Neil Parille

It's an unfortunate situation. I don't know the details, but Leonard and Grace bought a 3.7 million dollar home in SD County two years ago. According to Valliant, he bit off more than he can chew. Leonard says in his letter that he gave so much of his estate to Kira that he can't afford legal fees. LP might be the most competent 90 year old on earth, but I can understand Kira's concern.

In 2008, I published a blog post, Is Orthodox Objectivism a Religion? A lot has happened in the last sixteen years – the retirement of Leonard Peikoff, the publication of three biographies of Ayn Rand, several schisms, etc. – so I think it’s time for an update and a potential re-evaluation. As with my 2008 piece, my discussion of Objectivism is limited to Objectivists associated with the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) unless otherwise noted. 1. Rand saw herself as something of a secular prophet. In the first edition of Anthem, published in 1936, she wrote, “I have broken the tables of my brothers, and my own tables do I now write with my own spirit.” Rand’s writing is frequently apocalyptic as well. She begins John Galt’s sermon in Atlas Shrugged with an Old Testament-like rebuke of a sinful world facing judgment. “I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. I am the man who has deprived you of victims and thus has destroyed your world, and if you wish to know why you are perishing—you who dread knowledge—I am the one who will now tell you . . . .” Nothing much to change here. 2. Orthodox Objectivism has its official canon of scripture. As Harry Binswanger says to those who consider joining his email list: "It is understood that Objectivism is limited to the philosophic principles expounded by Ayn Rand in the writings published during her lifetime plus those articles by other authors that she published in her own periodicals (e.g., The Objectivist) or included in her anthologies." There are a couple things to change here. First, scripture isn’t quite so binding anymore on at least a couple of issues: Rand’s disapproval of homosexuality and a woman president. Objectivists seem to be free to reject these ideas. In fact, Craig Biddle (an orthodox Objectivist whose falling out with the ARI was of a personal nature), has said that if one were to apply Rand’s ideas consistently, these views are contrary to Objectivism. Second, while material not published by Rand during her lifetime isn’t seen as scripture, much of it has been published over the years. While you’d think while this material doesn’t rise to the level of infallibility, its status as Apocrypha should be respected. However, in 2009, Jennifer Burns published her biography Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. Burns revealed that six posthumously published books – most importantly The Journals of Ayn Rand – were so heavily edited as to be essentially worthless. These works were all edited by writers who were (and mostly still are) associated with the ARI. As Burns says of The Journals. “The editing of the Journals of Ayn Rand (1997) is far more significant and problematic. On nearly every page of the published journals, an unacknowledged change has been made from Rand’s original writing. In the book’s foreword the editor, David Harriman, defends his practice of eliminating Rand’s words and inserting his own as necessary for greater clarity. In many cases, however, his editing serves to significantly alter Rand’s meaning.” Not only that, but the published material has at times removed references to people with whom Rand or Peikoff had a failing out. While this rewriting may have parallels may be common in traditional religions, its closest parallel is to secular religions such as Communism where rewriting and airbrushing material is done to establish a Cult of Personality as with Lenin and Stalin. It is a sad reflection on the ARI that it has not come to terms with this. Yaron Brook was asked about this recently and he said claims of substantial rewriting were promoted by “the enemies of the ARI.” (To be fair, as Burns noted, this editorial tampering was not the work of the archivists at the ARI.) 3. Like religions, Orthodox Objectivism has the tendency to turn disagreements about doctrine into moral issues This has remained the same. Indeed, this aspect of Objectivism became clear when Leonard Peikoff excommunicated John McCaskey in 2010. Peikoff and David Harriman collaborated on a book on induction which was published (with only Harriman as the author) as The Logical Leap. McCaskey, a philosopher of science with a Ph.D. from Stanford University criticized the book, finding its discussion of certain thinkers inaccurate. Peikoff denounced McCaskey, who was on the Board of the ARI at the time, and said unless McCaskey was fired, he might stop supporting the ARI. When a great book sponsored by the Institute and championed by me – I hope you still know who I am and what my intellectual status is in Objectivism – is denounced by a member of the Board of the Institute, which I founded someone has to go and will go. It is your prerogative to decide whom. I do understand how much money M has brought to ARI, and how many college appointments he has gotten and is still getting. As Ayn would have put it, that raises him one rung in Hell, but it does not convert Objectivism into pragmatism. Shortly thereafter, McCaskey resigned from the Board. Craig Biddle, who edited what was then the house journal of the ARI, The Objective Standard, was also given the boot. Biddle’s sin was thinking Peikoff went overboard in his denunciation of McCaskey. Yaron Brook resigned from the masthead of The Objective Standard thereafter. Diana Hsieh was collateral damage in this dustup since she defended Biddle. (Hsieh has left Objectivism, apparently becoming something of a conventional leftist.) Peikoff also proudly said at the time that he was not on speaking terms with nearly half of the Board of Directors. Some years later there was another schism – this time with multi-millionaire supporter Carl Barney. Apparently tired of the “bad rap” Objectivism was getting over all the breaks, the ARI funded a paper in 2022 by Ben Bayer and Harry Binswanger. Essentially the paper said that the ARI wouldn’t respond in the future to breaks and – by a tortuous epistemology that’s hard to summarize – argued it’s basically impossible for anyone to conclude that the ARI is in the wrong when it comes to splits. 