Category Archives: Atlas Shrugged

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For billionaire Ken Griffin, it was well worth spending $54 million to ensure he and other rich Illinoisans wouldnt have to pay more tax.

By the time Illinois voters streamed into voting booths on Election Day in 2020, Griffin, then Illinois wealthiest resident, had made sure theyd heard plenty about why they should not vote to raise taxes on him and the states other rich people. His tens of millions paid for an unrelenting stream of ads and flyers against an initiative on that years ballot, which would have allowed Illinois lawmakers to join 32 other states in setting higher tax rates for the wealthy than for everyone else.

In the end, Griffin spent about $18 for every one of the 3.1 million votes against the initiative. After initial optimism about its prospects, the measure came up hundreds of thousands of votes short and went down to defeat.

Rarely does the public get a clear view of the payoff for wealthy Americans who put their money down to achieve a political outcome. But in this case, ProPublicas trove of IRS data can provide crucial context for the ballot fight. For Griffin and many of his fellow ultrawealthy Illinoisans, spending even such a vast amount was well worth it when compared with what a tax hike might have cost them.

According to the data, Griffin averaged an annual income of $1.7 billion from 2013 to 2018. That was the fourth-highest in the country, behind only the likes of Bill Gates.

Using that average income as a guideline, the new state tax increase, which aimed to raise the rate from 5% to 8% on the highest incomes, would have cost Griffin around $51 million every year in extra tax. In especially good years in 2018, Griffin reported income of almost $2.9 billion he might have been forced to pay more than $80 million more.

A Citadel spokesperson responding on Griffins behalf pointed out that, according to ProPublicas previously published data, Griffin paid the second-highest amount of taxes of any American from 2013 to 2018. Over the past decade, he said in a statement, it is almost a certainty that Ken has been the largest individual taxpayer in the State of Illinois a state notorious for profligate spending and rampant corruption. Griffin has said hes not against raising taxes; he opposed the measure, he added in his statement, because Illinois needs to put its fiscal house in order before burdening hard-working families with yet more taxes.

The states current flat tax rate of 5% is far below the top rates in other large states run by Democrats like California and New York and comparable to those in some Republican-led states like Utah. Advocates for raising the rates on the wealthy in Illinois say the state needs additional revenue, pointing to its regular budget deficits and deep pension debts.

Not all Griffins political bets pay off. A candidate for Illinois governor he supported with tens of millions of dollars went down to defeat in Junes Republican primary. Meanwhile, even though the income tax initiative was defeated, Griffin announced last month that he was moving Citadels headquarters to Miami and relocating there himself.

Though no other donor to the anti-tax fight came close to matching the tens of millions that Griffin gave, others made contributions that were more than what most Illinois households earn in a year. ProPublica analyzed the tax data of nine other ultrawealthy supporters of Griffins anti-tax campaign. According to our estimate, this group of heirs and business owners, which includes some of the wealthiest people in Illinois, can expect to see a healthy return on their contributions and save millions in taxes over the coming years.

The math behind our estimate is simple: Wealthy Illinoisans will save about 3% of their income, because that was the size of the proposed tax increase on the wealthy. Thats essentially how Illinois state income taxes work for Illinois residents. With some adjustments, a state tax rate is applied to the income listed on their federal returns. ProPublica contacted all 10 of the anti-tax donors mentioned in this article and the accompanying chart. None challenged the methodology used to estimate their tax savings.

For Ultrawealthy Illinoisans, It Paid to Oppose Tax Hike on the Rich

Some of the states richest people spent big to defeat a ballot initiative that would have enabled a higher tax rate on the rich. Using IRS data, ProPublica estimated how much some of the biggest backers saved when the measure failed.

Richard Uihlein, who along with Griffin has emerged as a conservative megadonor on the national stage, pitched in $100,000 to the anti-tax campaign for him a modest amount given his average annual income of $492 million in recent years. Through his family foundation, Uihlein has also given millions of dollars to the Illinois Policy Institute, a small-government group that fought the graduated tax plan. Uihleins average income would lead to about $15 million of annual tax savings from the defeat of the ballot initiative.

Sam Zell, the real estate mogul known in Chicago for putting together a leveraged buyout of the Tribune Company that preceded its bankruptcy, gave $1.1 million. Based on his recent income, he would save $1.6 million in taxes each year. A spokesperson for Zell declined to comment.

Patrick Ryan made his billions in insurance, and Northwestern Universitys football stadium and basketball arena bear his familys name, thanks to the hundreds of millions hes given the school. He gave $1 million. His recent income suggests $2.1 million in annual tax savings.

Richard Colburn, whose billionaire family owns the electrical parts maker CED, gave $500,000 to the anti-tax campaign, which would help save him $5.5 million each year in taxes, according to our estimates. In an email message to ProPublica, Colburn said his reasons for opposing the graduated tax were simple: It would have eaten substantially into his investment earnings, some of which he passes on to a nonprofit foundation he manages. Like Griffin, he contended the state would not have used the money well.

Though I enjoy living in the Chicago area, I could save immensely by moving to a lower-tax state, and therefore I invested to limit the temptation on me to relocate, Colburn wrote. Another element of my investment stems from my desire to limit the mis-spending by the State of Illinois that occurs every time Springfield has extra money. (His full statement is here.)

Donald Wilson, founder of the trading firm DRW, gave $250,000 to the anti-tax campaign. That donation in particular looks modest when weighed against his potential tax savings: Based on Wilsons average annual income of $114 million, the proposed tax increase would have cost him $3.5 million more every year.

Some of the contributions to the anti-tax campaign came from trusts, special legal entities often used by the wealthy to hide or protect assets, as well as to avoid the estate tax. Richard Stephenson, founder of a chain of for-profit hospitals called Cancer Treatment Centers of America, contributed $300,000 through his Celebrate Life Trust. Stephenson is a longtime Republican donor and such an enthusiast of Ayn Rands message of uncompromising self-interest that he was an executive producer on two movies based on the novel Atlas Shrugged.

Uihlein, Ryan, Wilson and Stephenson also did not respond to requests for comment.

One $25,000 contribution came from the Philip M. Friedmann Family Charitable Trust. Friedmann made his fortune by selling the greeting card company he co-founded to a private equity firm.

Friedmanns trust, unlike Stephensons, is a personal foundation. That means Friedmann likely received a tax deduction for donating to his own organization, which then used some of the funds to fight an increase in his taxes.

The contribution to the anti-tax campaign by Friedmanns foundation appears to have violated federal tax law, three nonprofit tax law experts told ProPublica. Personal foundations are prohibited from spending to try to influence legislation, a category that includes contributions to a ballot initiative committee, said Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a law professor at Notre Dame. Organizations that break that law are required to pay a penalty of up to 25% of the expenditure in addition to attempting to retrieve the money.

Although this prohibition is spelled out on the IRS online guide for private foundations, smaller family foundations dont always know the applicable rules, said Ellen Aprill, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University.

Friedmann did not respond to requests for comment.

Illinois didnt have an income tax of any kind until 1969, when a deal between GOP Gov. Richard Ogilvie and Democratic Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley resulted in a flat statewide tax of 2.5% on individuals and 4% on corporations. Some Democrats said the tax disproportionately punished low-income families, and pushed for higher rates on the wealthy. But Republicans and other critics argued for expiration dates or rate limits, warning that otherwise lawmakers would simply keep hiking and expanding income taxes. The following year, a compromise was encoded in the states updated constitution. It clarified that the General Assembly had the power to impose an income tax but only at a non-graduated rate.

As the states fiscal problems grew in the following decades, governors and legislators repeatedly raised the flat tax rate until it was up to 5% on individuals. In 2014, multimillionaire private equity investor Bruce Rauner, a Republican backed by Griffin, was elected governor after promising to slash taxes, and the rate was lowered to 3.75%. But as Rauner fell into a bitter standoff with the Democratic-controlled General Assembly, the state went without a budget for more than two years, leaving it in an even deeper financial hole.

The General Assembly, including some Republicans, voted in 2017 to raise the income tax again, to 4.95% on individuals.

Democrat JB Pritzker, a billionaire investor whose family founded the Hyatt hotel chain, launched his campaign for governor by casting himself as a wealthy man who would fight for the middle class and for a graduated tax that was less burdensome for low-income families than the flat-rate system. Rauner vowed to stop him. Their 2018 campaigns spent more than $250 million combined, including $22.5 million that Griffin gave to Rauner, before Pritzker won that November.

With the support of a committed and rich governor, a graduated income tax suddenly seemed possible in Illinois.

That created a bunch of new momentum, said Ralph Martire, executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, a think tank that argued in favor of a graduated income tax. That was enough political support to really get the grassroots groups working on it.

Outside of a special convention, both the Illinois House and Senate must sign off on a state constitutional amendment by three-fifths majorities. Voters then need to approve it, either by a clear majority of all voters casting ballots in a general election or a three-fifths majority of those voting on the measure itself.

In 2019 the Senate and then the House each met that threshold, passing a measure that would eliminate the graduated income tax ban if voters approved an amendment. Companion legislation laid out what the new tax schedule would be: Rates would either drop or remain at 4.95% for people reporting income up to $250,000; they would climb from there, to a rate of 7.99% on individuals earning above $750,000 and couples above $1 million. The top rate was within the range of those in other Midwest states with graduated systems higher than Missouris but lower than Iowas.

Supporters and opponents then had more than a year to make their cases.

Illinois election laws set some limits on campaign donations and spending. But the rules are riddled with loopholes, and they impose no limits on political committees formed to advocate for or against ballot initiatives like the income tax proposal.

Opponents of the graduated income tax formed at least five different campaign committees that raised nearly $63 million altogether. The best funded, by far, was the Coalition to Stop the Proposed Tax Hike Amendment, which collected almost $60 million, including the $54 million from Griffin. The coalition received most of its remaining money from other billionaires and millionaires, according to state campaign donation records.

On the other side, Pritzker created the Vote Yes for Fairness committee, plowing $58 million of his own fortune to support the fair tax campaign. Apart from Pritzkers donations, the committee received just one $250 contribution, records show.

Griffin also launched other offensives. In October 2020, the Chicago Tribune reported that Griffin had lambasted Pritzker as a shameless master of personal tax avoidance in an email to Citadels Chicago staff.

The bulk of Pritzkers wealth ($3.6 billion, according to Forbes) is in trusts, some domestic and some located offshore. Pritzker has said some were set up by his grandfather. As ProPublica reported last year, it was common for 20th century patriarchs to set up trusts that passed fortunes down through the generations free of estate taxes.

Pritzker has released his personal tax returns, but has not provided detailed information about the trusts. For 2020, Pritzkers office released returns showing $5.1 million in personal income for the governor and his wife, MK. The domestic trusts benefiting the governor also paid $16.3 million in Illinois taxes and $69.6 million in federal taxes in 2020, according to Pritzker spokesperson Natalie Edelstein.

ProPublicas IRS data does not shed light on those trusts. When ProPublica requested further detail, Edelstein said the governor is not releasing documents concerning the trusts because he is not the only beneficiary, so he does not have authority to release all of the information. She said that the governor had not personally accepted any disbursements from the offshore trusts, instead giving them to charity. She did not address whether the trusts had been set up to avoid estate taxes, only saying they were established generations ago.

At the height of the graduated income tax campaign, advertisements for and against the initiative seemed to be everywhere in Illinois in mailboxes, online, all over the airwaves.

You couldnt even watch TV it was just one ad after another, recalled David Merriman, a public administration professor at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Merrimans research had found that Illinois received less revenue from income taxes and placed a higher tax burden on low-income taxpayers than neighboring states with graduated systems, including states led by Republicans. But, perhaps predictably, the ads largely avoided policy discussions in favor of political appeals.

At the worst possible time, Springfield politicians are pushing a constitutional amendment that would give them new powers to make it easier to raise taxes on all Illinois taxpayers, a narrator in one anti-tax ad declared. And if theres one thing we know about Springfield politicians, its that you cant trust them.

The fair-tax campaign accused the rich of trying to fool middle-class families and claimed, based on the state Senate bill that had already passed, that as many as 97% of taxpayers would pay the same or less under the governors plan.

But voters werent convinced. Federal investigations of several Chicago and state politicians were making headlines, and Merriman said the graduated tax advocates failed to persuade voters that they would benefit from the amendment. The initiative failed by a vote of 53% to 47%.

It showed just how distrustful everyone is of the government, he said.

The big money battle has continued in the Illinois governors race this year. This January, Pritzker deposited $90 million into his own reelection fund the largest single political contribution in Illinois in decades and probably ever. Under state election law, candidates can lift donation limits in a race by funding their own campaigns.

Several of the anti-tax funders contributed large sums to Republicans aiming to unseat Pritzker this fall. Once again, Griffin led the way, spending $50 million, but his handpicked candidate lost the GOP primary last week to Darren Bailey, a right-wing state senator propelled by more than $17 million Uihlein gave to his campaign and an aligned super PAC. Pritzker and the Democratic Governors Association also went head-to-head with Griffin, paying for ads attacking his candidate, Richard Irvin.

Bailey received an endorsement from Donald Trump the weekend before the election and finished with about 58% of the vote. Irvin faded to third place with 15%. In his election night victory speech, Bailey ripped Pritzker as an out-of-touch, elitist billionaire.

Do you feel overtaxed? Bailey called out to his supporters. Their response: Yeah!

