Mellon seems to have become a John Galt cultist at some point, becoming an anti-tax recluse in Wyoming. He self-published a strident autobiography at some point that drew attention when he emerged from Randian self-exile to start showering money on Trump and the GOP in 2018 or so, with his ties apparently flowing through Linda McMahon.
From a WaPo story about his autobiography from back in 2018:
“… [he wrote] that Americans who rely on government assistance were “slaves of a new Master, Uncle Sam.”
In a self-published
2015 autobiography, Mellon called social safety net programs “Slavery Redux,” adding: “For delivering their votes in the Federal Elections, they are awarded with yet more and more freebies: food stamps, cell phones, WIC payments, Obamacare, and on, and on, and on. The largess is funded by the hardworking folks, fewer and fewer in number, who are too honest or too proud to allow themselves to sink into this morass.”
… “Something had obviously gone dreadfully wrong with the Great Society and the Liberal onslaught. Poor people had become no less poor. Black people, in spite of heroic efforts by the ‘Establishment’ to right the wrongs of the past, became even more belligerent and unwilling to pitch in to improve their own situations,” Mellon wrote, describing his view of America during Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign.
He continued: “Drugs rose to the level of epidemic. Single parent families became more and more prevalent. The likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton pandered endlessly to fan the flames.”
Two decades later, too many Americans are still relying on the government for help, he wrote.
Mellon slammed the educational system for becoming beholden to teachers unions, and wrote that “Black Studies, Women’s Studies, LGBT Studies, they have all cluttered Higher Education with a mishmash of meaningless tripe designed to brainwash gullible young adults into going along with the Dependency Syndrome.”
And he blasted media outlets, blaming journalists, particularly at MSNBC, for perpetuating the federal government’s “Dependency Message.”
“It took Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party to deal with the first scourge of slavery. And now it appears that it is again up to the Republican Party to deal with the contemporary counterpart,” he wrote. “The question is: Is the Republican Party up to it this time?”…”