4. As can be seen from the above quote, adulation of the group’s founder is paramount in Orthodox Objectivist circles. In particular, Rand’s sacred name is given great reverence by her followers. Rarely is she referred to as just “Rand.” She may be called “Ayn Rand,” “Miss Rand,” or “AR.” Leonard Peikoff is now commonly called “Leonard Peikoff” and “LP.” This is still the standard way of referring to Rand. One thing I’d mention is that the adulation of Rand has moved on to new levels. A couple prominent Objectivists, Harry Binswanger and James Valliant, have praised Rand as the founder of Cognitive Psychology. Also, at the time, I didn’t know that the concept of moral perfection played a large role in Objectivism. Objectivists such as Brook and Chief Philosophy Officer (what a title) Onkar Ghate, get suddenly agnostic when asked if Rand was morally perfect. Other Objectivists are rather explicit that she was. 5. Also, like many religious people, Orthodox Objectivists abhor the “backslider,” the person who appears to give assent to the truth but is working behind the scenes to circumvent it. Leonard Peikoff mentions the type of people Rand attracted in the above article: Not much new to report. This phenomenon was employed by Peikoff to explain why Rand (who was otherwise omniscient) didn’t excommunicate people like the Brandens and the Blumenthals sooner. I’d note that Peikoff said McCaskey “might for all I know be an Objectivist” implying that he was a back slider. 6. Orthodox Objectivism has its official villains and heretics of the type described by Peikoff. The two most evil figures in this pantheon are, of course, Nathaniel and Barbara Branden. There are lesser fallen angels, such as David Kelley. The Brandens and David Kelley remain arch villains. The dislike of Kelley (the originator of the “Open Objectivism” concept) became clear when Stephen Hicks debated Craig Biddle. Hicks, who is associated with the Kelley influenced Atlas Society, took the Open position. Needless to say, the hate fest against the Brandens shows no sign of abating, although it is now possible to at least mention Nathaniel’s contributions to pre-68 Objectivism. Since this piece was originally published, two biographies utilizing archival material have been published. Both biographies have confirmed the general accuracy of the Branden accounts. You’d like to think that those who denounced the Brandens (in particular those who called Barbara’s biography an “arbitrary assertion”) might consider making a posthumous apology, but that’s about as likely as a restoration of the Stuarts. 7. Orthodox Objectivism has its official church, the Ayn Rand Institute, which proselytizes on behalf of Objectivism. Leonard Peikoff and his small college of cardinals (Harry Binswanger and Peter Schwartz) supervise the movement. Peikoff occasionally speaks ex cathedra, as he did at the time of the Kelley break. "Now I wish to make a request to any unadmitted anti-Objectivists reading this piece, a request that I make as Ayn Rand's intellectual and legal heir. If you reject the concept of "objectivity" and the necessity of moral judgment, if you sunder fact and value, mind and body, concepts and percepts, if you agree with the Branden or Kelley viewpoint or anything resembling it — please drop out of our movement: drop Ayn Rand, leave Objectivism alone." Unlike many religions, however, Objectivists are intent on charging high prices for their material, which would seem to run counter to their movement’s aim. Objectivist retreats, called "Objectivist Conferences,” are quite expensive to attend. A few things have changed. Most notably Leonard Peikoff has retired. Also, Peikoff has said that upon his passing there will be no intellectual heir to Ayn Rand. But the ARI seems to have taken over Peikoff’s claim to speak for Objectivism. The ARI has for example stated dogmatically that Rand would have despised Donald Trump. The ARI occasionally implies that its position of de-facto open borders on immigration is the Randian position, although Rand wrote next to nothing about immigration. Put in Catholic terms, the Petrine Office has been shut down, but Apostolic Succession remains in force. I checked recently and the ARI’s bookstore has dramatically reduced prices for recordings of its scholars’ courses and the like. More importantly, since 2008 there has been a veritable explosion in books written by ARI scholars. Tara Smith has written at least three books, Binswanger finally published his long-awaited book on epistemology, and the Ayn Rand Society has published three anthologies of works presented in their conferences. Particularly valuable is the Greg Salmieri and Allan Gotthelf anthology, A Companion to Ayn Rand. 8. Those who are associated with the ARI must take care that they do not demonstrate their “worldliness” by fraternizing with Kelleyites and other deviationists. No member of the Objectivist movement may associate with Kelley’s Atlas Center, for example. While an Objectivist might be permitted to publish in a mainstream philosophical journal (notwithstanding the fact that such journals routinely publish articles devoted to the destruction of man’s mind), no Objectivist may publish in Chris Sciabarra’s Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. No word yet on whether the lapsed may be restored to a state of grace. Not much to change here. Since 2008, Objectivists such as Brook seem more willing to engage in debates or have talks with people such as Jordan Peterson, but I don’t know of any time an ARI scholar has debated an Atlas Society scholar. As noted above the debate between Hicks and Craig Biddle was denounced by the ARI. ARI supporter James Valliant said that debating Open Objectivism was on par with debating slavery or Holocausts denial.