By then, Griffin had made a big announcement that meant his state tax bill would plummet.

In a letter to Citadel employees, Griffin announced that he was moving the companys headquarters to Miami and that he himself had already moved his family to the area.

Florida does not have a personal income tax. Experts told ProPublica Griffin will still pay some personal income tax in New York and Illinois since Citadel has offices there. But his bill is sure to shrink dramatically, likely saving him tens of millions a year.

Ten Ways Billionaires Avoid Taxes on an Epic Scale

In response to ProPublicas questions, Citadel did not address whether taxes motivated his move. Instead, in its statement the spokesperson cited crime concerns as the prime motivator: Ken left Illinois for a simple reason: the state is devolving into anarchy. Senseless violence is now part of daily life in Chicago.

Griffins letter to Citadel staff also made no mention of taxes as being a reason for the move. Instead, it rhapsodized about how Miami embodies the American Dream embracing the possibilities of what can be achieved by a community working to build a future together.

Help Us Report on Taxes and the Ultrawealthy

Do you have expertise in tax law, accounting or wealth management? Do you have tips to share? Heres how to get in touch. We are looking for both specific tips and broader expertise.

Jeff Ernsthausen contributed reporting.

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Ken Griffin Spent $54 Million Fighting a Tax Increase for the Rich. Secret IRS Data Shows It Paid Off for Him. - ProPublica

When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing; when you see that money is flowing to those who deal not in goods but in favours; when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work; and your laws dont protect you against them but protect them against you; when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice; you may know your society is doomed. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957.

Stage 6 load-shedding has been forced on us by workers who are entitled, overpaid, underworked but have seen power abused everywhere else and have taken their monopoly position to extort an unaffordable increase. Never in the pre-1994 history of Eskom (formed in 1928, 60 years ago) did this happen. What changed? The only significant change was government policy cadre deployment, affirmative action and BEE.

Eskom has 10,000 too many employees; Transnet, the company that barely runs trains, employs 45,000 people. Most of these employees produce very little, a lot of them dont go to work, and when they do, they are disruptive and poorly managed by people who, like our president, cannot make a hard decision. They walk all over everything, and when things dont go their way, they throw their power around, because they can.

The leadership, institutional knowledge, work ethic and skills that carried these organisations has gone, retired or where made unwelcome just left. The ANC government has cut itself off from the skills that could help it implement its stupid policies, and now we all suffer.

I dont see private companies acting like this. Why? Because they have to compete and produce to survive.

Rob TiffinCape Town

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LETTER: Thank cadre deployment and BEE for the mess - BusinessLIVE

The American people understand that their democracy and their society are in deep trouble.But they do not agree on who or what is the cause of the problem, and do not share a common understanding of basic facts. To make matters worse there is a kind of sinister synergy between America's democracy crisis and other serious problems facing the country, which risks creating a state of collective paralysis.

During his prepared comments before the House Jan. 6 committee last Thursday, retired judgeJ. Michael Luttig, a lifelong conservative Republican who advised former Vice President Mike Pence before and during Donald Trump's coup attempt, issued this dire warning:

A stake was driven through the heart of American democracy on Jan. 6, 2021, and our democracy today is on a knife's edge.

America was at war on that fateful day, but not against a foreign power. She was at war against herself. We Americans were at war with each other over our democracy.

Jan. 6 was but the next, foreseeable battle in a war that had been raging in America for years, though that day was the most consequential battle of that war even to date. In fact, Jan. 6 was a separate war unto itself, a war for America's democracy, a war irresponsibly instigated and prosecuted by the former president, his political party allies, and his supporters. Both wars are raging to this day. America is now the stake in these unholy wars. America is adrift. We pray that it is only for this fleeting moment that she has lost her way, until we Americans can once again come to our senses.

In response to a question from committee chairman Bennie Thompson about the danger to the republic still represented by Trump and his supporters, Luttig elaborated further:

Almost two years after that fateful day Donald Trumpand his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy.

That's not because of what happened on Jan. 6. It is because, to this very day, the former president and his allies and supporters pledge that in the presidential election of 2024, if the former president or his anointed successor as the Republican party presidential candidate were to lose that election, they would attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way that they attempted to overturn the 2020 election, but succeed in 2024 where they failed in 2020.

If there are any reasonable and intelligent Americans who continue to doubt that this country is in the midst of an existential crisis, facing the dangers of Trumpism and a growing white supremacist authoritarian movement, Luttig's words should shock them back into reality.

A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll adds even more weight to Luttig's warnings about American democracy as it teeters on the precipice of irrecoverable disaster. The lead finding is that more than half of those surveyed, across the political spectrum 55% of Democrats and 53% of Republicans believe it is "likely" that the United States will "cease to be a democracy in the future."

RELATED:Global forecaster on "another bad year for democracy": Is the world near a dire tipping point?

Further findings in that poll are arguably even more troubling given the events of Jan. 6 and the Republican-fascist movement's increasing embrace of violence and terrorism:

This new poll also demonstrates that negative partisanship and other forms of extreme political polarization now appear to be permanent features of American political life.Andrew Romano summarizes this at Yahoo News:

When asked to choose the phrase that best "describes most people on the other side of the political aisle from you," a majority of Republicans pick extreme negatives such as "out of touch with reality" (30%), a "threat to America" (25%), "immoral" (8%) and a "threat to me personally" (4%). A tiny fraction select more sympathetic phrases such as "well-meaning" (4%) or "not that different from me" (6%).

The results among Democrats are nearly identical, with negatives such as "out of touch with reality" (27%), a "threat to America" (23%), "immoral" (7%) and a "threat to me personally" (4%) vastly outnumbering positives such as "well-meaning" (7%) or "not that different from me" (5%).

These findings offer further evidence that the U.S. in the Age of Trump and beyond is what political scientists call an "anocracy," a system that combines features of dictatorship and democracy. The coup against democracy and the rule of law did not end when Trump's insurrectionists left the Capitol on Jan. 6. The Republican-fascists and the larger white right continue to advance a strategy whose ultimate goal is a Christian fascist plutocracy, one modeled on a system of competitive authoritarianism in which political parties still exist and elections occur, but where outcomes are manipulated as in Russia, Hungary or Turkey.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

This dystopia made real will be a combination of such books and films as "The Handmaid's Tale," "Atlas Shrugged," "Brazil," "Idiocracy," "Robocop," "CSA: The Confederate States of America" and "1984."

Donald Trump and his acolytes continue to threaten political violence against their "enemies," meaning liberals and progressives, nonwhite people, Muslims, immigrants, LGBTQ people and any other groups or individuals they deem insufficiently "American" and not part of the MAGA faithful.

The Republican Party, its propaganda machine and other opinion leaders continue to amplify Trump's Big Lie and its inherent conclusion that further violence may be necessary to return Trump (or a successor) to the White House and, more generally, to prevent Democrats from winning or holding power by any means necessary.

The core tenets of the "great replacement" conspiracy theory which a white supremacist terrorist recently claimed as the motive for murdering 10 Black people last month at a Buffalo supermarket have been embraced by a majority of Republicans, and an even larger majority of Trump followers.

National security experts on terrorism and armed conflict have continued to warn that Trump's coup attempt and the Capitol attack are further evidence that the U.S. may face a period of sustained right-wing violent insurgency. Robert Pape, director of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats, has estimated that more than 20 million Americansbelieve that using political violence to return Trump to power is justified.

In a widely read December 2021 essay in the Globe and Mail, Canadian political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon offered a memorably grim prognosis of America's future. He predicted that "American democracy could collapse" by 2025 that is, following the next presidential election and that by 2030, the U.S. "could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship":

We mustn't dismiss these possibilities just because they seem ludicrous or too horrible to imagine. In 2014, the suggestion that Donald Trump would become president would also have struck nearly everyone as absurd. But today we live in a world where the absurd regularly becomes real and the horrible commonplace.

Mr. Trump's electoral loss has energized the Republican base and further radicalized young party members. Even without their concerted efforts to torque the machinery of the electoral system, Republicans will probably take control of both the House of Representatives and Senate this coming November, because the incumbent party generally fares poorly in mid-term elections. Republicans could easily score a massive victory, with voters ground down by the pandemic, angry about inflation, and tired of President Joe Biden bumbling from one crisis to another. Voters who identify as Independents are already migrating toward Republican candidates.

Once Republicans control Congress, Democrats will lose control of the national political agenda, giving Mr. Trump a clear shot at recapturing the presidency in 2024. And once in office, he will have only two objectives: vindication and vengeance.

Homer-Dixon then drew the this parallel between the current state of the U.S. and the collapse of the Weimar Republic in the early 1930s:

The situation in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s was of course sui generis; in particular, the country had experienced staggering traumas defeat in war, internal revolution and hyperinflation while the country's commitment to liberal democracy was weakly rooted in its culture. But as I read a history of the doomed republic this past summer, I tallied no fewer than five unnerving parallels with the current U.S. situation.

America's future stability is so much in doubt that even global rivals or enemies are concerned about the destructive forces unleashed by the Age of Trump. In a series of phone calls before and after the 2020 election, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sought to reassure his Chinese counterpart, saying, "The American government is stable and everything is going to be OK. ... Everything's fine. But democracy can be sloppy sometimes."

An ambush is always disorienting, and intentionally so, but the best option is always to fight back. That's where we are right now.

This situation is undeniably bewildering, and deliberately so. But for pro-democracy Americans, inaction is not an option. That will inevitably lead to defeat. In military terms, a successful ambush is almost always disorienting, but the best option is always to fight back, not hunker down. The Republican-fascists and their allies want the American people to feel so confused and overwhelmed by their unending attack on democracy, the rule of law, the common good and basic human decency that they essentially turn away, close their eyes and surrender.In essence, the Republican-fascist movement is using their own version of a political "shock and awe" strategy here at home against the American people.

The Lincoln Project recently offered this evaluation of America's democracy crisis:

After three [Jan. 6 committee] hearings we know for certain the nation is at one of the most dangerous moments in its history. These revelations will not change the true MAGA believers mind but will cause them to double and triple down on the "Big Lie" making them more dangerous and perhaps more violent. Every single American needs to decide if they are the side of the seditionists who tried to tear down a free and fair election, or do they support our Republic and its democratic principles?

In short, the American people must act with deliberate purpose and speed if they hope to save their democracy and society. Voting is of course necessary, but by itself is insufficient. "Hashtag activism," with its "likes" and "shares" and memes, is for the most part symbolic or performative politics that accomplishes little or nothing in the long run, and may actually be counterproductive if people mistake it for real action. In the long-term struggle, substantive movement-building and organizing will be required to defeat fascism in America and around the world.

Voting is necessary, but not sufficient. "Hashtag activism" accomplishes little or nothing, and may even be counterproductive. What we need is movement-building.

Supporters of democracy must engage in grassroots organizing. They need to join, establish, and grow a range of civil society organizations. They must raise and donate money in effective ways, not by giving it to doomed Democratic candidates in hopeless races. Ultimately, they must be willing to engage in corporeal politics, including general strikes, street protests, civil disobedience and other forms of direct action where they can confront the Republican-fascists and their allies with overwhelming numbers.

Right now, almost all the momentum is with the Republican-fascists and their broad-spectrum attack on American democracy and society. They are in revolutionary mode, and they are are winning. They will press onward to total victory, unless and until they are stopped. This will require people of conscience to take a personal inventory and ask themselves, "How much am I willing to sacrifice to save my country, my family and future generations from this nightmare?" The future of American democracy and society largely hinges on how many of us can answer that question honorably and rise to the challenge.

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Is American democracy already lost? Half of us think so but the future remains unwritten - Salon

Every now and again New Delhi gets its dander up because someone or the other, somewhere or the other, publishes a map of India which does not show Kashmir as being part of the country.

Questions are raised in Parliament as to how this insult to the countrys national integrity was permitted, and patriotic-minded citizens immolate copies of the offending depiction in public.

But India is not the only country to wax wroth over contumacious cartography. An indignant resident of Rio de Janeiro has moved a court seeking a municipal ban on the atlases being issued for geography classes in local schools.

The reason for the Cariocas umbrage is that the books in question feature maps based on the standard Mercator model which, inaccurately, shows the US state of Alaska to be the same size as Brazil, while in fact the South American country which is noted for its nuts, among much else, is almost five times larger than the northern territory which America bought from Russia in 1867 for USD 7.2 million.

While the Brazilian is justifiably exercised at his country cut being cut down to less than size, maps based on the Mercator projection also contain several other anomalies of magnitude.

The ice-bound and inappropriately named country of Greenland is depicted as being bigger than Africa, when in actuality the so-called Dark Continent is 14 times larger than the northern nation. Africa is shown to be similar in size to Europe though it almost three times more expansive.

Antarctica, in the world according to Mercator, is the biggest continent whereas in terra cognita it is the fifth largest.

The reason for these inaccuracies is that the Mercator projection, designed by the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569, represents the three-dimensional sphere of the Earth on the two-dimensional surface of paper. The result is that areas closer to the North Pole and the South Pole appear disproportionately larger than those closer to the Equator.

Despite such misrepresentations, the Mercator projection became an indispensable asset in oceanic navigation as it enabled ships to chart a straight-line course for their routes. Gerardus Mercator was much more than just a maker of maps. An accomplished mathematician, he applied the science of numbers to geography and astronomy, a union which he found extremely agreeable. His aim was to arrive at not only the description of the Earth, but also the structure of the whole machinery of the world, whose numerous elements are not known by anyone to date.

