1. Harry Binswanger recently said that he realized by 1969 that Alan Greenspan was departing from Objectivism. As Greg Nyquist noted, Rand didn’t seem to think so because she attended his swearing in ceremony in 1975 as President Ford’s Chairman of Board of Economic Advisors. Based on what Binswanger wrote, it appears that Binswanger’s big issue with Greenspan is that he wrote a supportive blurb for Barbara Branden’s 1986 biography of Rand, The Passion of Ayn Rand. As long-time readers of the blog know, Branden’s biography was labeled one long “arbitrary assertion” by Leonard Peikoff and Peter Schwartz. According to David Kelley, Peikoff said Branden’s claim that Rand and Nathaniel Branden had an affair was an arbitrary assertion. In any event, 1986 is forty years ago. Rand’s affair with Branden and certain unfortunate sides to her personality (her temper and grandiosity) would have come out eventually. I think at the end of the day, Branden did Objectivism a favor. Would forty years of continued dissimulation by the Ayn Rand Institute about Rand’s life done the movement any good? (ARI writers will still occasionally “trash” the Branden biography and subsequent ones, but mostly by challenging their interpretation of Rand’s ideas and not their description of Rand’s life and personality.)
2. The Ayn Rand Institute’s Onkar Ghate just gave a talk at OCON 2026, The United State at 250: Politics, Morality and Religion. Surprisingly, instead of focusing (as he typically does) about how the United States Founders were allegedly irreligious pro-Enlightenment thinkers, Ghate spends a lot of time on the Founders belief in the connection between religion, morality and politics. Maybe Ghate has been reading this blog, see here and here.
3. Ghate said in the same talk that Trump and his followers are members of a religious cult. Somewhat ironic since Ghate is the Chief Philosophy Officer of an organization that has systematically rewritten Rand’s posthumously published material and tells people what their dead founder would have thought about issues she could never have imagined (e.g., a Trump presidency).
--Neil Parille
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