Ayn Rand: Writing a Gospel of Success by Alexandra Popoff is the first new biography of Ayn Rand since the 2009 biographies of Rand by Anne Heller (Ayn Rand and the World She Made) and Jennifer Burns (Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right). As readers of the Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature Blog know, the first biography of Rand was Barbara Branden’s biography The Passion of Ayn Rand, which was published in 1986. Branden’s biography was largely commendatory; however, she first revealed that Rand and Nathaniel Branden had an affair and alleged that this affair led to Rand’s husband Frank O’Connor’s excess consumption of alcohol (which is well documented for his sad, final years but less well documented in the 50s and 60s). Because Barbara Branden had a falling out with Rand in 1968, it was inevitable that Objectivists associated with Rand’s heir Leonard Peikoff to dismiss this book. Peikoff denounced the book (while saying he would never read it) as an “arbitrary assertion.” This culminated in Peikoff’s friend James Valliant’s 2005 dishonest hit piece, The Passion of Ayn Rand’s Critics, which purported to show that Branden’s biography (and Nathaniel’s memoirs) were lies from beginning to end. However, the 2009 biographies largely confirmed the accuracy of the Branden accounts. Significantly, Jennifer Burns was given almost complete access to the Ayn Rand Institute’s archives. Her biography (and Heller’s, who did not have access to the Archives) largely confirmed the accuracy of Branden’s biography while making occasional corrections to the record (for example, Rand didn’t get her name from a Remington-Rand typewriter). In fact, both Burns and Heller showed that Rand’s mental health was compromised by decades of amphetamine usage (which, incidentally Branden denied). For at least the last twenty years, ARI associated scholar Shoshana Milgram Knapp has been working on an authorized biography of Rand. While I’ve heard conflicting things behind the scenes, Yaron Brook said recently that the biography was finished a couple years ago but for reasons he didn’t specify, said there has been a delay in publication. Now comes Popoff with this biography. She says she admires the Burns and Heller books but her take on Rand is different: she wants to discuss Rand in the context of her Eastern European Jewish upbring. Surprisingly, Popoff was given complete access to the Archives with the permission of Leonard Peikoff. One wonders if the ARI has given up on the idea that when the authorized biography of Rand comes out that it will refute the Branden accounts to a significant extent. In fact, Popoff references personal communications with Harry Binswanger. Binswanger has denounced not just the Branden books but the Heller and Burns biographies. (While it’s not surprising that Popoff didn’t mention Valliant’s book, I think she should have mentioned that Rand’s true believers dispute the Branden accounts.) Getting to the merits of the book, I think it is a significant addition to the biographical works on Rand. While it’s been a while since I read the Burns and Heller biographies, it looks as if Popoff has made good use of Archival material and in particular the correspondence between Rand and her family in Russia to fill in some gaps. Rand’s exchanges with her family in the Soviet Union were more extensive than I recall. There were, however, long periods where Rand did not write them. Popoff implies that Rand abandoned them at times. However, she notes how Rand helped some members of her extended family come to the United States. As far as the “Jewish angle” goes, I think Popoff goes a little to far. I never got the impression reading The Fountainhead that Howard Roark was modeled on the “New Jew” who could build a life in Palestine. She says Rand “surrounded herself with Jews,” referencing the Collective, all of whose members were of Eastern European descent. Given the prominence of Jewish culture in New York at the time, I don’t find this all that surprising. The one professional philosopher who struck up a friendship with Rand was John Hospers (who was of Dutch Calvinist descent). Popoff’s discussion of their relationship is one of the most interesting parts of the book. Rand’s husband was from a large Irish family in Ohio. As Popoff notes, for many secular Jews, Rand’s Jewishness only became an issue in the context of anti-Semitism. Rand did contribute money to Israel and considered it the only moral and rational country in the Middle East. Popoff could have mentioned some of the over-the-top things Rand said about Arabs, for example claiming that they were mostly nomads living in caves. Popoff concedes that there are also things about Rand that are decidedly non-Jewish, such as her glorification of money, which would only play into anti-Jewish stereotypes. One of the best parts of the book is the description of Rand’s influence in the 1960s. Rand was a frequent guest on television appearing with interviewers such as Mike Wallace. People would come from all over the nation to listen to her speeches. The Nathaniel Branden Institute had distributors for taped series throughout the country. This was a substantial presence in an age of relatively few “media outlets” (for those who can remember the world pre-cable television and pre-internet). Ironically, even with the existence of the well-funded Ayn Rand Institute, one could argue that Objectivism’s influence hit its peak in the 60s and has been on a slow decline since then. Rand’s public persona was contradictory, and one might say she was out of touch with reality. Rand would proclaim herself the most brilliant intellectual of her era and say her ideas had not been refuted. Yet before she appeared for a television interview, the interviewer had to provide her the questions, read the questions verbatim, and could not refer to any critics or engage in follow up debate. The movement that grew up around her might, with only slight exaggeration, be a called a cult. She claimed to welcome debate but eventually you had to agree with her or leave the movement. I don’t find much to criticize in Popoff’s biography. Her judgments are consistent with Rand’s previous biographers and other accounts. However, there are some significant claims that aren’t documented, such as that by age seventy-one, Frank was slipping into amnesia and heavy drinking, Rand overused amphetamines, and that members of the John Birch Society were almost all anti-Semitic.

