius goes into the life or the work. Well, for Bill, the life and the work intersected; they were one. He exuded a kind of generosity of spirit, no matter where he happened to come down on some political issue. And thats the thing we miss. Thats what elevated the conversation.

So when Bill publicly is writing about someone like Mailer Norman Mailer, the great writer he calls him every name you can imagine. And then he has him onFiring Line, and it almost looks as if hes trying to seduce him, because he admires his talent, his gift, so much. And thats Bill. So there was a largeness, a capaciousness to him that we dont see elsewhere. Those are personal traits, theyre not political or ideological traits. They dont get passed through a movement the same way.

Geoff Kabaservice: You get lost in reminisces about the personal qualities of Bill Buckley. But I think maybe the political point to put on that is first, yes, Buckley did admire quality from whatever quarter it emerged. But I think he also believed that high culture, for example, was the common property of conservatives as well as people on the left. That was why he hired John Leonard to maintain a culture section, which was actually a pretty good culture section of a magazine. Even though Leonard, when he quit, said thatNational Reviews readers were the stupidest people hed ever encountered in his entire life.

And it was why Buckley criticized theNew York Times, as every conservative has, but he really thought the solution to the problem of theNew York Times dominance was not its demolition but creating a conservativeNew York Timeswhich was just as good. And so in many ways, Buckley is that kind of path just not followed by the conservative movement.

And on some level he could never decide whether he was a conservative in the sense of being a traditionalist or libertarian. He did call one of his volumes of memoirReflections of a Libertarian Journalist. But I think he attached to the Russell Kirk idea that the correct meter is not left versus right, but civilization versus barbarism. And he wanted to be on the side of civilization.

So these are all things that make him an interesting figure. But youre almost talking about him as sort of anomalous. And I think that in many ways he, as the creator of the conservative movement, bred a lot of his DNA into that movement as well.

Sam Tanenhaus: Yes he did. And its interesting too, because if you look at his own history in particular, his fathers ambitions His father was from South Texas. Many people think Buckley descended from New England gentry. He did not. He was the son of two Southerners, one from Duval County, Texas (South Texas) that was his father. His mother was from New Orleans.

Geoff Kabaservice: I was always taken by the fact that one of Buckleys ancestors on his fathers side died in a bar brawl in Texas.

Sam Tanenhaus: Well, yeah, there are questions about that. There were a lot of tall tales told about the Buckleys. The most interesting aspect this gets into material thats far afield But his grandfather was a remarkable figure. What I found was that he wanted to set the family on a course they didnt follow politically. He was going to be a kind of Grover Cleveland, Mugwump reformer as a sheriff in Duval County, Texas. And he was actually indicted by the U.S. government for being involved in a revolution led by a Mexican Tejano. Its a very interesting story

But all that aside, there was something about Buckley that was set apart from the normal run of the Republican Party in the United States. Now, his father And his father was enormously influential, a commanding presence and figure in his life and in some ways the real progenitor, not just of a brilliant son, but of the movement. His father was involved in counter-revolutionary politics.

As Bill later did, his father was secretly working for a Senate investigative committee, in this case looking at the Mexican Revolution in the Woodrow Wilson years. The Buckleys crossed a lot of lines. The Buckleys broke a lot of rules, broke a lot of laws.

Sam Tanenhaus: Bill Buckley was almost indicted for his pursuit of Adam Clayton Powell in the late 1950s. He came very close to getting indicted for jury tampering, and in fact was guilty of it; the judge let him off.

So theres an interesting thing one of Buckleys prep school tutors wrote about him I saw the file. Its not in the Yale archive, the massive Yale archive, its in the Millbrook Prep School archive, which I saw a number of years ago. Its a line that I have in the book and really stayed with me. So hes writing about the 15- or 16-year-old Bill Buckley, and he says, He has to be made to understand that the rules dont exist just to be invoked in his favor.

And if you keep that in mind, you see a lot of how the conservative movement works today. When black people in the South were asking as American citizens for the right to vote, he and others atNational Reviewdismissed that as democratism. When the white backlash came, Bill Buckley wrote a column and he said, Well, the majority has its rights too. They shouldnt be pushed around by these minorities, meaning blacks. And the majority in that case was the white South. And you will see this time and time again.

Bill Buckley was a libertarian, absolutely. One of the original founding principles ofNational Reviewwas opposition to the imperial presidency what one of Bills mentors, James Burnham, called the Caesarist presidency. Bizarrely enough, they thought that Caesar was Dwight Eisenhower. But that was their view.

AndNational Reviewwas founded as a vehicle in support of Joe McCarthy. And Ill get back to that point in a moment. And it was understood to be that; it was not a secret, it was not hidden from anyone. It was McCarthyite intellectuals who foundedNational Review. Thats how they were perceived in the broader culture of that time, the journalistic culture.

