In June 1921, Ayn graduated high school in Crimea. She joined her family when they returned to Saint Petersburg (called Petrograd then). The family faced near-starving conditions. In 1921, Russian universities opened to women as a result of the Russian Revolution and Ayn took immediate advantage, being among the first women to enroll at Petrograd State University at age 16. She majored in history in the department of social pedagogy. She was 'purged' from university shortly before graduation as a bourgeois (having perceived materialistic values or conventional attitudes) student. However, she was reinstated after foreign scientists visiting the university complained. The university was then renamed to Leningrad State University.
In October 1924, Ayn graduated and moved on to study at the State Technicum for Screen Arts in Leningrad, Russia. It was here she wrote her first published essay about Polish actress Pola Negri. This is when she chose the pen name "Ayn Rand" that she would continue to use for the rest of her life.
In fall of 1925, Ayn visited relatives in Chicago, Illinois. On February 19, 1926, she landed in New York City, New York with intentions of US citizenship and becoming a screenwriter. She stayed in New York long enough to learn English then moved to Hollywood, Los Angeles, California. A chance meeting upon her arrival landed her a job as an extra in Cecil B DeMille's film The King of Kings. This then led to a job as a junior screenwriter.
On April 15, 1929, she married Frank O'Connor (1897-1979), an aspiring actor she met while working on The King of Kings. The couple had no known children. Ayn never remarried after Frank's death in 1979, after 50 years of marriage.
In July 1929, she became a permanent US resident and a full US citizen on March 3, 1931. Although she tried, her parents were not granted permission to emigrate.
Ayn pursued a fiction writing career after her experience on the set of The King of Kings. She published The Fountainhead in 1943 followed by her best-selling work Atlas Shrugged both works of fiction. Then she moved to non-fiction writing promoting her own ideas on political and governmental topics. She advocated reason and rejected faith/religion. She was opposed to hedonism and altruism. She thought using force (violence) was immoral.
Ayn was a supporter of laissez-faire capitalism which she defined as recognizing individual rights (including individual property rights). While she is now associated with the modern libertarian movement, she viewed libertarianism as an anarchism. Ayn's writings have influenced right-leaning libertarians, conservatives, and objectionists; even though she was known to criticize them as well. She, herself, was an advocate of Objectivism.
In later life, Ayn gave yearly lectures at Ford Hall Forum. She supported abortion rights, opposed the Vietnam War, opposed the military draft, called draft dodgers bums, supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, called Arabs savages, claimed European colonists had the right to seize American Indian lands, called homosexuality immoral and disgusting even though she advocated for repealing laws against it; believed in the tabula rasa (blank slate) philosophy over humans being born in original sin as described in Christianity; and endorsed republican candidates for president of the US.
Another source of the differences between a Constitutional Republic and a Democracy is the PragerU channel on YouTube. Here is the transcript of one of their videos on the topic:
At the close of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1789, legend has it that a woman called out to Benjamin Franklin to ask what kind of government the delegates had created. Franklin responded “…a republic, madam. If you can keep it.”
A republic? Shouldn’t Franklin have said “a democracy”? Isn’t that what we have in the United States? Most people today would say “yes.” After all, if our country isn’t a democracy, what is it? It’s not a dictatorship, the rule of one man. Or an oligarchy, rule by a small group. In America the people are in charge. That’s literally what democracy means in the original Greek—demos kratos—the people (demos) rule (kratos).
But let’s pause for a moment and consider more deeply what the word means in practice and why the delegates in Philadelphia rejected it. That’s right—rejected it.
Our government was established by a national charter—the Constitution of the United States. We are governed by the institutions, and according to the rules and principles, created and adopted when our forebears ratified that document, making it “the Supreme Law of the land.”
Are those institutions properly speaking democratic? The men who bequeathed our form of government to us—those we call our founding fathers—didn’t see it that way. They understood the institutions established by the Constitution to be republic. In fact, though the founders believed in “government of the people, by the people, for the people” as Abraham Lincoln [discussed in my February 13, 2026 ANP Article] put it in the Gettysburg Address, they did not believe in pure or unrestricted democracy. They feared that democracy, strictly speaking, contained within it the impulse to mob rule—the stifling of civil liberty, the trampling by majorities of the rights of minorities. To put it more bluntly, pure democracy frightened them.