Michael, You can search the book. There is no mention of Valliant or is screed. Popoff says she respects the Burns and Heller books, but her approach to Rand is different. She said she had access to the archives.

How much compassion is due someone who quite publicly hated the very idea of compassion? This question kept haunting me as I read Alexandra Popoff’s new biography of Alisa Rosenbaum, better known to the world as Ayn Rand. The life traced out in Popoff’s retelling (also discernible between the lines of Rand’s own novels and public pronouncements) conforms in broad outlines to what the literary critic Parul Sehgal dubbed “the trauma plot,” when violence a long way back is revealed at the end to account for a person’s least likable, least explicable traits and actions. Rand, author of the single-minded and literal heavyweight classics “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead,” was not shy about the proximate cause of her trauma, although she would never have used that word herself. She blamed “Communism,” but that name covered a multitude of sins and doesn’t alone explain why Rand felt additionally compelled to advocate against most acts of human kindness. Popoff, a prolific biographer of Russian literary figures including Vasily Grossman, Sophia Tolstoy and the wider Tolstoy circle, is most comfortable and expansive detailing the hothouse competitive atmosphere of Alisa’s early years at the elite and progressive Stoyunina gymnasium for girls. Her classmates there included Vladimir Nabokov’s sister Olga, along with other teachers and students who would go on to shape the early Soviet arts scene before fleeing to exile (the lucky ones), getting sent to the gulag or being shot during various purges of the Russian intelligentsia. Alexandra Popoff, the author of a new biography of Ayn Rand. (Cindy Moleski) The future Ayn Rand’s survival and eventual rise to prosperity and fame were as much results of a diversity of options and lucky breaks as any superhuman qualities like the ones espoused in her work. The extended Rosenbaum family, especially the Kaplans on Rand’s mother’s side, covered a fair spectrum of 20th-century Eastern European Jewish experiences and outcomes: One uncle joined the Bolsheviks and, in 1919, became director of the Museum of the Revolution in St. Petersburg, ensuring that the family could eventually rebound from the confiscation of their apartment and family business (a pharmacy); a great-aunt had emigrated to the United States in the 1890s — one of her daughters owned a movie theater in Chicago and introduced Rand to her Hollywood connections, while the family sponsored Rand’s initial travel visa in 1926; another cousin studied medicine at the famous Robert Koch Institute in Germany. Meanwhile, the Bolshevik abolition of sex discrimination in universities enabled Rand to enroll at the Institute of the Living Word, the center of both the avant-garde literary experimentation of the Russian formalists and the art of Soviet propagandistic oratory. (Rand preferred the latter.) She later studied film production and screenwriting at the Leningrad State Institute for Screen Arts, giving her access to her beloved American films and burnishing her résumé for when she would land in Hollywood as “a very inexperienced, very bewildered and frightened little immigrant from Russia,” as she later remembered herself in a letter to Cecil B. DeMille. Follow Books Follow Rand was also fortunate to have been rejected by her teen crush, Lev Bekkerman, a talented engineering student whom, thanks to Rand’s early Russian diaries and letters, Popoff identifies as the model for John Galt in “Atlas Shrugged.” Bekkerman would go on to design early tank engines for Joseph Stalin before he was murdered by the Soviet state in 1937. Rand’s eventual Americanization did not come about through recognition of her extraordinary abilities in her field or perceived importance to American society, but through her marriage to a C-list actor named Frank O’Connor. (“A shotgun wedding — with Uncle Sam holding the shotgun,” as she described it.) Rand supported O’Connor through a series of odd Hollywood jobs while she wrote the scripts and early novels that would launch her career. The Rand who carved success for herself out of these hardscrabble Hollywood years appears, in Popoff’s account, as a direct ancestor of our own era’s massively online authors: a relentless polemicist and talented propagandist who knew how to stay on message, and who was intolerant of nuance in her characters and in her life; nakedly ambitious, often confusing friendship with uncritical adulation and unqualified support; hyperaggressive but also easily wounded by the slightest criticism. When Bennett Cerf, the legendary Random House editor, requested cuts to “Atlas Shrugged,” Rand asked him whether he would dare edit the Bible. Once the novel appeared, she organized her followers to write letters protesting negative reviews and later paid for a full-page rebuttal to a critique of her essays in the New York Times. What she lacked in talent, grace and subtlety of intelligence, she more than made up for in unyielding drive, an amphetamine-boosted capacity for late-night writing sessions after a full day’s work and a terrifyingly consistent imagination. Popoff also partly credits Rand’s American success to her early training as a Soviet system writer; she may