Several years ago, I transitioned from a 25-year sales and marketing career into a freelance writing career, and for a time, I had some success writing about personal computer technology. I enjoyed the work as well, because it combined some of my favorite things and it seemed to be going pretty well.

Then BAM! Various changes in Google’s search engine, the attention deficit caused by social media, and the advent of AI obliterated the market for many freelance writers. Check out this chart, where my longest-term client (Digital Trends) and my most recent client (PCMag) have seen rather significant declines in traffic. As the post alludes to, there are bigger problems than “just” web site traffic, but for me personally, this has been rather devastating.

Obviously, that reduction in traffic correlates with a decline in their revenue, which further correlates with a decline in my revenue. Suffice it to say, I’m not getting any revenue today from writing about personal computer technology. I probably never will again, and at age 60, I’m well past the point where I could restart a career in sales and marketing (even if I wanted to, which I don’t). If I’m honest, I don’t really have any other marketable skills, so it’s either find something else to write about or sell my physical labor.

As I explore other ways to make money from writing, this Substack has been one of my chosen tools. Can I generate content here that people would be willing to pay for? I don’t know. But if so, given my talents, knowledge, and preferences, what kind of content should that be? That’s been my biggest struggle so far — figuring out something to write about that won’t drive me crazy and that people will want to read enough to pay for it.

They say to write what you know, and one thing I know something about is Ayn Rand and her philosophy of Objectivism. After all, I was an Objectivist for almost 40 years until I discovered, only recently, that it’s a hot mess of rationalizations. Nevertheless, it’s a fertile field of inquiry, capable of supporting tons of content. But would it make any money? I don’t know that, either. In part, that’s why I explored the question a few weeks ago: “Does Ayn Rand actually matter?”

On the one hand, the Objectivist “movement,” such as it exists, is entirely dysfunctional and comically pathetic. The two major Objectivist organizations, the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) and The Atlas Society (TAS), hate each other, as I outlined in the piece linked above. Objectivists do love their schisms, with today’s main variant being a battle of nitwits between various “anti-Trump” and “pro-Trump” factions. Neither organization is capable of leading a meaningful charge to bring about a widespread Objectivist conversion, even if it was possible (which it’s not).

On the other hand, and this is what’s important, you see shades of Ayn Rand everywhere. She’s directly referenced by the likes of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and various and sundry “conservatives” and Republicans (MAGA and otherwise). She was one of the energy sources for the Tea Party that morphed into MAGA. She’s the right-wing Goddess of “capitalism,” “individualism,” and “freedom,” whose quotes are invoked like Biblical passages whenever they want to attack “the left” and “socialism” and various and sundry other poorly defined bogeymen. Many of her favorite ideas show up in catchphrases like “Taxes are theft!” — whether or not she used those specific catchphrases herself. More on that in just a bit.

The thing is, I was this close to deciding that it’s not worth my time to bother with Ayn Rand or her philosophy, beyond what I’ve already invested in deciding for myself that it’s a false and destructive ideology. I was ready to set her and her ideas aside.

And then I read ’s piece “The Autistic Obsession.”

In that piece, Brock beings with:

Public choice theory is one of the most revealing windows into the libertarian political mind. Not because it is wrong, exactly. Because of what it assumes without knowing it assumes it.

The framework goes roughly like this: there are universally agreeable sociopolitical outcomes — arrangements that, if only people reasoned correctly and the right incentive structures were in place, everyone would prefer. The obstacles to these arrangements are epistemic and structural: collective action problems (the tragedy of the commons), majoritarian tyrannies over minorities, rent-seeking by political actors, information asymmetries that prevent markets from clearing efficiently. Apply the right analytical tools, design the right institutions, and the path to optimal outcomes becomes visible.

He’s talking about libertarians here, and I know he’s making a specific point, but as I read the piece I kept hearing Ayn Rand’s voice whispering in the background. It was only hints at first, but they coalesced into a roar when I read this:

The libertarian has taken a genuine insight — that property rights matter for freedom — and converted it into a totalizing framework in which property rights are the master value that subsumes all other considerations. Every political question becomes a property rights question. Every policy intervention becomes a violation of property rights to be opposed. Every collective action becomes a potential tyranny to be resisted. The framework is internally consistent, logically rigorous, and capable of generating an answer to any political question you can pose.

Ask libertarians where they got their framework, and they’re likely to first reference their gurus Hayek, Rothbard, and von Mises. They would credit Rothbard, in particular, for their assertion “Taxes are theft!” (Again, more in a bit.) But at some point, they’re likely to reference Rand when they need a moral argument. And at some point, they always do. Rand tied not just property rights, but a very specific and more fundamental notion of individual rights, to rationalistic assertions about man’s nature as a “rational being” and about selfishness as a primary virtue (and several others). She appeared to create a moral political philosophy that was founded in reality.

It was Rand who said that capitalism — laissez-faire capitalism, with a separation of state and economy equal to the separation of church and state — is both practical and moral. It’s Rand who libertarians (and the right in general) invoke to say that not only are regulations — any and all regulations — bad for business, but they’re fundamentally immoral, as well. She took the libertarian “non-aggression principle” and supercharged it.

Without Rand, libertarian (and right-wing) arguments would remain relatively easily to counter by raising specific moral objections. It’s precisely those objections that Rand was most influential in disarming.

And just as the libertarian practical framework is “internally consistent, logically rigorous, and capable of generating an answer to any political question you can pose,” so too is Rand’s moral framework. Objectivism, which is a complete philosophical system encompassing not just ethics and politics but also metaphysics and epistemology (we can ignore her aesthetics here), is generally logical and internally consistent.

If one accepts Rand’s basic premises, then it’s easy enough to substitute “individual rights” for “property rights” in the quote above and come to the same sorts of conclusions. But logic doesn’t tell us the truth, it only tells us an argument’s consistency. The trick to refuting Rand, which I’m not going to do in this piece, is recognizing where her basic premises are egregiously flawed.

Where Rand is most different from other thinkers is that she introduced her philosophy, including her moral framework, in a highly emotional polemic of a novel, Atlas Shrugged. Although she asserted that people should always be “rational,” her primary tool for communicating her ideas was an overly long, hyped up, amphetamine-fueled screed whereby she built up massive straw men so she could knock them down in fits of pique. It’s a surprisingly violent story, in fact, and in many places it’s rather dark and ugly. Rand didn’t just intellectually undress her fictional villains, she physically destroyed them.

In short, Atlas Shrugged isn’t an appeal to the mind, it’s an appeal to the heart — but not just any heart. Those who love the novel, as opposed to those who hate it (there’s really no in between, as with so many of Rand’s ideas; I was once in the former camp but have transitioned into the latter), almost certainly see themselves as residing somewhere near the top of the food chain. As a dystopia, almost everybody dies, and so if you make it all the way through, you’re conditioned by the narrative to deeply desire to be one of the good people who survive.

Furthermore, consider that by Rand’s own words, the novel’s purpose, if not its theme — and indeed, the purpose of all of Rand’s work and the reason she took up philosophy— was to present her “ideal man,” John Galt. Here’s Rand in the postscript to “Atlas Shrugged”:

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged (Function). Kindle Edition.

Then, here’s Rand in her 1964 Playboy interview:

Playboy: As a novelist, do you regard philosophy as the primary purpose of your writing?

Rand: No. My primary purpose is the projection of an ideal man, of man “as he might be and ought to be.” Philosophy is the necessary means to that end.

Playboy. Ayn Rand: The Playboy Interview (Singles Classic) (50 Years of the Playboy Interview) (p. 20). (Function). Kindle Edition.

Toss in the fact that she decided at nine years old to become a writer, which was also around the time that she developed a schoolgirl crush on the character Cyrus Paltons from The Mysterious Valley. I don’t think that’s at all coincidental, and neither is the fact that the Paltons character sounds suspiciously like John Galt (and is spattered throughout Rand’s heroes). It’s quite easy to conclude that Rand didn’t discover her “ideal man” by doing philosophy, but rather she started with that ideal and rationalized a philosophy to make him seem possible.

It should be no surprise, then, that the novel’s strongest appeal seems to be as a sort of inspirational myth for many people, particularly those with young, impressionable minds. Who doesn’t want to see themselves as a “heroic being”? For some people, Atlas Shrugged is a powerful drug.

But to get back on point, I suspect that the novel also appeals to libertarians, specifically, on a more superficial level. I think they also respond to the fictional world of Atlas Shrugged, complete with its caricature of the “anti-business authoritarian state” based on Rand’s extreme versions of altruism and envy and its veneration of very libertarian traits like individualism, productivity, and the use of reason. In this regard, I think libertarians respond to the novel’s expression of Rand’s political philosophy, even while that was always somewhat incidental to the novel’s greater purpose.

Here, I will refer back to a portion of the Brock quote:

Every political question becomes a property rights question. Every policy intervention becomes a violation of property rights to be opposed. Every collective action becomes a potential tyranny to be resisted.

Atlas Shrugged provides the fullest and most dramatic expression of these sentiments. The novel describes a dystopia that Rand said would result from these very political evils, and presents heroes who are uniquely qualified to bring it down. The fact that it’s a work of fiction where the author maintained complete control of the narrative, engaged in a bunch of special pleading, and begged many questions, doesn’t seem to matter — libertarians (and others) take it as an expression of the Truth.

Next, considering that without Rand and the instant popularity of Atlas Shrugged, which spent 22 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and peaked at #3, their ideas would never have broken through to the wider culture. Hayek’s The Ethics of Liberty (1982) and For a New Liberty (1973), for example, didn’t exactly set the world on fire. And Atlas Shrugged continues to sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year and typically surges during political crises (e.g., 500,000 copies sold in 2009 following the financial crisis), giving libertarians some coattails to grab onto.

All of that explains why libertarians generally maintain an affinity with Rand even though she never reciprocated — in part, because she asserted (almost certainly falsely) that libertarians had plagiarized her ideas.

Q: Why don’t you approve of the Libertarians, thousands of whom are loyal readers of your works? [Ford Hall Forum: “The Age of Mediocrity,” 1981]

Ayn Rand: Because Libertarians are a monstrous, disgusting bunch of people: they plagiarize my ideas when that fits their purpose, and they denounce me in a more vicious manner than any communist publication, when that fits their purpose. They are lower than any pragmatists, and what they hold against Objectivism is morality. They’d like to have an amoral political program.

Rand was nothing if not vindictive, and note her allusion to their “amoral political program.” That matters. Today, in spite of Rand’s assertions that they are “monstrous” and specifically hold “morality” against Objectivism, libertarians (and the right in general) seem quick to quote Rand — even while many or most Objectivists continue to reject libertarians.

As an aside, Objectivist intellectual David Kelley’s interaction with “evil” libertarian groups kicked off a major Objectivist schism years ago, resulting in the ARI-TAS conflict I mentioned above (Kelley founded The Objectivist Center, which eventually became TAS). Kelley is also known for asserting that Objectivism should be an “open philosophy” that can be extended and altered, as opposed to Ayn Rand’s intellectual heir, Leonard Peikoff, who insists that it should be “closed” and limited only to Rand’s words. The “open versus closed Objectivism” represents another major schism.

This is all by way of saying: you really can’t talk about libertarians, as Brock did, without acknowledge that Rand is just as important. Perhaps, her ideas are even more important, because arguing against libertarians practically isn’t even the most important battle. It’s arguing against Rand morally that’s required.

And note that in our culture, successful businesspeople — the billionaire class, as it were — are defended by libertarians and others on the right as heroes who lift society up on their shoulders and to whom everyone else should be eternally grateful. They’re “Atlases,” get it? Rand called them “America’s most persecuted minority,” and at least in part and behind the scenes, that’s why the likes of Elon Musk are venerated. All of that’s straight out of Atlas Shrugged, and it’s also why “capitalism” is revered even while Rand’s extreme version of “capitalism” has never existed and never could (and we certainly wouldn’t want it to).

As I read Brock’s piece, I saw how these ideas — whether framed by libertarians or Objectivists — stand in the way of our developing a better framework for society. You can’t argue for social welfare, for example, when the knee jerk response is “Taxes are theft!” That phrase, particularly when backed up by Rand’s rationalistic ethical foundation, is meant to morally incapacitate any suggestion that taxes should be paid to ensure that members of a wealthy society don’t starve, or go homeless, or simply die because they can’t access healthcare.

I wrote a piece asking “What would Ayn Rand’s idea society look like,” and Brock’s piece lurks below it as a sort of subtext. In that piece, I described what amounts to a dystopia, and it’s one that I think must result from the ideology that he discusses. It will require more work to show that my dystopia isn’t just as made up as Rand’s, but I think it can be done by looking at reality in a way that Rand never did. After all, I’m not trying to create a world where Cyrus Paltons is in charge.

In order to defeat that ideology, therefore, you can’t simply respond to libertarians, as Brock did. You have to respond to Rand, as well. You have to first call out and then dispel her ideas, because they form the moral foundation of modern libertarian (and right-wing) thought. You have to bring those ideas into the light so that they can be snuffed out.

To bring this piece full circle, then, my question of whether or not Rand’s ideas matter is answered. They do matter, a great deal, and they must be addressed if we want to undo the damage that’s been done to America’s democracy — or, to create the democracy that it always should have been. Because Rand’s influence there simply can’t be ignored.

I guess all that’s left is for me to decide if I can make any money doing it. As much as I care about the future of our society, I do have bills to pay.

Given news about the Trump administration dismantling the U.S. Forest Service, I thought Joni Mitchell’s iconic song is appropriate.

