And comparing it to other cultures which arent as functional. We gave some examples and that immediately caused a firestorm. Sunday night at 8 00 pm eastern on cspans q a. Jennifer grossman, who was ayn rand . Ayn rand was an immigrant, she was born Alyssa Rosenbaum in 1905. She and her sister witnessed the Russian Revolution when she was 12 from the window of her parents apartment. After the revolution the communists came and took her parentss business, all their money him of their home. She wandered and struggled. She was inspired by what she saw on screen that there was a possibility to go to a place where she could live her life and pursue her dreams. She came here six years after women got the franchise to vote. She worked many jobs, she became a writing machine, she wrote screen plays, she wrote books, then she wrote of course you pick novel the we know her best buy, the fountain head and Atlas Shrugged. Between those two books, she wrote anthem, a short dystopian scifi novel which we chose to adapt as a graphic novel. Host we will get into that in just a minute. What was her philosophy . Why is she still relevant among a segment of Society Today . If you have been watching politics lately what we are seeing a lot of is entitlement, free this, free that, the rich are to blame, the 1 are the ones causing the problems in our society. We are seeing an epidemic of in the which ayn rand called behavior being good for being good, the epidemic agreed, not as popularly talks about the greed as ayn rand designed it is the desire for the unearned. We are in a moral moment as a country where capitalism is being questioned. Our free market system is being questioned. Our fundamental basic fairness. People are searching for answers. Ayn rand challenged those ideas and values. She saw firsthand what collectivism and socialism rot and how it destroyed the country. She came to america and was alarmed to see these ideas being glamorized and popularized and she spoke out and it was none too appreciated at the time. Her books which celebrated capitalism, celebrated the entrepreneur, celebrated individualism are unlike anything else that came along and a lot of people including myself read them and said wow, i came from a Board Meeting and one of our board members, you first heard about this book, remembers as a child, he heard the teacher writing chalk on a chalkboard and this is a dangerous woman and a 12yearold boy perked up into dangerous woman, i have got to take a look. She is a dangerous woman because her ideas directly challenge the premises on which politics are based. Host you talk about the board. What board is this . The Atlas Society, the nonprofit philosophy think tank i am privileged to run. It has been around for 30 years and responded by princeton philosopher named david kelly and it has been dedicated to her philosophy, the philosophy of objectivism. We have a brand which is open objectivism and the time i have been involved in the organization, very involved in making sure we correctly identify our market as younger people being influenced by socialism and we communicate to them in ways that would be easily accessible to them. We do a lot of animated videos. We at the top engaged Facebook Page and the Liberty Movement and all the conferences and doing graphic novels. That has also become popular, go to any public library, School Library graphic novels have become very popular with young people. We thought this was good work for that. Host why that she call her philosophy objectivism . That is a very good question. She called it objectivism because it is a branch of philosophy, it has 5 branches, system elegy, politics, and fedex, metaphysics, that this world is reality. Reality exists, that it is not what you think it is. Logic and reasoning we can use our mind to identify it. It was premised on the idea that reality, her axiom, a is a. That is why she calls it objectivism. She believes there is objective reality, very different from the postmodern idea that things are based on your perception. Host is amoral philosophy . It is a deeply moral, moral philosophy and that she has issues with libertarians or conservatives and it went back to the moral. Morality, ethics, based on individualism and self ownership, that we have a right to our own lives. Our founders believed that too. It is not amoral. It is deeply moral, and i would say because these are our lives. Fountain head and Atlas Shrugged are wellknown. What is anthem about . Guest it was written in 1938 and it is a dystopian world in which the premises of collectivism come to full fruit. It is a society in which the sf and does his research and create an invention he thinks will be of Great Service to my fellow man, the highest moral duties to serve our fellow man and it is the story of what happens to him. Along the lines of a lot of dystopian stories which are very popular now. The hunger games and a lot of things in Popular Culture and it also has a moral message to it. Host it predates orwells 1984 by two years. Guest it is quite similar in some ways. I think it is enormously appealing at a shock to see how popular it has been. We came out with a year ago at freedom fest. We distributed 25,000 copies since then. I will say briefly again, wanting to make this work accessible, a lot of people reading graphic novels. We have taken the artwork by dan carson, an awardwinning model comics illustrator and animated in 18 part web series that is available and popular. Host did anthem selling it today . Guest it did. It was popular but not to the extent that Atlas Shrugged or fountainhead was. Host who is your coeditor or coadapter . Dan parsons, also to the lustrations. Guest dan parsons did the illustrations. At the san diego comic con. One of the benefits of renting out to this space is a lot of libertarians go to these conferences, we do white papers, we are also exhibiting not just every single student conference but we have been at comic con around the country introducing new audiences to this book. Host jennifer grossman, is it fair to say a Dystopian Society can exist on the left or the right . Extremes of the left or the right kick you guest i guess he would have