And so one founding principle its in their original prospectus for the magazine was opposition to the strong presidency. When Richard Nixon was elected and got in trouble for Watergate, Bill Buckley wrote a column saying, Well, American presidents are essentially monarchs. Why are we telling this guy what to do, what laws he cant break?

Right? We see this time and time again. So as far as the philosophical consistency goes, it doesnt exist; it simply doesnt exist. There are different strands. And then Bill the musician he was a pretty good pianist hits the chord he needs at that time. If its somebody he doesnt like, if its an Adam Clayton Powell, then hes shocked that the system of jurisprudence is not working so Powell will be indicted and sent to jail for tax evasion.

If its black people and civil rights activists who say, Well, maybe the problem in the South is all-white juries which keep turning down every black person who puts in a complaint about not being allowed to vote, then Buckley says, Well, what do we need these jury systems for? There are higher values than jurisprudence when it comes to protecting the superior civilization. It happens over and over and over again.

So you think, Well, how then does this influence what we have now? And the answer is: its everywhere. Thats essentially what our conservative movement is. Its a war against liberalism.

So we have not mentioned the first great mentor, the most underrated figure on the right, because he has been kind of ridiculed in recent years and he was a kind of a ridiculous figure. But he also saw everything. And that was Bills first mentor, Albert Jay Nock, the writer, whos often called a libertarian. Hes called In his book, the comprehensive history of the intellectual movement, George Nash says that had he lived longer he died in 1945 Albert Nock would have been the godfather, the great old man of libertarianism.

But thats not really what he was. He was a social Darwinist. His famous book,Our Enemy the State, is a rewriting of Herbert Spencers book on the predatory state. And if you read enough of Nock, youll see hes a social Darwinist. What I would propose to you is that we come back to ideology forget libertarians, forget traditionalists. Russell Kirk has 15 pages [inThe Conservative Mind] on John Calhoun, who was the philosophical hero for many atNational Review. And Harry Jaffa wrote about this very directly and talked to me about it before he died in 2010.

Russell Kirk has 15 pages defending the great John C. Calhoun. He says hes one of the two outstanding, two preeminent conservatives in American history, conservative thinkers. John Adams was the first. And of course John Adams was the only one of the early presidents who didnt own slaves. And the second was John Calhoun.

And what he said was, Calhoun was the great defender of American minorities. And the only minority that does not get mentioned in those 15 pages is African Americans, whom he wanted to enslave. And this is the contradiction. This is the problem we have with that conservatism. Heres something for the real geeks out there I recommend you read an exchange inNational Reviewfrom the summer of 1965. The first is by Frank S. Meyer another one of the ideologues and mentors atNational Review, very much involved in the Goldwater movement called Lincoln without Rhetoric.

And it essentially makes the argument you hear from the ultra-libertarians today that the great villain in American history is Abraham Lincoln because he brought in the centralized state. He couldnt just make a nice bargain with the Southern states; instead he had to defeat them. And he goes on to say, Frank Meyer does, that this brought on the evils of the New Deal and the evils of his own moment which happened to be the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Then youll see a reply that came a month later. Franks piece ran, I believe, August 24th, 1965. And youll see Harry Jaffas reply from September 21st, 1965. And Jaffa says, this is Im paraphrasing, but its pretty close to accurate Harry leads the piece: Frank Meyer has succeeded in doing something I have never in all my years Jaffa, who some years before had completed one of the masterworks on Lincoln,Crisis of the House Divided, on the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Harry Jaffa says, Frank Meyer has succeeded in doing something I dont think Ive ever seen before. He has written an extended essay on Abraham Lincoln and his legacy and the Civil War, and has not once mentioned or even alluded to slavery. I dont think Ive seen that before.

Geoff Kabaservice: Is there a racial or at least ethnic component to Nocks idea of the Remnant?

Sam Tanenhaus: Yes. I dont think there was initially, but I think there later was, after he began to be nervous at all the Turks and Jews he saw rubbing shoulders in the reading rooms of the New York Public Library. Yes, I think so.

Geoff Kabaservice: Something interesting about Buckley, though, and the conservative movement, is that Buckley first comes to public prominence with the publication in 1951 ofGod and Man at Yale. Its this kind of slashing attack on his alma mater for insufficiently defending capitalism and Christianity which is ironic given how conservative Yale really was at that point.

Sam Tanenhaus: And he knew that too, by the way.

Geoff Kabaservice: And he knew that. But Buckley then makes various thwarted attempts to get a conservative magazine going before he startsNational Reviewas the flagship of this new intellectual conservatism in 1955. And he is well aware that the conservative movement is a difficult proposition because of the bad image that most Americans have of the right, which comes from having fought Nazi-ism in World War II and being well aware that theres still a considerable amount of antisemitism on the right. And Buckley takes pains to oppose antisemitism. He hires many Jewish (or at least formerly Jewish) people onto his staff and claims at least to have no truck with antisemitism. And he certainly breaks with people who he had worked for and with, for that reason. And yet this logic does not carry over to black people or other groups who are minorities in this country.