He taught himself the art of engraving, on metal and wood, and in 1536 he designed a terrestrial globe for the Emperor Charles V, the first of many which he crafted, some of which are extant today.

Mercator was an enthusiastic debater on philosophic themes, and had he been around now he would have welcomed the discourse, often contentious, surrounding his most renowned creation. For while maps based on his projection continue to be used to aid navigation and to teach the elements of geography to students, there is a growing body of controversy regarding the political, social, and cultural implications of the cartographic distortions inherent in his projection.

Critics take to task the implicit, though unintended, racism through the prism of which Europe and North America are shown to be much larger than they are in comparison with Africa, Asia and South America, thereby endorsing the concept of white superiority and indirectly justifying the history of subjugation and colonialism. In response to such objections, present-day cartographers have devised substitute projections, such as the Gall-Peters representation, gaining usage both in corporate and scholastic spheres, which attempts to show countries and continents in correct size but which tends to get them elongated at the equator and compressed in the higher latitudes near the Poles.

Those who delight in opening the Pandoras box of paradox would contend that a truly true map of the world is a logical impossibility for it would not only have to be as large as the world itself is, but would also have to include in itself a map as large as itself, and so on ad infinitum.

Geography is about maps/While history is about chaps, goes the old doggerel. But it seems that history can also be about maps and the chaps who make them.

Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Atlas shrugged: Getting mad with maps with attitude about latitude - Times of India

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Atlas Shrugged: Part I (PG-13) (2.5) [Some sexuality.] [DVD and VOD only] A powerful, captivating, intriguing, eerie, timely thriller, which is based on Ayn Rands classic 1957 novel, about high-powered executives (Michael Lerner, Graham Beckel, Jon Polito, Jack Milo, and Geoff Pierson) who begin to mysteriously disappear in 2016 when John Galt (Paul Johansson) comes calling while the comely, tenacious CEO (Taylor Schilling) of a transcontinental railway firm joins forces with the ruthless owner (Grant Bowler), who has been married to his cold-hearted wife (Rebecca Wisocky) for a long ten years, of a steel manufacturing company to build a one-of-a-kind, ultra-fast transit system as gas prices skyrocket to above $35 per gallon and the economy continues its downward spiral.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (NR) (3) [DVD and VOD only] Werner Herzog narrates his fascinating, educational, 3D, 90-minute documentary that uses hand-held cameras to showcase the 32,000-year-old, pristine, Paleolithic drawings of palm prints and horses, bison, mammoths, lions, and rhinoceros that were discovered in 1994 inside the stalagmite-filled, bear-skull-strewn, 1,300-ft.-long Chauvet cave of Southern France, and scientists such as cave custodian Dominique Baffier, Carole Fritzs, Gilles Jean-Clottes, Jean-Michel Geneste, Gilles Tosello, paleontologist Michel Phillipe, researcher Julien Monney, Nicholas Conrad, Wulf Hein, and Maria Malina and master perfumer Maurice Maurin add insight into the cave artwork.

Crusaders (R) (3) [Violence and brief nudity.] [DVD and VOD only] After his father (Armin Mueller-Stahl) and the one-armed baron (Dieter Kirchlechner) are murdered and the woman (Karin Proia) he loves says that she will marry a power-hungry lord (Rodolfo Corsato) to save her family in 1079 A.D. in this action-packed, violent, factually inspired, 200-minute, 2001 film, an adopted, grieving blacksmith (Alessandro Gassman) leaves with his sheepherder best friend (Thure Riefenstein) and a Norman nobleman (Johannes Brandrup) to fight in the Crusades in Jerusalem where discord ensues when the two best friends end up fighting on different sides and a comely Jewish scholar (Barbora Bobulova) stands in the middle.

An Engineer Imagines (NR) (3) [Played June 2 as part of AARPs Movies for Grownups and available on TUBI and various VOD platforms.] Marcus Robinson's engaging, educational, insightful, well-paced, 80-minute, 2018 documentary that showcases the amazing career and the genius and talent of distinguished, influential Irish structural engineer Peter Rice who worked on such iconic structures as the Sydney Opera House, the Menil Collection, The Pompidou Centre, Glyndebourne, Lloyd's of London, the Louvre Pyramid, and Paris Stansted Airport and consists of architectural photographs and film footage and interview snippets with architects (such as Renzo Piano, Hugh Dutton, Paul Andreu, Dan Ritchie, and Richard Rogers), Full Moon Theater founder Humbert Camerlos, Arup director Andy Sedgwick, architectural critic Jonathan Glancey, "Traces of Peter Rice" editor Kevin Barry, Deputy chair of Arup and Arup fellow Tristram Carfrae, structural engineer Henry Bardsley, Contractors for Steel and Glass structures Bernard Viry, T/E/S/S associate director Bernard Vaudeville, Arup associate director Sophie Le Bouvra, "Financial Times" arts editor Jan Dalley, T/E/S/S partner Tom Gray, Ove Arup & Partners former chairman Sir Jack Zunz, designer Martin Franc and Peter Rice's wife Sylvia, sister Kitty Rice, son Keiran Rice, and daughters Julia Rudin, Heidi Rice, and Nemone Routh.

Charlotte (NR) (3.5) [Available June 3 on Apple TV+/ iTunes, Amazon Video, Google Play, Vudu, and Redbox digital.] Eric Warin and Tahir Ranas poignant, factually inspired, powerful, coming-of-age, artistic, heartbreaking, bittersweet, star-studded (voiceovers by Mark Strong, Henry Czerny, and Sophie Okonedo), 92-minute, 2021 animated film based on Life? Or Theatre?: A Song-Cycle and a collection of more than 1,000 expressionist paintings in which talented German-Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon (voiceover by Keira Knightley), who is supported by her parents (voiceovers by Eddie Marsan and Helen McCrory), escapes from Berlin to the home of her grandparents (voiceovers by Jim Broadbent and Brenda Blethyn) in the South of France on the eve of WWII in an effort to fulfill her dream of becoming a successful artist, marries an Austrian therapist and vocal coach (voiceover by Sam Claflin), and tragically ends up murdered by the Nazis in Auschwitz on Oct. 10, 1943, at age 26.

The Fall of the Queens (NR) (3) [Subtitled] [Available June 7 on various digital platforms.] Lucas Turturros engaging, award-winning, coming-of-age, well-acted, predictable, 83-minute, 2021 film in which the close, tight-knit relationship between a troubled, obsessive 17-year-old orphan (Malena Filmus) and her feisty, sexually-curious, 14-year-old sister (Lola Abraldes), who live with their alcohol-abusing aunt (Umbra Colombo) on an Argentinean farm producing honey from multiple beehives, becomes strained and threatened when their handsome cousin (Franco Rizzaro) arrives and jealousy rears its ugly head.

Hoodwinked Too! Good vs. Evil (PG) (1.5) [Some mild rude humor, language, and action.] [DVD and VOD only] When Hansel (voiceover by Bill Hader) and Gretel (voiceover by Amy Poehler) and granny (voiceover by Glenn Close) are kidnapped by an evil, red-eyed, jealous witch (voiceover by Joan Cusack) in this lackluster, silly, star-studded (voiceovers by Martin Short, Cheech Marin, Andy Dick, David Alan Grier, Tommy Chong, and Brad Garrett), 3D, animated film dominated by a stupid plot and funny potshots at many fairytales, a teenage Red Riding Hood (voiceover by Hayden Panettiere), who graduated from the Sisterhood of Kung-Fu Bakers, joins forces with the big bad wolf (voiceover by Patrick Warburton), Twitchy the squirrel (voiceover by Cory Edwards), and the head (voiceover by David Ogden Stiers) of the Happily Ever After Agency to save granny and the secret recipe for the Norwegian Black Forest Truffle Devine Cake, which makes the eater of the cake powerful and invincible.

I'm Charlie Walker (NR) (2.5) [Available June 10 on various VOD platforms.] An uneven soundtrack hinders Patrick Gilles wacky, factually based, humorous, unpredictable, 78-minute film in which ambitious, feisty, streetwise, cunning, wheeler-dealer, Black truck company owner Charlie Walker (Mike Colter), who has a wife (Safiya Fredericks) and three daughters, faces repossession of his home in San Francisco, applies for a lucrative contract to clean up an environmentally devastating crude oil spill after two oil tankers collided in 1971, is reluctantly awarded a beach nobody wanted to save, and when duplicitous, racist oil company executives (Dylan Baker and Mark Leslie Ford) initially support his ingenious scheme to clean up the beach, they turn against him because of racism, greed, politics, and financial shenanigans.

Im Not Jesus Mommy (PG-13) (3) [Some disturbing violent content.] [DVD and VOD only] Seven years after stealing from a genetic researcher (Charles Hubbell) turned religious fanatic an embryonic clone derived from DNA from the Shroud of Turin and impregnating herself to the horror of her incredulous husband (Joseph Schneider) in this creepy, philosophical, imaginative, thought-provoking, minimalistic, sci-fi thriller that raises moral, ethical, and religious questions, a widowed obstetrician (Bridget McGrath) raises her son (Rocko Hale) in a world, which is plagued by famine, disease, and death, that may have been profoundly changed by her selfish, desperate actions.

Jurassic World Dominion (PG-13) (2.5) [Intense sequences of action, some violence, and language.] [Opens June 10 in theaters.] After a power-hungry, duplicitous, psychopathic CEO (Campbell Scott) creates gargantuan locusts that will eventually decimate crops worldwide in his effort to control the food supply in a world where prehistoric dinosaurs roam the planet among humans and he then arranges the kidnapping of a valuable, feisty, cloned teenager (Isabella Sermon) with altered DNA in Colin Trevorrows entertaining, disconnected, action-packed, fast-paced, poorly written, predictable, star-dotted (Jeff Goldblum, BD Wong, Omar Sy, Mamoudou Athie, Justice Smith, Scott Haze, Daniella Pineda, Dichen Lachman, Elva Trill, and Dimitri Thivaios), 147-minute thriller dominated by terrific special effects but hindered by a lackluster storyline, a worried couple (Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard) tries to protect the dinosaurs and to search for their strong-willed, kidnapped charge with the help of a daredevil pilot (DeWanda Wise) while two doggedly determined, smitten scientists (Sam Neill and Laura Dern) gather locust DNA as damning evidence to take down the madman mogul.

Legend of the Oro Arrowhead (NR) (2) [Available June 7 on various VOD platforms.] Bill Rahns lackluster, low-budget, poorly acted, predictable, 112-minute, 2021 film with a weak plot in which a military-trained ranger (Stephen Thompson), whose sister (Amber Lynn Kennison) becomes a pawn, in a small town in Tennessee uses an ancient map to search for a magical, golden arrowhead, which tribal elders buried along with gold, in the woods after his fathers death while being tracked by a ruthless, power-hungry woman (Robbie Dernehl) and her unsavory scumbag henchmen (E. Dale Johnson, Joey Deese, Ashley Eller, Jasmine Dernehl, Wayne Deloriea, et al.) and then is aided by a combat-skilled Cherokee (Vanessa Ore), who is much older than she appears, and longtime friends (Jeri Little, Quinton Nash, and Luis Carlos Machicao).

The Policeman's Lineage (NR) (2.5) [Subtitled] [Available June 7 on various digital and VOD platforms.] An ethical, greenhorn South Korean detective (Woo-sik Choi), whose father and grandfather were on the force, is assigned to go undercover to investigate a decorated, break-the-rules Metropolitan Investigation Unit leader (Cho Jin-woong) who may be corrupt and involved with unsavory criminals (Kwon Yul, Park Myeong-hoon, et al.) in Kyu-mann Lees convoluted, action-packed, well-paced, clich-driven, plot-hole-filled, violent, 119-minute film adapted from Joh Sasakis Japanese novel Blood of the Policeman.

Rondo and Bob (NR) (3) [Available June 7 on various VOD platforms.] Joe M. ODonnells captivating, award-winning, educational, insightful, 100-minute documentary that examines the obsession that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre art director Robert A. Burns had with B-film, acromegaly-afflicted actor Rondo Hatton, who starred in numerous cult and horror movies during the 1930s and 1940s, and consists of archival photographs, letter excerpts, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre film snippets, and candid commentary by author Alison Macor, cinematographer Daniel Pearl, film critic Joe Bob Briggs, The Austin Chronicle cofounder Louis Black, producers Peter Locke and John Dwyer, Erma Taylor, actors (such as Dee Wallace, William Vail, John Dugan, Edwin Neal, Aldo Ray, Gunnar Hansen, Ryan Williams, Cara Kanak, Chris Bonno, Kelsey Pribilski, Sidney Brammer, and Allen Danziger), filmmakers (such as Fred Olen Ray, Andy Lalino, and Marcus Van Bavel), Hattons widow Mae Hatton, columnists John Kelso and Mark Pace, re-animator director Stuart Gordon, director David Gregory, Bill Helmer, writer Ernest Sharpe, writer and producers Craig Muckler and Edward E. Toutant, journalist Pete Szilagyi, actor and musician Ed Guinn, filmmaker and collector Tom Rainone, magician and comedian Paul Driscoll, veteran stuntman and actor Gary Kent, set decorator Michael Peal, production designer Deborah Pastor, Mary Jo Langford, attorney Robin Dwyer, Jan Lewis, Mary Church, Margaret Roberts, Wayne Thomas, Tom Rainones brother Greg, and Robert Burns brothers Ross and Fred and nephew Bruce.