have hated what the Bolsheviks stood for and what they did to her family and friends, but she was too good a student not to absorb their rhetorical lessons. Rand intuited the basic principles of “politically correct” socialist realism (once cheekily summarized as “boy meets tractor”) even before they were officially promulgated by Stalin’s commissars. The heroic capitalists, architects and engineers of her fiction were American counterparts to the heroic proletarians of novels like “How the Steel Was Tempered,” by Nikolai Ostrovsky. Her insistence on outputs as the sole measure of economic happiness reflected both her tremendous productivity and her early exposure to classic Soviet quota economics. She liked to pepper her intellectual disputes with invective: One economist was a “frantic coward.” Her arguments for granting a vast leniency to exceptional individuals, whose own self-interest she believed was identical with the greater interest of humanity, perfectly mirrored Vladimir Lenin’s and Stalin’s justifications for revolutionary violence in the name of history. Popoff is less clear, however, when it comes to what makes Rand’s life unusually noteworthy in a Jewish context — all the more unfortunate because this book is published as part of Yale University’s “Jewish Lives” series. Popoff might have been better off avoiding the weak attempts to detail biblical influences in Rand’s fiction — they are few and mostly unconvincing — and instead done more to contextualize Rand within the long political history of Jewish Messianism and the messiah-like figures to have emerged from the Russian-Jewish encounter. After the success of “The Fountainhead” and while she was writing “Atlas Shrugged,” Rand became a mid-20th-century cult figure to rival Leon Trotsky and the grand rabbi of Lubavitch Hasidism, Menachem Schneerson. In modern Jewish experience, she is the only woman to do so. Unlike libertarianism, which predated Rand and already had an American following, Objectivism, as Rand named her philosophy, attracted a core group of mostly first-generation American and Canadian Jews who were in their teens and early 20s during the Eisenhower years. Unmoored from traditional religious beliefs, often gifted overachievers in music, math or science (like longtime Rand loyalist and former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan), they sought an authoritative doctrine that would allow them to pursue personal happiness and financial success without the hang-ups of their parents’ more anxious generation. Predictably, the Objectivist Institute devolved into a cult of personality, complete with dogmatic reading groups, sex scandals, official purges and denunciations, and plenty of hurt feelings. Rand had come home, and that home was the groupthink atmosphere that her alter ego, Alisa Rosenbaum, had fled. Her outright rejection of psychoanalysis, that other great Jewish messianic cult of the 20th century, was as overdetermined as it was unavoidable. Nonetheless, it is Freudian insight more than Objectivist theories that keep her and her writing relevant to the contemporary American political and cultural scene. Although contemptuous of human vulnerability and suffering, Rand’s political philosophy is, at its core, a classic drama of self-destructive victimhood, a revolt of snubbed, self-proclaimed elites. Her various supermen of all genders — Howard Roark, Dominique Francon, John Galt, Dagny Taggart — are primarily motivated by the desire to avenge perceived slights; their major actions come across as spiteful and reactive, like the patently absurd idea of the capital strike in “Atlas Shrugged” and Roark dynamiting his own buildings in “The Fountainhead.” Rand’s works also overflow with lengthy courtroom dramas where the defendant repeatedly acknowledges bad deeds (including murder) only to argue that they are not guilty by reason of inherent superiority. Rand always invites judgment, and always refuses it. Someone curious about deeper patterns in human lives is left wondering what might have gone differently if Alisa hadn’t suffered an apparent crisis of confidence after she lost her first scriptwriting job for DeMille. (Popoff refers to it as “depression.”) She then ghosted her parents and two sisters, not replying to their letters at just the moment they were trying to join her in America. That they never blamed her when she eventually wrote to them again, after it was too late for the visa, seemed to have made it worse for Rand. She had assumed a responsibility she was unable to bear, or had refused a responsibility that was hers alone: what to do when your loved ones are hostage to a force you believe to be an absolute evil, and you have the means to attempt their rescue and don’t? She would spend the rest of her life and many hundreds of thousands of words justifying that failure without ever addressing it directly. All of her family but her sister Nora, the youngest of the Rosenbaums, would eventually die during the Nazi siege of Leningrad. In 1974, after 47 years of separation, the sisters met in New York, and quarreled about altruism and Solzhenitsyn — Rand disliked his public professions of Christianity. Rand never spoke to her sister again. Inside the roaring fire of individualism, the still small voice of guilt. Marco Roth is Tablet’s cultural critic at large and the author of “The Scientists: A Family Romance.” Ayn Rand

