NI StaffARI is celebrating another success in its effort to spread Ayn Rand’s ideas on social media. In October 2023, we launched a new series of short clips featuring Ayn Rand’s extemporaneous answers to questions during Q&A sessions after her lectures or during interviews. So far, the project is an unqualified success.
The clips, chosen by ARI’s intellectual staff, feature Rand’s commentary on topics of vital significance. They range from topics of special significance to current events, such as innocents in war, the right to abortion, and immigration, to timeless questions of philosophy, such as the nature of individual rights, the existence of God, egoism vs. altruism.
“Rand’s Q&As and interviews are truly a goldmine of intellectual material,” says Ben Bayer, ARI’s director of content. To make her comments more discoverable online, “We’re mining some of the best nuggets, using resources like Robert Mayhew’s Ayn Rand Answers and Peter Schwartz’s Objectively Speaking as prospecting tools. The result is that for the foreseeable future, we’ll have a steady stream of short-form content that’s ideal for introducing newcomers to Rand’s incisive mind and wit.”
The clips have quickly become popular, and some have already gone viral. For example, a clip with Rand’s view about the difference between democracy and constitutional republic has been watched over 150,000 times in less than a month since its publication, and the number is still growing. Our most recent clip, from the series “What to Do About the ‘Talentless Masses’?,” has amassed almost 100,000 views in three days since its publication!
“Just since October, the series has by itself added thousands of new subscribers to our already rapidly growing YouTube channel,” reports Bayer. “These very brief videos are opening new gateways to our longer form content. ARI donors should be heartened that their support for our mission enables us to continue to digitize previously unreleased material from the archives and secure rights from external parties (something not everyone on YouTube bothers to do). This will propel this series and our other educational projects into the future.”
We have published sixteen such clips to date and plan to publish one each week. You can watch all of them here.
This success isn’t our first on YouTube. In October our YouTube channel surpassed the 100,000-subscribers milestone (now almost 140,000). Several days later one of our videos (about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) reached one million views within a few days (by now it’s been viewed more than 2.8 million times).
Be sure not to miss our clips, podcast episodes and other videos and then subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Image credit: PixieMe/Shutterstock.com.
Brandon Lisi
Ibis Slade
