Aaron Day, who became CEO of the Atlas Society a couple years ago, and has done so much to extend the reach and voice of Ayn Rand's philosophy, has posted on the TAS Web site a truly frightening report on the Obama's administration's conscious, systematic moves to choke off ideas and organizations that oppose the Left's final drive for power. Aaron quotes a 1963 statement by Ayn Rand about the point of inversion at which government acts at will and citizens act by permission. That was 50 years ago, and, for some of us, reading her urgent warnings of encroaching government, it came to seem that they were over-stated.

But Ayn Rand knew that ideas have inevitable consequences, if not stopped, and the only variable is time. And she knew that the catastrophic advance of dictatorship--in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Communist China--had gone too far, gained too much power, before its aims were obvious enough to spur vocal opposition. She knew that usually the victims saw the fist, the gun, and the shackles too late.

And so she sounded the alarm as early and often and urgently as she knew how.

And now, 50 years later, what she warned us about has become obvious--but, as always, in an advanced stage. That she warned us so early, so eloquently, and so often has enabled us to build up our forces. What Aaron is asking is that we, all of us, take what is happening seriously and ask ourselves how much of our time, attention, and money should be devoted to fighting back before it is too late. Support for TAS is only one issue, though a crucial one, given the ideological consistency and means of disseminating ideas it has build over more than two decades.

Ayn Rand warned us and is gone. What she predicted has come to pass. Thanks to her warning, we are able to recognize it and know what we must do. Now, we must do it.