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Ben Connelly's avatar

I’m not a Randian, but I strongly disagreed with Whittaker Chambers’s review of Atlas Shrugged. It was shockingly unfair to her. Ayn Rand was not trying to put people in gas chambers. Chambers was aiding the movement to exile Rand from the conservative coalition and there’s a good case that her toxic personality and hatred of religion were doing a lot more harm than good. But that in no way justifies what was basically a hit piece on a book most conservatives actually liked. We don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There is a lot to dislike in Ayn Rand. But she made some serious positive contributions to the case of advancing freedom and she was right about a number of things, including her criticisms of the anti-anti-Soviet left. She was also the first escaped dissident from the USSR to expose what life was really like behind the curtain and her book We The Living predated The Gulag Archipelago by decades.

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