Sam Tanenhaus: Youve touched on a really interesting point there, because heres something If there are any masters students, MA students or Ph.D. students out there who might listen to us, looking for a topic, one I would suggest is the anti-black feeling racially fairly intense biological racism of the Jews in theNational Reviewcircle and in libertarian circles.

Murray Rothbard was one. Frank Chodorov. Frank Meyer. Ayn Rand was a defender of segregation; she opposed the Civil Rights Act. The interesting thing is, all of those libertarians were Jews right after Nazi-ism. Im allowed to say this because Im a Jew. Here you have a group of Jewish intellectuals who think the problem is the state trying to intervene to protect a minority. It really boggles the mind. But youll remember it gave us, at the end, Murray Rothbard siding with the police who beat up Rodney King in Los Angeles. There was an odd thing that happened there.

So, Im going to do a little sideline again, because here were talking about this One of the most famous early pieces as you know very well, and some of our listeners will know too published inNational Reviewwas Whitaker Chambers very strong critique ofAtlas Shrugged, Ayn Rands novel. This was in the winter of 1957. And theres a whole joke that works through it which most people will miss, and that is that Atlas seemed a very maladroit title because Atlas was the name of one of the American missile systems that kept fizzling on the launch pad.

So this idea of Atlas shrugging, it looks like the pictures of the missiles that would fall. And Chambers had some fun with that. He talks about these materialist systems that come crashing down to earth when they go up in the sky, and all the rest. Chambers was, by the way, the only person atNational Reviewwho thought Sputnik was a great breakthrough. The others either thought it was a hoax or pretended that it didnt make any difference.

So in his attack onAtlas Shrugged, Chambers has a very famous line He said, Her message seems to be, Go to the gas chamber.' And that was really upsetting to Rand and her circle because almost every single one of them was Jewish. And they thought, Who is Chambers the Christian communist, they called him to be telling Jews that they seem to promote gas chambers? And of course the famous letter was published inNational Reviewby the very young Alan Greenspan, who was a Randian at the time.

But I realized now, all these years later, coming back to Chambers and Buckley and all the rest, Chambers saw something. He saw there was a paradox here. Remember, Chambers was married to a Jewish woman and many of his closest friends when he was coming up through the intellectual world in New York were Jews at Columbia. So its not a question of the country club guy who says, Well, I wont let them into my club, but some of my best friends are Jews.

No, Chambers grew up among Jewish intellectuals. That was his world. And he saw something. He saw there was something profoundly disturbing in this, in somebody Because remember, Rand, she was an immigrant from St. Petersburg whod come over earlier than the others. She came over in the 1920s and had gone out to Hollywood; she had a different career from the other immigrants. But he saw something there that I think is really important. And its surprising, Geoff, if you go throughNational Reviewall the way through the 1970s, in their book pages edited by Frank Meyer, they are publishing surprisingly indulgent analyses of tracts on biological racism by writers like Nathaniel Weyl and Ernest van den Haag.

Theres an interesting moment in 64, I think it is Bill Buckley was very impressed by an essay that van den Haag (who taught at Columbia) had written defending bigotry, racial prejudice, and segregation. And so Bill sent it to two (at that time) liberal journalists he really admired, Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell. And they both told him, This stuff was discredited decades ago. This guy is doing the old racial arguments nobody believes anymore.

And Bill didnt believe them. You can see it in the correspondence. Youll remember he told the real racists, There arent biological differences. There may be mild cultural differences. But Bill himself thought Jews were smarter than Gentiles. So he was willing to accept that maybe pure intellect is not that important. But he was surprisingly indulgent And as you yourself have noted I dont know whether youve done it in print, certainly you and I have discussed this as weve teamed up on the research weve done Bill kept up pretty friendly relations with some quite notable antisemites for a really long time.

Geoff Kabaservice: Gerald L. K. Smith, for example.

Sam Tanenhaus: Gerald L. K. Smith. Merwin K. Hart was a really important figure someones writing a book on Hart. Let me throw something else in here too, Geoff, and I know were going far afield, but here we are Bills first political movement, remember, that he was involved in and all his siblings were was the America First Movement.

I have a lot of pages in my book on America First. Bills first idol was Lindbergh also Gore Vidals idol, which is kind of fun. If you look at Bills first novel, his first Blackford Oakes novel, youll see he calls him the great advocate for peace. Hell never changed his mind about Lindbergh.

