New Ideal, from the Ayn Rand Institute

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4kQrSryOiQ

Podcast audio:

In this episode of New Ideal, Elan Journo, Ben Bayer, and Onkar Ghate discuss the 2024 U.S. election results.

Among the topics covered:

Why the Democrats and Kamala Harris didn’t deserve to win;

How Harris should have dealt with the failures of the Biden administration;

The American sense of life vs. the view of the elites;

Why Trump didn’t deserve to win;

The Republican Party’s capitulation to Trumpism;

How policy will change under the new administration;

The Trump campaign’s appeal to the worst in Americans.

The podcast was recorded on November 13, 2024 and posted on November 15, 2024. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Watch archived podcasts here.

https://youtu.be/rPsgR0WCqxw

Podcast audio:

In this episode of New Ideal, Elan Journo and Ben Bayer discuss Ayn Rand’s radical view on abortion rights and the debates over abortion as an election issue.

Among the topics covered:

Why Ayn Rand defended abortion rights as a matter of individual freedom;

How to understand abortion as an election issue after the Dobbs decision;

How to evaluate recent Democratic arguments for abortion rights;

How state ballot initiatives on abortion fail to uphold women’s right to life;

What the future holds for abortion rights as an election and moral issue.

Mentioned in this podcast are Ayn Rand’s entry in the Objectivist Lexicon on “Abortion,” Ayn Rand’s essay “On Living Death,” and Ben Bayer’s essay “Ayn Rand’s Radical Case for Abortion Rights” and book of essays, Why the Right to Abortion is Sacrosanct.

The podcast was recorded on October 21, 2024. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. Watch archived podcasts here.

https://youtu.be/MLF5deQWbrc

Podcast audio:

In this episode of New Ideal, Aaron Smith interviews Elan Journo to discuss his critical evaluation of two popular but deeply flawed biographies of Ayn Rand: Jennifer Burns’ Goddess of the Market and Anne C. Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made.

Among the topics covered:

The standards of objectivity that the biographies fail to meet;

The authors’ disregard for how Rand thought of herself and her work;

Examples of the books’ lack of objectivity;

How the authors mishandled the biographies' sources;

Why ignoring Rand’s philosophy makes the books less interesting and intelligible.

Recommended in this podcast are Journo’s articles “‘Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right’ Is Worse than Incompetent” and “Postscript: ‘Ayn Rand and the World She Made’ Is an Exploitative, Tabloid Biography,” and Allan Gotthelf and Gregory Salmieri’s book A Companion to Ayn Rand.

The podcast was posted on October 23, 2024. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Watch archived podcasts here.

https://youtu.be/wgKovwvgEs0

Podcast audio:

In this episode of New Ideal, Mike Mazza and Sam Weaver discuss the enduring value of The Virtue of Selfishness, a collection of Ayn Rand’s essays on ethics, on its sixtieth anniversary.

Among the topics covered:

Why Ayn Rand wrote and collected the essays in The Virtue of Selfishness;

How Ayn Rand’s essays address questions central to living a good life;

How Ayn Rand presented a radical new way to think about morality;

How Ayn Rand challenges conventional ways of thinking about morality;

How Ayn Rand provided novel ways of evaluating many moral issues.

Mentioned in this podcast is Ayn Rand’s essay collection The Virtue of Selfishness.

The podcast was recorded on October 8 and released on October 18, 2024. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. Watch archived podcasts here.

https://youtu.be/Lsm2sRbywwg

Podcast audio:

In this episode of New Ideal, Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo discuss Western misconceptions around October 7 and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Among the topics covered:

Why the war is really between Israel and Iran;

How pragmatism effects the West’s inability to understand Iran;

How Palestinian grievances help pragmatists evade Iran’s ideology;

Why most Palestinian grievances are deliberately made up;

How October 7 demonstrates the power of philosophy.

Mentioned in this podcast are Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo book Failing to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism and Elan Journo’s book What Justice Demands.

The podcast was recorded on October 4, 2024 and posted on October 7, 2024. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Watch archived podcasts here.

https://youtu.be/IBopAUk3s4A

Podcast audio:

In this episode of New Ideal, Mike Mazza and Tristan de Liège discuss the private space industry and Ayn Rand's philosophical thoughts on the subject.

