Free Republic

Organizations that vigorously oppose government spending took Paycheck Protection Program loans, including some that have criticized the CARES Act, which created the PPP program, according to data released by the Small Business Administration. Americans for Tax Reform Foundation, which says it “educates taxpayers on the true cost of government” and “the realities of costly government programs,” received between $150,000 and $300,000 in loans. In a statement, Americans for Tax Reform claimed it “never opposed” the PPP program and defended the foundation’s decision to take government loans, which it said allowed the foundation to “maintain its employees without laying anyone off”...

The soon-to-be White House chief strategist laid out a global vision in a rare 2014 talk, one where he said racism in the far right gets “washed out” and called Vladimir Putin a kleptocrat. BuzzFeed News publishes the complete transcript for the first time.

As they plough through their GCSE revision, UK students planning to take politics A-level in the autumn can comfort themselves with this thought: come September, they will be studying one thinker who does not belong in the dusty archives of ancient political theory but is achingly on trend. For the curriculum includes a new addition: the work of Ayn Rand.

The evolving foreign policy of Donald Trump is an unintended reincarnation of Ayn Rand. When he says “America First,” he is effectively saying that the United States should act in what Rand would call its “rational self-interest.” Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) was founded forty-one years before the 9/11 attack on America, that is, on September 11, 1960 at the Buckley estate, Great Elm. Its founding document ended: “That American foreign policy must be judged by this criterion: does it serve the just interests of the United States?” Not the United Nations or the Third World, but only the U.S....

When President Elect Donald Trump named Ayn Rand as his favorite writer, and The Fountainhead as his favorite book, last spring, few Objectivists took notice. With his inauguration as the 45th President of the United States tomorrow, perhaps it’s time we should. Others -- critics of Rand and Trump -- aren’t shying away from the topic. “Ayn Rand acolyte-Donald Trump stacks his cabinet with fellow objectivists,” wrote Washington Post National Political Correspondent James Hohmann in a piece last month. At the same time, one prominent Objectivist, Onkar Ghate, called Trump’s election “One Small Step for Dictatorship.” Both positions are exaggerated....

Over the past few years, Anton LaVey and his book The Satanic Bible has grown increasingly popular, selling thousands of new copies. His impact has been especially pronounced in our nation’s capital. One U.S. senator has publicly confessed to being a fan of the The Satanic Bible while another calls it his “foundation book.” On the other side of Congress, a representative speaks highly of LaVey and recommends that his staffers read the book. A leading radio host called LaVey “brilliant” and quotations from the The Satanic Bible can be glimpsed on placards at political rallies. More recently, a respected...

It is common knowledge --at least for part of the right-- that resentment of Israel is merely an extension of Western self-hatred. We know that Israel is hated by the Arab world and many of the “have nots” of the postmodern age, because the fact that it is the only democracy and successful economy in the Middle East serves as a constant and unwelcome reminder to these countries that their problems cannot simply be blamed on the Western colonial legacy, and that, on the contrary, there is a fundamental flaw in their mentality and culture. For the same reason, the...

Progressive politics is rooted in racism. Look carefully at most social or fiscal policies advocated by progressives and you’ll see that underneath their false public rationales lie hidden racist fears and assumptions — some of which the progressives may be too embarrassed to admit even to themselves, much less to the world. In modern politics, everyone doubts everyone else’s sincerity. Each side automatically presumes that the other side presents a false public justification for its political views. And in most cases it is wise to doubt, because most public justifications are indeed lies — sometimes unconscious lies. But surprisingly often...

Barbara Branden, the first biographer of Ayn Rand with her penetrating and humanizing The Passion of Ayn Rand (1986), has died at age 84. Branden and her then-husband Nathaniel Branden were Rand's closest associates and friends during the years she finished writing Atlas Shrugged and the years when the Nathaniel Branden Institute began teaching the principles of Rand's Objectivism in lecture form to a wider world.

Who is John Galt?: A Navigational Guide to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is now available at Amazon. Click here for a link to the book. This book is the result of our first FReeper Book Club. In recent press articles and among the general public, there is a sense that Ayn Rand’s monumental Atlas Shrugged is a prophetic work, accurately predicting the Great Recession and the path on which America’s economy and society are set. But Atlas Shrugged is a difficult book to read. Many are daunted by its extreme length, Rand’s prose style, interminable speeches where the action stops...

Complete Title:Alan Greenspan: What Went Wrong The Former Fed chairman on Where the Economy Went Wrong, Where He Went wrong—and Ayn Rand. Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, goes to a lot of parties. He and his wife, the TV journalist Andrea Mitchell, "sort of get invited everywhere," he says, sitting in front of the long bay window in his office on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. Lately, though, cocktails and dinners seem to have guest lists drawn almost exclusively from one political party or the other. "It used to be a ritualistic 50-50 at parties—the doyennes...