More Than Just Parks

BREAKING: Trump Administration Orders Dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service

Late Tuesday afternoon, with the subtlety of a wrecking ball and the morality of a foreclosure notice, the Trump administration announced the most devastating attack on the U.S. Forest Service in the agency’s 121-year history. Not a budget cut. Not a policy shift. Not a “reorganization.” An execution…

Read more

5 months ago · 1264 likes · 278 comments · Jim Pattiz and More Than Just Parks

It’s the worst possible caricature of capitalism, and it’s nobody’s right to destroy this country’s natural beauty for some people to become wealthy. Yes, as a society, these resources are for all of us to share and for all of us to decide how to protect them. Nobody has a right to destroy them.

Trump posted this on Truth Social this morning:

Of course, what he really means is that the very wealthy will make a lot of money — the very people whose children will never go to war to fight and die.

Black Sabbath had some thoughts:

Lyrics:

Generals gathered in their masses
Just like witches at black masses
Evil minds that plot destruction
Sorcerer of death's construction
In the fields the bodies burning
As the war machine keeps turning
Death and hatred to Mankind
Poisoning their brainwashed minds...
Oh Lord yeah!

Politicians hide themselves away
They only started the war
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that role to the poor

Time will tell on their power minds
Making war just for fun
Treating people just like pawns in chess
Wait 'till their judgment day comes, yeah!

Now in darkness, world stops turning
Ashes where the bodies burning
No more war pigs have the power
Hand of God has struck the hour
Day of Judgment, God is calling
On their knees the war pigs crawling
Begging mercy for their sins
Satan, laughing, spreads his wings...
Oh Lord, yeah!

Another highly relevant song sets today’s tone.

Lyrics:

He had white horses
And ladies by the score
All dressed in satin
And waiting by the door

Ooooh, what a lucky man he was
Ooooh, what a lucky man he was

White lace and feathers
They made up his bed
A gold covered mattress
On which he was led

Ooooh, what a lucky man he was
Ooooh, what a lucky man he was

He went to fight wars
For his country and his king
Of his honor and his glory
The people would sing

Ooooh, what a lucky man he was
Ooooh, what a lucky man he was

A bullet had found him
His blood ran as he cried
No money could save him
So he laid down and he died

Ooooh, what a lucky man he was
Ooooh, what a lucky man he was

Just taking a moment to post my theme song for today. I can’t think of one that’s more relevant.

Lyrics:

Some folks are born made to wave the flag
Hoo, they’re red, white and blue
And when the band plays “Hail to the chief”
Ooh, they point the cannon at you, Lord

It ain’t me, it ain’t me
I ain’t no senator’s son, son
It ain’t me, it ain’t me
I ain’t no furtunate one, no

Some folks are born silver spoon in hand
Lord, don’t they help themselves, Lord?
But when the taxman come to the door
Lord, the house lookin’ like a rummage sale, yeah

It ain’t me, it ain’t me
I ain’t no millionaire’s son, no, no
It ain’t me, it ain’t me
I ain’t no fortunate one, no

Yeah-yeah, some folks inherit star-spangled eyes
Hoo, they send you down to war, Lord
And when you ask ‘em, “How much should we give?”
Hoo, they only answer, “More, more, more, more”

It ain’t me, it ain’t me
I ain’t no military son, son, Lord
It ain’t me, it ain’t me
I ain’t no fortunate one, one

It ain’t me, it ain’t me
I ain’t no fortunate one, no, no, no
It ain’t me, it ain’t me
I ain’t no fortunate son, no, no, no
It ain’t me, it ain’t me...

Source: Musixmatch

There’s so much to talk about, and so much to process. But I wanted to take a moment to post two videos that everyone who values the American republic should take very seriously.

First, we have a group of “faith leaders” surround Trump in the Oval Office, praying for God to give him guidance in the war with Iran. Included among them are a variety of evangelicals and Christian Nationalists, and Paula White-Cain, leader of Trump’s White House Faith Office.

In cast you have any doubt about Paul White-Cain (the woman directly to Trump’s right):

Next, we have Pete Hegseth talking to a group of Western leaders, with a partial transcript that describes his white Christian nationalist perspective. And note that Hegseth is the man known for drunkenly yelling “Kill all Muslims!” in a bar in 2015, and whose book “American Crusade” describes America’s “holy war” in defense of freedom, faith, and patriotism. As described here:

Hegseth’s statement:

“All the nations represented in this room are offspring of Western civilization.

Our nations are and always will be united by our heritage, history, and geography in this New World. We share the same interests, and because of this, we face an essential test.

Whether our nations will be—and remain—Western nations with distinct characteristics—Christian nations under God.”

The Trump administration has presented numerous and constantly shifting justifications for the war with Iran. They’re all bullshit, and instead, I would submit that there are several reasons that have nothing to do with what’s best for America or the world. I won’t go into all of those reasons here, except for this one: there are important people in this administration (and in Israel) who see this as a holy war of Christians versus Muslims. Some of them (far-right Jews in Israel and certain dispensationalist evangelical Christians in the United States) even believe that such a conflict is necessary to bring about the end times, albeit their vision of the end times differs.

If you’re still trying to hold onto the idea that there was some rational basis for starting this war — including “Iran bad! Must destroy Iran!” — then I submit that you’re only fooling yourself. And there never was a good reason to assert that floating abstraction disconnected from the facts, in the first place.

Please restack this. Everyone should be aware of the things these people are saying.

UPDATE: As often happens, I just came across this video from January. Here, Lindsey Graham talks about a religious war, only it’s between Muslims and Jews for control of the Middle East. That's not quite the same as what I’m referencing here, but it’s in the ballpark.

I started a longer piece to discuss how differently my mind is working today compared to when I called myself an Objectivist (an adherent of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism). And maybe I’ll finish it and post it one day.

But then I wrote a quick post on Facebook, which I know will be seen mostly by Objectivists (because almost all of my Facebook friends are Objectivists), and I think it presents a good enough summary. I’ll expand on it just a bit.

Here’s what I wrote:

Every time I see an Objectivist posting about how bad, e.g., North Korea is, I wonder who they’re arguing against. Is there really a large contingent of people out there pointing at North Korean-style authoritarian state socialism and saying, “I want that!”?

Or, are they just doing the typical Objectivist thing of using Rand’s definitions of words, like “socialism,” as if everyone else is using them, too? “Ooh, they said ‘socialism,’ so they want to forcibly sacrifice the individual to the collective! How can they support that? Look at North Korea! Oh, I know, it’s just the usual altruism, envy, and hatred of the good for being the good.”

I’ve found that once you stop doing that -- you start actually listening to what people are saying and looking at what’s actually true in reality -- you discover that it’s actually not so simple. More generally, I’ve found that to be true about pretty much everything that’s foundational in Objectivism.

I could have also mentioned Mamdani’s inauguration speech, where he promised “to replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” That set off a real tizzy in Objectivist land, and in fact across the right-wing spectrum, primarily because he said “collectivism.” And almost certainly, that’s because of Rand’s definition of the word, which I think has permeated certain elements of our culture:

Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group—whether to a race, class or state does not matter. Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called ‘the common good.’

Is that really what Mamdani meant when he used the word, that he literally wants to chain people to collective action and collective thought? Elsewhere in the speech, he also said:

We will govern without shame and insecurity, making no apology for what we believe. I was elected as a Democratic Socialist, and I will govern as a Democratic Socialist. I will not abandon my principles for fear of being deemed radical.

But I suppose that comes down to his definition of Democratic Socialism, right? And is that the same as Rand’s definition of socialism? She said:

Socialism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.

It’s hard to nail down a definition of Democratic Socialism that’s used by most people, but Wikipedia basically describes it as:

Democratic socialism is a left-wing political philosophy supporting political democracy alongside socially owned economy (e.g., worker cooperatives, public ownership, or decentralized planning), with emphasis on economic democracy, workplace democracy, and workers’ self-management. It rejects authoritarian socialism (e.g., one-party Marxist-Leninist states) and often contrasts with social democracy, which seeks to reform capitalism via welfare states rather than abolish it.

There’s a host of different positions that all refer to the same basic idea. But even that definition, of an ideology that I don’t necessarily support, doesn’t actually mean “society may dispose of [a man] in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.” So, what Rand described is simply not what Democratic Socialists are actually advocating. (Importantly, as Wikipedia also says, Democratic Socialism can be distinguished from “social democracy,” which is the mix of regulated capitalism and social safety nets inherent in the Nordic model. Today, I tend to think that the Nordic model is closest to the right model, and you could never get there by applying Rand’s ideas).

Mamdani has described his definition this way, in various interviews:

When we talk about my politics, I call myself a democratic socialist in many ways inspired by the words of Dr. King decades ago who said, ‘Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism. There has to be a better distribution of wealth for all of God’s children in this country.’

Does he therefore, deep down, share even the same definition of Democratic Socialism that I posted above? I’m not sure we know, and it’s easy enough to conclude that he might not. It’s possible to think that he might more closely support the Nordic model than anything approaching Democratic Socialism’s wholesale “social ownership of the means of production.” Many of his policy proposals seem along those lines. Understanding that, however, would mean delving into what Mamdani actually means when he says various things.

But that’s not what Objectivists tend to do. Instead, many Objectivists just went batshit crazy when they saw “collectivism,” in some cases literally alluding to North Korea as the inevitable result of Mamdani’s mere use of the word. Some even implied that North Korea is what Mamdani literally wants to turn New York City into. But not only does that fly in the face of the most common definition of Democratic Socialism, which explicitly rejects authoritarian state socialism, it also doesn’t align with the full context of the fuller Mamdani quote:

And if for too long these communities have existed as distinct from one another, we will draw this city closer together. We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. If our campaign demonstrated that the people of New York yearn for solidarity, then let this government foster it. Because no matter what you eat, what language you speak, how you pray, or where you come from—the words that most define us are the two we all share: New Yorkers.

That sounds a lot like a leader who wants to unify a major American city that he perceives as fractured, not a man who wants to put people in chains and force them to exist solely for the sake of the collective. But Objectivists automatically used Rand’s extreme definition of “collectivism” to describe what Mamdani was actually saying, with all its consequences.

And therein lies the rub. Again, this is what Objectivists do: they apply Ayn Rand’s definitions to words used by other people to falsely describe exactly what those people actually mean. It’s what I used to do, when I called myself an Objectivist. But you really can’t do that, because people most often aren’t using words to mean the same things that Ayn Rand meant (which Objectivists have uncritically accepted).

I also recently came across the following comment on a web site dedicated to picking apart Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism and the Objectivist movement that her ideas spawned. It struck me pretty hard just how precisely the comment reflects my own feelings today. (That site remains interesting, even though most recently it’s focused more on the utter insanity of the Objectivist movement than on refuting Objectivism itself.)

I know how you feel. I finally escaped after close to 20 years of being in Objectivism. It’s been not quite a year since I figured out that Objectivists (from Rand on down) are not nearly as rational or reality-oriented as they proclaim and believe themselves to be. I still find myself frequently scratching my head and wondering why I didn’t figure it out a lot sooner.

Replace “20 years” with “40 years” here, and it’s essentially what I started to say in “Holy shit, but I was wrong,” only in far fewer words. This comment was written in 2011, so about 15 years ago. When I read it, I found myself wishing that I had been the one who wrote that comment back then.

This individual then went on to finish:

So it seems that for 20 years I never actually thought about the claims of Objectivism ... because I believed I already had. When I finally did start thinking about them, I quickly realized that they don’t stand up.

That’s about right, I think. For many or maybe most Objectivists, Rand provided a plug-and-play philosophy that seems so clear and is presented so emotionally that without anything to compare it to, it’s easy enough to just accept it as the truth. That describes the young people who most often give lip service to the philosophy after reading Atlas Shrugged, but then drop it as the real world disabuses them of Rand’s assertions. And I think it describes many other people (like me, before) who continue to unwittingly substitute Rand’s thinking for their own, even as they grow older. That’s compounded by a sort of lazy belief that Rand’s ideas express the totality of philosophical thought, even though Rand very often misrepresented the ideas of other philosophers.

And because Rand said that hers is the one and only true philosophy for applying reason to human flourishing, or more precisely that she provided the one and only true philosophy for being fully rational, thus fully moral, thus fully human… Well, that has quite the appeal, doesn’t it?

And how many people are really going to spend so many hours digging into Rand’s most important assertions, only to discover that they’re either completely arbitrary or directly contradict the known facts of reality? Because that’s what it takes to recognize excactly why Objectivism is so wrong. That describes my own process over the last two years or so, in concluding exactly that.

Now that I’ve rejected Objectivism — and this is my main point here — I suddenly feel like the entire world has opened up to me. It’s like I was looking at the world through Ayn Rand’s filter, which in fact is exactly what I was doing. To one degree or another, I mainly heard people talking in the voice of Rand’s villains, using her extreme and inapplicable definitions. I evaluated everything based on Rand’s arbitrary or unreal assertions, including other people. I can only be glad that I immediately rejected Rand’s aesthetics, or I would have severely limited the music and other art (including many movies and TV shows) that I’ve otherwise enjoyed.

In short, it’s only now that I’ve rejected Ayn Rand’s version of reality that I’ve finally started seeing reality as it actually is. And although I turn 60 in less than a month, I suppose I can only say: better late than never.

(If you enjoyed this piece, please like and restack. Thanks!)

