Jennifer Burns, the author of the best-selling late 2009 book on Ayn Rand’s remarkably contentious history with the American right stopped by the vast Silicon Graffiti production facilities last week to discuss her book and the research that went into it.
We’ll explore Rand’s resurgence last year with the members of the Tea Party, who can pick and choose which elements of Rand’s Objectivist philosophy they agree with in a way that Rand would have found anathema while she was still living. We’ll also discuss Rand’s tempestuous relationship with both the right and the left during the 1940s through the early 1970s, including her look at what she described as JFK’s “Fascist New Frontier” in 1962.
Plus some thoughts on what the Fountainhead had to say about Rand’s take on modernist aesthetics, and the socialistic milieu in which they originally emerged, along with clips of the 1949 movie starring Garry Cooper.
