Last year’s two-part PBS American Experience series, Taken Hostage, written, produced and directed by Robert Stone, merits renewed attention.
Scott Holleran
Scott Holleran interviewed 2025 Carnegie Hero medal recipient Henry Reese, whom Salman Rushdie credits with saving his life from a radical Islamic assassin. Mr. Holleran wrote the Western Pennsylvania Press Club’s Best Sports Journalism award-winning “Roberto Clemente in Retrospect” in 2021 and his short story “Boom-Boom Goes to Jail” won a 2025 Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Writing Award prize. Scott Holleran’s first book, Long Run: Short Stories: Volume One, a collection of 16 previously published short stories, features a foreword by Ayn Rand and literary scholar Shoshana Milgram, Ph.D. Scott Holleran lives in the San Fernando Valley, where he’s writing his first novel, Speakeasy, choreographing dance and coaching weight loss. Watch him dance in his movie debut—the first film inspired by his fiction writing—in Henry Dances. Read his non-fiction at ScottHolleran.substack.com. Follow and listen to him read his fiction aloud at ShortStoriesByScottHolleran.substack.com
For the New Individualist: A Message of Hope, Love and Selfishness
In her pamphlet, Textbook of Americanism, Ayn Rand wrote that “[a]n individualist is a man who says: “I will not run anyone’s life—nor let anyone run mine. I will not rule nor be ruled. I will not be a master nor a slave. I will not sacrifice myself to anyone—nor sacrifice anyone to myself.”
Iran Gets Just Deserts
America’s first major defense against Iran is an absolutely rational act and a historic exemplar of the virtue of selfishness.
The Confluence: The Making of a Radical Chicago Activist
The child who became a radical activist for freedom that day cried out in defiance against injustice.
Establishmentarians for Authoritariansim
Sam Donaldson Seeks Bloomberg vs. Trump
Bombshell (2019) is a Dud
The problem with Bombshell is that it doesn’t take women — or men — in any industry seriously.
Gervais, Hanks, and John All Shine at the Golden Globes
Hanks emphasized the singular pleasure of doing one’s work, of doing it right, of doing it on deadline (and, by implication, on budget) and of doing it for one’s own sake.
After Years of Appeasement, America Acts Morally Against Iran
Donald Trump is the first American president to militarily counterstrike an enemy explicitly on the principle of saving American lives.
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’s Flaws are Fundamental
The Star Wars inversion from 1977’s can-do Americanism to blank Nineties reboot and post-9/11 tribalism is complete. JJ Abrams directs and Kathleen Kennedy guides as Disney funds this mashup of mysticism and mainstreamed “social justice” pap.
Richard Jewell: One of 2019’s Best Motion Pictures
Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell poetically depicts and pays tribute to heroism while deliverting a taut movie on American Injustice.
Andrew Carnegie: An Intellectual Capitalist
Wealthy capitalist Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) was an indefatigable steel tycoon—and he was also intellectual.
Move Review: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
The two-hour drama plugs Fred Rogers’ ideal that living for your own sake, “without hurting yourself or others”, is ultimately like making for yourself heaven on earth.
The Big Aristotle Educates King LeBron on Freedom for Hong Kong
With his historic statement against Communist China for the ideal of free speech and the United States of America, Shaq showed a prime example of the highest moral action. Leonard Peikoff once said that to save the world is the simplest thing — all one has to do is think. Shaquille O’Neal did exactly that.
Impeaching Trump, Greta Thunberg and Faith in the Status Quo
The new religionists tout environmentalism, feminism, multiculturalism, and welfare statism.
The Joker Movie: Making Outcasts Into Monsters
The Joker depicts with a penetrating portrayal by Joaquin Phoenix of the much-maligned, non-college-bred white male, which is why the “social justice” thugs hate this film sight unseen, the various factors that breed one of today’s most persecuted minorities, the American outcast, into monsters.
Support Joshua Wong and The Hong Kong Freedom Protests
Hong Kong’s protest leader Joshua Wong recently Tweeted this image [by @harcourtromanticist] of a painting, which imitates Liberty Leading the People (1830) by French romanticist painter Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), whose painting is at the Louvre in Paris. This...
Communist China, The Trump Presidency and The Democrat Totalitarian Threat
However vulgar, nationalistic and anti-capitalist is Trump’s presidency, he’s looking better than the alternative, each of whom shares the same moral premise and economic ideal as China.
The Last Emperor
Scott Holleran on Bertolucci’s muted, mythological, China-themed masterpiece.
The Vietnam War by Ken Burns on PBS: Flawed, But Compelling
The Vietnam War, a 10-part series for PBS which aired in 2017, is flawed, biased and incomplete. It is also a compelling and important examination of the Southeast Asia war America lost.
Philosopher Robert Mayhew on Ayn Rand’s Novel: We the Living
We the Living is not about Soviet Russia in 1925–its a novel about any dictatorship, anywhere, and hopefully it will prevent one in the United States.
Appreciating “Gone With the Wind” (1939) as a Great Work of Art
Gone with the Wind is an expression of the ability of the individual to resist the times, the trials and ruins of the day, rise and never let one’s ego be destroyed.
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