My Reddit feed serves up some interesting content, based on whatever its algorithm thinks I’m interested in (or maybe what it thinks will enrage me). That’s how social media works, of course. It’s all about driving engagement. So, I get things ranging from posts about hamburgers (which I love), to posts about science fiction (which I also love), to posts about Ayn Rand and her philosophy of Objectivism (which I don’t).

The latter posts show up because I often visit Objectivist subreddits as part of the research I’m doing in my ongoing effort to discredit that philosophy. As I’ve pointed out in other pieces, I once considered myself an Objectivist but have since not only distanced myself from that movement, but I’ve also concluded that the philosophy is very wrong.

Dangerously wrong, in fact.

Just a little while ago, I ran across a post in the Ayn Rand subreddit that qualifies as among the saddest — and frankly, among the most disturbing — things I’ve read this week. And this has been a really bad week for sad and disturbing things.

Here’s the post:

Americans need to support ethical American manufacturing

Ok. Is it just me or do people not realize that every manufacturing job creates 5 jobs with it?

If every American bought 1 pair of jeans made in USA, we would create more jobs.

Why do they think Americans would loik (sic) down on these jobs?

I am not a Dagny Taggart or a Hank Reardon, I am an Eddie Willers.

From what I see on social media, many people think other people do not want a factory job.

Every job has dignity.

Set aside the silly economic discussion at the beginning and focus instead on the sentence a little further in. This one:

I am not a Dagny Taggart or a Hank Reardon, I am an Eddie Willers.

If you know anything about Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, then you’ll know that the first two, Taggart and Rearden, are important Rand protagonists. They’re industrialist heroes who the main protagonist, John Galt, ultimately convinces to leave a society that hates them and to let it collapse under the weight of what Rand describes as its irrationalism and incompetence.

They’re the Atlases holding up an unworthy world, and Galt tells them they should just “shrug.” Get it?

That’s the gist of Rand’s speculative fantasy worldview, where all of human progress depends entirely on the contributions of a handful of Übermensch-like cartoon characters (credit to Mike Brock for that reference). Take them away — and in the novel, we’re talking tens of people or maybe hundreds, but not thousands — and everything falls apart. Literally. That’s how she built the world in Atlas Shrugged, and that’s how she constructed the characters. Or should I say, the caricatures.

“Wildly simplistic” and “utterly unreal” would be the kindest descriptions. Completely batshit crazy is perhaps more appropriate.

Now, who is Eddie Willers? Well, in a nutshell, he’s a character who Rand wrote to describe a hardworking, loyal, generally decent person who just couldn’t quite get it. He just couldn’t quite conclude, as Taggart and Rearden eventually did, that all of his hard work was only propping up an immoral and ungrateful society. It was self-sacrificial (based on Rand’s definition of “sacrifice,” which is literally the opposite meaning of how the word is typically used). Because he couldn’t quite make that leap, he didn’t leave with the heroes to join Galt’s Gulch, Rand’s capitalist commune, to wait out society’s collapse.

In other words, he was left behind. Rand doesn’t actually describe what happens to all such people — who were, other than Eddie himself, virtually an entire population comprised of looters, moochers, and second-handers, in Rand’s vernacular. She describes the post-collapse landscape in very dystopian and apocalyptic terms, but weirdly enough she never says whether any of the people outside of Galt’s Gulch survive.

Let’s just assume that Eddie dies in the mayhem.

So, here we have a real person, presumably an honest one and not just a troll, deliberately comparing himself to Rand’s fantasy characters and deciding that he’s not one of the good ones. He’s not fully worthy.

Here’s my response on Reddit, and I admit I wrote it in the mood of being completely gobsmacked by the post. I wasn’t very nice, especially the last paragraph:

You’re an Eddie Willers? Really? So you’ll get left behind when the truly enlightened Objectivist heroes leave society for their capitalist commune? You’ll die along with all the looters, moochers, and second-handers when society collapses? You really think of yourself as someone who just doesn’t quite get it? You’re just not one of the really special people?

You’re actually looking for dignity because you don’t think you live up to someone’s insanely unrealistic fictional characters?

Damn, I’ve read some sad and pathetic things in Objectivist subreddits, but this one really takes the cake. Rand was a really fucked up person with some really bad ideas. Do not let her define you like this. And I’ve never been more serious in writing anything on Reddit.

I’ve always thought that many or most Objectivists see themselves as a John Galt or at least a Taggart or a Reardon. I suspect that many of them consider themselves superior because they’ve adopted her philosophy and aspire to her (perverted) heroic vision, that it makes them more intellectual, more rational, more moral than everyone else. Most won’t admit that, and I could be wrong about some of them, but all of my experience combines to tell me that’s an essential truth of the Objectivist movement.

I never really bought into that narrative, even at my worst, because first, I was never a fan of the novel. I like good speculative fiction, and Atlas Shrugged isn’t it. And I’m happy to say that while I accepted some of Rand’s ideas, I never built my own self-esteem around how well I compared to her fictional characters. I always saw them as the philosophical props that they were.

But this is maybe the first time I’ve seen someone so explicitly condemn themselves as inferior for being unable to live up to Rand’s ridiculous definitions of what makes for a good person. It’s the first time I’ve seen someone expressing a need to defend their own occupation because, while they’re not a Randian hero, they still think they deserve dignity.

To which I say to any such person: of course you fucking deserve dignity. And if what you got from Ayn Rand is that maybe you don’t, then that’s as bad an indictment of her philosophy as I’ve seen so far. I have to wonder how many other readers of Atlas Shrugged have come to the same conclusion.

(I started this piece prior to ICE murdering an innocent woman. I’m going to finish and publish it because I think it remains important, if not quite essential. My tone might be a little different than I originally intended, however.)

I wouldn’t blame you for wondering why I spend so much time talking about Ayn Rand and her philosophy of Objectivism. After all, Rand has been dead for over 40 years, and she’s rather widely dismissed as a hack writer and an amateurish philosopher. Objectivism isn’t taken seriously by the vast majority of philosophers, and few Objectivists hold tenured positions in college philosophy departments. Obviously, the philosophy isn’t taking over the field.

And Objectivism has little visibility in the cultural mainstream. It’s been a while since I can remember an Objectivist intellectual speaking to anything approaching a national audience. The last time I can remember, in fact, was Leonard Peikoff, Rand’s “intellectual heir,” sounding a little batshit crazy talking to Bill O’Reilly on Fox News back in 2008:

I already wrote about Objectivism’s position on killing innocent people, so I won’t cover that again. But it’s no surprise that Peikoff sounds thoroughly unhinged here — the usual Objectivist argument on this topic is unhinged, and he’s just repeating it with the typical Objectivist “moral clarity” (that is, highly emotional dogmatic rationalism).

If you know of an example of a prominent Objectivist speaking to a national audience since the clip above, please let me know. But my point is that Objectivism is rather irrelevant in the mainstream.

It doesn’t help that they spend an inordinate amount of time morally judging each other in one ridiculous schism after another. Today, it’s the pro-Trump Objectivists versus the anti-Trump Objectivists. They even have pet names for each other: “MAGAjectivists” versus “Obleftivists.” Both sides are convinced that the other side isn’t Objectivist enough, and both claim Rand as their own.

And those schisms go way back, starting with Rand’s breakup with her lover Nathanial Branden in 1968 (following an open sexual relationship that both of their spouses knew about). It’s a rather sordid tale, and so I won’t bother recounting it. But Nathanial Branden was once intended to be Rand’s “intellectual heir,” a title that, as I noted above, passed to Leonard Peikoff when Branden was excommunicated post-schism. There have been several others, including one between Objectivist intellectual David Kelley and Peikoff that led to a bifurcation of the movement into the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) and what eventually became The Atlas Society (TAS).

Today, members and followers of both organizations basically despise each other. ARI is the more “official” of the two organizations, but interestingly, TAS has almost twice the presence on X. That’s no surprise to me, given that TAS is more friendly toward techno-fascist figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.

So, given all this, why am I concerned about countering Ayn Rand and her ideas? After all, it might seem like some other movements — MAGA, the techno-fascists, white Christian nationalism, which I’ve also written about — are a lot more important.

In part, I suppose it’s because Rand’s philosophy appears more generally palatable. With only a passing knowledge of Rand’s ideas, it’s easy enough to conclude that she stood for some good things like individualism, reason, freedom — positive values that a great many people will find attractive.

Sky Clearly put it quite succinctly in her piece about the importance of not ignoring Rand:

With ideals of happiness, hard work and heroic individualism – beside a 1949 film starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal based on her novel The Fountainhead(1943) – it’s perhaps no wonder that she caught the attention and imagination of the US.

The devil is in the details, though, which is why many people — or more likely, the vast majority — would never want to live in an ideal Objectivist society.

Whatever the reason, Rand continues to have a popular impact on the culture even if it’s more behind the scenes. Here is a short list of some of their impact:

• Her novel Atlas Shrugged continues to sell hundreds of thousands of copies every year. Sales jump during periods of crisis, such as during the 2008 financial meltdown. People see parallels between Rand’s dystopia and contemporary culture, and that’s particularly dangerous given that Rand’s proposed solution would fix nothing and would make a great many things even worse.

• Public figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel — two of the most evil people outside of the American government — credit her for their intellectual development. You’ll find the same among several Republican figures (famously, including Paul Ryan and Clarence Thomas), both MAGA and old-school conservatives. Rand is the guru of capitalism, after all, whether those people who admire her know her strict definition of it or not.

• ARI has a program focused on spreading her ideas among high school teachers and students, boasting “Our free books programs have put Rand’s novels into the hands of more than 5.2 educators and students, and our essay contests have incentivized more than 460,000 students to engage deeply with the ideas therein.” They plan to ramp up that program going forward.

• ARI is building a new Ayn Rand Center (ARC) in Austin, Texas, and they’re creating an Intellectual Incubator program that will “train the most promising young Objectivists and amplify their impact on the culture.” There’s real money being spent on spreading Objectivism, and an organized effort behind it.

• TAS has actively supported MAGA organizations like TPUSA. As mentioned above, TAS has engaged directly with Peter Thiel. Generally, TAS has programs similar to ARI that are aimed at students.

The bottom line is that Rand continues to influence American society, even if that influence is more pernicious and hidden (albeit not secret) than loudly out in the open. Most dangerously, her ideas serve as a sort of pseudo-intellectual scaffolding to lend credence to the very people who today are destroying the American republic. That’s particularly true when you consider that so many people — including many Objectivists — pick and choose whatever ideas uphold a particular narrative.

And most disturbingly for me, as someone who only recently rejected Objectivism as my own philosophy and who knows how easy it is to short-circuit your way into a ready-made philosophy, Rand is particularly influential among young people. Her words appeal to them as they search for an identity, seek independence from parents and teachers, and look for self-assurance and moral clarity. Her two most philosophical novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, are simplistic enough to appeal to developing minds and emotional enough to hook them. They present idealistically heroic figures who are easily contrasted with her cartoon villains. Want to be a great person? Just mimic John Galt, even if living up to his ideal is literally impossible in reality — and you wouldn’t really want to, anyway. (Edit 4/3/2026: Since I wrote this piece, I’ve discovered that Rand completely made up a version of human nature specifically to justify John Galt. And in essence, it makes him into a kind of sociopath.)

Many people grow out of their Rand phase, recognizing that her philosophy is woefully oversimplified and based on views of human nature that don’t hold up in the real world. It might have sadly taken me 40 years to go through that phase, but once I saw how bad Objectivism really is, I couldn’t unsee it. Others never do, holding onto the philosophy essentially by ensconcing themselves in a false reality where Rand’s ideas can make sense. Such people can be successful in business and other careers, but they produce very rationalistic and self-serving ethical and political perspectives.

So, for whatever it’s worth, I’m going to spend some time doing what I can to uncover Rand’s errors and identify them. I don’t know how much impact I can have in blunting her influence, but I think there’s some value in the attempt.

So, Stephen Miller posted this on X:

Famously, William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols deliberately sabotaged the network’s attempt to film an alternative to the following scene, fearing a backlash in the South:

This may or may not be the first scripted biracial kissing scene in American TV or movies, but it was certainly the most celebrated. And America’s reaction — at the height of tensions during the civil rights movement — was surprisingly mild, even though the scene was shown in most place in the South. America was better even then than it is today.

As far as I can tell, Shatner is non-political. Miller is just being his usual nasty self by implying that Shatner would do anything differently if he were controlling the Star Trek franchise today. And while Shatner doesn’t speak out about such things, he wanted that biracial kiss to happen and he made sure it did. I think that speaks volumes.

The point is that Star Trek has always been “woke.” It has also always presented a strong critique of capitalism, although I’ll set that aside for another discussion.

I was told by someone on Reddit just the other day, in an unrelated discussion, that my piece “R.I.P. America, 2025” was “hysterical.” It was a very short piece, and so I’ll quote the entire thing here.

I will do what I can, but I don’t know what that is. I fear this country may never recover. If it remains in name, I don’t know what it will be in spirit.

For me, today is not a day of celebration, nor even of reflection. It’s a day of mourning. Maybe I’ll be proven too pessimistic. I hope that I am. Tomorrow, I will pick up the fight again, as I’m able. But today, I will lament the passing of the republic, however much of it there ever was. Because there’s very little of it remaining today, on July 4, 2025.

I don’t think I was “hysterical.” I think I was simply honest about how I was feeling on Independence Day, and of course, things have gotten so much worse since then. I would characterize my emotions as angry, and frustrated, and perhaps depressed and demoralized. But “hysterical” would have meant that I was blowing things out of proportion.