A Sexplanation (NR) (3) [Available June 7 on Amazon Prime Video, iTunes, and various digital and VOD platforms.] Alex Lius poignant, multi-award-winning, educational, insightful, humor-infused, 76-minute, 2021 documentary in which the gay 36-year-old filmmaker and health reporter crisscrosses the country to talk with educators and researchers regarding sex in all its facets, such as the benefits of orgasm, sex education in schools, openness about sexuality, and shame regarding sex, and consists of candid commentary by adolescent psychologist Lisa Medoff, Kinsey Institute Public Health professor William L. Yarber, psychology professor Barry Komisaruk, psychologist Dr. Jason Winters, British Columbia School of Nursing professor Kristen Gilbert, clinical psychologist Morag Yule, Faculty and Staff Spirituality associate director and Jesuit priest Donal Godfrey, senator Todd Weiler, McCreary Centre Society executive director Annie Smith, clinical psychologist and radio host Laurie Betito, Porn Hub data scientist Mike, Great Conversations cofounder and pediatrician Rob Lehman, Great Conversations founder and RN Julie Metzger, Included youth leader Sofia Garza, Planned Parenthood Association of Utah education director Annabel Sheinberg, and sex educators Joel Burton, Anton Fulmen, and Besha Grey.

The Story Won't Die (NR) (3.5) [Partially subtitled] [Opens June 10 in L.A. and June 17 in New York City in theaters and available June 21 on various VOD platforms.] David Henry Gersons uplifting, timely, inspirational, powerful, thought-provoking, 83-minute, 2021 documentary focuses on talented Syrian artists rapper Abu Hajar, musician Anas Maghrebi, Syrian singers Bahila Hijazi and Lynn Mayya, breakdancer Bboy Shadow, choreographer Medhat Aldaabal, and visual artists (such as Tammam Azzam, Omar Imam, and Diala Brisly) as it explores life in Syria both before and during the Civil War, including the shootings, killings, beatings, and imprisonment, that occurred and follows these artists as they make the difficult decision to leave Syria and their families and to join the millions of their countrymen as refugees while using their poignant artwork and performances to continue their protests and to highlight the ongoing struggles of millions of refugees living in exile as they fight for freedom and justice of all Syrians.

The Walk (NR) (3.5) [Opens June 10 in theaters.] While a compassionate, protective, straight-and-narrow Irish cop (Justin Chatwin) is assigned to protect Black students in Boston in 1974 after Massachusetts passes a controversial law that forces integration in the Boston school system by bussing Black students to all-white high schools and vice versa during citywide protests in Daniel Adams poignant, factually based, award-winning, riveting, thought-provoking, star-studded (Malcolm McDowell, Jeremy Piven, Sally Kirkland, Jim Gleason, Jason Alan Smith, Thomas Francis Murphy, William Mark McCullough, Jay Huguley, Bill Dawes, Maggie Wagner, Jason Alan Smith, Dane Rhodes, Coletrane Williams, Tedrick Martin, and Anastasiya Mitrunen), 105-minute film dominated by terrific acting, his feisty, rebellious, 17-year-old daughter (Katie Douglas) examines her own bigotry and use of racist language and an 18-year-old Black student (Lovie Simone) and her security guard father (Terrence Howard) must deal with pervasive racist attitudes amidst increasing violence.

We Feed People (NR) (3.5) [Available currently via streaming on Disney+.] Ron Howards award-winning, compelling, inspirational, educational, enlightening, 90-minute documentary that follows magnanimous, heroic, compassionate, world renown chef Jos Andrs who founded his World Central Kitchen (WCK) in 2010 after the devastating earthquake in Haiti with the goal of feeding survivors of disasters, including hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico in 2017, eruption of the Fuego volcano in Guatemala in 2018, hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas in 2019, quarantined cruise ships during the pandemic in 2020, and the war in Ukraine in 2022, and tirelessly and selfishly works with his team and locals to provide much-needed meals and consists of commentary by author and journalist Richard Wolfe, wife Patricia Fernandez de la Cruz, Washington Post food writer Carole Sugarman, WCK CEO Nate Mook, culinary consultant and gourmand Maisie Wilhelm, WCK Relief Operations (such as Sam Bloch, Jason Collis, and Josh Phelps), DC Central Kitchen founder Robert Egger, WCK volunteers (such as Elsa Corrigan, Kenneth Roker, and Shirley Dorsett), WCK contractor Kyle Pounders, COVID-19 emergency response team member Grace Ramirez, Navajo Ollie Arviso, and Jos daughters Carlota, Lucia, and Ins Andrs.

The Wild One (NR) (3) [Plays June 6/8-19 at the Tribeca Film Festival; for tickets, log on tohttps://tribecafilm.com/films/wild-one-2022.] Willem Dafoe narrates Tessa Louise-Saloms compelling, powerful, insightful, thought-provoking, 94-minute documentary that chronicles tumultuous, fascinating life and career of Czechoslovakia-born director and Actors Studio West cofounder Jack Garfein who survived Nazi concentration camps to arrive in New York City in 1946 at age16 and eventually used his traumatic life experiences in his influential work on Broadway and in films such as The Strange One (1957) and Something Wild (1961) to cover controversial topics, including homosexuality, rape, racism, violence, sexual expression, and segregation, and consists of archival photographs and film clips and commentary by director and actor Peter Bogdanovich, writer Foster Hirsch, film critic Kate Rennebohm, agent/publicist Dick Guttman, journalist Patricia Bosworth, wife Natalia Repolovsky, and actors Geoffrey Horne, Irne Jacob, Willem Dafoe, Blanche Bake, and Bobby Soto.

Wolf Hound (R) (2.5) [Violence.] [Opens June 3 in theaters and available on various VOD platforms.] When courageous Jewish-American fighter pilot Captain David Holden (James Maslow) is shot down over German-occupied France by a revengeful, fanatical, major Nazi pilot (Trevor Donovan), whose wingman brother (Ronald Woodhead) died in aerial combat, flying Trojan Hurricane and Spitfire planes in 1944 in Michael B. Chaits compelling, factually inspired, tension-filled, action-packed, fast-paced, bullet-riddled, 130-minute thriller, he tries to save a B-17 flight crew (Taylor Novak, Michael Parrish, Brian Heintz, Mason Heidger, Franco Pulice, and David Fink), two American privates (Lance Newton and Daniel Jeffries), and a French resistance fighter (Kara Joy Reed) taken prisoners by Nazi soldiers (Michael Wayne Foster, John Turk, et al.) and then stop the Germans from unleashing a superbomb over London during WWII.

1-800-Hot-Nite (NR) (3) After his irresponsible parents (Dajuan Johnson and Nicole Steinwedell) are arrested during a drug raid and a well-meaning social worker (Kimleigh Smith) from Child Protection Services intervenes in Nick Richeys critically acclaimed, down-to-earth, coming-of-age, well-acted, 95-minute comedic drama, a rebellious, headstrong, 13-year-old boy (Dallas Young) is forced to grow up fast when he runs away into the night with a friend (Gerrison Machado) and a cousin (Mylen Bradford) while being pursued by a cop (Brent Bailey) and getting unlikely advice from a phone sex operator (Ali Richey).

COVID-19 Ground Zero (NR) (3) Mustafa Ozguns award-winning, factually inspired, heartbreaking, realistic, unsettling, predictable, 90-minute, 2021 film in which the close relationship between a stubborn hospital nurse (Laura Weissbecker) and her supportive, unemployed Broadway technician boyfriend (Cyril Durel) in New York City becomes increasingly strained during March to May 2020 after she contracts the coronavirus and refuses to go to the hospital for treatment amidst Black Lives Matter protests who a photographer friend (Brandon Sutton) is documenting.

The Critic (NR) (3) When a charismatic, playful, mysterious, handsome, resident golf pro (Nick Puya) coerces a beautiful, no-nonsense mystery shopper (Julia Collier) who is busy critiquing the amenities and service at a large, luxury hotel to spend time with him and have dinner in Frank Kellys enjoyable, surprising, well-written, unpredictable, 24-minute romantic film, the date does not end as expected and eventually steers her life in a different direction.

El Carrito (NR) (3.5) [Subtitled] Zahida Piranis powerful, bittersweet, well-acted, thought-provoking, realistic, 15-minute, 2021 film in which a hardworking, illegal immigrant street vendor (Eli Zavala), who cares for her aging father (Jose Febus), competes with other vendors (Idalia Limnas, et al.) as she sells her Mexican cuisine from dawn to dusk in Queens, New York, and when she decides to use all her savings to buy a new cart, she is traumatized after it is stolen and is desperate to get it back.

Eternal Spring (NR) (3.5) [Subtitled] Jason Loftus award-winning, factually inspired, creative, original, gritty, educational, thought-provoking, 86-minute documentary that combines awesome animation with live-action footage in which talented Chinese comic book illustrator Daxiong, who is a member of the outlawed spiritual Falun Gong group, uses his artistic talents and artwork to create an animated documentary that details the planning and execution of the hacking and gut-wrenching aftermath after the brazen hijacking of state-controlled television on March 5, 2002, in Changchun City by brave, doggedly determined Falun Gong practitioners, including Liang Zhensing, Zhang Wen, Liu Big Truck Chunjen, Auntie Zhou, Lei Ming, Xio Lam, Sister Chen, and Jin Mr. White Xuezhe, who wanted to expose state-favored propaganda and religious persecution, repression, and treatment of Uyghur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, and Christians and ended up paying a terrible price in prison.

Hotter Up Close (NR) (3) When a nervous, lonely, kindhearted, gay waiter (Aguila Christopher Matias) with low self-confidence, who recently broke up with his boyfriend (John David Williams), is invited to a pool party by a hunky, hot guy (Francisco San Martin) who he is smitten with on his 30th birthday in Leland Montgomerys engaging, award-winning, funny, predictable, 16-minute comedy, his friend (Liz Jenkins) convinces him to go and he is surprised to discover that there is a mutual attraction.

Iron Family (NR) (3) Patrick Longstreths captivating, insightful, inspiring, down-to-earth, 90-minute documentary that focuses on the close relationship that talented, creative, 32-year-old playwright Jazmine Faries, who has Down syndrome and loves soap operas, Matthew McConaughey, John Travolta, and Barbie dolls, has with her 48-year-old, yoga-loving, ex-addict brother Chad and her pot-growing mother Kate Faries German, her struggles and dreams to live an independent life and to find love, and working with her brother and family to produce, to rehearse, and to perform in her plays, such as The Double Life, in Iron River, Mich., and it consists of commentary by pastor Dawn, high school friend Robert Ruuska, playwright and poet Jonathan Johnson, addiction counselor Carroll Ann Swanson, mom's former boyfriend Greg Banks, tattoo artist Holly Harvey, artist Amy Brzoznowski, and Faith Peterson.

Lodo (NR) (3) After a grieving 10-year-old boy (Jayden Enamorado), who lives with kindhearted grandmother (Laura Patalano) upon the death of his mother (Marita De La Torre), falls into some mud while retrieving a soccer ball on sacred ground with his friend (Adam Cortez) in a cemetery in Alessandro Gentiles poignant, factually inspired, touching, well-acted, moving, 20-minute Mud film, he goes into a spiritual world through a dream-like state and ends up being visited by his mother who ensures her son that she is always with him, and his grandmother then perform a ritual by using native medicine to remove any negative energy in the home.

The Long Rider (NR) (3) Awesome cinematography and scenery dominate Sean Cisternas compelling, award-winning, inspirational, 96-minute documentary that chronicles the arduous, 8,000-mi, 2-year journey of wannabe journalist Filipe Masetti Leite, who was inspired by Aim Tschiffelys 8-year, 25,000-km equestrian journey in 1925, as he encounters horrific weather and dangerous drug traffickers in his attempt to ride on horseback from Calgary, Canada, to his familys home in Brazil with commentary by the Long Riders Guild founder and The Encyclopedia of Equestrian Travel author Cuchullaine OReilly, Filipe's parents Iso and Claudia Leite, girlfriend Emma Brazier, long rider Stan Walchuk, and Peter Lisker father of deceased long rider Naomi Lisker.

My Friend Tommy (NR) (2.5) Nem Stankovics quirky, silly, heartwarming, candid, funny, 89-minute documentary in which the former basketball player turned comedian filmmaker takes his virginal, well-educated, 40-year-old friend, who still lives at home in Toronto with his strict Korean parents Grace and Richard, under his wing on a cross-country journey traveling to New York, Miami, the California Redwoods, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas with the goal of helping his best buddy get out of his comfort zone and experience lot of firsts, including watching pornography, going on first a date, cooking his first dinner, going to a strip club, and doing laundry, with the goal of being in a fulfilling relationship.

