In The Passion of Ayn Rand, Barbara Branden says that she met Rand in 1981 and wrote Rand a letter thereafter. (PAR, pp. 397-400.)

Since my two critiques of PARC, I've moved on to other projects, but here are a few things worth mentioning.

1. Frank's Drinking

Objectivists often accuse non-Objectivists, anti-Objectivists and apostates from ARI Objectivism as suffering from “rationalism.”

Valliant accuses Nathaniel Branden of alleging that Rand engaged in “grandiose dishonesty” in making her claim in the About the Author postscript to Atlas Shrugged that “no one helped me . . .

The extent to which James Valliant is willing to misrepresent his sources can be seen in his distortion of Barbara Branden’s discussion of Rand’s use of a diet medicine, Dexamyl (which contains an

In reading PARC, one gets the impression that all the negative reports about Rand’s personality have their origin in the Brandens’ books and that without these books there is no reason to accept as accurate the description of Rand provided in them. Let’s remember that the most Valliant is willing to concede about Rand is that her anger could be unjust at times and that she made some poor choices.

One claim of PARC is that the Brandens’ books can be shown to be unreliable based on evidence that Valliant has unearthed. Most significantly, Valliant argues that Rand’s diaries contradict the Brandens’ version of the 1968 split. However, these diaries do not shed much (if any) light on other events.

One of the central sub themes of PARC is that not only that the Brandens’ books are untrustworthy, but also that the Brandens have so departed from Objectivism that they view Rand from their new perspective, often distorting Rand as result.

On pages 69-70 of The Passion of Ayn Rand’s Critics, James Valliant discusses Rand’s disapproval of libertarianism and the Libertarian Party (LP). According to Valliant “[t]he Brandens, along with many others, believe that Rand was intolerant and ‘close-minded’ because she denounced the Libertarian Party.” (PARC, p. 70.) In support of his claim that both Brandens and “others” disagree with Rand’s denunciation of the LP, Valliant cites to PAR once and to Peter Schwartz’s article on libertarianism once.

Barbara Branden's discussion of Rand's relationship with philosophy professor John Hospers is four paragraphs on pages 323-324 of PAR.

In paragraph 1, Branden talks of their first meeting. Hospers said that Rand had a "tremendously powerful intellect." (p. 323.)

In my previous post, I showed how James Valliant misrepresented Barbara Branden in claiming that she omits the fact that it was the Blumenthals that broke with Rand. Let’s look at two additional misrepresentations in The Passion of Ayn Rand’s Critics.

On pages 74-75 of The Passion of Ayn Rand’s Critics (“PARC”) James Valliant discusses Rand’s breaks with Henry Holzer and Allan Blumenthal as related by Barbara Branden in The Passion of Ayn Rand (“PAR”).

James Valliant, in his book The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics, practically begins his attack on the Brandens with Barabara Branden's claim that Rand took her name from the Remington-Rand typewriter. He quotes Allan Gotthelf as discovering that it wasn't until 1927 that Remington-Rand typwriters began to be produced. He says that Gotthelf, in a future edition of his 2000 work On Ayn Rand will discuss the results of his research.