And then yesterday, an ICE agent executed an innocent woman on a public street in broad daylight. The entire incident is on video, from various angles. For me, and I would submit for any objective observer, the videos show the kind of authoritarian violence that I expected to see as I wrote that short passage above.

It’s what Trump anticipated when he said his “mass deportation” was going to be “a bloody story.” It’s what Trump intended, because his ultimate goal is to use any violent response to such a murder as justification for invoking the Insurrection Act — the last step remaining in his (really, Stephen Miller’s) strategy to usurp power completely.

Today, that evidence is serving as a sort of litmus test: people see either a thug murdering a woman in cold blood because he didn’t like her being in his way, or a domestic terrorist who got what she deserved. She fucked around and found out. And the prevalence of that latter response is a stark reflection of just how corrupt this nation has become. While some people are against that authoritarianism and know it to be evil, some people are fully behind it. They’ve slipped on their jackboots and are proudly wearing them.

So, here’s what I want to say right now: if what I felt when I wrote that piece on July 4 was “hysterical,” what word would I use to describe how I feel today? And I think I know the right word, and I really couldn’t care less if anyone — like this Objectivist on Reddit — thinks I’m being over the top.

That word that describes how I feel? Radicalized.

For the first time, I know what that words means. It means that I’ve reached a tipping point, where I’m transitioning from a mere (very passionate) observer who periodically comments on or analyzes various topic, into something else.

No, I’m not a violent person. This isn’t my manifesto explaining some violent action I’m planning to take. While I recognize that we might reach a point where revolution is our only option — as Thomas Jefferson foretold — I don’t think we’re there. Yet. And I don’t know that a revolution would work, not today, not with this administration holding onto the federal police state and, perhaps, the military.

I’m not sure if it’s revolution that we’ll see, or civil war. Mostly, I’m not sure that enough Americans have been so radicalized that it would make a difference, or if far too many are either MAGA authoritarians themselves or merely hiding from reality behind whatever form of diversion serves as their escape.

But that’s not me. I’m not equipped to engage in that kind of action, even if I thought it was necessary, or had any chance of being effective. If I can do anything to affect change, it will be intellectual. And so that will become my new objective: to affect radical change by whatever intellectual means that I can.

Right after I posted this, I came across this video of Vance saying that yesterday’s law enforcement action was legitimate because they were “going door to door to try to find criminal illegal aliens.” That is an explicit acknowledgement that they are deliberately violating the 4th Amendment. That is pure treason against the Constitution.

Ayn Rand’s most famous work, Atlas Shrugged, described society as she said it should not be. She described the dystopia that she believed would arise — and then ultimately collapse into chaos — without her ideas shaping the world. What she never described is what society would look like if, in fact, her ideas actually won out.

She had Galt’s Gulch, the secret mountain enclave hidden beneath a Wakandian force field where the “men of the mind” migrated once their leader, John Galt, told them it was finally time to go. But Galt’s Gulch was never fully described. It was just a temporary refuge for the relative handful who had achieved Objectivist enlightenment, and it sounded more like a capitalist commune than anything else. It could not in any sense have been a fully established society.

At the end of Atlas Shrugged, Rand gave some hints as to how her ideal society would be created, figuratively (or maybe literally) out of the ashes. Those same enlightened Objectivists would emerge from Galt’s Gulch into a world purged of all looters, moochers, and second-handers, intellectually pristine and waiting for them to forge a fully Objectivist society.

Okay, that’s not precisely what Rand described in the novel. It’s actually unclear what the world looked like after her heroes “shrugged.” Rand’s primary symbolic device was that the lights went out — Rand gave a nod there to her novella Anthem, where the hero invented the light bulb — but she didn’t say what happened to all the people. Perhaps as looters, moochers, and second-handers, they really didn’t matter. All that mattered was that, if they still existed at all, they had relinquished their grip on the world.

She gave some hints, though. For example, her financial wizard archetype, Midas (everything he touched turned to gold, get it?) Mulligan, was formulating his plan to buy up all the best property — presumably available on the cheap now that society had collapsed — with the “assets” he had stashed away:

The rectangle of light on the side of a mountain was the window of Mulligan’s study. Midas Mulligan sat at his desk, with a map and a column of figures before him. He was listing the assets of his bank and working on a plan of projected investments. He was noting down the locations he was choosing: “New York—Cleveland—Chicago ... New York—Philadelphia ... New York ... New York ... New York ...”

There are a few more passages alluding to some allegorical visions of a future, but nothing that answers any specific questions. In the novel, Rand left it almost entirely to the imagination. Her philosophy of Objectivism, though, can be extrapolated to describe what Rand’s ideal society might look like. And so in this piece, I want to list just a few examples of what to expect, should Objectivists succeed in bringing about the world they imagine.

And then I’m asking the question: would you want to live there?

If you listen to some Objectivists, they’ll say that you can’t evaluate Objectivism within the constraints of modern society. An Objectivist society would be different, they say, because people would be raised as Objectivists without all the intellectual and emotional baggage. It’s a rather self-serving perspective, of course, because that “intellectual and emotional baggage” is entirely what Objectivism itself defines as “bad.” Yes, that means: Objectivists will make an ideal society because everything they believe is ideal.

So, an Objectivist might say, some of what I’m laying out here wouldn’t happen or wouldn’t be significant in an Objectivist society. People would be more universally rational, and more universally moral. And a society with fully Objectivist participants and fully Objectivist ethical and political frameworks would be better — economically, culturally, morally. Never mind how such an assertion would be measured.

They might not realize it, but they’re making the same kind of utopian argument that communists make about communism. By communism, I mean the end-state version, the stateless, moneyless, propertyless society that Marx said would ultimately result from the transition of capitalism to state socialism to eventual full communism. Communism would work, communists might say, because people would be raised with the kind of communist ideal mindset required — including a commitment to living according to the edict “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Rand said that edict derives from “altruism,” so within her framework, one might say that (among other things) communism could only work to the extent that everyone was fully altruistic.

An Objectivist might argue that this isn’t how people are, or how people should be. People should (and would) demand appropriate value for their productive effort, in like-for-like transactions with other people. They wouldn’t be (and shouldn’t be) willing to produce more value and receive the same in return as people who produce less value. A communist society would therefore be a race to the bottom, where people would stop producing value because they have no incentive to do so.

But their own ideal society would depend just as much on the Objectivist ideal mindset — on enough people being universally rational, moral, and self-interested (all per Rand) but with full recognition of the same in other people. Most would have to fully embrace and live by John Galt’s oath: “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” It’s the last clause (among other things) that would be most problematic if enough people didn’t live by it.

If enough people aren’t “altrustic,” then communism falls apart. If enough people aren’t John Galt, then Ayn Rand’s ideal society falls apart. It’s entirely possible — if not almost certainly true — that both ideologies are based on imperfect, downright false, or impossible notions of human nature.

And that’s to the extent that either ideal society is actually desirable. I suggest here that certainly Rand’s idea is not (and neither is communism, but that’s not my point in this piece).

If you want to see an intelligent exploration of what such a communist society might look like (one that doesn’t pass through Marx’s state socialist phase but rather directly arises within a pristine world not unlike Rand’s post-apocalypse), including its various potential pitfalls, read Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Unlike Rand’s pure philosophical polemic Atlas Shrugged, Le Guin’s novel is more honest about how people actually are, rather than merely presenting “ideal” positive and negative philosophical archetypes. Ultimately, I found it a lot more interesting regardless of whether or not you agree with Le Guin’s analysis. Certainly, it will prompt you to think, rather than merely submit to Rand’s quasi-intellectual demands that are presented as an emotional assault. It’s also a better work of fiction.

So, without further ado, here are a few glimpses at what Ayn Rand’s ideal society would look like.

Starving children would die

For my first example, consider what Ayn Rand’s ethical and political framework says about a child who is orphaned when their parents die in an automobile accident. Objectivism says that if no individuals step up to voluntarily help the child, then it’s moral that the child should die. Literally that: in a moral society, which is to say in Rand’s ideal society, such a child must be left to die. It is immoral for the government to use a dime to help the child if it’s taken via taxes from another individual. A society with a safety net that’s funded by taxes, whereby the child’s life is saved, is therefore immoral. Even more so: it’s downright evil.

Objectivists who are both honest and knowledgeable about Objectivism should concede that point, if pressed. But you’d really have to really press them, because they often equivocate by saying things like, “Yes, but that’s not likely to happen. Look at all the charity we already have in our imperfect society! Someone will step up!” They’re loath to fully and clearly acknowledge that premise, though, because they know that many or most people would reject it. Perhaps they just hope nobody will notice, and once everybody’s Objectivist, it will no longer be so controversial.

Of course, that would apply to all people, not just children. In an Objectivist society, people would simply die absent sufficient voluntary charity, no matter the circumstances and no matter the cost to help them. Even a tax that was a fraction of a percent of a given person’s income would be immoral, even if in total that minuscule tax saved thousands or millions of lives. It’s an absolute prohibition — literally, not even a dime.

And note that for Objectivists, according to Rand in her 1964 Playboy interview, charity is a “marginal issue” and not a “major virtue”:

My views on charity are very simple. I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty. There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them. I regard charity as a marginal issue. What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue.

Taken as a whole, Objectivism says that charity is only moral when performed for those one values, such as friends, family, and colleagues, or secondarily for those who one deems virtuous, e.g., a “productive person” who has come across hard times. That’s Rand’s “when they are worthy” here. It’s immoral if performed for someone who doesn’t represent a personal value of some kind — that is, for a perfect stranger or for someone who’s “unworthy” by some measure. That would be a “sacrifice,” which Rand inverted from its usual meaning into the worst possible sin. It would be “altruistic,” another word that Rand redefined into something evil, and that’s a major Objectivist vice.

In other words, the decision to engage in charity would be the same kind of contingent, transactional “trader principle” process that defines the entire Objectivist approach to human relationships. There’s always a calculus involved.

Put yet a different way, as Rand said in The Virtue of Selfishness:

The fact that a man has no claim on others (i.e., that it is not their moral duty to help him and that he cannot demand their help as his right) does not preclude or prohibit good will among men and does not make it immoral to offer or to accept voluntary, non-sacrificial help.”

So, the Objectivist ethical framework doesn’t “preclude or prohibit” good will among men (gee, thanks, Ayn Rand!) nor does it deem charity immoral, per se. But as an Objectivist, you better be sure to dot your i’s and cross your t’s when engaging in charity (or opening a door for a stranger) else you commit a mortal sin. And that ethical framework makes it easy to look the other way when you spot someone in need, because after all, it’s only a “marginal issue” and thus easily dismissed.

How much charity would there be, really, in Ayn Rand’s ideal society? How much time and effort would anyone take to determine that a starving child — a stranger, who they know nothing about and therefore can’t judge as being of any value to them — is worthy of help, when it’s so easy to assume they’re not and therefore hold onto your cash? Because you have no moral duty whatsoever to help that child, remember, and it’s not a major virtue.

Consider as well that some significant percentage of charity today is religious charity, which derives directly from the principle that charity actually is a moral duty and a major virtue according to various religions. What happens when you take that away? Some other significant percentage of charity comes from its being tax deductible — you certainly wouldn’t receive any tax benefits in an ideal Objectivist society, because there would be no taxes. And remember: the government can do nothing to help, regardless.

That removes two of the most important factors driving charity throughout history. We’ve never seen what charity would look like in a society like Rand’s ideal, because such a society has never existed.

And even worse, helping the child might even be immoral, if you’re not careful to calculate the value properly. Now, think about how Objectivists must evaluate adults before extending a helping hand.

Note that Rand did have her idea of “emergencies” as being temporary exceptions to normal “everyday” ethics, whereby she neatly dismisses any question that smacks of “lifeboat ethics.” But that was more of a way to excuse one’s own otherwise immoral behavior, such as stealing food from someone’s cabin in the woods if you’re lost and starving (or, killing the person and taking their food, because you need it to survive) or — yes, that’s right — choosing to contribute to a stranger’s survival after a shipwreck. Doing so would be okay because the rules are different during “emergencies” (of course, Rand didn’t describe when her ethical system shifted from “normal mode” to “emergency mode,” and she couldn’t have done so because it was merely a rationalization).

Perhaps seeing a starving child might rise to the level of an “emergency” for a given individual, granting them moral permission to help a child without a concomitant value in return. Perhaps — but I wouldn’t count on it. And the fact remains: if nobody lends voluntary assistance, per Objectivism, then the child will die. It’s the only moral outcome.

(Note also that Rand’s “emergency ethics” did not extend to government action, such as lending assistance during disasters via FEMA and the National Guard using its logistics abilities to distribute food and water and to assist people to safety. In terms of a natural disaster, for example, it merely permits a person to temporarily set aside their own long-term interests in deciding to help disaster victims. If thousands of people die because the circumstances overwhelm all forms of private insurance and charity, then that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.)

Killing a child to save yourself would be moral

As I wrote in my piece “Would you kill a child to save yourself,” Objectivism has a very distinct moral position regarding those who initiate force versus those who are their targets. It’s implicit in the philosophy’s rejection of “just war” theory as being rooted in altruism, mysticism, and collectivism, and it applies just as clearly to more personal contexts.

In that piece, I quoted Objectivist scholar Onkar Ghate’s essay “Innocents in War,” where he wrote:

But, it will be objected, is it not more monstrous to kill all those innocent civilians?

No. The moral principle is: the responsibility for all deaths in war lies with the aggressor who initiates force, not with those who defend themselves. (Similarly, if in self-defense you shoot a hit man about to kill you, and also strike the innocent bystander the hit man was deliberately using as a shield, moral responsibility for the bystander’s death lies with the hit man not you.)