And theres a biography of Bill that came out a few years ago that mistakes which of the Lindbergh rallies Bill Buckley attended. There were two in New York. One was in May of 41 and one was the very last rally before Pearl Harbor. That was the one Bill Buckley was at, which is notorious today for the Bellamy salutes that youve seen in photographs. Now, Bill Buckley did not do that. He was a Lindbergh idolater. But from internal evidence, documentary evidence, its very clear thats the rally he attended.

And Lindbergh, as we know I recommend Sarah Churchwells book to people who are interested in the whole idea of America First and also the American dream; she very cleverly shows how theyre complementary ideas. Lindbergh was very much a race theorist, a subscriber to racial theories. Absolutely no doubt about it. The first magazine Bill read closely was one that was essentially banned by the government for being pro-Nazi. It was calledScribners Commentatorand was published for just a few years, from 39 to 41 or 42. That was the first magazine Bill Buckley ever subscribed to. And Albert Jay Nock wrote for it after he was banned from other publications.

So theres a very strong America First component in that ideology. And we tend to think it went away because the anticommunists were internationalists. But theres a key word, theres a key linking word, that Arthur Schlesinger and Richard Rovere thought they were coining. The word actually was already in the vocabulary, and they kind of knew it but they didnt bother tracing the genealogy. But they reintroduced it as a joke, as a satirical term, which they called unilateralist. Because if you think about it, the word unilateralist is almost a contradiction in terms. But thats what connects That concept is what connects America First to the extreme anti-communism of the 50s, because theyre both about America going it alone. So youll see a lot of praise inNational Reviewfor people like Curtis LeMay and theWings For Peacepeople, the ones who thought that if you strapped enough megatonnage onto B-52 bombers they could circle the globe the Doctor Strangelove thesis.National Reviewwas very much behind that. So thats the America First carryover. Its the Fortress America argument.

Geoff Kabaservice: And of course Buckley and his brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell co-authored a book calledMcCarthy and His Enemies, which was really a defense of McCarthy or at least McCarthyism.

Sam Tanenhaus: Yes. And its interesting you say that, because what they tried to do was to set McCarthy himself aside, even though Bill really liked McCarthy. Bill had this personal loyalty; its one of the things I like about him. If you were his friend, you were going to stay his friend. And McCarthy was quite a genial person for those who got to know him, if you drank with him or you went to the racetrack with him. Joe McCarthy would call Bill at home and trade stock market tips with Pat Buckley, Bills wife, that sort of thing. McCarthy as we know dated some of the Kennedy sisters and all these other things.

In that book, what people noticed at the time reviewers like Richard Rovere, the great journalist of theNew Yorker is theres not a word in that very long book about McCarthys own biography. They say nothing about him, because they werent interested in him. They wanted to create around him an honorable McCarthyism. And thats another one of their really notorious statements, right? McCarthyism is a movement that men of stern moral discipline can gather behind.

See, now were getting close to Trump and Trumpism. So you have defenders, champions of Trump on the American Greatness blog, and theyre intellectuals, theyre very smart. Theyre good writers and theyre well-read and they know languages, just the way theNational Reviewcrowd did multilingual, remarkable figures. When John Leonard, the young John Leonard, first met them Ive seen his letters, theyre in an archive at Columbia University, he wrote letters home he describes his first meeting with Bill Buckley. And he said, You have no idea what these people are like. Theyre called every name in the book, but you cant believe how brilliant they are. They quote reams of poetry. Theyre incredibly sophisticated.

William Rusher, Bill Rusher, with his wine collection and his eidetic memory for verse, he could do hundreds of lines of poetry he could recite. And Burnham and Kendall and Meyer and Whitaker Chambers some of them spoke three and four languages. Chambers was going to translate Proust at one point when he was young, even while he was a communist. So they have all these qualities about them. And Bill, tooEnglish, you know, was his third language.

So the idea, by the way, that he wrote a letter to the King of England about the war debt when he was six if he did it, he wrote it in Spanish. And he couldnt write Spanish because he learned Spanish from his nursemaids, and they were not writers. Thats one of these myths that surrounds Buckley. Its kind of fun to poke little holes in those. You just think it through logically: of course he didnt write a letter to the King of Spain when he was six. You have seen the letters he wrote when he was seven and eight years old.

At any rate, what they wanted to do was to create an idea of McCarthyism that had nothing to do with Joe himself. And this is part of the problem. Garry Wills was telling me the other day He remembered a conversation he had with Frank Meyer, who had been his mentor after they discovered him at this incredibly young age he was 23 when they discovered him, had just left the Jesuit seminary. And Meyer asked him a question about Aristotle, and he said, Now, is this argument in Aristotle? And Garry Wills said, No, its not. And in his note, Gary actually gives me the Greek terms. And Meyer says, Well, it ought to be. It should be in Aristotle. And Garry said, Thats it. Yeah, thats it: if its not in Aristotle, it should be in Aristotle. If Joe McCarthy isnt a great guy, well, he ought to be a great guy because we agree with him. Hes going off to fight liberals.

