Ayn Rand is spinning in her grave from the way religious republicans conveniently invoke her name like a brand to get voters (in the 2012 election). And the media is playing along, reporting that VP-candidate Paul Ryan, who is very religious, is also an Ayn Rand fan. I keep wondering why none of the media points out the obvious contradiction. That Rand was an anti-theist, though the term wasn’t used in her time, and made very strong arguments against the so-called “virtues” of religion.
I hope (in vain, i’m sure) that the media will go to school and learns about Ayn Rand, and that they get a nut and ask harder questions. So far, I’ve only found this article by Mike Lofgren of Salon magazine. salon.com/…/republicans_slouching_toward_theocracy/ . My hunch is that nobody — especially Fox News — will report the whole truth about Ayn Rand because it goes against the ideas of their christian audience. And heaven forbid (pun intended) that Fox News would ever follow journalistic integrity and report the whole truth about the irony of Paul Ryan being an Ayn Rand fan.
To quote Lofgren’s article from Salon magazine:
Ayn Rand, an occasional darling of the Tea Party, has become a cult figure within the GOP in recent years.
…
The problem is that Rand proclaimed at every opportunity that she was a militant atheist who felt nothing but contempt for Christianity as a religion of weaklings possessing a slave mentality.So how do Republican candidates manage to bamboozle what is perhaps the largest single bloc in their voting base, the religious fundamentalists, about this? Certainly the ignorance of many fundamentalist values voters about the wider world and the life of the mind goes some distance toward explaining the paradox: GOP candidates who enthuse over Rand at the same time as they thump their Bibles never have to explain this stark contradiction because most of their audience is blissfully unaware of who Ayn Rand was and what she advocated.