I’ll quote myself in response:

What’s most striking to me about this quote is actually the parenthetical, where he shifts the context away from warfare and into the personal sphere. That is, a “hit man [is] about to kill you” and in order to defend yourself, you strike what he first calls an “innocent bystander” but then shifts to a literal human shield. So, to put it more plainly, if you have to shoot through that (innocent) human shield in order to kill the hit man and save yourself, that’s your moral right and the moral responsibility falls entirely on the hit man.

The very first thought that came to my mind, or rather the mental image it conjured, was of a hit man holding a child as a human shield and my having the choice to kill the child in order to save myself. The child ended up in my mind’s eye because whenever I contemplate the question of human innocence, it is children who first appear.

I said more in that piece, but what’s important to note right now is that taken to its most logical conclusion, not only would it be considered perfectly moral in Ayn Rand’s idea society to kill a child to save yourself, but one shouldn’t even feel bad about doing so. After all, she said, emotions are based on your most deeply-held philosophical premises (see below), whether or not they’re implicit or explicit.

If you hold the right premises — that you had a moral right to kill the child, hold no moral responsibility for doing so, and your own life is your only proper standard of value — then the only appropriate emotional response would be to feel that you did the right thing. You should sleep just fine at night, comfortable in knowing that you remain on the right side in your “moral responsibility” ledger. Because that matters a lot in Objectivism.

Maybe you might feel a kind of detached sadness, like when you hear about such a killing on the news. But even then, you might find yourself feeling happy that you live in a society where other people would make the same moral decision that you just made. He who initiated the use of force was punished and his intended victim was saved, so justice was done — never mind the innocent child who got in the way.

People would have to die for improvements to be made

Objectivism says that all government regulation is improper, because it represents the initiation of force. It’s only proper for the government to act in retaliation against those who initiate the use of force. It is therefore improper for government to dictate how a person provides a service or produces a product, but rather it can only respond when a person does so in a way that directly harms someone else.

A government cannot, therefore, engage in actions like establishing standards for the production of toxic particulates by a factory, and then police those standards via an agency like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) via regular inspections. It cannot establish food handling standards for butchers, no matter that certain simple practices have been shown to reduce the spread of harmful pathogens. That idea extends to all of human economic activity where such questions commonly arise. And it’s not just the violation of rights that bothers Objectivists, it’s also the additional costs involved. Government regulations get in the way of generating profits, which for them is most fundamental fuel by which society prospers.

Instead, government can only establish laws that provide civil or criminal penalties for pumping too much toxic poison into the air, for example, or for selling meat that’s jam packed with e coli. Government can only act after the fact, when actual harm has been done. The victims, or their families if they’re dead, can also sue for damages. And, according to Objectivists and other like-minded economists, the free market will help take care of things as well, because people will just stop buying from producers who aren’t doing things the right way.

Of course, in practice, that all means that — generally speaking — some number of people would have to get sick or die for any action to be taken. That’s how things would work in day-to-day existence. The government simply cannot demand that anyone take any specific steps, no matter how reasonable or ultimately cost-effective, to avoid causing harm. It can’t demand the installation of filtration systems on smokestacks, for example, or monitor restaurant kitchens to ensure basic food safety protocols are being followed.

Furthermore, there would need to be incontrovertible evidence for a crime to be charged, or a preponderance of the evidence for a successful lawsuit. Not only would people have to die (or otherwise suffer harm) before any improvements might be made to avoid others being harmed, but there would be real obstacles in the way that might take years to resolve. And who knows if such criminal or civil action would act as a general deterrent, such that other producers would take more care in order to avoid the cost of criminal prosecution or civil lawsuits. How have criminals generally responded to deterrence?

And if a number of people suddenly become ill, someone would need to be able to track the outbreak back to the source of, say, a butcher who is secretly unsanitary. It’s not like butchers would put out signs admitting that they’re not concerned about food safety. And for the free market to function as Friedman implies, that information would need be to be widely shared to have a meaningful impact. I suppose if enough people get sick or die, the possibility of bad press increases.

I suppose one might ask, “What happens if someone discovers that something is happening that’s likely to cause harm?” That is, for example, they discover a company dumping toxic waste into a river, but before anyone actually drinks it. Sure, in that case, government can act, per Objectivism — just like it can act if a crazy person with a gun is running toward a crowd, even though they haven’t yet shot anyone.

Per Rand’s own definition, though, that’s not how things usually work, so it’s not how you can derive moral or political principles. It would be something like her idea of “emergencies.” Usually, nobody actually sees the company dumping the toxic waste before people start getting sick, and mass shootings would never happen if the shooters were stopped beforehand. Examples of potential harms that are stopped before they occur are the outliers.

Of course, all of these bad things can and do happen even when there’s a regulatory framework in place. But it’s certainly true that, without that framework, bad things would happen a lot more often. I’ll add as well that I’m being extremely generous in my interpretation here — it’s entirely possible that Objectivism would preclude even responding to a known chemical spill, up to the point where someone is actively harmed. It might be that the government couldn’t act even then, per Objectivism.

Objectivists like to say that the market would voluntarily create their own agencies, such as currently exists with the Underwriters Laboratories (UL) that certifies electrical products and Consumer Reports that provides reviews on (some) consumer products. But the widespread development of private agencies like that is not guaranteed.

Generally, it’s not guaranteed that producers will be willing to sacrifice profit to ensure safety. It’s not guaranteed that companies won’t build homes with substandard wiring, for example, then skip town and evade the consequences of houses catching on fire and people dying. The EPA itself exists, in part, because private industry did not address real environmental problems and were unlikely to ever do so. The free market was not sufficient to compel them. If you lived through air pollution in the 1970s, then you know what I’m talking about.

Would John Galt run a factory and fail to spend money (sacrifice profits) to install the right air filtration systems so deadly toxins aren’t released? Of course he wouldn’t! He’s fully committed to his oath, to reason, to rational self-interest. But good communists would also be more than willing to spend the time and energy to become doctors while being perfectly happy with the same standard of living as ditch diggers. They would live up to the communist ethos, just as Galt would live up to his oath. They’re the ideals, after all.

Would a different legal structure around things like private property and tort law be sufficient? Objectivists would like to assert that it would be, but there’s little evidence in support of that assertion — and plenty of evidence against it.

This is just one area where Objectivists are likely as wildly unrealistic about human nature as are communists. (And I haven’t even mentioned the question of economics itself, and what it would be like living in Ayn Rand’s ideal capitalist society. That’s a very long discussion on its own).

Torturing your own animal would be perfectly legal

According to the Objectivist political framework, there could be no law prohibiting a person from abusing — even torturing — their own animal. That’s because, per Rand, the law exists only to protect the rights of human beings. Animals have no rights, and if they are a person’s property, then the person has the right to treat them, qua property, however they wish.

A person could douse their dog in gasoline, record it running around their yard in terror and pain until it died a miserable death, and it would be perfectly legal. They could freely share the video on social media, protected by the 1st Amendment (if the social media company allowed it, which, as experience shows us, they would). Any law that prohibited it would non-objective and would therefore be improper. Such a law could not exist in a fully consistent Objectivist society.

It’s interesting to me that this specific topic seems to bring out some of the weirdest arguments from Objectivists. I guess that many Objectivists are pet lovers.

For example, some Objectivists say that such laws would be proper because a person who would torture an animal this way could be considered “vicious” and potentially dangerous. Such a person might be capable of doing the same thing to a human being, and so they represent a threat. But that’s entirely inconsistent with Objectivism.

Simply stated, as noted above, it is improper for government to act based on the mere possibility that someone might cause harm to another person. There must be an imminent threat for government to act, or else the harm must have already occurred.

Why would it be proper for government to punish someone for a valid crime that they might only theoretically commit, through a rather tortuous chain of logic, and yet improper for government to establish regulations when it’s much easier to argue that harm is less likely to occur? That’s a contradiction. (I’ll set aside the question of whether such a person could be involuntarily committed as insane within the Objectivist framework. That’s a really slippery slope, I think, that I don’t remember Objectivists ever sliding down.)

Furthermore, according to the strict Objectivist ethical framework, it wouldn’t be immoral, either. Objectivism says that morality only concerns human activity vis a vis other humans or oneself. A person torturing their own animal would not be a moral issue. At best, it would be amoral.

I suspect that many Objectivists (but shockingly I know it’s not all, in my experience) consider torturing an animal to be a sign of an ugly, vicious soul who they would ostracize, socially and economically. The problem is, that just reveals a deeper problem for them — they know it’s wrong, somehow, but their own ethical framework doesn’t describe why it’s wrong. Their ethical framework only accounts for individual human activity and individual human impact. It only accounts for individual human value. Simply put, animals don’t count.

They have to twist and stretch their own ideas in an attempt to explain why it makes them feel so bad (just as they might regarding a starving child, which isn’t at all coincidental).

And remember: I’m talking about Ayn Rand’s ideal society here.

Science cannot be allowed to contradict Objectivist principles

I’m only going to briefly touch on this one, because I have more work to do in fully identifying what I think are some very egregious mistakes that Objectivists make in various sciences. I’ll just mention two examples here, and please don’t hold me to these evaluations, quite yet.

First, I mentioned in “Objectivism has a reality problem, Part 2” that the traditional Objectivist ideas on psychology are something that I take quite personally. I suffer from clinical OCD, and so I possess significant knowledge about that mental disorder based on my own painful experience, my own deep introspection, and a large body of research in neurobiology. All of it demonstrates conclusively that OCD is caused by a variety of influences — including, quite literally, how my brain apparently works differently from most others.

Traditionally, that is, according to Rand, Objectivism says that a person’s psychology is entirely determined by their explicit or implicit philosophical premises. Solving any kind of mental condition is therefore wholly a matter of thinking hard and rationally enough to identify those premises, and then changing them through the application of reason. It’s a purely philosophical endeavor.

My perspective, that the Objectivist position on psychology is ludicrous hogwash, is anathema to many Objectivists. And the disagreement isn’t just in the scientific details.

Consider this brief exchange I had with one Objectivist, that’s similar to other exchanges I’ve experienced. Note the comment in blue:

Very simply put, the entire Objectivist epistemological framework — that is, how our minds gather and process information — is grounded in the idea of all human thought and emotion being grounded in the volitional application of reason. That’s one of Rand’s (I would say, false) philosophical contributions, and it’s essential to the Objectivist epistemology.

His use of scare quotes around “intrusive” is quite telling here. He’s categorically rejecting the idea that the intrusive thoughts I mention can be coming from any source other than my own underlying “bad/false premises.” Even the very idea of their being intrusive, that is, disruptive and unwelcome (i.e., non-volitional) is an assault on his perspective.

If I say they come from some other source, like some part of my brain malfunctioning and throwing up disconnected gibberish, then I’m “buying into determinism.” That’s in spite of the available facts. Because, you see, that would mean that at least some part of my mind is not acting volitionally, even subconsciously. And that would completely break the Objectivist epistemology.

That means he’s rejecting all of the real-life data in order to uphold his philosophical convictions. He’s essentially rejecting all of modern psychology and neurobiology because, otherwise, he’d have to consider that maybe the Objectivist epistemology is wrong. To the extent that too many Objectivists think this way, the entire science of psychology in Ayn Rand’s ideal world would be subverted in service to their philosophy.

God help an Objectivist who suffers from OCD as an Objectivist psychologist demands they torture themselves in trying to identify what “bad premises” underly those bizarre thoughts that pop into their mind.

I don’t know if or how psychology among Objectivist psychologists and psychiatrists has advanced since Rand’s time, because quite frankly, I don’t care. I simply don’t expect them to have made any important contributions in the field, given where they start as Objectivists. And I kind of expect that anyone who suggests that the mind might ever act without full volition would be excommunicated from the Objectivist movement.

But for many Objectivists, and I would say Objectivism itself, modern psychology and related fields like neurobiology must be completely rejected because they stand in stark contrast to the Objectivist epistemology as formulated by Ayn Rand.

Next up, and this will be a very short one, is the science of quantum physics. I keep mentioning that one, and I keep putting off my full discussion, because it’s frankly quite challenging. Right there, I linked to a piece I wrote that just started to delve into the topic, and you’re welcome to read it.

But my basic position is this: if Objectivists had ruled science for the last century or so, we wouldn’t have quantum physics. And if we didn’t have quantum physics, then we wouldn’t have a host of modern technology. We wouldn’t have the computers that I’m using to write this piece and you’re using to read it. We’d be living in a sort of late 19th-century steampunk reality.

So, in conclusion: does any of this sound like a society that you would want to live in? Because it doesn’t sound like one to me.

Given some responses to the first part of this series, I want to be 100%, perfectly clear: I am not, in this series, attempting to refute Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. I am not saying that so many Objectivists being rationalistic and suffering from what I call a shallow epistemology is proof that the philosophy itself is incorrect. I’m making a different point.

Specifically, I’m saying that there simply has to be some reason why so many Objectivists fit this description — in my experience, the vast majority to some degree, and myself when I called myself an Objectivist (hopefully less so today). That includes many of the most knowledgeable Objectivists, those who are considered the movement’s intellectual leaders. That includes Ayn Rand’s “intellectual heir,” Leonard Peikoff. It includes Rand herself.

Consider the importance of induction to Objectivism, that is, reasoning from specific observations to general conclusions. It’s debatable whether Objectivism is fundamentally an inductive or deductive philosophy. A case can be made for either, or for some combination (Edit: I’ve been told this isn’t actually a question. Objectivism is not deductive, it’s classically inductive outside of its axioms. I’m not so sure about that, but if anything, that would only reinforce my point. So, okay.). Regardless, induction is very important within the Objectivist framework.