to talk about how we define the left and the right. I think if you define it that the right is authoritarian or nationalistic, the left is socialist but i tend to look at things more in terms of the scope are are you in step with minimal government and maximum freedom or are you believe the government should make the most of our choices . That extreme in terms of having the most minimal government possible, there are some anarchists, we are not anarchists. We believe government is necessary to secure Property Rights. I see a dystopian future in which there was no protection for Property Rights but i would get a lot of argument around here. Host how did you come to believe in this . Guest very good question. I came to it a little later than most i was born in new delhi, india. My parents were in the peace corps. I was raised as a peace corps baby. I grew up in massachusetts which is a very liberal community, my parents were democrats. I dont think i ever met a republican or conservative or anything in all my childhood years and grew up believing that anybody who was very dumb or really bad people, i went to college at harvard and even there, not exactly a bastian of conservatism i began to meet people that werent necessarily liberals or democrats but they werent dumb and didnt seem to get up every morning figuring out how to do this. It made me question my premises and i started to do research and a crack in things i started to believe similar to the protagonists in anthem found and the more i learn and go deeper the more i found i believe in individualism and values like achievement and productivity and liberty and that resonated with me and when i read ayn rand, that is it, this is absolutely what i believe in. I felt a debt of gratitude and gratitude is a new theme at the Atlas Society is an antidote to the entitlement we see in society and i felt gratitude, i wanted to repay that debt by sharing this philosophy with others and maybe it is the peace corps baby in me but social beings, we have a benevolence and likes to create communities and i would like to help others and make the world a better place. Deeply empowering for me. Host what were the difficulties of turning anthem into a graphic novel . Another very good question. One of the challenges is the Atlas Society, we are a small nonprofit depending on people believing in us. They say leaves our resources that are finite. We had finite resources to accomplish this. We found an artist that really believed in this book and wanted to work with us and was willing to do it at a cost he could afford and we could afford. One interesting challenge is it is a labor of love and he believed this is my creation. Giving any direction and asking him to change the work, it had to be done very diplomatically because wanted to. It was a big challenge. If you have you did do you have to edit it . I wouldnt say, there is some adaptation but 90 is in there. Theres a little bit of some passages, some punctuation has been changed and that gets to your other question, was a challenge creating a piece of art or literature like this . People who are comic book consumers are used to seeing their products in a particular way which is not a lot. For a comic book this is a little wordy but i was trying to balance two goals here. One was being authentic to what ayn rand wrote. I couldnt have written it better. But making sure it is accessible and popular with the people i believe that could benefit. There you go. Any thought about Atlas Shrugged and fountain head becoming graphic novels . We stand ready with that process. We do not own the copyrights to those two. Who owns the copyright . The estate of ayn rand. I heard a couple years ago after we announced we were doing this graphic novel, there was an announcement that they were going to do a graphic novel of Atlas Shrugged and that was three years ago and ive heard nothing about it since. We will do it well. We have the distribution so give us a call. Host is a tension between the Ayn Rand Institute or estate and the Atlas Society . The Atlas Society which was founded by david kelly was actually founded in part because of tension between the two groups. Was formally rejected by the line grand institute and so kind of tragic because not that many crimson chains objectivist philosophers around but he founded his own organization and from that where is the anthem graphic novel available . On amazon, we are doing giveaways, tens of thousands of people signed up for that and it is also available as i said as a video series on youtube, facebook and our website. Host jennifer grossman, ceo of the Atlas Society and adapter of this book, ayn rands anthem. Thanks for joining us on booktv. Heres some of what you can watch today on cspan2. In the wake of the recent shootings at el paso, texas, and dayton, ohio, the House Judiciary Committee will return early from its summer recess to mark up three gun violence prevention bills which include banning highcapacity ammunition magazines, restricting firearms from those deemed by the court to be a risk to themselves, and preventing individuals convicted of misdemeanor hate crimes from purchasing a gun. Live coverage begins wednesday, september 4 at 10 eastern on cspan and cspan. Org. If youre on the go listen to our live coverage using the free cspan radio app. In 1979 a Small Network with an unusual name rolled out a big idea. Let viewers make at their own minds pixies that opened the doors to washington policymaking for all to see britney you unfiltered content from congress and beyond. A a lattice changed in 40 years but today that big idea is more relevant than ever. On television and online cspan is your unfiltered view of government so you can make up your own mind. Brought to you as a Public Service by your cable or satellite provider. Next, discussion on u. S. Foreign aid in Global Development with the head of the Millennium Challenge Corporation which was established in 2004 as an independent Government Agency to combat global poverty and provide for an assistant. From the center for strategic and international studies, this is an hour. Okay. Hello, everybody. Im daniel runde. I hold the chair. Csis. I