I came across an interesting article earlier today. With the rise of Trump I thought the religious right and the Ayn Rand extremists in the Republican party had been ousted. Unfortunately, the fake Christians seem as empowered as ever, and according to this piece, Ayn Rand has never held more sway over D.C….Here’s the word from The Guardian…
Rand, who died in 1982 and was alternately ridiculed and revered throughout her lifetime, is having a moment. Long the poster girl of a particularly hardcore brand of free-market fundamentalism – the advocate of a philosophy she called “the virtue of selfishness” – Rand has always had acolytes in the conservative political classes. The Republican speaker of the US House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, is so committed a Randian, he was famous for giving every new member of his staff a copy of Rand’s gargantuan novel, Atlas Shrugged (along with Freidrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom). The story, oft-repeated, that his colleague in the US Senate, Rand Paul, owes his first name to his father Ron’s adulation of Ayn (it rhymes with “mine”) turns out to be apocryphal, but Paul describes himself as a fan all the same.
No one’s illuminated the cult of Rand at the heart of American politics and technology better than filmmaker Adam Curtis. Here’s the director’s visionary three-part BBC documentary “All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace…”