Consider Leonard Peikoff (Rand’s “intellectual heir”) in his seminal book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (OPAR):

An adult determines whether a previously unperceived object is a man, an animal, or an automobile by applying to the new experience his earlier formed concepts. The man who has conceptualized the requirements of survival decides by a similar epistemological method whether or not in any particular case to tell a lie—or to work for his keep—or to compromise his convictions—or to give to charity—or to fight an advancing dictatorship. He decides not by feeling or by polls and not by trying to assess each new situation without context, as though he were an infant, but by the application of his earlier formed moral concepts.

The common name of this latter form of cognition (which extends far beyond moral issues) is “principle.” A “principle” is a general truth on which other truths depend. Every science and every field of thought involves the discovery and application of principles. Leaving aside certain special cases, a principle may be described as a fundamental reached by induction. Such knowledge is necessary to a conceptual consciousness for the same reason that induction and the grasp of fundamentals are necessary.

That certainly sounds like gathering knowledge — that is, knowing the facts in a give context — would be utterly essential at every step in an Objectivist’s cognition. That seems so fundamental to the philosophy that every Objectivist would understand the importance of knowing the facts before drawing conclusions. And in the case of Objectivists, quite often their conclusions are incredibly absolutist, and so that requires absolutely careful in knowing the facts before making an assertion.

Here’s Rand talking about Native Americans in a 1974 lecture at the Ford Hall Forum at West Point:

But now, as to the Indians, I don’t even care to discuss that kind of alleged complaints that they have against this country. I do believe with serious, scientific reasons the worst kind of movie that you have probably seen—worst from the Indian viewpoint—as to what they did to the white man.

I do not think that they have any right to live in a country merely because they were born here and acted and lived like savages. Americans didn’t conquer; Americans did not conquer that country.

Whoever is making sounds there, I think is hissing, he is right, but please be consistent: you are a racist if you object to that [laughter and applause]. You are that because you believe that anything can be given to Man by his biological birth or for biological reasons.

If you are born in a magnificent country which you don’t know what to do with, you believe that it is a property right; it is not. And, since the Indians did not have any property rights—they didn’t have the concept of property; they didn’t even have a settled society, they were predominantly nomadic tribes; they were a primitive tribal culture, if you want to call it that—if so, they didn’t have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using.

It would be wrong to attack any country which does respect—or try, for that matter, to respect—individual rights, because if they do, you are an aggressor and you are morally wrong to attack them. But if a country does not protect rights—if a given tribe is the slave of its own tribal chief—why should you respect the rights they do not have?

Or any country which has a dictatorship. Government—the citizens still have individual rights—but the country does not have any rights. Anyone has the right to invade it, because rights are not recognized in this country and neither you nor a country nor anyone can have your cake and eat it too.

In other words, want respect for the rights of Indians, who, incidentally, for most cases of their tribal history, made agreements with the white man, and then when they had used up whichever they got through agreement of giving, selling certain territory, then came back and broke the agreement, and attacked white settlements.

I will go further. Let’s suppose they were all beautifully innocent savages, which they certainly were not. What was it that they were fighting for, if they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their right to keep part of the earth untouched, unused, and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or maybe a few caves about.

Any white person who brings the elements of civilization had the right to take over this continent, and it is great that some people did, and discovered here what they couldn’t do anywhere else in the world and what the Indians, if there are any racist Indians today, do not believe to this day: respect for individual rights.

Each of Rand’s assertions here are historically inaccurate. Hundreds of Native American tribes recognized various types of individual and collective property rights. Many were sedentary agriculturalists or mixed farming with seasonal hunting, and were thus not entirely or at all nomadic.

Native Americans were productive in domesticating numerous crops such as corn, potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate, and more, in establishing large urban centers, and in building extensive road networks and sophisticated irrigation systems. They were stewards of the land and of various species that supported their cultures, like the bison that the “civilized” Europeans and Americans almost wiped out for no good reason. They engaged in controlled burning that contributed to some of the most beautiful American landscapes.

And Rand completely ignored the hundreds of treaties that white Europeans and Americans violated. She ignored, or simply didn’t know about, the very existence of democratic societies like the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy that predated America’s founding by centuries.

Rand used terms like “primitives” and “savages” to describe Native Americans, which is egregiously false and wholly collectivist as compared to the historical record. And she did all this in order to justify the wholesale slaughter and indeed genocide of the Native Americans, in direct contradiction to her own philosophy’s assertion of the inviolability of individual rights, that is, the complete rejection of the initiation of force.

As an aside, consider the Objectivist position on a child who is abandoned by their parents. Objectivism’s principle of individual rights is so essential, and its rejection of the initiation of force is so complete, that if no individual steps up to voluntarily help the child, then Objectivism says it’s moral that the child dies. Literally that: in a moral society, the child would die. It would be immoral for the government to use a dime to help the child that’s involuntarily taken from another individual. A society with a safety net for such circumstances, whereby the child’s life is saved, would be immoral.

And yet, Rand supported the murder of thousands of Native American individuals who never initiated force against anyone, based on her wholly collective premise that they were “primitive savages.” That included children, who by definition are innocent and not yet capable of forming complex ideas like “property rights.” At best, Rand was egregiously hypocritical. But I fear there’s something worse there, that this is inherent in Objectivism.

Even at my most Objectivist, I found her position about Native Americans untenable and offensive. Her use of “Any white person” really galled me. I thought she was incredibly wrong here, but I wrote it off to her being simply uninformed. When she said, “I do believe with serious, scientific reasons the worst kind of movie that you have probably seen,” I thought to myself that she probably really did get her knowledge about Native Americans from 1950s Westerns. And, “what they did to the white man.” Holy shit.

My mistake, and the same mistake that many Objectivists make in defending her today, was in considering this egregious error in isolation. It was in thinking that Rand was incredibly knowledgeable in all these other contexts but just not in this one. It was in failing to consider just how important it was that Rand was that prepared to so self-righteously defend genocide based on such flimsy knowledge — and that’s even if you accept her premise that it’s fundamentally okay for more advanced civilizations to wipe out less advanced civilizations, which I certainly do not. Really, there’s just so much that’s so bad here.

And I should note, pursuant to the point of this series, that many Objectivists aren’t apparently any more historically informed than she was, and so they make the same error. But I think they’re even less excused than she was, because I’m far from the first to point out just how ignorant Rand was on the topic. So, any knowledgable Objectivist who still defends or agrees with (!) Rand’s position here simply must be evading the facts, not just ignorant of them.

So, the question that I should have asked myself was: If Rand made such egregious errors in this context, then where else might she have done so? She alleged that her most fundamental principles, and indeed her axioms, were derived inductively, that is, by applying logic to the actual facts. Doing so consistently would therefore be incredibly important to her entire framework.

Once again, I have to stress that I’m not claiming that this one really bad application invalidates the philosophy itself. This could simply be a “Physician, heal thyself!” moment where Rand didn’t practice what she preached. But then you have to consider her other ideas, such as on homosexuals; on the proper dominant and submissive relationship between the sexes; on her assertion that a rational woman wouldn’t want to be President because she couldn’t tolerate the absence of a man who was above her; on her assertion that psychology is wholly about uncovering a person’s basic philosophical premises, and that all mental illness can be addressed simply by thinking rationally and hard enough.

As someone who suffers from clinical OCD that can be very severe, intensely painful, and utterly debilitating at times, that last one’s very personal for me. Some Objectivists stubbornly hold onto Rand’s ludicrous ideas about psychology because they’re afraid that all the advances in neurobiology imply determinism and thereby undo free will. They reject the facts in service to their premises. That’s literally the pattern of rationalism I’m identifying here. (I’ll talk at some point about how they do the same regarding quantum physics.)

Here’s an example (and please excuse the brevity of my comment here, it was a quick thought and I would actually have a lot more, and I think better, to say). This example represents what I’ve found to be a common Objectivist perspective. If pressed, I would bet good money that the person who responded to me (the comment in blue, and again I’m blurring out names) would argue that my perspective must be wrong because the Objectivist epistemology is based entirely on the volitional nature of rational thought.

He must reject what he sees as “determinism,” or else the entire Objectivist epistemology falls apart. He’s basically telling me that I must reject all of my personal experience, all of my introspection, and all of the relevant research, else I’m “buying into determinism.” Because determinism must be rejected else Objectivism is wrong, and that’s what’s unacceptable for him. Although I doubt he’d admit that.

Taken altogether, you have to start to wonder if perhaps Rand was also ignorant or evasive of some important facts when she formulated the philosophical principles that define Objectivism. Remember Piekoff above: “a principle may be described as a fundamental reached by induction.” What happens with induction when you don’t possess enough facts, or you possess the wrong facts? This tendency to be rationalistic, to ignore or evade the facts, could very well have made its way into the philosophy itself. That opens up a whole can of worms that I’ll leave for another discussion.

But I think it’s entirely possible that, at least, many Objectivists could have picked up this tendency in studying her material, and in the material produced by those who knew her the best. I’ll borrow a legal concept here and say that maybe it’s something like the fruit of a poisonous tree. And that’s setting aside the very real possibility (I would say, the likelihood) that Objectivism is simply wrong, and that it is not, in fact, a valuable philosophy for living one’s life because it is not, in fact, based on reality.

Of course, all philosophies have people who represent it poorly, I’m sure. They misunderstand it and misapply it (how often that includes the intellectual leaders, I’m not sure). But for me, the difference is that Objectivism’s creator and proponents so fervently claim that it’s the only philosophy based on objective reality, the only philosophy that properly identifies reason as man’s means of survival, the only philosophy that can properly guide man’s life.

With reason and objective reality (i.e., the facts) being so fundamentally important to the philosophy, why do so many of its adherents think they can ignore or evade the facts when they’re applying reason? And why do so many Objectivists assert that they’re right by virtue of following such a reality-based philosophy when their positions are based on no facts, or on outright, demonstrable falsehoods? Why do they seem so clueless about the very fact that they’re so often uninformed, or wrongly informed?

I mean, hell… Why did I do that so often myself?

I think it’s pertinent here to note that if you read the first part of this series, you might have sensed some emotions from me. I might have come across as angry, frustrated, and offended in certain places. Maybe I was a bit sarcastic and facetious at times. I tried to avoid it (although maybe not all that hard), and I know it seeped into the piece.

There are two reasons for that. First, some of it is projection, I’m sure. I’m expressing my own chagrin — specifically in that word’s sense of “distress” — at the way I used to think and am now striving against. Mike Brock had some very kind words about that piece in a note, where he wrote:

I must say, I love reading essays like this that show the evolution of ones thinking. This is generative and beautiful. It is the generosity of spirit embodied in intellectual engagement. To demonstrate for others, mistakes you see that you made, to give the future a chance to be better than the past.

I wish I could say that I fully intended the piece to serve such a generous purpose, to “give the future a chance to be better than the past.” However, I hadn’t really thought about it like that. More so, I simply felt the need to express myself, and to do so fully honestly in recognition of my own errors. I’m an honest person by nature, and being dishonest in this context would invalidate everything I’m trying to say.

Incidentally, he makes a great point. I’ve struggled to come up with a purpose for this Substack, and maybe that could be one focus. I do have some things to say about how important it is to be diligent in one’s own intellectual development, and about what can happen if you’re not. Maybe there’s some value in giving my perspective, to whatever extent I have something valuable to say there.

Nevertheless, some of the emotions I express emanate, I’m sure, from my own disappointment with myself. And I recognize that’ not at all fair to the people I’m criticizing.

But second, I have a particularly strong response to Objectivists when they’re ignorant, irrational, or hypocritical. I’m not going to apologize for that. Their shallow epistemology particularly bothers me, more so than it does when I spot it in the average person. They put themselves, and Ayn Rand, up on a pretty high intellectual pedestal that’s meant to tower, morally, over everyone else.

The result is that they can be incredibly smug, elitist, and condescending — an opinion that I maintained even when I called myself an Objectivist. There’s a reason why I never had many Objectivists friends (in person, and not even on Facebook) or attended any Objectivist events. I just didn’t like being around many of them, all that much. And yes, I recognize how weird that must sound. Why didn’t I make the obvious connection?

They quite often seem to think that because of their allegiance to Objectivism, every assertion they make must be taken as the obvious truth. They don’t even feel the need to argue, in many cases, and ad hominem can be directly baked into their approach. If you’re not an Objectivist, then your perspective can’t be correct. They sometimes assert their own, more subtle version of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” in response to disagreement, as “Rand Derangement Syndrome.” Or, because Objectivism is fundamentally reality-based (per them), any disagreement can be summarily dismissed because it can’t be reality-based if it’s in contradiction.

Yes, this is a generalization based on my own experience. It’s my own induction, if you will. And I certainly know of Objectivists who aren’t like this. But as I wrote in Part 1, I don’t think that’s because of Objectivism itself. In this respect, I think it’s in spite of Objectivism.

This seems like a good stopping point for this part. I was planning to include more examples from contemporary Objectivists, but I spent more time than I expected on Rand herself. That’s probably a good thing.

A few months ago, I wrote that Ayn Rand’s Objectivism is not my philosophy. That was a major milestone for me, arriving as it did soon after I turned 59 and after almost four decades of thinking it was. I wrote that piece, in part, as a sort of catharsis. Seeing some Objectivists — as advocates of that philosophy call themselves — say some really bad things, I wanted to distance myself from them and, in that moment, from the philosophy itself.