So, while they built into the Constitution significant democratic elements, they also built in non-democratic features to protect liberty and prevent tyranny. It wasn’t simply that they favored representative government over direct democracy, though they did; it’s that they rejected the idea that “the majority wins” was by definition the just outcome.
Indeed, in what is perhaps the most famous of the eighty-five Federalist Papers—Federalist 10—James Madison, precisely in distinguishing a democracy, which he did not favor, from a republic, which he did, noted that a crucial advantage of republicanism is “to refine…the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interests of the country…”
And, so, we have representative government, and more than that, we have a bicameral (that is, two-tiered) legislature—a Congress with a highly democratic House of Representatives [ only needs a majority to pass a bill] and a not-very-democratic Senate [needs 60% agreement to pass a bill]. Therefore, California, with its massive population, has fifty-two representatives in the House. Wyoming has one. Yet Wyoming has two Senators—the same number as California and every other state.
A pure democrat would say, “that’s unfair!” Each Wyoming resident has far more power than every Californian. But a republican would say, well, we aren’t and shouldn’t be a pure democracy. If we were large population states like California would overwhelm the needs and interests of small population states like Wyoming.
That’s why we’re called the United States of America. Each state has its own separate identity; holds its own separate elections. Just as we don’t want one person or small group of people to dominate our government, we don’t one state or a few states to dominate our government. A republic is a way of diffusing power—and a brilliant one at that.
There has been much talk in the ANP forum over the years of how Democrats have been subverting our Constitutional Republic through changing the meaning of words. Dan Smoot, in the first video in Part 1 of this 2-part series, commented multiple times about language (definitions of words) being used to subvert our Constitutional Republic. And we see it blatantly in every Democrat's word usage. They are all about protecting our democracy.
One principle of Communism/Totalitarianism is control of language. Even George Orwell's book 1984 changed the language such that good was bad, right was wrong, and everything else turned topsy turvy.
PragerU has a video called Control the Words, Control the Culture that is germane to the way the Democrats are using language to subvert our Republic (below). Here is a transcript of that video:
What’s in a word? Why does it matter whether we call someone who breaks the law to enter the country an illegal alien or an undocumented immigrant? What’s the difference between a Christmas tree and a holiday tree? It’s just semantics, right?
Yes…and no. It is just semantics, but semantics means the meaning of words. Words exist so that we might discriminate one thing from another. Without words, we have chaos. And it starts with the first words—a baby says mama to distinguish mommy from daddy. Words shape how we think; they color how we view the world. No one understands this better than the left. They are the masters of words. Because they know that words matter.
The left has a special gift for euphemisms—soft words selected to sugarcoat harsh realities so as to make those harsh realities easier for us to swallow. But these soft words are insidious. Their sole purpose is to deceive. Race discrimination in hiring and college admissions is refashioned as the much nicer-sounding affirmative action. Who would ever oppose an affirmative action? Global warming, which can be measured and challenged, has morphed into climate change, which means essentially nothing because the climate is always changing.
When Barack Obama became president, George Bush's war in Afghanistan suddenly transformed into the far less ominous and threatening overseas contingency operation. That’s one way to try to end a war: just rename it.
The examples are endless. There’s a new euphemism every week.
In the make-believe world of leftist language, young criminals have become justice-involved youth. Mandates and taxes are individual shared responsibility payments. Government spending becomes an investment. Wanting to keep more of your hard-earned money becomes greed; taking more of someone else’s money is them paying their fair share. Opposing a Democrat in the White House is obstruction. Opposing a Republican in the White House, resistance! In the name of diversity, the left enforces intellectual conformity. It censors opposing views in the name of tolerance. And it labels all non-left viewshate speech. Consider the ongoing battle over pronouns—whether to call a man who thinks he’s a woman he or she. Very few people in the country suffer from gender confusion, and we should have compassion for those who do, but the left has invested countless funds, time, and energy to make everyone refer to some men as she and some women as he.