Geoff Kabaservice: Buckley and Bozell had studied at the feet of Willmoore Kendall at Yale. And Kendall opposed the Bill of Rights; he didnt think the founders actually intended to pass the Bill of Rights. But he wanted society to be ruled by an extremely coercive mentality and morality and standards. And in that sense theres kind of an anti-democratic element encoded in conservatism from the beginning as well.

Sam Tanenhaus: At the same time, Kendall called himself a majority-rule Democrat. He had the famous formulation: 50% of the population plus one equals a majority. And its funny, Geoff, because he made that argument about McCarthy. McCarthy never really got to that 50%. Maybe for about Its the argument you hear about Trump now: Everybody loves Trump. Well, they dont. 74 million people is still 7 million less than voted for the other guy. It is interesting.

Well, you may remember theres a paper Bill wrote when he took the seminar with Kendall, and at the bottom Willmoore wrote: I think the First Amendment is going to have to go. Remember he says that? And its about McCarthyism. Its defending McCarthy. I have a lot on that.

The text people should read to really understand Kendall, who was an extraordinary figure he was hugely influential on Garry Wills too. The text they should read is Saul Bellows short story, Mosbys Memoirs. Wills was the first one to point out in his book,Confessions of a Conservative, that its clearly a portrait of Kendall. And he said to me, I think Frank Meyer told me that. Because Meyer knew all the literary gossip.

Then you know theres a scholar, a young scholar at North Carolina named Joshua Tait, who went through the Kendall papers (which are not cataloged) and found the letter Saul Bellow wrote to Kendalls widow explaining exactly when and how hed known Willmoore Kendall. Hed known him in Minneapolis when they were part of the Hubert Humphrey circle. Hed known him again in Paris, hed known him in Chicago, and he wrote one of his most famous short stories about him. Mosbys Memoirs is the title of the first collection of short stories that Bellow published. It was published in theNew Yorkernot long after Kendall died. And if you were part of the very small circle, you knew that. You can read James Atlas very good biography of Saul Bellow, which discusses that short story, and not see Kendalls name mentioned. There was a kind of inner circle that this group inhabited. Let me say

Now Im going to get to one of Bills great sides, because weve talked about some of the questionable things with his politics. He made people feel that they belonged to an exclusive club when they came toNational Review. You know this, you are the expert on this in these United States, about how the elite operated at Yale. And part of Bills genius was He was welcomed into the club. He was the last man tapped for Bones. And heres the thing to think about If the great [African-American] football player, Levi Jackson, had not turned Bones down, we mightve gotten a different picture of race from Bill Buckley. Youve probably thought about that, right?

Geoff Kabaservice: Sure.

Sam Tanenhaus: Because Bill was all about personal relationships. I can see Bill saying, How can I oppose the Civil Rights Act and look at Levi across the table when we have dinner next? Thats what he would have done. Thats the best to Bill Buckley. Thats what he would have done at any rate, thats what Id like to think.

See the rest here:

The Man Behind the Modern Conservative Movement, with Sam Tanenhaus - Niskanen Center

"Capital still pats labor on th' back, but on'y with an axe. Labor ray-fuses to be threated as a frind. It wants to be threated as an inimy. It thinks it gets more that way. They are still a happy fam'ly, but it's more like an English fam'ly. They don't speak."

--Mr. Dooley

They don't speak, all right. The first we've heard of this year's PRO Act was when French Hill shotgun-blasted an email saying that he'd voted against it. This hasn't exactly been covering up the front pages. But when even close news-watchers have missed it, you know those behind it don't want it noised about.

The PRO Act--more formally known as the Protect the Right to Organize Act--is supposed to be labor's No. 1 priority in the early Biden years. Elections have consequences, and the consequence of the last one is that the White House is very pro-union.

During the campaign, Candidate Joe Biden said he would be "the most pro-union president you've ever seen." His party is working to make that come true.

To make things easier on unions, or perhaps just harder for businesses, the House of Representatives has passed a measure that would give workers more power to form unions, and other abilities. The Washington Post calls it "one of the most significant bills to strengthen workers' abilities to organize in the past 80 years."

How significant it will be, however, depends on the U.S. Senate, which still has the filibuster (for now).

Here are a few provisions of the legislation:

Most states (27 in all, including Arkansas) have right-to-work laws that allow workers to opt out of their company's union and not pay union dues. But such workers still get the benefits of the union contracts.

The PRO Act "would allow unions to override such laws and collect dues from those who opt out," according to NPR. And the "law would prevent an employer from using its employees' immigration status against them when determining the terms of their employment."

Meetings by companies to lobby against a union effort (many times attendance is mandatory) would become illegal.