My item on Rand Paul the other day, predictably, went over quite badly in the libertarian community. The Insomniac Libertarian, in an item wonderfully headlined “Obama Quisling Jonathan Chait Smears Rand Paul,” complains that my Paul piece “never discloses that [my] wife is an Obama campaign operative.” A brief annotated response: 1. I question the relevance of the charge, since Rand Paul is not running against Obama. 2. In point of fact, my wife is not an Obama campaign operative and has never worked for Obama’s campaign, or his administration, or volunteered for his campaign, or any campaign, and does...

Ayn Rand was no fan of C.S. Lewis. She called the famous apologist an “abysmal bastard,” a “monstrosity,” a “cheap, awful, miserable, touchy, social-meta­physical mediocrity,” a “pickpocket of concepts,” and a “God-damn, beaten mystic.” (I suspect Lewis would have particularly relished the last of these.) These insults and more can be found in her marginal notes on a copy of Lewis’ Abolition of Man, as printed in Ayn Rand’s Marginalia: Her critical comments on the writings of over 20 authors, edited by Robert Mayhew. Excerpts appear below, with Lewis’ writing (complete with Rand’s highlighting and underlining) on the left and...

Paul Ryan is Romney’s pick for Vice President and now Ayn Rand’s name is on everyone’s lips. Many on the left are pillorying Ryan as an unrealistic “ideologue” because of his Rand connection. Many on the right accede, quickly trying to set aside Ryan’s admiration for "Atlas Shrugged" as youthful indiscretion. “Every young conservative has a fascination with Ayn Rand at some point,” Romney’s strategist Eric Fehrnstrom says dismissively. But hold on. If we actually consider the essence of what Rand advocates, the idea that her philosophy is childish over-simplification stands as condemnation not of her position but of the...

The sidewalk vendors of Times Square sell cheap metal signs bearing the image of Spider-Man, no doubt unaware that the superhero’s co-creator walks right past them every day, completely unrecognized. Then again, only a handful of people in the world would recognize Steve Ditko, the mysterious 84-year-old artist who, with writer Stan Lee, dreamed up the wall crawler back in 1962. ...When The Post knocked on his door, Ditko — who turns out to be a owlish man with wisps of white hair and ink-stained hands, wearing large black glasses and an unbuttoned white shirt with a white tee beneath...

For version with links, see Source URLIf you’re one of the many Americans—including both Tea Partiers and Occupiers—angry at privileged people who seem to make private profits on socialized risks, you may feel a certain schadenfreude at the news that Rajat Gupta has been charged with a felony: Gupta is being prosecuted for his alleged conduct during the period when Goldman Sachs, of whose board he was a member, received a massive bailout from the United States Treasury, whose secretary, one of the leading advocates of bailing out financial businesses like Goldman, was a former CEO of Goldman. No doubt...

With New York the latest state to allow gay marriage and others likely to follow, this issue will continue to consume public attention. Most conservatives strongly oppose such unions. I want to ask my conservative friends to take a quick logical trip: Help me—and you—understand your perspective. Your Limits on Government Let’s start with your views concerning government. Most of you believe that government should not jail consenting adults for engaging, in the privacy of their homes, in homosexual acts of which you, personally, disapprove. Most of you would not have the government bar such individuals from living together. Most...

Rand changed my life. When I embraced her philosophy, Objectivism, the conversion was far more dramatic than my decision, several years later, to follow Jesus Christ—more dramatic, but in the end transitory. Yet Rand, the novelist, philosopher, and uncompromising atheist, inadvertently opened a door for the gospel. I don't believe dead people spin in their graves, but if they did and she could read these words, I imagine Rand would be twirling violently. As many have noted, Rand's ethic of rational self-interest is incompatible with the gospel, and leads to social as well as spiritual disaster. "Most observers see Rand...

Over the past few years, Anton LaVey and his book The Satanic Bible has grown increasingly popular, selling thousands of new copies. His impact has been especially pronounced in our nation’s capital. One U.S. senator has publicly confessed to being a fan of the The Satanic Bible while another calls it his “foundation book.” On the other side of Congress, a representative speaks highly of LaVey and recommends that his staffers read the book. A leading radio host called LaVey “brilliant” and quotations from the The Satanic Bible can be glimpsed on placards at political rallies. More recently, a respected...

...Perennial presidential candidate, Ron Paul is the standard bearer of the Libertarian movement in this country and a Conservative Republican Congressman from Texas. His first official run for President occurred in 1988 on the Libertarian ticket. Since then, he ran again in 2008 as a Republican and is now officially seeking the Republican nomination in 2012. Even with this assumed notoriety, at this point, Paul is still not that well known (although that may be changing) and as such, is considered a ‘dark horse’ candidate. And, this is why I ask: Who is Ron Paul and really, what does he...