I’ve spent some time since then digging into the various questions I’d always had about Objectivism, which I had foolishly dismissed over the years as inconsequential. As I’m finally answering them, I’m coming closer to identifying what I see as some of the philosophy’s fatal flaws. I’m prompted to write this particular piece because one of those flaws — and it’s a doozy — appears to be that the philosophy has had little value in producing rational thinkers.

Now, please don’t misunderstand me, particularly my Objectivist subscribers. I’m not saying that no Objectivists are incapable of thinking rationally. From my interactions with you, I’m quite certain that many of you are so capable. I’m saying that it’s unlikely that the philosophy of Objectivism itself accounts for your ability to arrive at rational conclusions. It might even be a detriment. And I say that because, in my estimation, Objectivism is not — contrary to its most fundamental intentions — a reality-based philosophy.

Instead, I think it’s a philosophy that’s based on various assertions that have little to do with a study of reality itself, including historical and contemporary facts, and it disregards a host of unanswered questions about the nature of reality and about the human being. Rand had some ideas that she asserted as objective truths, in a vacuum and without real-world foundation, and she built a house of cards constituting what might be more properly labeled an ideology than an actual philosophy.

No, I’m not prepared to fully defend that evaluation of Objectivism itself right now, but that’s where I’ve landed so far. Mike Brock wrote a short breakdown of Objectivism that I know Objectivists will generally hate, primarily because it’s a very strong polemic (not unlike Rand herself was wont to produce). He calls Objectivism “stupid,” which I certainly wouldn’t do, but he makes some valid points. I tend to agree with many of them. Note that Brock does not attack Objectivism from a “leftist” or a religious perspective, which is where many critiques of Rand and Objectivism have originated. And he has some incredibly insightful work on other topics, such as his excellent deconstruction of techno-fascist guru Curtis Yarvin. Brock is generally not very easy to dismiss.

Rather, what I’m writing about here (in what will almost certainly be a multipart series, based on sheer length), is what I alluded to very early in this Substack: the shallow epistemology. In that piece, I outlined a growing realization that many Objectivists — and, prior to that and hopefully less so today, including myself — are guilty of rationalism. That is, they assert principles as floating abstractions disconnected from reality. They don’t know the facts, or they evade them, and so their assertions sound neat and tidy until you dig below the very surface and take a look at reality itself.

I haven’t yet identified precisely what it is about Objectivism that produces that tendency. Maybe, it’s simply the result of Rand’s own shallow epistemology, her own ignorance or evasions that seeped into her most fundamental ideas. As I said, I think that Objectivism is based on various assertions made in a vacuum and disconnected from reality. Perhaps studying those assertions and uncritically accepting them as absolute, objective truths predisposes a person to do the same in other areas. But that’s just a quick guess.

So, what prompts me to write this piece? What’s my evidence for asserting that such a shallow epistemology is at work? Well, I suppose it’s been the very kind of inductive process that Rand herself would have advocated (only, I don’t know that she actually followed it all that closely herself). I’ve evaluated what I’ve seen from Objectivists, both mainstream and prominent, in terms of their various positions on important topics of the day. From that, I think I’ve identified a pattern.

In this piece (or series), I’m going to highlight a few instances where I think the shallow epistemology is at work. And it’s not just about applying the relevant facts. It goes deeper, revealing a certain intellectual laziness that I’ve often seen among Objectivists (and been guilty of myself). There’s a tendency to quote Rand or assert some isolated principle (often undefined) as if it’s an entire argument — which is, if I was to guess, one reason why some people become Objectivists in the first place. If you just accept Rand’s internally consistent (but isolated-from-reality) ideas, you don’t have to think all that hard. You can consider yourself intellectually superior without putting in all that much work.

Want to answer why some people support socialism, for example? Just say “Altruism,” as with the Objectivist below. Easy peasy. Your Objectivist buddies will get what you’re saying. There’s no need to define “socialism,” let alone “altruism,” or to consider current reality and why some people might perceive socialism as preferable to modern conditions — especially young people, whose reality is pretty grim right now. It’s always “altruism,” per Rand, or maybe “envy,” “intellectual evasion,” “hatred of the good for being the good,” or a “desire for the unearned.”

That’s pretty much the sum total of the Objectivist perspective on why people hold “socialist” ideas.

Ultimately, according to Objectivism, everyone is some combination of a looter, a moocher, or a second-hand non-thinker — or they’re an Objectivist striving for a place in Galt’s Gulch. And how awesome would that be? Better than being Eddie Willers, who in spite of his years of loyal work for Dagny Taggart’s railroad was left behind to suffer the apocalypse when the “men of the mind” exited society for their capitalist commune. Because poor Eddie just didn’t get it, you see. He couldn't quite make the intellectual leap to perfect selfishness and pure reason necessary to secure a spot. He wasn’t a bad person, exactly. He just wasn’t fully good enough. And everyone wants to be fully good enough.

Of course, Rand generated considerable material asserting and supporting her ideas, and those who followed her have added on considerable material as well. Rand’s “intellectual heir,” Leonard Peikoff, wrote the most complete non-fiction statement of the philosophy with Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (OPAR). Atlas Shrugged remains the Objectivist Bible, if there is such a thing, wherein Rand communicated her philosophy by portraying the world as she said it would exist in contradiction to her ideas, in her characters constructed entirely to represent philosophical ideals (or antitheses), and in a 60-page oral dissertation by her “ideal man.” And I mean “ideal man” quite literally — Rand’s ideal man, not just her ideal human being. John Galt would never have been a woman. That’s another discussion entirely, but her view on the sexes provides a hint as to potential errors in considering human nature more generally.

And there are numerous other works that either elucidate or — yes, in spite of its being a “closed” philosophy for many Objectivists, limited to “the philosophy of Ayn Rand,” the ideas that she expressed herself — add onto or clarify certain points. Others have taken the “open philosophy” approach and have written material that may or may not correspond to Rand’s own words. That “closed versus open philosophy” conflict represents just one of the many schisms in the Objectivist movement.

My point is that I’m not just evaluating what’s said by various mainstream or prominent Objectivists today in arriving at my conclusions about the philosophy itself. I’ve read the source material, and I’ve arrived at a variety of conclusions about it. More so, I’m saying here that the philosophy — no matter its underlying validity — has utterly failed to produce anything even remotely like a reliable population of proponents communicating anything like a consistent, rational worldview. It’s supposed to be a reality-based philosophy that can guide a person’s life, but the intellectual results have been a bit spotty.

Some Objectivists might be in touch with reality with regard to one topic, but then completely removed from reality in another. That’s why today’s major Objectivist schism — and it’s a whopper — is between one group of Objectivists who are wholly anti-Trump and another group who are pro-Trump either completely or as a “lesser evil” against a wildly contrived boogeyman of “the left.” Both sides accuse the other of misunderstanding or misrepresenting Rand’s ideas. According to both, Rand would have vehemently disagreed with the other. Both say that the other side should stop calling themselves “Objectivists.”

Some even make up childish Trump-like nicknames for the other side, like “Obleftivists,” and they parrot the idiotic “Trump Derangement Syndrome” accusation that MAGA adores. Leonard Peikoff himself (again, Ayn Rand’s “intellectual heir”) implied in no true Scotsman fashion that “Real Objectivists for Ayn Rand” (ROAR!) know that no matter how bad Trump is, he’s still better than any realistic alternative. He’s certainly better than Peikoff’s Fox News-fueled specter of “the left.”

To the outside world, it all might seem a little ridiculous. Non-Objectivists — those who notice, anyway — might see it as a really weird little tempest in a teapot. After all, both sides adhere to a philosophy that they each claim is the only one that acknowledges objective reality and describes the proper role of reason in man’s survival, selfishness as the only proper moral ideal, and capitalism as the only proper and moral social system. And yet, that same philosophy — which is supposed to be complete and internally consistent — nevertheless results in such wildly different applications among so many people. People who all equally claim that Rand was right somehow end up hating each other, because apparently they disagree in what she was actually right about.

For me, even as a once-Objectivist, it’s mortifying. It should be mortifying to every Objectivist, regardless of which side they’re on. However, I’ve been told by both sides that the other side in that schism doesn’t actually demean Objectivism because, well, they’re wrong. People can make mistakes, they say. That doesn’t mean the philosophy itself is wrong. As Objectivists love to say, though, I’d check that premise if I were them.

And besides, as I was quite literally told by one Objectivist, we won’t see “real Objectivism” (ROAR?) until the entire society is Objectivist and people are fully raised as Objectivists. People have intellectual and emotional baggage, he said, from growing up in a non-Objectivist society that holds them back from fully thinking as Objectivists. What that person didn’t describe, among other things, is how an Objectivist society could ever be implemented by such imperfect people. “It will only be possible in Galt’s Gulch,” he might say.

But consider the following exchange I had with another Objectivist, on X. This one was particularly impactful for me, because it was such a surprise coming from this individual.

Here, I took issue with this Objectivist’s use of “Muslims” to describe the Islamic extremists who advocated for and committed violence against those who criticized Islam. He argued that such violence is the result of Islam itself, or more generally of “faith qua faith” — although he certainly seems to be singling out Islam here. He never answered whether “Christians” should be used to describe the actions and ideology of Christian nationalists. Looking back, I can’t remember him ever using “Christians” to describe that splinter group.

I would say he contradicted himself with “The threats arise not from a fringe but from doctrines embedded in certain interpretations of Islam.” Of course, there are certain interpretations of Islam that contain those doctrines, just like white Christian nationalists interpret the Christian Bible to justify their doctrine that women should be stripped of the right to vote. At the same time, there are more interpretations that do not, for both religions.

Similarly, he then makes an assertion that those doctrines are “widely respected within many Muslim majority cultures.” I think that’s false. As far as I can tell with some reasonable research, the majority of people in most majority Muslim cultures do not accept those doctrines. And, that’s becoming more true, not less. The trend is toward even more widespread rejection of Islamic extremism, particularly of violence. You have to look at certain authoritarian Islamic countries, like Iran and Saudi Arabia, to find those doctrines explicitly voiced. And it’s debatable even there how many people actually accept the doctrines, as opposed to being forced to live within them by religious authorities.

I’ll set aside “protected by Western political correctness,” because when I read that, I sense the influence of the vehement anti-Muslim sentiment emanating from the far-right. But, I don’t want to accuse him of that kind of bigotry. At the same time, it also strikes me as a form of begging the question: the Islamic reality that he’s asserting as true would be more widely known, but for “Western political correctness.” That just seems very convenient to me.

My argument, though, was simply that using “Muslims” this way is collectivist. He ascribed to all Muslims the beliefs of some Muslims. That’s in spite of Islam having the same kinds of varying interpretations as do almost all religions, including both Judaism and Christianity. He simply wouldn’t accept that he could easily have used “Islamic extremists” or some other term instead, to denote more precisely who he was talking about. He finished with, “But if a Muslim rejects my view, they should take it up with those who preach their creed as a license to kill — and with the faith-based premises that make such evil possible.” (Emphasis added.)

Why do I bring up this specific example here? For two reasons. First, this Objectivist is squarely in the anti-Trump camp. I have agreed with just about everything he’s said in that context. I also know his position on the schism: those Objectivists who support Trump are entirely wrong. And to his credit, he has “taken it up with those who preach [his] creed” in what he would say is such an egregiously false fashion. He has strongly and openly disagreed with the Objectivists on the other side.

But here’s the thing: I could rewrite his final clause as, “… and with the Objectivist-based premises that make such evil possible.” I’m guessing he would respond by saying that Objectivist premises don’t make such evil as supporting Trump possible. Again, those “Objectivists” are wrong, he would say. But I know that many Muslims would say exactly the same thing about Islam, that Islam’s premises just as equally don’t make the evil he alleges possible. They would say that he is wrong about Islam, just as he says those Objectivists are wrong about Objectivism. And I think they would be right. (Note: I would also reject his assertion that faith itself necessarily results in violence. But I’m not surprised by the claim — Objectivism unconditionally ascribes a great deal to faith versus reason. Some things make sense to ascribe to faith as a particular means of cognition, but not everything does.)

Why did this Objectivist abandon the very individualism — the anti-collectivism — that’s so fundamental to his own philosophy, in this particular context? I know that he unequivocally rejects it in other contexts. And I’m certain that he would reject someone saying “Objectivists support Donald Trump” when that’s only true of a select group of Objectivists.

But to get back to my point: I’m going to make a massive assumption here and say that, just maybe, this Objectivist took this tack because he simply doesn’t know that much about Islam. Maybe he’s thinking in terms of some of the jingoistic anti-Muslim rhetoric that immediately followed 9/11. I think that describes the opinion that many people hold about the religion.

Maybe he doesn’t know that the Quran has several verses that prohibit violence against people of other faiths, including the other Abrahamic religions, and against people with no faith. The verses that call for violence are actually limited to certain historical contexts (like so many of the Bible’s most violent passages are in the Old Testament), and aren’t widely accepted (ditto). Maybe he thinks that “jihad” means “holy war,” and not the internal struggle to live according to the tenets of Islam. I can’t say whether or not he agrees that allowing Muslims to immigrate into the United States will result in the imposition of “Sharia law” — a redundancy that demonstrates that someone doesn’t know what “Sharia” actually means. I certainly hope he doesn’t believe that MAGA-inspired narrative.

Ultimately, I think that if this Objectivist was reality-based, he wouldn’t be tempted to violate his own individualist principles, to be so collectivist, in denigrating all Muslims as a group. And therein lies the rub.