Among the topics covered:

How state monopolization forestalled the development of the private space industry;

Why Rand saw the Apollo 11 mission as a philosophical, not a political achievement;

How pull peddling threatens space entrepreneurship;

How the goal of making a profit enables progress in the private space industry;

What's wrong with the objection that private business will corrupt science;

How space exploration benefits us.

Recommended in this podcast are Rand’s piece “Apollo 11,” the essay “Common Fallacies About Capitalism” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, and Keith Lockitch’s “Ayn Rand on Apollo 11.”

The podcast was released on October 2, 2024. Watch archived podcasts here.

https://youtu.be/5Bpu-bAQXMs

Podcast audio:

In this episode of New Ideal Live, Ben Bayer and Robertas Bakula discuss the recent antitrust case against Google and what it reveals about the nature of antitrust law.

Among the topics covered:

Why Ayn Rand regarded antitrust law as immoral and un-American;

What evidence the DOJ’s antitrust case against Google is based on;

How antitrust law is non-objective in theory and in practice;

Why the DOJ’s antitrust case against Google is non-objective and unjust;

How antitrust law criminalizes businesses for being successful as such;

How the DOJ’s antitrust case equivocates political and economic power;

Why we need to fight for the moral right of businesses to be successful.

Mentioned in this podcast are Ayn Rand’s articles “The Age of Envy,” “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” and “Antitrust: The Rule of Unreason,” as well as our previous New Ideal podcast episode “Recent Antitrust Attacks on ‘Big Tech’.”

The podcast premiered on September 25, 2024. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Watch archived podcasts here.

https://youtu.be/pKCfFCED9XA

Podcast audio:

In this episode of New Ideal Live, Agustina Vergara Cid and Ben Bayer analyze the anti-American immigration platforms of both the Trump and Harris campaigns.

Among the topics covered:

The tribal and arbitrary nature of Trump's anti-immigration rhetoric;

Why Republicans rely on fear-mongering to push their anti-immigration agenda;

Harris’s shameful evasion of the immigration topic and the racism of her opponents;

How both Democrats and Republicans share a collectivistic view of immigrants;

The role of altruism in shaping the anti-American approach to immigration.

Mentioned in this podcast are Vergara Cid’s essay “Rethink the Term ‘Illegal Immigrant,’” Ayn Rand’s essay “‘Extremism,’ or the Art of Smearing” and her answer to “Should There Be Open Immigration?” Also referenced are the New Ideal Live episodes “The Problem With Pro-Immigration Arguments,” “A Legal Crisis in Immigration,” and “Who Is a Communist?”

The podcast was recorded on September 20, 2024. Watch archived podcasts here.

https://youtu.be/emKgc2aO7x8

Podcast audio:

In this episode of New Ideal, Agustina Vergara Cid interviews Gregory Salmieri about his essay “Free Speech as a Right and a Way of Life.”

Among the topics covered:

What free speech is and why a defense of it is needed;

How to respond to acts of de-platforming and cancellation;

Why the right to free speech is absolute;

How public education violates free speech;

Non-governmental violations of free speech;

The difference between thought and action;

When protests and civil disobedience are justified;

How to promote a culture of free speech.

Mentioned in this podcast are Gregory Salmieri’s essay “Free Speech as a Right and a Way of Life” and Tara Smith’s book The First Amendment: Essays on the Imperative of Intellectual Freedom.

The episode was released on September 18, 2024. Watch archived podcasts here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C-eEwx1jv0

Podcast audio:

In this episode of New Ideal, Onkar Ghate and Nikos Sotirakopoulos discuss the question of whether Kamala Harris is a communist, and if not, what the real problem with her views is.

Among the topics covered:

The essence of the Marxist ideology;

Why Harris is not a communist;

How the “communist” label helps New Right tribalists hide their own anti-Americanism;

The importance of using concepts precisely;

How mislabeling someone as “communist” whitewashes real communism.

Recommended in this podcast are Ayn Rand’s article “The Left: Old and New” and Sotirakopoulos ’s lecture at AynRandCon Europe 2024 “Lessons From the Intellectual Success of Marxism.”

The podcast was recorded on September 9, 2024 and released on September 14. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Watch archived podcasts here.