The bill could allow gig workers at Uber and Lyft to form unions, too, by classifying them as employees rather than contractors.

There are line items that allow for penalties and fines, of course.

The PRO Act? You have to love the titles of legislation coming out of Congress. It reminds us of the Employee Free Choice Act by Ted Kennedy a dozen years ago, which limited free choice by employees. Or the high-sounding names for low congressional proposals in "Atlas Shrugged."

"Once again," Rep. Hill said in his email, "House Democrats are using a fancy title to blur their real intentions, which are to favor unions and union bosses at the expense of Arkansas workers and families. The so-called PRO Act would overturn the laws of Arkansas and 26 other right-to-work states . . . .

"The bill also violates worker privacy, removes secret ballot protections, and potentially creates costly fines for small businesses if they misinterpret the legal requirements included in the PRO Act."

It would be more honest if its proponents would just call the legislation the PRO-Union Act. Because the bill would stop the falling participation in labor unions across the country almost immediately. No matter what employees want. If this thing passes, every shop would be a closed shop.

The Senate can keep things open. It still has the filibuster.

For now.

Read more:

OPINION | EDITORIAL: The PRO-union Act - Arkansas Online

Few games ever reach the heights of literary reference thatBioShockdoes.The original has stood the test of time because of its gameplay and innovative setting. While we can't say that everything in the game was about Ayn Rand and whatthe series wants to teach about a philosophy,playershave a deeper experience when they know the author's work. The themes, characters, and even plot devices in the game are a criticism (in an academic and literal sense) of the ideas she unleashed in the 1950s.

RELATED: 10 Years Later: 15 Things You STILL Didn't Know About BioShock

However, the page count for the original edition of Atlas Shrugged, Rand's magnum opus, came in at an uber-healthy 1,168 pages. Her nonfiction does not mince words either, so it's understandable if the more intriguing details of what's in BioShock escapes a player.Dig into all that Bioshock truly has to offer by learning a bit more about the inspiration behind the games.

Ayn Rand uses the phrase "Who is John Galt?" as the central metaphor for Atlas Shrugged. Characters use it as a way to express futility or to dismiss something as unknowable. Beyond the obvious connection between names, the character who drives the plot of BioShock has other parallels with Rand's heroic protagonists.

"Who is Atlas?" posters found throughout Rapture maintain the spirit of mystery from Atlas Shrugged, but it's more of a taunt than in the 1957 novel. While Atlas in BioShock wants to taunt Andrew Ryan, "Who is John Galt?" is more of a sigh than a threat until the end of the book. However, that doesn't mean this isn't a great plot device that creates incredible if unlikely theories.

Men and women who hold the world on their shoulders abandon a society filled with "leeches" in Atlas Shrugged. Rand's novel suggests that if people like Elon Musk or Bill Gates retreated from public life, the "evil moochers" of the world would burn everything to the ground without "real entrepreneurs" to improve everyone's lives. In other words, Objectivism (the philosophy behind Rand's works) suggests thatsociety needs the rich unless people want to watch everything crumble into dust.

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When Andrew Ryan describes why he chose to build Rapture under the sea, it's reminiscent of John Galt telling the protagonist of Atlas Shrugged about his secret mountain retreat. In Rand's world, when takers start oppressing the makers, the latter should refuse to give others anymore of their brilliance.Regardless of the next game's location, fans can only guess what the setting of BioShock 4 will have to say about thistopic.

Conservatives in America have adopted Ayn Rand as a heroic figure, but that number would dwindle if more knew she was an atheist. Some have assumed that theinspiration for the phrasepictured above came from Ken Levine. But it was the intellectual mother of modern Libertarian philosophy who viewed God as an illogical crutch for the weak-minded.

During a national TV interview, Rand literally "tsk-tsked" at the concept of believing in God. After all, when humans are capable of building skyscrapers, what use is there for spiritual intervention? The real heroes worthy of worship in Objectivism create tangible results and don't feel entitled to their success like a king or queen.

Players arenot in Rapture much longer than ten minutes beforethey get their first plasmid injection. It's easy to understand why anyone can get their hands on these after the collapse. But how could something so dangerous go so unregulated? Even the most hard-nosed capitalists could see that the ends may not justify the profits with this invention, right?

In Rand's style of laissez-faire capitalism, the market decides everything. Ifsomeone makes a product that kills people, they won't buy that product, and they'll go out of business. However, we see real-world failures of this concept with items like cigarettes. If someone wanted to sell a product that gave people superpowers on the streets of Rapture, Andrew Ryan would have no problem letting that happen despite the potential ramifications.

This famous phrase from the game could have sprung out of the mind of Ayn Rand herself. The philosophy of Objectivism's central tenet is that people make money according to their contributions. In other words, Rand would have suggested that a janitor shouldn't get paid as much as the CEO because he has nothing to do with profitability.