How much compassion is due someone who quite publicly hated the very idea of compassion? This question kept haunting me as I read Alexandra Popoff’s new biography of Alisa Rosenbaum, better known to the world as Ayn Rand. The life traced out in Popoff’s retelling (also discernible between the lines of Rand’s own novels and public pronouncements) conforms in broad outlines to what the literary critic Parul Sehgal dubbed “the trauma plot,” when violence a long way back is revealed at the end to account for a person’s least likable, least explicable traits and actions. Rand, author of the single-minded and literal heavyweight classics “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead,” was not shy about the proximate cause of her trauma, although she would never have used that word herself. She blamed “Communism,” but that name covered a multitude of sins and doesn’t alone explain why Rand felt additionally compelled to advocate against most acts of human kindness. Popoff, a prolific biographer of Russian literary figures including Vasily Grossman, Sophia Tolstoy and the wider Tolstoy circle, is most comfortable and expansive detailing the hothouse competitive atmosphere of Alisa’s early years at the elite and progressive Stoyunina gymnasium for girls. Her classmates there included Vladimir Nabokov’s sister Olga, along with other teachers and students who would go on to shape the early Soviet arts scene before fleeing to exile (the lucky ones), getting sent to the gulag or being shot during various purges of the Russian intelligentsia. Alexandra Popoff, the author of a new biography of Ayn Rand. (Cindy Moleski) The future Ayn Rand’s survival and eventual rise to prosperity and fame were as much results of a diversity of options and lucky breaks as any superhuman qualities like the ones espoused in her work. The extended Rosenbaum family, especially the Kaplans on Rand’s mother’s side, covered a fair spectrum of 20th-century Eastern European Jewish experiences and outcomes: One uncle joined the Bolsheviks and, in 1919, became director of the Museum of the Revolution in St. Petersburg, ensuring that the family could eventually rebound from the confiscation of their apartment and family business (a pharmacy); a great-aunt had emigrated to the United States in the 1890s — one of her daughters owned a movie theater in Chicago and introduced Rand to her Hollywood connections, while the family sponsored Rand’s initial travel visa in 1926; another cousin studied medicine at the famous Robert Koch Institute in Germany. Meanwhile, the Bolshevik abolition of sex discrimination in universities enabled Rand to enroll at the Institute of the Living Word, the center of both the avant-garde literary experimentation of the Russian formalists and the art of Soviet propagandistic oratory. (Rand preferred the latter.) She later studied film production and screenwriting at the Leningrad State Institute for Screen Arts, giving her access to her beloved American films and burnishing her résumé for when she would land in Hollywood as “a very inexperienced, very bewildered and frightened little immigrant from Russia,” as she later remembered herself in a letter to Cecil B. DeMille. Follow Books Follow Rand was also fortunate to have been rejected by her teen crush, Lev Bekkerman, a talented engineering student whom, thanks to Rand’s early Russian diaries and letters, Popoff identifies as the model for John Galt in “Atlas Shrugged.” Bekkerman would go on to design early tank engines for Joseph Stalin before he was murdered by the Soviet state in 1937. Rand’s eventual Americanization did not come about through recognition of her extraordinary abilities in her field or perceived importance to American society, but through her marriage to a C-list actor named Frank O’Connor. (“A shotgun wedding — with Uncle Sam holding the shotgun,” as she described it.) Rand supported O’Connor through a series of odd Hollywood jobs while she wrote the scripts and early novels that would launch her career. The Rand who carved success for herself out of these hardscrabble Hollywood years appears, in Popoff’s account, as a direct ancestor of our own era’s massively online authors: a relentless polemicist and talented propagandist who knew how to stay on message, and who was intolerant of nuance in her characters and in her life; nakedly ambitious, often confusing friendship with uncritical adulation and unqualified support; hyperaggressive but also easily wounded by the slightest criticism. When Bennett Cerf, the legendary Random House editor, requested cuts to “Atlas Shrugged,” Rand asked him whether he would dare edit the Bible. Once the novel appeared, she organized her followers to write letters protesting negative reviews and later paid for a full-page rebuttal to a critique of her essays in the New York Times. What she lacked in talent, grace and subtlety of intelligence, she more than made up for in unyielding drive, an amphetamine-boosted capacity for late-night writing sessions after a full day’s work and a terrifyingly consistent imagination. Popoff also partly credits Rand’s American success to her early training as a Soviet system writer; she may have hated what the Bolsheviks stood for and what they did to her family and friends, but she was too good a