Rewilding (NR) (3) Jesse Spiegels honest, fascinating, down-to-earth, inspirational, 78-minute documentary highlighted by stunning cinematography and scenery in which aspiring artist and poet and former Rikers Island 27-year-old convict Anthony DeJesus participates in an experimental program and travels with rock climbers and wilderness guides Jesse Spiegel and Vitek Linhart over seven weeks to Colorados Indian Peaks Wilderness, Californias Wide Willow Farm and Soul Flower Farm, Redwood National Park, Wyomings Grand Teton National Park, and Las Vegas to determine whether immersing other former inmates in nature would be beneficial and consists of commentary by artist and adventurer Jeremy Collins, permaculture farmer Eric Olsen, foster mother Ms. Moore, sister Magaly DeJesus, Friends of Island Academy executive director Christine Pahigian, Friends of Island Academy youth advocacy director Andrs Obasogie, and Soul Flower Farm co-owner and instructor Yasir Cross.

Wendy Schadewald is a Burnsville resident.

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Short Redhead Reel Reviews for the week of June 10 - ECM Publishers

HARTFORD Nearly six years after the hotly contested 2016 elections, Connecticut conservatives are highly concerned about the upcoming hiring of a new misinformation officer to monitor the internet and combat foreign and domestic interference in this falls elections.

The specialist, a state employee who will be paid $150,000 per year, will monitor social media for false information that often starts on obscure, lesser-known websites like 4-chan, 8-chan, and Reddit, but then gains a much wider audience after appearing on sites such as Twitter, Instagram, Tik-Tok and Facebook.

Republicans have blasted the Democratic idea, generating attention on talk radio and Newsmax, a national television outlet that is often described as more conservative than FOX News.

Greenwich fundraiser Leora Levy, a conservative who is running in the Aug. 9 primary for U.S. Senate, was the first prominent candidate to recently blast the idea, landing her an interview with anchor Greg Kelly on Newsmax.

People should have the right and the ability to come to their own conclusions, based on the legitimate news that they read from legitimate news sources not from the government, Levy said on Newsmax. To me, as someone who escaped Cuba and escaped communism, I feel I am living through an Orwellian or Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged experience.

Levy was referring to the 1957 novel by Rand that argued that citizens need to remain independent minded in order for society to function properly and avoid coercion by the government.

Joe Biden, Ned Lamont and Democrats have one mission here: silencing any dissenters under the guise of combating misinformation, said state Republican chairman Ben Proto. Their hyper-partisan plan is designed to further infringe on voters First Amendment rights and is an attempt to control the political discussion, silencing those who disagree with them. Who determines what is misinformation and how exactly will they silence the speaker? Who will determine who will be hired? Will this be an open application process or has a local Democrat in need of a job already been chosen?

But Gabe Rosenberg, a spokesman for Secretary of the State Denise Merrill, countered that the new employee will be hired after the new fiscal year starts in July for a nonpartisan, civil service position that will be chosen by a four-member panel and would not be a hand-picked Democratic appointee as argued by Republicans.

The employees duties will be narrowly limited to election administration issues, and the state will not become an arbiter in determining which candidate is lying on a particular issue, Rosenberg said. The employee will be looking for false information on subjects like polling sites and times, rather than political policy issues, he said.

The idea that you could call this a partisan hack is ridiculous, Rosenberg said in an interview. Its a civil service position that has to follow all the rules of hiring that any other state employee-civil service position has to follow. Despite people making very cute turns of phrase about the meme content and such, its only related to election administration and finding and correcting inaccurate information about how voters can participate in the election.

The plan to hire the misinformation officer has largely flown under the political radar screen. It was mentioned in Lamonts budget summary in February and included in the secretary of the states budget. The states fiscal plan was subjected to public hearings and committee deliberations for nearly three months, along with debates and votes by the state House of Representatives and Senate. Still, it gained scant attention until recently.

House Republican leader Vincent Candelora of North Branford said he did not receive any comfort that the position will be in the civil service system, saying it belongs in nonpartisan offices like the State Elections Enforcement Commission or the state ethics office. The secretary of states office is an elected, political office that has been led by Democrats for 58 of the past 62 years.

It shouldnt lie in a partisan office, Candelora said in an interview.

House Republican leader Vincent Candelora of North Branford is concerned that a permanent misinformation officer is not being placed in a nonpartisan office like the State Elections Enforcement Commission. Here, he speaks with Rep. Tammy Nuccio of Tolland in the historic Hall of the House at the state Capitol. (Jessica Hill / Special to the Courant)

With little fanfare, the state had already hired a similar officer at $90 per hour for the 2020 election on a short-term, contract basis with federal funds. The new position will be permanent and funded by the state, along with $2 million for a public information campaign that will reach voters statewide on multiple media platforms on absentee voting and other election issues.

In 2020, the officer caught several examples of misinformation, and social media companies removed them.

First, there was a tweet that said a truck delivering Connecticut ballots had dumped the ballots on Interstate 95 and that the ballots were blowing around nearby.

Thats not how the ballots are delivered, first of all, Rosenberg said. Each town orders them individually. Thats not even a possible thing that could have happened, but also, it didnt happen. ... Twitters terms of service have always said you cannot lie about election administration.

Second, someone posted on Facebook that they had received an absentee ballot for a deceased relative.

The problem was that the absentee ballots didnt exist yet because they hadnt been printed, Rosenberg said. We knew that that was not right. Its impossible for that to happen before the absentee ballots were printed, so we reported that to Facebook, and it came down before it could be shared widely.

Third, an online rumor said that any election ballots filled out with Sharpies would not count. That was false.

Sharpies work fine in Connecticuts tabulators, Rosenberg said. Literally the only pen that wont work is a red pen because the laser is red. Anything else would work as long as its filled in enough. We were able to get out in front of a major conspiracy theory that came up on election day, and we were able to get correct information out to Connecticut voters before that even started to spread in Connecticut.

University of New Haven political science professor Chris Haynes said the sheer size of the internet and the multiple websites will make it difficult for only one state employee to scan, identify, research and assess the accuracy of any claims in a timely fashion as the election quickly approaches.

Facebook devotes many, many workers to these types of efforts, Haynes said in an interview. Im all for it, but I just question whether one person can do this job in an effective way. ... Theyre going to have to be the watchdog, the detective. This person is playing multiple roles just on one piece of misinformation. If they caught three of 35 false claims, does that make it better? But which three claims did they choose to focus on?

I dont blame states like Connecticut for doing this because the aim is noble, Haynes added. I wouldnt want to have this job, and that person would just get criticized in all types of ways. ... On a national level, you need probably hundreds of people to do this. Its a huge team. ... Theres no silver bullet here.

Nationally, states like Colorado and California have adopted similar positions under the secretary of the state, which is often the chief elections official. In addition, Arizona, Idaho, and Oregon are conducting advertising campaigns on television, radio, and the internet in the same way that Connecticut is planning with the $2 million allocation.

The job description says the specialist will identify dis- and misinformation related to Connecticut election administration in real time, monitoring the dark web, internet subculture websites such as 4- and 8-chan and reddit, as well as traditional social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Tik-Tok, etc., and reporting dis- and misinformation related to Connecticut election administration, before it spreads."

Merrill, the states chief elections official, said earlier this year that the misinformation officer was successful two years ago and will be again this year.

The 2020 election, and its aftermath, have been marred by multiple election administration conspiracy theories, driven by misinformation, that are rapidly eroding Americans trust in our elections," Merrill said. This position will be key in stopping the spread of election administration misinformation before it can do lasting damage in Connecticut."

Christopher Keating can be reached at ckeating@courant.com.

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Connecticut conservatives are wary about a misinformation officer overseeing 2022 election - Hartford Courant

This is a version of an article published in the Out of Frame Weekly, an email newsletter about the intersection of art, culture, and ideas. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday.

Imagine waking up one day unable to access your bank account because of your political beliefs. Imagine faking your facial expression whenever people were around to avoid committing "facecrime." Imagine if the economy ground to a halt like a train that ran out of fuel. Does it sound far off?

It may sound like paranoid hyperbole to say we are living in a dystopia. But the core of valuable dystopian fiction is exploring what elements of our society have effects that would, if taken to the extreme, destroy our freedom and go against human dignity.

My Out of Frame colleagues have analyzed the meaning and relevance of a variety of dystopian fiction: Demolition Man, The Hunger Games, Arcane, The Matrix, The Handmaid's Tale, Brave New World, V for Vendetta. But what dystopia is most relevant right now? Here are three contenders (excluding examples that bear similarity purely due to the presence of a pandemic).

The sci-fi anthology series is packed with ideas that are as intriguing as they are nightmarish. But the episode "Nosedive" from 2016 stands out as relevant to our current world.

Darkly comedic rather than terrifying, as most Black Mirror episodes are, "Nosedive" follows Lacie (Bryce Dallas Howard), who lives in a society where everyone rates each other using an app after every interaction. Characters can see each other's aggregate rating, on a scale from one to five stars, through augmented-reality eye implants. If your score drops too low, your access to housing, transportation, healthcare, and work is restricted. Naturally, authentic human interaction has been blotted out in favor of cloying for social status. In the episode's opening shot, Lacie is literally practicing her fake smile and laugh in front of her bathroom mirror.

"Nosedive" is a pretty obvious metaphor for how humans vie for reputation, and how social media has made it even more competitive. You can draw parallels that range from Uber ratings to the People's Republic of China's social credit system.

Although the episode doesn't explore how a culture of conformity relates to political expression, it rings true regarding cancel culture and how people self-censor their opinions to avoid social backlash. Sixty-two percent of Americans have opinions they're not willing to share (77% among conservatives). This trend was evident when "Nosedive" was produced, but it has only gotten worse since then.

The episode's vision that people would be denied access to services based on socially disapproved actions also feels eerily prescient. Recently, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau froze the bank accounts of people involved in the Canadian trucker protest and cracked down on donations to the demonstrators. It's not hard to see how, as technology comes to integrate more aspects of our lives, the opportunity will arise for state and corporate authorities to monitor our actions and try to mold them.

Yes, I know as well as anyone that George Orwell's most famous work is the most over-referenced novel when it comes to authoritarianism. But the fact that some people beat a dead horse should not preclude me from drawing legitimate comparisons to the book, especially when going beyond its most commonly cited themes: censorship, propaganda, surveillance, and torture.

What makes Nineteen Eighty-Four great is how concretely it describes the psychological effects of living in an authoritarian society. Like in "Nosedive," this involves social conformity, only the consequences are much more severe. Citizens of the authoritarian nation of Oceania report their friends and neighbors, even their family, to the police for the smallest infractions. Characters keep their facial expressions under control at all times for fear of committing "facecrime" by revealing discontentment with the system, whether to the comrades or to the omnipresent telescreens.

Politics dominates life in Nineteen Eighty-Four, from daily "Two Minutes Hate" rallies to Big Brother posters on every corner:

"In principle a Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in bed. It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping he would be taking part in some kind of communal recreation: to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: OWNLIFE, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity.

The paranoia of this reality both fills the protagonist with hate and makes him yearn for "ownlife," for an escape from all-consuming political dogma.

Though America of 2022 bears little resemblance to the Oceania of 1984, this desire is relatable. With political messages filling entertainment, sports, advertising, and the workplace, more aspects of life are becoming "culture-war" battlefields. Along with the animosity engendered by rising polarization, about two-thirds of Americans feel worn out by the degree to which they are required to pay attention to political and social issues.

Whether or not you're a fan of Ayn Rand's influential novel or her philosophy as a whole, Atlas Shrugged offers a lot to think about, particularly regarding America's struggling economy.

Over the course of the book, the government issues regulations to solve economic problems (and to satisfy special interests), but these actions only worsen the situation by discouraging competition and productivity. The government takes more and more authoritarian measures, including freezing wages and banning people from leaving their jobs. But it only digs the nation deeper into the recession, as it ignores the incentives that keep the economy running and causes entrepreneurs to get fed up.

Rand grew up in the Soviet Union and lived through the Great Depression in the US, and its clear these experiences influenced Atlas Shrugged. But the plot is also reminiscent of the most recent recession. For example, the current supply-chain crisis was in part caused by the labor shortage, which was caused by enhanced unemployment benefits, which were intended to remedy workers laid off when the government ordered businesses to shut down to stop the pandemic. In reaction to the supply-chain jam, the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach issued fines to try to force carriers to get their cargo moving.

Each action only creates the cause for further actions, and the result is the same as in Atlas Shrugged: fewer goods on shelves and an overall reduction in quality of life.

It's easy to succumb to catastrophic thinking when comparing current events to fictional dystopias. But the entire purpose of the genre is to point out how our society is evolving in destructive ways. Quoting Orwell:

"It has been suggested by some of the reviewers of Nineteen Eighty-Four that it is the authors view that this, or something like this, is what will happen inside the next forty years in the Western world. This is not correct. I think that, allowing for the book being after all a parody, something like Nineteen Eighty-Four could happen. This is the direction in which the world is going at the present time, and the trend lies deep in the political, social and economic foundations of the contemporary world situation. [...] The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Dont let it happen. It depends on you."

See the rest here:

Which Dystopian Story Does 2022 Resemble the Most? - Foundation for Economic Education

AnthemPublished in 1938 & 1946

Anthem is Ayn Rands hymn to mans ego. It is the story of one mans rebellion against a totalitarian, collectivist society. Equality 7-2521 is a young man who yearns to understand the Science of Things. But he lives in a bleak, dystopian future where independent thought is a crime and where science and technology have regressed to primitive levels.

All expressions of individualism have been suppressed in the world of Anthem; personal possessions are nonexistent, individual preferences are condemned as sinful and romantic love is forbidden. Obedience to the collective is so deeply ingrained that the very word I has been erased from the language.