But the author takes that concept to new heights in her most well-known novel Atlas Shrugged. The brilliant minds of the world who make products and take the economy's wheel abandon society because they're tired of people "stealing" their profits. The problem with valuing a person based on their economic value plays out in horrific ways in Andrew Ryan's underwater city.

Art Deco architecture heralds back to a golden era of prosperity in America. In fact, that's enough to provide a contrast to BioShock's narrative by itself. However, Rand had so much love for skyscrapers that she made the protagonist of her novel "The Fountainhead" an architect. While that novel didn't sell as well as her next one, there are clues about how Ken Levine frames his vision of Objectivism's endgame in the design for Rapture.

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Ayn Rand fled Soviet Russia in 1926 and fell in love with the skyline of New York. Skyscrapers are more than phenomenons of a capitalist society to her. Atlas Shrugged uses steel manufacturing and the buildings created from it as a metaphor for the best of humanity's values and ideals. For Bioshock, the beauty of the buildings belies the terrors within.

Atlas Shrugged divides society intobinary categories: creators and moochers. The former builds innovative products or companies that change how people live and provide jobs to the masses. The latter benefits from the brilliance and successes of others while complaining about their awful lot in life. Setting the merits (or lack thereof) within this context is at least one way to build a dystopia in video games.

The "Makers & Takers" posters found in Rapture mirror Rand's heavy-handed metaphor from Atlas Shrugged albeit in a cuter way. Ryan the Lion is the hero of these cartoons while Peter the Parasite is the most menacing-looking mouse in BioShock history. No matter what metaphor he may have chosen, Ken Levine must have spent time lugging Ayn Rand's novel to and from the office while developing the game.

It's notable that "brilliant" businessman Andrew Ryan allows his underwater retreat for super Republicans to fall apart due to a "working man" antagonist. The player is told during a critical point in the gamethat "They come to Rapture thinking they're gonna be captains of industry, but they all forget that somebody's gotta scrub the toilets."

While it's easy to criticize Ken Levine's choices as knocking people over the head with a setting as a living metaphor, this subtle moment is possibly the best criticism of Objectivism in the game. For all the posturing about "captains of industry" having a rightful claim to ownership and riches in America, no one can accomplish any of it without someone to clean the bathrooms at the end of the day.

When they get tired of being torn down by their "betters," the result is some version of the political statements about Rapture in BioShock (and we're going to have to learn how to deal with it).

Andrew Ryan's prophetic and famous warning ties perfectly into Ayn Rand's philosophy. One of the core concepts of Objectivism is that people make money according to their value to the market. If you choose to follow and never contribute, you can't expect to receive more in life than what your choices have brought to you.

RELATED: BioShock: The 10 Worst Things Andrew Ryan Has Done

This ties in directly withone of the most memorable quotes from BioShock:"We all make choices, but in the end, our choices make us." While BioShock centers around the illusion of choice in a laissez-faire capitalist society that mutated, Rand focused on socialism as the thief of humanity's noble ambitions. Taking the central tenets of Objectivism and providing a critique of it was the perfect device for literary criticism within the plot.

Children make an appearance in Ayn Rand's work, but that's the extent of their interaction with adults. After establishing a world of makers and takers in a novel like Atlas Shrugged, there's no room left forconsidering how to raise a child in her philosophy. The Simpsons even provided commentary on this phenomenon in Rand's work in Season 4 Episode 2, "A Streetcar Named Marge."

While no one goes so far as to call children looters or moochers, it's notable how littlea group of humans is dealt with in Ayn Rand's fiction. One can argue that she only mentioned or used children for whatever value they could bring to the equation. In Rapture, that math gave us the Little Sisters and their half-frightening, half-adorable relationship with the Big Daddies. Itwas so important to the creators that they wanted to have gamers play as a Little Sister in BioShock 2.

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Aaron Wolfe is a freelance writer from Seattle, WA. He has experience as an English Language Arts Teacher with reading and writing specialist endorsements. Aaron also worked with Microsoft Partners to transition businesses to cloud solutions. He's a life-long gamer and PC enthusiast with a passion for collecting retro games.

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BioShock: 10 Things In The Video Game That Only Make Sense If You Read Ayn Rand - TheGamer

Alisa Rosenbaum was one of the most controversial writers in Americas history. Why, then, have few people heard of her? Because both peoples plaudits and their intemperate attacks have been aimed at the new name she adopted after leaving Russia for AmericaAyn Rand.

Her influence is beyond question. She sold more than 30 million books, and decades after her 1982 death, hundreds of thousands more sell each year. Atlas Shrugged has been ranked behind only the Bible as a book that influenced readers lives.