student not to absorb their rhetorical lessons. Rand intuited the basic principles of “politically correct” socialist realism (once cheekily summarized as “boy meets tractor”) even before they were officially promulgated by Stalin’s commissars. The heroic capitalists, architects and engineers of her fiction were American counterparts to the heroic proletarians of novels like “How the Steel Was Tempered,” by Nikolai Ostrovsky. Her insistence on outputs as the sole measure of economic happiness reflected both her tremendous productivity and her early exposure to classic Soviet quota economics. She liked to pepper her intellectual disputes with invective: One economist was a “frantic coward.” Her arguments for granting a vast leniency to exceptional individuals, whose own self-interest she believed was identical with the greater interest of humanity, perfectly mirrored Vladimir Lenin’s and Stalin’s justifications for revolutionary violence in the name of history. Popoff is less clear, however, when it comes to what makes Rand’s life unusually noteworthy in a Jewish context — all the more unfortunate because this book is published as part of Yale University’s “Jewish Lives” series. Popoff might have been better off avoiding the weak attempts to detail biblical influences in Rand’s fiction — they are few and mostly unconvincing — and instead done more to contextualize Rand within the long political history of Jewish Messianism and the messiah-like figures to have emerged from the Russian-Jewish encounter. After the success of “The Fountainhead” and while she was writing “Atlas Shrugged,” Rand became a mid-20th-century cult figure to rival Leon Trotsky and the grand rabbi of Lubavitch Hasidism, Menachem Schneerson. In modern Jewish experience, she is the only woman to do so. Unlike libertarianism, which predated Rand and already had an American following, Objectivism, as Rand named her philosophy, attracted a core group of mostly first-generation American and Canadian Jews who were in their teens and early 20s during the Eisenhower years. Unmoored from traditional religious beliefs, often gifted overachievers in music, math or science (like longtime Rand loyalist and former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan), they sought an authoritative doctrine that would allow them to pursue personal happiness and financial success without the hang-ups of their parents’ more anxious generation. Predictably, the Objectivist Institute devolved into a cult of personality, complete with dogmatic reading groups, sex scandals, official purges and denunciations, and plenty of hurt feelings. Rand had come home, and that home was the groupthink atmosphere that her alter ego, Alisa Rosenbaum, had fled. Her outright rejection of psychoanalysis, that other great Jewish messianic cult of the 20th century, was as overdetermined as it was unavoidable. Nonetheless, it is Freudian insight more than Objectivist theories that keep her and her writing relevant to the contemporary American political and cultural scene. Although contemptuous of human vulnerability and suffering, Rand’s political philosophy is, at its core, a classic drama of self-destructive victimhood, a revolt of snubbed, self-proclaimed elites. Her various supermen of all genders — Howard Roark, Dominique Francon, John Galt, Dagny Taggart — are primarily motivated by the desire to avenge perceived slights; their major actions come across as spiteful and reactive, like the patently absurd idea of the capital strike in “Atlas Shrugged” and Roark dynamiting his own buildings in “The Fountainhead.” Rand’s works also overflow with lengthy courtroom dramas where the defendant repeatedly acknowledges bad deeds (including murder) only to argue that they are not guilty by reason of inherent superiority. Rand always invites judgment, and always refuses it. Someone curious about deeper patterns in human lives is left wondering what might have gone differently if Alisa hadn’t suffered an apparent crisis of confidence after she lost her first scriptwriting job for DeMille. (Popoff refers to it as “depression.”) She then ghosted her parents and two sisters, not replying to their letters at just the moment they were trying to join her in America. That they never blamed her when she eventually wrote to them again, after it was too late for the visa, seemed to have made it worse for Rand. She had assumed a responsibility she was unable to bear, or had refused a responsibility that was hers alone: what to do when your loved ones are hostage to a force you believe to be an absolute evil, and you have the means to attempt their rescue and don’t? She would spend the rest of her life and many hundreds of thousands of words justifying that failure without ever addressing it directly. All of her family but her sister Nora, the youngest of the Rosenbaums, would eventually die during the Nazi siege of Leningrad. In 1974, after 47 years of separation, the sisters met in New York, and quarreled about altruism and Solzhenitsyn — Rand disliked his public professions of Christianity. Rand never spoke to her sister again. Inside the roaring fire of individualism, the still small voice of guilt. Marco Roth is Tablet’s cultural critic at large and the author of “The Scientists: A Family Romance.” Ayn Rand