In pursuit of his quest for knowledge, Equality 7-2521 struggles to answer the questions that burn within him questions that ultimately lead him to uncover the mystery behind his societys downfall and to find the key to a future of freedom and progress.

The countrys top banker a leading oil producer a once-revered professor an acclaimed composer a distinguished judge. All vanish without explanation and without trace.

A copper magnate becomes a worthless playboy. A philosopher-turned-pirate is rumored to roam the seas. The remnants of a brilliant invention are left as scrap in an abandoned factory.

What is happening to the world? Why does it seem to be in a state of decay? Can it be saved and how?

Atlas Shrugged is a mystery story, not about the murder of a mans body, but about the murder and rebirth of mans spirit.

Follow along as industrialist Hank Rearden and railroad executive Dagny Taggart struggle to keep the country afloat and unravel the mysteries that confront them.

Discover why, at every turn, they are met with public opposition and new government roadblocks, taxes and controls and with the disappearance of the nations most competent men and women.

Will Hank and Dagny succeed in saving the country and will they discover the answer to the question Who is John Galt?

In her first notes for The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand describes its purpose as a defense of egoism in its real meaning . . . a new definition of egoism and its living example. She later states its theme as individualism versus collectivism, not in politics, but in mans soul; the psychological motivations and the basic premises that produce the character of an individualist or a collectivist.

The living example of egoism is Howard Roark, an architect and innovator, who breaks with tradition, [and] recognizes no authority but that of his own independent judgment. Roarks individualism is contrasted with the spiritual collectivism of many of the other characters, who are variations on the theme of second-handedness thinking, acting and living second-hand.

Roark struggles to endure not merely professional rejection, but also the enmity of Ellsworth Toohey, beloved humanitarian and leading architectural critic; of Gail Wynand, powerful publisher; and of Dominique Francon, the beautiful columnist who loves him fervently yet is bent on destroying his career.

The Fountainhead earned Rand a lasting reputation as one of historys greatest champions of individualism.

The setting is Soviet Russia, early 1920s. Kira Argounova, a university engineering student who wants a career building bridges, falls in love with Leo Kovalensky, son of a czarist hero. Both Kira and Leo yearn to shape their own future but they are trapped in a communist state that claims the right to sacrifice individual lives for the sake of the collective.

When Kira is kicked out of the university as an undesirable and Leos past makes him unemployable, life becomes a grim struggle for physical survival. Leo contracts tuberculosis but cant get admitted to a state sanitarium, despite Kiras best efforts. Desperate, she seeks help from Andrei Taganov, an ardent young communist whose love for Kira helps awaken him to the meaning of genuine personal values, not to be surrendered for others sake.

What will happen as these three struggle to be living individuals in defiance of the power of the collectivist state?

The method of capitalisms destruction, Ayn Rand writes, rests on never letting the world discover what it is that is being destroyed. InCapitalism: The Unknown Ideal, Rand and her colleagues define a new view of capitalisms meaning, history, and philosophic basis and set out to demolish many of the myths surrounding capitalism.

Does capitalism lead to depressions, monopolies, child labor or war? Why is big business so hated? Why have conservatives failed to stop the growth of the state? Is religion compatible with capitalism? Is government regulation the solution to economic problems or their cause? What is freedom and what kind of government does it require? Is capitalism moral?

Capitalism: The Unknown Idealtackles these and other timeless questions about capitalism, and lays out Rands provocative thesis: that the system of laissez-faire capitalism is a moral ideal.

In the lengthy introductory essay ofFor the New Intellectual, Rand argues that America and Western civilization are bankrupt, and that the cause of the bankruptcy is the failure of philosophy: specifically, the failure of philosophers and intellectuals to define and advocate a philosophy of reason.

In the subsequent selections, culled from her novels, Rand presents the outline of her philosophy of reason, which she calls Objectivism. These excerpts cover major topics in philosophy from Objectivisms basic axioms to its new theory of free will to its radical ethics of rational egoism to its moral-philosophic case for laissez-faire capitalism.

For the New Intellectualcontains some of Rands most important passages on other philosophers, including Aristotle, Plato, Hume, Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche. Many of its selections also develop Rands unprecedented critique of altruism the notion that our basic moral obligation is to live for others.

Philosophy: Who Needs Itis the last work planned by Ayn Rand prior to her death in 1982. In these essays, Rand shows how abstract ideas have profound real-life consequences. She identifies connections between egalitarianism and inflation, collectivism and the regulation of pornography, alcoholism, and the problem of free will vs. determinism.

Contrary to the notion that philosophy is detached from the practical concerns of life, Rand sees philosophys influence everywhere, leading her to ask questions like: How can a persons views about metaphysics impact his ambition and self-confidence? How has the notion of duty given morality a bad name? How did the belief that faith is superior to reason unleash the horrors of twentieth-century totalitarianism?

Philosophy: Who Needs Italso includes Rands assessment of a number of prominent thinkers, including John Rawls, John Maynard Keynes, B. F. Skinner, and, above all, Immanuel Kant, whom Rand regards as her arch philosophical adversary.

In these eighteen essays, readers learn why Rands answer to the question of who needs philosophy is an emphatic: you do.

In this collection, Ayn Rand explains the indispensable function of art in mans life (chapter 1), the source of mans deeply personal, emotional response to art (chapter 2), and how an artists fundamental, often unstated view of man and of the world shapes his creations (chapter 3). In a chapter that includes an extended discussion of music, Rand explores the valid forms of art (chapter 4).

Rand also presents her distinctive theory of literature (chapter 5) and sheds new light on Romanticism, under which category Rand classified her own work (chapters 6 and 10). Later essays explain how contemporary art reveals the debased intellectual and esthetic state of our culture (chapters 7, 8 and 9).

In the final essay (chapter 11), Rand articulates the goal of her own fiction writing and upholds the value of art that depicts men as they might be and ought to be. Chapter 12 is a short story Rand wrote in 1940, illustrating how an artists sense of life directs his subconscious and shapes his creative imagination.

Most ethical discussions take for granted the supreme moral value of selfless service. Debate then centers on details: Should we serve an alleged God or substitute society for God? How much sacrifice is required? Whos entitled to benefit from others sacrifices?

In this volumes lead essay, The Objectivist Ethics, Ayn Rand challenges that basic assumption by reconsidering ethics from the ground up. Why, she asks, does man need morality in the first place? Her answer to that question culminates in the definition of a new code of morality, based in rational self-interest, aimed at each individuals life and happiness, and rejecting sacrifice as immoral.

In additional articles, Rand expands her theory and discusses practical questions such as: Do people face intractable conflicts of interest? Isnt everyone selfish? Doesnt life require compromise? How do I live in an irrational society? What about the needs of others? What are political rights? Whats the rational function of government? Her fresh, provocative answers cast new light on what it means to be genuinely selfish.

Mans mind is able to grasp the atomic structure of water and the trajectory of a planet. What explains this enormous cognitive power, far outstripping that of any other animal? The key, Ayn Rand argues, is that man can form and use concepts.

InIntroduction to Objectivist Epistemology, Rand introduces her theory of knowledge by means of its central feature, a new theory of the nature and formation of concepts. Along the way, she provides her fundamental answer to the Kantian turn in epistemology, offering a non-skeptical, non-mystical approach to knowledge.

The 1990 second edition contains edited transcripts of four workshops Rand conducted between 1969 and 1971 with professors and experts in philosophy, physics and mathematics. These extended conversations show Rands mind at work in real time, providing additional detail, examples, explanation and context for her theory.

Although Ayn Rand defined a full philosophic system, which she called Objectivism, she never wrote a comprehensive, nonfiction presentation of it. Rands interest in philosophy stemmed originally from her desire to create heroic fictional characters for her novels, especiallyAtlas Shrugged, whose final philosophic speech she called Objectivisms briefest summary.

In 1976, philosopher Leonard Peikoff, her longtime student and associate, gave a lecture course that Rand described as the only authorized presentation of the entire theoretical structure of Objectivism, i.e., the only one that I know of my own knowledge to be fully accurate.

Following Rands death, Peikoff edited and reorganized those lectures to produceObjectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, the first comprehensive statement of her philosophy. Published in 1991, this book presents Rands entire philosophy metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics and esthetics in essentialized and systematic form.

The 60s are usually glorified as a time when Americas youth stood up in rebellion against the cultural establishment. Protesting everything from Vietnam to industrial capitalism, college students under the banner of the New Left forcibly occupied campus buildings and idolized Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro and were hailed as idealistic revolutionaries.

Ayn Rand viewed them very differently.

In a number of essays, she analyzes the campus protests and the ideology of the New Left, concluding that far from rebelling, they were slavishly following every basic idea of their teachers and that far from being idealistic, they were attacking the key foundations of a rational, free society.

Rands writings on these and related topics were collected inThe New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution(1971). A 1999 edition,Return of the Primitive, added supplementary articles, including three by editor Peter Schwartz analyzing the New Lefts enduring legacy.

Between 1961, when she gave her first talk at Ford Hall Forum in Boston, and 1981, when she gave the last talk of her life in New Orleans, Ayn Rand spoke and wrote about topics as different as education, medicine, Vietnam and the papal encyclicalHumanae Vitae (Of Human Life).

The Voice of Reasonis a collection of these pieces gathered in book form for the first time. Here we get some of Rands most in-depth treatments of issues such as religion, sex, abortion, foreign policy and the mixed economy.

With Rands selections are five essays by philosopher Leonard Peikoff, Rands longtime associate and literary executor, covering such topics as education and socialized medicine, as well as a piece by Objectivist scholar Peter Schwartz on the difference between libertarianism and Objectivism.

The work concludes with Peikoffs epilogue, My Thirty Years with Ayn Rand: An Intellectual Memoir, which answers the question What was Ayn Rand really like?

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Free Books - AynRand.org

The lead character is an independent woman who sleeps with different men. She lives life on her terms.

People talking about socialism vs capitalism vs libertarian have it all wrong!!

Its not about economics, its about feminism!

Warn the general public before its too late!

^^Elisabeth Moss for the biopic.

Famous Libertarians:

Rand Paul - Senator from KY - KY is in the top 3 dependent on SOCIALISM for its survival. He also went to Universal healthcare Canada for surgery.

Curt Schilling - Retired Pitcher - The taxpayers of RI had to bail out his shit video game company to the tune of a couple million when it failed.

Paul Ryan - Former SotH - Social Security moocher

Ayn Rand - Social Security and medicare moocher

R2 yes she would capture her look perfectly, and honestly a biopic would have to more enjoyable than her books.

Walter Pidgeon was in one of her Broadway plays. Do you think he made a play for her husband?

That's not writing, it's typing.

Follow this link:

Atlas Shrugged Is A Feminist Tome - datalounge.com

We are as gods and might as well get good at it. Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog

Ayn Rand was a brilliant, inventive thinker whose contributions go largely unsung outside libertarian circles. Rand developed a secular eudaimonist ethics decades before the 20th century revival of virtue ethics ignited. She pioneered a thick ethical and aesthetic defense of capitalism that celebrated business and innovation as heroic; her frontal assault on altruism represented a fundamental shift away from defending economic freedom under the pall of suspicion of the profit motive. She erected a philosophical permission structure for rational self-interest, achievement, and the pursuit of happiness.

Rand forged a synthesis of possessive and expressive individualism and fashioned a perfectionist political doctrine of truly human flourishing, sweeping away the Marxist monopoly on such rhetoric and anticipating its reemergence in the capabilities approach by several decades. She promised a vision of human possibility, progress, and triumph over limitations that boldly assumed that we are indeed as gods, and that the greatest threats to our future are philosophies prioritizing impossibility, failure, and weakness.

Rand achieved all this as a refugee from Soviet Russia by way of a couple of gripping, wildly successful philosophical novels that cast rail networks and steel production in romantic glory. She launched a movement that rocked conservative politics, shaped the nascent libertarian movement, and is still going strong some four decades after her death.

Ill have several sharply critical things to say about Rand in this essay, which explores how her philosophy of Objectivism relates to the liberal tradition. Indeed Ill question whether Rand really belongs within the liberal tradition at all, as several aspects of her thought reveal an illiberal, even reactionary hue. For whatever harsh words follow, I maintain that Rand was an ingenious thinker and a talented novelist who deserves respect and sympathy. Despite the doubt I will cast on Rand qua liberal and indeed qua social thinker, I will conclude by sketching what a liberal and genuinely emancipatory Objectivism might look like.

Rand is usually seen as one of the pillars of the modern classical liberal tradition. For libertarians, famously, it usually begins with Ayn Rand. Yet at a time when some major political parties in the worlds liberal democracies, once so comfortingly colonized by liberal habits, are flirting with or openly endorsing antiliberal values, its worth reevaluating foundational assumptions. It is in that spirit that I explore points of tension between Rands philosophy and the liberal tradition, and argue that she is better understood as a heterodox conservative.