Some are devoted enough that Randian has become a descriptive term. Others use her name only to disparage opponents. Still others disagree with some of her ideas (e.g., while Rand was an often-strident atheist, capitalism is clearly defensible on Christian principles, and most historical defenses of liberty employed Christian rationales which conflict with Rands reasoning), yet find a great deal of insight in her analysis of liberty, rights and government.

As we mark the anniversary of Rands February 2 birth, consider some of her most insightful words:

However much some adore Ayn Rand and others despise her, those who seek wisdom wherever it can be found will find serious food for thought in her words on liberty, rights and government.

When so many promote the cognitive dissonance of pursuing supposed collective or social justice by the unjust expedient of violating the rights of individuals who make up society, she can stimulate our thought about foundational questions. And that is crucial, because, as George Mason said, No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.

See the rest here:

35 of Ayn Rand's Most Insightful Quotes on Rights, Individualism, and Government | Gary M. Galles - Foundation for Economic Education

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell speaks during a news conference. (Tom Brenner / Pool via AP)

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The US Senate was a mistake. Its a fundamentally antidemocratic institution that gives political power to land instead of people, and it was structured that way at the request of slavers who worried about losing their right to hold people in bondage. Abolishing it should have been part of the conditions of surrender at Appomattox.1

As it is, nothing can be done to change the Senates antidemocratic structure. (Article V of the Constitution literally mandates that equal representation of the states must be preserved in the chamber.) But something can be done about the Senates anti-majoritarian nature. Ending the filibuster is one way to make the Senate less beholden to a ruthless minority and more responsive to the majority of its members. Its also the only practical way for Democrats to move their agenda through Congress, because many Republicans just proved theyd rather overthrow the government than work with the Biden administration.2

Unfortunately, senators generally like the filibuster.It gives each and every one of them the power to grind democratic self-government to a halt.That was made evident at the start of the new Senate term, when minority leader Mitch McConnell staged a week of parliamentary temper tantrums to try to force the Democrats to promise they wouldnt end the filibuster. He finally relented when Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema reiterated their long-standing commitment to keeping it intact.3

But what does that promise really mean?4

The filibuster refers generally to the ability of any senator to delay or block a vote on a bill. But when people talk about ending the filibuster, what they really mean is reforming the rules of cloture. Cloture is the procedure that ends Senate debate and allows the body to vote on legislation and move forward with the peoples business. Its this process that needs to be changed.5

The cloture rules have been rewritten multiple times over the course of US history. The current rules have been in place only since 1975. Thats when thenSenate majority leader Mike Mansfield, a Montana Democrat, pushed a change to Rule 22one that allowed the Senate to achieve cloture with a three-fifths majority (60 votes) as opposed to two-thirds (67 votes), which had been the rule since the Wilson administration. That would have been fine, but Mansfields new three-fifths majority applied to the total number of senators (all 100) instead of those who were actually in the building at the time a vote was taken. That massively changed how the filibuster could be deployed. Instead of minority senators having to be physically present for the entire filibuster, only a single one needs to be there. In addition, since 1970, Mansfield had allowed the Senates work to proceed on two tracks, meaning members could continue to debate and vote on other bills while one was held up by a filibuster, awaiting cloture. The age of the talking filibusterthink Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washingtonwas over.6

One can see why all this sounded very progressive in 1975. On paper, the change made for less gridlock. In practice, it has been a disaster. The use of the filibuster has skyrocketed, largely because it costs the members of the minority nothing. They dont have to talk; they dont even have to be present. And they dont have to explain to the American people why C-Span is showing Ted Cruz reading Atlas Shrugged for eight hours a day while Americans suffer and die.7Current Issue

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Fixing this doesnt require centrist Democrats to abandon the filibusters anti-majoritarian principles in favor of aggressive progressive policies; it simply requires them to go back and fix one of their own mistakes. Letsto borrow a phrasemake the filibuster great again. Lets require the minority to do something to exercise it. The people who are against cloture should have to be in the chamber, all day and all night, to vote against it. The Senate should have to stop all other business until one side or the other relents.8

Im confident Democrats would win these battles, if only they would fight them. I can imagine an army of volunteers providing food, water, and moral support to Democrats as they battle to the last to preserve the Affordable Care Act. I can imagine Republicans looking like fools as they filibuster Covid-19 relief. And I can imagine both parties using the filibuster only as a last-ditch effort to protect some cherished belief, not as a de facto requirement that nearly all bills must get 60 votes to pass.9

Are Manchin and Sinema against that? Do they have a principled reason to support the cowards filibuster?10

We dont have to nuke the filibuster (though many of us would still like to). We just have to make senators show up to work and account for their actions. Thats not too much to ask. And if it is, well, thats just another reason we should abolish the whole chamber and start over.11

Originally posted here:

If Senators Wont Kill the Filibuster, They Should at Least Sweat for It - The Nation