New biography of Rand coming in August: Amazon.com WWW.AMAZON.COM

Speaking of books, Yaron said the other day that he doesn't know why the Milgram Knapp bio has taken "longer than I hoped or expected."

She has interesting things to say when it comes to Objectivism. When she talks about other things such as religion she should be used with some caution.

I don't know much about this area of law, but people make millions of videos like this every year - excerpting another video interspersed with comments.

Valliant sent Vocab Malone a cease and desist letter over this. Vocab told me he's not budging.

No reply from Ben Bayer. Interesting that as usual no mention in the video of PARC.

A recent interview with Harry and Ben Bayer. I'm not good at time stamping. It starts at 46:20 Hi Ben, Enjoyed the discussion, interesting anecdotes and observations. I wanted to point out that Harry misrepresents Barbara's biography on her final meeting and phone call with Rand. As Harry says, Rand and Barbara met in Rand's New York apartment in 1981. According to Barbara, after the meeting, she sent Rand a letter stating that she was writing Rand's biography. When Rand didn't respond, Barbara called her. Rand refused to talk. Barbara says she was certain that this was most likely due to Rand's disapproval of the prospective biography. Harry doesn't mention the letter and implies Barbara first sprang the idea of the biography in the phone call and asked for Rand's assistance. He says Barbara claims that the final conversation was of a ""I'm sorry that things didn't work out" variety. That's not what she writes. (The existence of the post-meeting letter telling Rand about the biography is confirmed by Cynthia Peikoff in 100 Voices) Feel free to share this with Harry. I don't think he'd open one of my emails. Regards, Neil

James flips out again. Go to 2:02.40 James S. Valliant Author of Creating Christ enters Paradigm Shift TV 314 - YouTube

Here is something else from Valliant. He and Rabbi Singer repeat the probably false claim that Christians settled on December 25 as Jesus's birthday because there were December 25 Sun God celebrations. I've sent Valliant the documentation that this is likely false, but he repeats it here as if it's not controversial. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32F7vPCKlOA&t=240s