Ill set the stage by specifying what I mean by liberalism and its alternatives. Liberalism is an approach to politics that seeks to defuse, redirect, or even harness conflict in a society of reasonable individuals who differ in beliefs, backgrounds, and concerns. At minimum, liberalism holds to some level of representative government with genuinely open elections, basic freedoms of religion, speech, assembly, and commerce, and a tolerance for internal pluralism and diversity. Liberalism stands explicitly against absolutist power, in the form either of monarchies or totalitarian communist regimes, among other possibilities. Its closer (and overlapping) neighbors are socialismwhich weakens or opposes the sanctity of commerce and in its extreme forms undermines the other liberal desiderata in order to empower the working classand conservatismwhich tends to weaken pluralism and the freedoms of minorities and in its extreme forms compromises representative government and the rule of law to favor a preferred racial or religious group.

Rand advances a comprehensive doctrine, Objectivism, that sits uneasily with the political liberalism of democratic authority. Rands idealist views of the history and meritocracy of capitalism naturalized traditional hierarchies and justified contempt for the poor and marginalized. While Rand despised religious faith and thus the traditional religious authority much of conservatism appeals to, in her own life she thought of herself as on the political right, focused most of her rhetorical fire against the left, and exemplified a kind of reactionary anti-leftism. Rands illiberal conservatismhowever heterodoxis showcased with particularly stark clarity in her epic masterpiece, Atlas Shrugged, in which a vanguard party engineers a total social and economic collapse to pave the way for a society ordered according to Objectivist values.

The role of comprehensive worldviews in a pluralist society is one of the perennial sources of tension in liberal thought. So-called liberal neutrality requires that a government favor no comprehensive doctrine over any other. But some comprehensive doctrines (like Catholic integralism) require that society be reshaped in their favored mold; some doctrines simply dont play well with others. Rand insisted, even in her nonfiction, that there can be no conflicts of interest between individuals whose interests are rational. This idea first appears in Atlas Shrugged at steel industrialist Hank Reardens trial for violating regulations on the use of Rearden Metal.

Are we to understand, asked the judge, that you hold your own interests above the interests of the public?

I hold that such a question can never arise except in a society of cannibals.

What . . . what do you mean?

I hold that there is no clash of interests among men who do not demand the unearned and do not practice human sacrifices.

Rand, represented here by Rearden, goes beyond the belief that people may be mistaken or taken in by erroneous ideologies. She instead introduces the idea that a clash of interests must involve error or evil. Where bog standard political liberalism assumes innocent conflicts of interests and a boisterous polity of worldviews in tension with each other that must be managed for the sake of peaceor in a stronger vein, this diversity actually provides greater resources for solving social problemsin Rands Objectivism some party must be illegitimate. If, as Rand insists, any compromise of good with evil only profits evil and some party of every social conflict is evil then the idea that disagreement should be settled by elections is abominable. Democracy is by necessity a handmaiden to evil.

In Atlas Shrugged democracy is entirely sidelined. The plot follows the quickening erosion of economic freedom and its replacement with an economy of political threats and favors. All of the politics in the novel takes the form of corrupt, backroom deals between dishonest businessmen, lobbyists, political hacks, and ultimately economic czars of one kind or another. Rands virtuous heroes stay above this fray, and struggle valiantly to conduct ordinary business in an increasingly hostile environment. Importantly, Rands heroes really are virtuous: incorruptibly honest, just, hard-working, dependable, and even benevolent. The novel explores how such virtue is punished in statist economic regimes, those that fall short of laissez-faire capitalism.

While there is a legislature, an executive, and legal courts, theres no mention of democratic elections or formal political parties (though there are factions). In So Who Is John Galt, Anyway? Objectivist commentator Robert Tracinski suggests this absence of the expected democratic institutions is because they had already been swept away in political turmoil prior to the main events of the novel. But this is unsatisfying. Such a cataclysm would surely leave marks on the main characters who would have ample reason to reference it. And if Rands heroes simply ignored the political worldwholly engaged as they were in their productive toiluntil the looters government bore down on them, then this would reveal culpable negligence.

Rand conveniently includes a perfect being in Atlas Shrugged, John Galt, whose philosophical determinations and emotional reactions are beyond reproach. In the momentous scene at the heart of the novel that sets in motion Galts strike of the men of the mind there is no mention of prior or present political activism. Voting is rarely mentioned throughout the novel, and when it is its usually denigratory, as in Galts speech where he accuses his misguided audience of [voting politicians] into jobs of total power over arts you have never seen, over sciences you have never studied, over achievements of which you have no knowledge, over the gigantic industries .

Objectivists may think that honest business people shouldnt have to be bothered with politics, but this reveals the problem with Rands conception of no rational or innocent conflict of interest. Good, rational people simply do see the world from different angles and come to different conclusions, and democratic politics is in part about managing these differences peacefully. When this essential vice of disagreement is coupled with the extreme conclusions of Rands political philosophysuch as that taxation is theft and all regulation of business violates the prohibition on the initiation of forcethe entire range of normal democratic politics is rendered illegitimate, vicious, and evil. This weakens any hold normal liberal democratic politics has on the Objectivist and frees them from any restraint of perspective.

This antidemocratic element in Rands thinking finds its fully antiliberal expression in Galts Gulch, where Galts strikersRands heroesdecamp to withdraw their productive capacity from society, watch it collapse, and prepare to reenter society on their own terms. Rand scholar Chris Matthews Sciabarra notes in Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical that Galts Gulch is effectively organized as an ideological commune, with every person adhering to the same belief system, obviating both politics and government. But this misses the planned hostile takeover of the outside world. The strikers are not passive communitarians engaging in some kind of Benedict Option, but vanguardists specifically seeking to overthrow the current regime. Ostensibly, this vanguardism is nonviolent, but the strike is effective only in Rands fantasy worldbuilding, wherein the removal of a thousand or so of the most talented industrialists, engineers, and capable people of all kinds would reduce society to a state of total dysfunction, literally unable to keep the lights on.

I must note here that in her actual life, Rand participated avidly in democratic politics, campaigning for (Republican) candidates and encouraging her followers to vote in certain ways. So Rands no-compromise-with-evil position never took the antidemocratic, anti-voting turn popular among some Marxist-Leninists and anarcho-capitalists. So its certainly possible to be an Objectivist and still be a small-d democrat. My purpose here is to explore the tensions between Objectivism and liberalism, which sometimes but not always result in illiberal politics.

Rand sits uneasily with the liberal idea of inescapable political conflict and democratic politics. But how could Rand be a conservative when she opposed the religious right, fiercely defended the right to abortion, and was an outspoken atheist who condemned religious faith? Rands philosophy is on the surface quite liberal. Her own vision of capitalism was one of progress, openness to new ideas, and an openness to strivers from all backgrounds to test their mettle in the market and strike it rich.

Rands critics who assume she merely shilled for the rich and business interests face an awkward set of facts. Most of Rands villains in Atlas Shrugged were wealthy businessmen, her heroes all discard or destroy their worldly riches, and her ideal man, John Galt, was a manual rail laborer.

At times Rand goes out of her way to admire the quiet, modest dignity and competence of the regular laborer. Track workers saluting Dagny Taggart, Rands rail heiress protagonist, and cheering the initial run of the John Galt Line is a notable example of this, and its paralleled by the good relations both Rearden and Francisco, Rands ultra-capable and flamboyant copper industrialist, have with their respective employees.

The first main character we meet is Eddie Willers, a decent man and ally of Dagny and unwitting confidant of Galt, but no bermensch. Cheryl Taggart, Dagnys sister-in-law and a victim of Jim Taggarts psychopathic need for warrantless love and praise, provides an example of a simple store clerk discovering the values of Rands heroes. Rand gives at least two redemption arcs, in the railroad tramp Jeff Allen who Dagny deputizes in an emergency, and in the Wet Nurse sent by the government to spy on Rearden who is converted to Reardens cause and values.

Rearden rose from unskilled, dangerous work in ore mines as a teenager to owning his own steel mills and even inventing a lighter, stronger alloy. Such rags-to-riches stories are to be expected in Rands capitalism. But so is the obverse. In his famous money speech, Francisco argues that those who are born rich must eventually fritter away their wealth if they are incompetent. This is the morality of capitalism: ability and hard work are rewarded and sloth and venality are punished. To the extent capitalism fails to match Rands vision, its because we mix capitalism with socialism in a mixed economy. Rand associates the explosive innovation and productivity of the 19th century with the relatively purer capitalism of that era.

In its ideal form, Rands capitalism embraces liberal equality and universalism. It is color-blind, recognizes equal rights for women, and is open to ambitious, freedom-seeking immigrants (like Rand herself). Dagny is a capable, confident woman thriving by her own lights in a mans world. In what might be viewed as an early manifestation of sex-positivity, Dagny knows what she wants in love and sex and is undeterred in pursuing her sexual ends on her own terms, which incidentally never involves marriage.

Rand in practice differs markedly from her ideal theory. In the end she does endorse many traditional values. But her conservatism assumes the form of an orientation toward upholding extant social hierarchies. Rands capitalism is free and equal in the ideal, but by a rhetorical sleight of hand Rand in practice naturalizes and romanticizes hierarchy in a way that neatly maps onto existing social strata.

In tension with the respect she sometimes shows for workers, Rands heroes frequently show contempt for the poor. An early example of this is when Dagny measures herself against both her peers and the adults around her and notes the regrettable accident that she is imprisoned among people who were dull. Later she contrasts normal people with her fellow superlative, Rearden.

Watching him in the crowd, she realized the contrast for the first time. The faces of the others looked like aggregates of interchangeable features, every face oozing to blend into the anonymity of resembling all, and all looking as if they were melting. Reardens face, with the sharp planes, the pale blue eyes, the ash-blond hair, had the firmness of ice; the uncompromising clarity of its lines made it look, among the others, as if he were moving through a fog, hit by a ray of light. (Emphases added)

Note the physical differences between Rearden and others under Dagnys gaze. Rand persistently associates physical attractiveness with superior capability and moral uprightness throughout Atlas Shrugged. Capability for Rand is a singular value; in what might be considered a tension with another liberal tenetthe division of laborRands heroes are good at anything and everything they do. Where ordinary people are often portrayed as untalented and unmotivated about whatever job they find themselves in, Rands superlatives can farm and sew with the same elite skill they apply to their chosen profession.

By strongly associatingif not exactly equatingattractiveness, capability, and morality, Rand naturalizes hierarchy. This association becomes all the more alarming when we consider that all of Rands heroes are white, most of them blond. There is something essential within heroic individuals that fundamentally sets them apart from normal folks, just as Dagny surmised at age nine. Of course there are some rags-to-riches cases in actual capitalism. But this is far from the norm, and contra Franciscos faith that fools and their money are soon parted, phenomenally venal and incompetent peoplethink Donald Trumpare born to wealth and live their lives in luxury and power as their wealth maintains itself on autopilot.

While ordinary folks are not always contemptible, they are always expendable in Atlas Shrugged. The non-superlative but ethical characters discussed aboveEddie, Cheryl, and the Wet Nurseall meet grisly fates. The strike of the men of the mind is itself the prime example of the expendability of the mediocre, as millions die or are brutally impoverished (though its worth considering how many children are victimized by the strike who may have grown into superlative adults). It was part of Rands romantic vision that none of the denizens of Galts Gulch ever died or suffered serious misfortune. Rand insisted that pain, fear, and guilt should not be taken as primary. But lesser characters, like real world mortals, dont have this plot armor, and have plenty of reason for fear.

Rand insists that real capitalism has never been tried, and capitalism la Rand really never has existed, but this doesnt stop Rand from appealing to the meritocratic and productive properties of ideal capitalism to defend actually existing capitalism. This creates a perilous discursive situation in which Objectivists can with suspicious convenience attribute all the good results of modern mixed economies to capitalism and all the bad results to the failure to adhere to Rands precise specifications.

In practice this constitutes a justificatory algorithm for defending the esteem of anyone who is richand the legitimacy of their wealth whether it was acquired by inheritance, implicit or explicit government transfers, or Herculean effort and Promethean innovationand blaming the poor, regardless of their circumstances. Rand thus defended the upper classes from incursions by the lower orders in both theory and in practice, and Objectivists have followed her lead.

Despite Dagny, Rand affirms patriarchal values. Rand believed it was a womans purpose to worship a man who embodied her greatest values. She believed there would be something sinister about a woman ever being President because such a woman would be betraying her feminine nature. For all Dagnys assertiveness and capability, she is the only female titan of industry, and even in Galts Gulch there appear to be few women, most of whom remain unnamed and have come to join their menfolk. Dagnys sex-positivity must be understood alongside Rands persistent slut-shaming, as when Francisco lectures Rearden that he can tell everything about a mans values just by seeing the woman he sleeps with.

Rand is untroubled by sexism and misogyny. In an early throwaway exposition Dagny dismisses sexual prejudice and casually resolves not to consider it again. Perhaps Rand envisaged a world without misogyny. Indeed Dagny receives no abuse, denigration, or lowered expectations from men in a book littered with scenes of otherwise all-male board rooms. Yet if thats the case, were left with the troubling question of why Rands fiction isnt peopled with more women like Dagny. The ready answer is that women arent natural leaders or innovators.

In real life women cannot shrug off sexual and domestic violence, discrimination and harassment in the workplace, objectification, and non-remuneration of reproductive and domestic labor as easily as Dagny can. In her nonfiction and her public comments, Rand loathed feminists, even referring to herself as a male chauvinist. Firmly supporting the right to abortion on grounds of bodily autonomy, though laudable, doesnt absolve her of her traditionalist views about womens roles or her reaction against social movements to liberate women from those roles.