Why? Is it because the left is so compassionate? Or, is it more likely because so much of the left’s cultural agenda is about blurring—even denying—the natural distinctions between men and women?
Sometimes it’s just an adjective that can change or even negate the entire meaning of the word it describes. Take social justice. Justice means getting what you deserve without favor. Social justice means getting what you don’t deserve because you are favored.
Here’s one we hear a lot these days: my truth. Truth is reality regardless of any individual’s feelings or perceptions. My truth is how I perceive things, regardless of how they really are.
I know it's hard to believe; but, Democracy in America is now an institution where you can be jailed for speaking (or writing) the wrong words. And, Democrats, in the time of Socrates, put people to death for having an opinion that was not accepted by the majority. During COVID, if they could have sentenced people to death for disagreeing with the narrative, you can be sure they would have as they were clamoring for those speaking against the narrative to be jailed or housed in special concentration camps. They even advocated (and still do) for forced jabs! If we were a democracy, you can be sure that the loudest voices in the room would have advocated for the death of anyone disagreeing with them. As is, many dissenting voices, such as All News Pipeline, were de-platformed, censored, and had their ad revenue disrupted during the COVID scamdemic.
On August 19, 2026, the Socialist Legislature of California decided to hold a 'majority vote' pass a law (the Stop NICK SHIRLEY Act) to keep investigative reporters from investigating potential fraud in the state, stop them from recording the fraudsters, and stop them from posting their findings online. They make special rules for doing so around "immigrant" communities. The only thing this law does is allow the fraudsters to continue ripping off the US taxpayer. And it's the wife of the AG who is supposed to be prosecuting fraud that is leading the charge in getting this legislation passed. I'm sure if we were in the times of Socrates, Nick Shirley's sentence would be death instead of jail. I wonder how many other sanctuary states will do the same? And remember, it will take YEARS for challenges to this law to go through all the level of courts and while the lawsuit is traveling, they will be enforcing the law. THIS is the modern essence of socialism (which is communism in disguise)!
In a republic, you have a 1st Amendment right to speak your words; however, laws have been passed to restrict your 1st Amendment right. It is now illegal, by law, to do such things as yell 'fire' in a crowded theater. Most recently, it is now illegal to speak poorly of Jewish people (called antisemitism) even when your words are verified truth. Criminals who are minors are simply released to go commit crime again because the socialists tell us "they don't know any better." Criminals are not sent to jail because jail "does not address the root cause of why the criminal commits crime." Remember Shiloh Hendrix, the lady that was sentenced for saying the "n" word to a criminal who was attempting to rob her? While she was fined and sentenced to community service, the criminal who attempted to rob her received no punishment and the man who kept telling her to say the "n" word again (he, himself, actually saying the "n" word) also received no punishment for his use of the "n" word. This is simply ONE example of a recent travesty of justice! And there are plenty more examples of democracy in action.
Why is it so important to know the difference between a Democracy and a Constitutional Republic?
Because a Democracy is the next step towards Socialism which will lead to Communism, and ultimately to Totalitarianism. A Constitutional Republic, on the other hand, when enacted in its true form, protects the rights of individuals over any government.
We need to STOP calling our REPUBLIC a democracy!
Please join me in starting a new trend. Let's call things what they are and not use the soft language that the democrats want us to use! People in our country illegally are illegal aliens while also being "undocumented"; men are men even though some have a mental illness in which they think they are women; homeless people, while technically being unhoused are still homeless even when they are housed in homeless shelters; and we have a REPUBLIC, not a democratic, form of government in the US (IF we can keep it!).
Those are some of the exact words used by Google’s censors, aka 'Orwellian content police,' in describing many of our controversial stories. Stories later proven to be truthful and light years ahead of the mainstream media. But because we reported those 'inconvenient truths' they're trying to bankrupt ANP.
Those are some of the exact words used by Google’s censors, aka 'Orwellian content police,' in describing many of our controversial stories. Stories later proven to be truthful and light years ahead of the mainstream media. But because we reported those 'inconvenient truths' they're trying to bankrupt ANP.