Rand averred that homosexuality was immoral, the result of psychological disorder, even disgusting. Needless to say theres no distinction between sex and gender for Rand, and these are strictly binary. The government has no role in enforcing sexual values, but gender and sexuality are a site of judgment, with nary a presumption of innocent difference or respecting human diversity. In Atlas Shrugged Rand evades the problem of gays, lesbians, and transexuals byblank-outsimply leaving them out of her world-building. In the real world, homophobic and transphobic rhetoric supports narratives of non-Objectivist rightwing parties that do not so scrupulously refrain from force and fraud. This matters. Young Objectivists tend to think Rand was wrong about homosexuality but Objectivists generally endorse anti-trans talking points.

Another tool Rand deploys for justifying hierarchy is an epistemic vice she decried in her adversaries: what the great liberal philosopher Charles Mills would dub the epistemology of ignorance but Rand named blanking out.

Thinking is mans only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of ones consciousness, the refusal to thinknot blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgmenton the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict It is.

Rand doesnt discuss race at all in Atlas Shrugged, but omission speaks volumes. Slavery for Rand is usually a histrionic metaphor for the oppression of the industrialist. When she refers to genuine slavery in history, its the non-racialized slavery of antiquity, and its followed by an apparent denial of the racialized slavery of antebellum America.

That phrase about the evil of money comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slavesslaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebodys mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer.

[]

To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of moneyand I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, mans mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human beingthe self-made manthe American industrialist.

Rand blanks out slavery itself in a stunning hagiography of America, notes that she knows real slavery has existed in history and studiously blanks out race throughout the rest of the novel except when describing the white features of her heroes.

Rands history is no better when she engages race in her nonfiction, where she argues that racism was strongest in the more controlled economies, such as Russia and Germanyand weakest in England, the then freest country of Europe. There might be some truth to this if Rand judged 19th century America as unfree, but for Rand in its great era of capitalism, the United States was the freest country on earthand the best refutation of racist theories. Rand continues,

It is capitalism that broke through national and racial barriers, by means of free trade. It is capitalism that abolished serfdom and slavery in all the civilized countries of the world. It is the capitalist North that destroyed the slavery of the agrarian-feudal South in the United States.

Such was the trend of mankind for the brief span of some hundred and fifty years.

Rand explicitly rejects the notion that some races have greater incidence of men of potentially superior brain power but her historical analysis reveals she viewed slavery and the oppression of Jim Crow as minor deviations from a system of full individual freedom.

In her essay on racism, Rand goes on to condemn Black leaders as racist for supporting affirmative action, compulsory school integration, and anti-discrimination laws on private establishments. Like todays anti-anti-racists, Rand projects the notion of collective racial guilt onto whites for the sins of their ancestors for policies aimed at repairing racial inequities despite no significant Black thinker using such concepts, certainly not the specific activist Rand quotes in her essay. Such inequalities obtained, Rand recognized, on account of government policies, but Rand ignored or didnt understand the extent to which the government continued to support racial inequality with policies like redlining, segregation, relative deprivation of public funds for Black communities, and a long laissez-faire approach to anti-Black terrorism. But even if, as Rand imagined, direct government racism had ended, a vast difference in life prospects would have remained for Black and white individuals. Rands just-so story in which racism is a minor problem and the graver threat comes from the redistributionist policies of anti-racists functions as an ideological bulwark against policies to promote racial equality, once again reinforcing the status quo socio-economic hierarchy.

In all these cases Rand instinctively defends the relatively advantaged and inveighs against the claims of the disadvantaged. Rand and her followers would claim that she merely defends individual rights, especially those of property, and does so in accordance with equality before the law. But this reactionarya word Rand self-appliedkind of nominal liberalism erodes the rule of law in fact while upholding it in name. Liberalism cannot be collapsed into rights alone; there must be a dimension of political contestation. A highly hierarchical society that jealously guards property rights without real political contestation is not any kind of liberalism, but feudalism.

Consider the disproportionate violence inflicted on Black men by police. On its face this is a failure to uphold equality before the law, but if the resulting protests are successfully framed in terms of alleged looting of private property, then Objectivists will flock to the defense of the rights-violating police. In contrast to Rands version of the great era of capitalism, real people who are not wealthy white men have not enjoyed equality under the law. By aggressively objecting to alleged excesses of any appeal to social justice, blanking out historical evidence of oppression, and insisting the most legally and institutionally coddled classes are really the most oppressed, Rand undermines the civic equality of all persons.

Blanking out inconvenient truths combines with the antidemocratic elements of Rands political philosophy to brutal effects. The illegitimacy of actually existing governments renders the supposedly objective political theory subjective in practice. This enabled Rand to endorse deeply illiberal ideas, such as the right to invade dictatorshipswhat does this mean when all actual governments are illegitimate by her lights?and the lands inhabited by savages who dont share Rands concept of property rights (neither has America, ever). Yaron Brook, the erstwhile Executive Director of the Ayn Rand Institute, would take this reasoning further to condone torture and preemptive nuclear strikes. Rand adopted a kind of American exceptionalist outlook based not on the actual proximity of American governance to Objectivist doctrine, but to her biased views of Americas founding ideals and her largely imagined history of early American capitalism. Rand pitted America in theory against the rest of the world in practice.

Randian reaction today is expressed by befuddlement in the face of genuinely antiliberal, antidemocratic authoritarianism. I have no doubt that Rand would have condemned Donald Trumphe really is like one of her villains, only less believablebut its not at all clear she could have held her nose enough to support Democrats. The mere presence of democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the wings would likely have spooked Rand into a pox on both houses stance. Some prominent Objectivists today exhibit such both-sidesism, and even invite Trumpist figures like Peter Thiel to their galas.

To recap, Ayn Rand is more fruitfully understood as a heterodox conservative than as a liberal, and is at best a rightwing liberal with illiberal tendencies. Rand advanced a politics of the good that viewed its ideological adversaries as fundamentally illegitimate. Her totalizing vision of the political orderhowever easily stated on one foot as strict laissez-faire capitalismallowed her to be a kind of nationalist, an American chauvinist. Rand defended the rule of law in principle, but undermined civic equality in practice by promoting hierarchy and reaction.

To touch grass for a moment, of course Rand was a conservative, or at least a rightwinger. Rand saw herself as on the political right, was active in rightwing political campaigns throughout her entire life until the rise of Reagan, and is embraced almost exclusively by the political right. These claims arent controversial. My controversial claim is that Rands heterodox conservatismespecially as expressed in her magnum opushas underappreciated tensions with liberalism (even classical variety) that sometimes slips into illiberalism.

It is not so hard for admirers of Rand to stay on the side of liberalism. It means firmly supporting democratic institutions and practices. Some Rand enthusiasts remain firmly liberal. Robert Tracinski is admirable in this. In academic philosophy, Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl have fleshed out a Randian liberalism that plausibly manages the tension between political liberalism and Rands perfectionism. Neera Badhwar lessens the tendency for Objectivism to view other ideologies as basically illegitimate.

Its no accident that Rand has many fans in gay and queer communities. Its not unheard of even for some prominent progressives to signal appreciation for Rand, a recent case being Stacey Abrams. I attribute this to Rands celebration of individualism against the crowd, of triumph over adversity, and of joy in ones own projects and self-directed life. These sentiments have cross-political appeal. The fact is, people will continue reading and finding inspiration in Rand because she was a fascinating and inspiring figure. It is thus worthwhile both for those dismissive of Rand to see what is valuable in Rand and for her enthusiasts to identify and jettison the illiberal elements of her philosophy. I end by offering an under-explored left Randian liberalism that I hope can serve as a bridge over the apparently impassable chasm separating Rand from social liberalism.

Rands exaltation of the innovative and productive powers of capitalism is shared by Marx and other socialists. Marx associated productive labor with the essence of human nature. The dimension of Rand that evokes the unfolding of human potential mirrors both Marxism and the expressivist left liberal branch of the liberal tradition stretching from Adam Smith through J.S. Mill and T.H. Green to the capabilities approach of Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen. Sciabarra recounts,

Peikoff argues that at the core of Objectivism is a belief in the actualization of human potentialities. In this regard, Objectivism follows the Aristotelian conception of eudaemonia as the human entelechy. For Aristotle, the proper end of human action is the achievement of a state of rich, ripe, fulfilling earthly happiness. [Branden] argues that human life involves the expansion of the boundaries of the self to embrace all of our potentialities, as well as those parts that have been denied, disowned, repressed. The actualization of human potential is a form of transcendence, an ability to rise above a limited context or perspectiveto a wider field of vision. This wider field does not negate the previous moments; it is a struggle from one stage of development to a higher one, emotionally, cognitively, morally, and so forth

This provides the basis for a Randian left liberalism: securing the conditions for the free development of capabilities for all persons. This requires a reevaluation of certain empirics and a gestalt shift in how the demands of social justice are perceived. A move away from Rands categorical prohibition on the initiation of force to a more complicated limitation of coercion within the rule of law is also needed. A categorical non-aggression principle is a floating abstraction in a world characterized by pervasive historical injustice and complex social relations and institutions that persist over generations. Redistribution toward some base level of relational equality for all and effective capability to pursue ones own flourishing is more akin to Rands philosopher pirate Ragnar Danneskjolds liberatory antics than it is to kleptocratic predation.

Rand gets a number of facts about the world simply wrong. The reality of global warming is one of the least controversial examples. Objectivists deny global warming in defiance of a broad scientific consensus, perhaps because it is seen as a threat to capitalism. But the fossil fuel industry has feasted on subsidies, has an entrenched lobby for political pull, enjoys implicit advantages like the government embrace of suburbs and car culture. The fossil fuel industry hardly embodies laissez-faire capitalism. Pollution causes real harm and is best tackled not by courts and litigation, as Rand preferred, but by legislation and regulation, preferably by pricing in externalities.

Theres no intrinsic reason to glamorize Big Oil and its tycoons instead of Big Renewables and their own heroic scientists, engineers, and business leaders. Environmentalism is not, as Rand maintained, inherently anti-human or anti-development. The gestalt shift here is to see fossil fuel companies as villains clamoring for handouts (by not paying the full cost of greenhouse gases) and solar, wind, and nuclear companies as heroic innovators struggling against the odds to usher forth an era of energy abundance. Stewart Brand, whose epigraph opens this essay, combines just such a Randian vision for human potential with no-nonsense environmentalism.

Even orthodox Objectivists should accept this revision. But social justice issues are thornier because they directly challenge Rands reactionary tendencies. The extent, contours, and social and economic impact of sexual harassment and sexual violence is matter for objective study, one where perhaps feminists know whereof they speak. Theres little reason for Objectivists to categorically dismiss these concerns other than by slavish adherence to Rands prejudices.

Rand loathed feminists for making demands on the government, but the gestalt shift here is that the domestic and reproductive labor typically performedunpaidby women is socially necessary (wait til you see what a strike of the womb can do) and men feel entitled to the fruits of that labor. Patriarchy is rule by the moochers and looters of sex, care, and reproduction. Institutions to reward feminine-coded labor like subsidized child care and paid parental leave would engender a more consistent capitalist order, even if they are built upon a platform of social provision.

Philosopher Kate Manne persuasively describes patriarchy as a set of entitlements, and one of these entitlements is for women (and men in a roundabout way) to conform to a normative image and set of functions. The backlash against trans and nonbinary persons owes to the failure or refusal to conform to the patriarchal model. Thats it; theres not even a significant demand for redistribution in the struggle for trans rights and dignity. But a Randian feminist sees trans liberation as a heroic refusal to perform gender on anyones terms but ones own.

I already discussed above that Rands understanding of the history and legal reality of race in America is largely a fabrication. Objectivists who want to take individual liberty seriously should reckon not only with the profound unfreedom of slavery but with the persistent resistance to policies conducive to Black equality and Black flourishing. Objectivists imagine that the impediments of racism have largely been removed. The racial disparities in policing and incarceration suggest this is overstated. But the entanglement of race in American policies and institutions makes merely removing superficial impediments a deceptive goal. White Americans have been showered with political advantages, legal privileges, and asset-building handouts like the G.I. Bill, land grants, and preferential home loans that have enabled them to accumulate intergenerational wealth and disproportionate political power. Banning only public discrimination and doing nothing to repair the damages caused and permitted by the state constitutes a failure of the state to secure equality before the law. Rands idea that this is about collective racial guilt is defensive histrionics.

The gestalt shift here is that policies of Black flourishing are not special pleading for collectivist redistribution. They reverse more than two centuries worth of white collectivism and upward redistribution of wealth and esteem to whites. The white plantation owner should be seen as the most profound of Randian villains, along with the white legislator, the white prison warden, and the white NIMBY.

Securing the conditions for all persons to fully participate in capitalist enterprise is the lodestar of Randian left liberalism. To do this requires understanding that social justice is not collectivism but the appropriate, targeted response to the collectivism of white supremacist patriarchy. Just as Galts sense of benevolence and his desire to live in a free world prompted him to liberate his fellow heroes from an unfree system, we should likewise foster the conditions of freedom and abundance in which more heroic innovators will emerge. Though Rand may not have approved, this vision retains a distinctively Randian sense of life by celebrating achievement, damning genuine collectivism, and affirming the rational joy of the world where the rail lines merge.

More here:

Liberalism versus Reaction in Ayn Rand Liberal Currents - Liberal Currents