I’m going to finish this part with the following screenshot, to maybe exemplify my premise that Objectivists aren’t very reality-based. As you can see, it’s at least obliquely related to the previous example.

For me, this is the quintessential Objectivist statement, made by an individual who isn’t exactly a “prominent” Objectivist but is well-known and — for good reason, I think — well-respected. Personally, I’d rate him as an overall good guy.

The statement itself is positive and uplifting, and it presents America as a shining example of an individualistic society, just as Rand advocated. She, too, described America this way. America was “built on individualism,” the statement says. It has “thrived and prospered on treating individuals individually rather than on their place of birth or the color of their skin.”

The statement has just one small problem: it isn’t true. It makes an assertion that simply does not correlate with historical or contemporary reality. America was certainly founded on moral principles, including individual rights, perhaps uniquely so. It’s the result of Enlightenment ideas, and it’s the best that Western civilization has wrought, so far. But the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and (imperfectly) codified in the Constitution have always been, and certainly remain, aspirational. “A republic, if you can keep it,” as Franklin said — only, we haven’t. Not yet.

Even a cursory discussion identifies just how disconnected that statement is from reality. I’ll break down just some of it here.

To begin with, the United States of America retained black slavery for almost 80 years, which was resolved by a civil war that was only partly about undoing the deep bigotry against blacks that existed in American society. A brief, 12-year flirtation with Reconstruction that aimed at allowing the freed blacks to fully participate in American society and economy was demolished by Jim Crow in half the country. That era lasted for almost another 90 years. So legalized discrimination and/or slavery existed in America for at least its first 177 years, out of 250.

And then, throughout the country, blacks were subjected to widespread private discrimination that kept them — as a group — from participating in the American dream. There were a host of private methods by which blacks were disenfranchised, such as employment discrimination, restrictive home deed covenants, redlining and discriminatory lending, private business refusal of service, private housing discrimination, and more. These things happened everywhere, and incidentally, they strongly contradict the assertion (made by many Objectivists) that “capitalism kills racism.”

Consider that up to the 1950s, at most around 35% of blacks owned homes compared to 57% of whites. It was just 23% in the 1940s. Today, it’s 46% versus 75%. Prior to the civil rights movement, most blacks worked in low-wage, low-skill, and highly segregated roles in agriculture, domestic service, and a few other industries. Only a very small minority worked in professional or managerial roles. At various times, black men made about 45% of the wages paid to white men. More black men participated in the workforce than white men, because older men couldn’t afford to retire and younger men couldn’t afford to go to school.

Things have changed in this regard through today, due almost entirely to various civil rights legislation — improving in some areas and regressing in others. Suffice it to say, it’s still not the same for all people. Note that the question of “reparations” is often dismissed as ridiculous, because “nobody alive today was a slave or a slave owner.” But whether or not you agree with reparations, that response is a bit facile in the face of the evidence.

Such discrimination didn’t disappear with the civil rights movement. Rather, the methods simply shifted, such as to the imposition of a welfare state that created considerable dependency in black communities (a theory that many Objectivists would support). That was the “left’s” contribution. The “right’s” contribution was the “war on drugs,” which has always disproportionately targeted blacks and further contributed to the destruction of black communities.

Consider that today, the United States incarcerates black men at more than five times the rate of white men (around 1,218/100,000 versus 231/100,000), which is a slight improvement from when Obama was first elected President in 2008 — when the rate was seven times. In a statistic that’s certainly related, roughly 70% of black children today are born to single mothers as compared to roughly 28% of white children. And the resulting poverty, combined with the impact of the illegal drug trade (also poverty-related), poor education among blacks, and other factors, contributes to much higher crime rates than among whites and partly explains the higher rates of incarceration. (As an aside, an Objectivist [!] once assured me that these influences don’t actually account for the higher crime rates among blacks. Rather, it’s entirely biological, he said. Blacks are just born to commit more crime than whites.)

Today, the same racists that have existed throughout American history are being drawn into the light, like cockroaches, by a white Christian nationalist movement that is deeply white supremacist. The President’s chief advisor, Stephen Miller, is demonstrably a white nationalist. The most influential person in American politics outside of the government, Elon Musk, is a white nationalist. The Trump administration, including the now-defunct DOGE, is or was full of white nationalists. I think that these facts are demonstrable, and you don’t have to dig very deep to find them.

I mean, my god: the Department of Homeland Security account on X, and other executive branch social media accounts, regularly posts blatant white nationalist messaging. The owner of MyPillows, MAGA-aligned Mike Lindell, once sold a pillow for $14.88 in an obvious neo-Nazi dog whistle (“14” for the white supremacist “14 words,” and “88” for HH, or Heil Hitler). And he’s just announced that he’s running for governor in Minnesota, immediately after Trump denigrated the entire Somali immigrant population there as basically sub-human and anti-American. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has announced that only white South Africans will be allowed to fill the dramatically reduced number of asylum seekers, now set at just 7,500. Brown and black immigrants are bad, white immigrants are good.

This kind of collectivism didn’t just appear out of nowhere.

I grew up among racists in Northern Indiana. When I was 9 years old and a ward of the State of Indiana, I spent a year with an uncle who was a Fort Wayne city cop, openly a white supremacist, and a closet neo-Nazi complete with commemorative Nazi china. I remember his refusing to allow a black childhood friend of mine on his property, and (violently) berating me later as a race traitor who demeaned himself by associating with blacks. My anger and disgust at such collectivism was one of the things that attracted me to Objectivism, and I always thought other Objectivists were stupidly wrong when they asserted “America is no longer racist against blacks.”

More recently, I argued — futilely — against Objectivists this year when they celebrated the Trump administration undoing half a century of civil rights by capriciously prohibiting “DEI” and removing historical references to blacks and other minorities from government web sites. They called that a good thing, because it was undoing “reverse racism” (what Objectivists would normally call an “anti-concept”) against whites. I found it egregiously stupid that they were so damn happy because, essentially, the Ku Klux Klan was being put in charge of policing racism.

And don’t get me started on women, who couldn’t vote until 1920 and who were also widely discriminated against until the sexual revolution (and even since then, although to lesser degrees). It’s remarkable that, for example, women couldn’t open bank or credit card accounts without their husbands’ signatures until the middle of the 1970s. And then there was the treatment of Chinese immigrants during the Gilded Age (one of the most corrupt eras in American history and yet the era that Objectivists routinely hold up as the closest ever to “real capitalism”), the treatment of various European immigrants during the first half of the 20th century, the treatment of Catholics at various times, the treatment of homosexuals and now transgender people, and the treatment of brown and black immigrants today by that same white Christian nationalist administration.

I could go on. But it’s simplest to say that America has been very individualistic and not collectivist at all — for straight white Protestant Christian men who can trace their American ancestry back far enough. For everyone else, though, America has been deeply collectivist, and it remains so today.

That Objectivist’s statement immediately reminded of Elon Musk’s post from last December, where he extolled the virtues of America’s “meritocracy.” As a white nationalist himself, albeit an immigrant, I’m sure he means a meritocracy where some specific people are allowed to participate, and where some specific people enjoy “freedom and opportunity.” At best, “more than anywhere else on Earth” is doing some real heavy lifting here (and is false, at that).

So, with all that, why would such an intelligent and, presumably, knowledgeable Objectivist make the statement that I screenshotted above? “Don’t let it go,” he says. But for me, it’s eminently clear that we never had it. His perspective is not at all reality-based, and yet it’s stated with so much confidence as if it’s self-evident — and the statement was liked by a number of other Objectivists, who didn’t take even a moment to challenge the basic premise.

I think the answer might be very simple, if I’m allowed to psychologize a bit (Rand’s term). I think it’s because Objectivists need it to be true. They need to believe that America lives up to their Objectivist ideal, because Rand asserted it and without it, they have nothing to point at in reality to validate their premises. Reality doesn’t fit, so they have to assert their ideal — which exists entirely in a vacuum — and pretend it accords with something real.

I think that’s also why so many Objectivists have held up Elon Musk — a man who I consider to be wholly evil — as an Ayn Rand hero, and indeed as a “modern-day John Galt,” because they consider Musk to be a bona fide industrialist super producer. I think that’s because Objectivists need John Galt to be real, or else they’ll have to acknowledge that, in fact, he’s only Rand’s fictional “ideal man” and not someone who’s ever been shown to exist in reality.

I have lots more to say, but I’m going to stop this part here. Next up will be a discussion about how Objectivists use “capitalism” to have their cake and eat it, too. I might also discuss how Objectivists have done some pretty wacky things with the concepts of causality and determinism, in a weirdly inverted (and I think entirely self-defeating and anti-reality) attempt to salvage free will.

Stay tuned.

I posted yesterday about how I can no longer say “I can’t believe…,” at least when it comes to the actions of our government today. I started with a video clip of Senator Marsha Blackburn expressing her contempt for Democrats who had published a short video reminding military members that they should not follow illegal orders.

I didn’t post that video in yesterday’s post, and so I’ll post it here:

This is a simple, clear expression of what military members should already know. They should know that not only are they not required to follow illegal orders, but in fact, they must not do so. It’s codified, implicitly and explicitly, in their oath to the Constitution, in the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), in the Manual of Courts-Martial (MCM), and in the Department of Defense Law or War Manual.

It’s simply reminding them that the Nuremberg defense of “just following orders” is no defense at all. It’s what the term “manifestly illegal” refers to, an order such that “a person of ordinary sense and understanding would know it to be illegal.” As I outlined yesterday, that’s one of the defenses explicitly mentioned in the MCM. And the oath that military members take is to support and defend the Constitution, that is, the nation’s fundamental law. By definition, that means that they must refuse to violate the Constitution.

Simply put, only someone who plans to give illegal orders would be worried about military members being told that they should not obey illegal orders. If someone believes that there is no such thing as an illegal order, then they should not be in command.

To begin with, the video was issued in the context of our military being sent into American cities, according to Commander in Chief Donal Trump to “fight crime.” That violates the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the military being used for domestic law enforcement. Trump only gets around that prohibition by publicly saying it’s to fight crime, but in legal documents saying it’s to support ICE in their mass deportation and to protect federal buildings. The latter is not a valid legal argument, but it’s not as intrinsically illegal as the former. And it’s possible that most people, including military members, believe that it’s to “fight crime” that the military is being sent into American cities because that’s what they hear the most.

One could argue that any member of the military who refused to deploy for that mission would be reasonably disobeying an illegal order. But beyond that, there are a host of potential situations where illegal orders might be issued. The most obvious would be an order to fire on civilians in the context of an illegal deployment, an order that is not explicitly required to quell an insurrection or fight an invasion — which is when the military can be legally used on American soil.

As I said yesterday, I would hope that every single soldier given such an order would disobey it. And remember that in Trumps first term, he is alleged to have openly asked why National Guard troops couldn’t fire on George Floyd protesters. “Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?” Thankfully, he was surrounded by better people then. He is not surrounded by better people today.

What’s most disturbing, though, has been Trumps response to the video. For that, I’ll just present some of his Truth Social posts and resposts from this morning:

This one deserves to be highlighted:

The President of the United States has thus accused Democrat Congresspeople of committing sedition, and directly implied that they should be put to death. He did so because those Democrat Congresspeople reminded military members that they must not obey illegal orders.

I’ll say it again: only someone who plans to give illegal orders would be worried about military members being told that they should not obey illegal orders. If someone believes that there is no such thing as an illegal order, then they should not be in command.

And whether Trump himself would prosecute members of Congress for “sedition,” and put them to death, you might be reminded of all the talk from the Trump administration, Republicans, and MAGA about allegedly dangerous political rhetoric from “the left” in calling them fascists. And here we have the President saying that people should be put to death for saying his illegal orders must not be obeyed. It’s hard to imagine more dangerous rhetoric than that.

Please like and share this post if you agree with it. This is vitally important.

Update: It should come as no surprise that Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, would lie through her teeth in describing Trump’s posts. She says that the Democrats in the video encouraged military members “to defy the President’s lawful orders.” That’s literally, demonstrably, egregiously false. But lying is what Leavitt does best.

I caught myself starting a sentence to my wife this morning with, “I can’t believe…” I was going to mention to her the following video clip, where Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee was speaking on Fox News about Democrats reminding US military members to ignore illegal orders. The context, of course, is Trump illegally sending military troops into American cities to “fight crime.” The illegal orders might include firing on American citizens.

Here’s the clip:

Here’s the transcript:

Well, indeed, I think that secretary Hegseth was right. They have stage four Trump Derangement Syndrome. And it is inconceivable that you would have elected officials that are are saying to uniformed members of the military who have taken an oath to protect and defend that they would defy the orders that they have been given to execute their mission. I find it inconceivable, but that is what they have chosen to do, and we will see what the response to them from Democrats. You know, Harris, I talk to Tennesseans every day. I did a telephone town hall last night. People want to see respect for the rule of law. They are appreciative of our nation’s military and of the work they do to protect our nation. And I find this just so disturbing they would say, defy the orders if you do not like the orders.

This is a slippery little statement from Senator Blackburn. She didn’t quite finish the clause “taken an oath to protect and defend,” and so we don’t know precisely what she thinks the oath compels service members to do. Later she says that her constituents appreciate the military’s work to “protect our nation.” Is that how she would complete the previous clause, “taken an oath to protect and defend our nation”? Perhaps. We don’t know.

However, there’s the United States Oath of Enlistment:

I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God. (Title 10, US Code; Act of 5 May 1960 replacing the wording first adopted in 1789, with amendment effective 5 October 1962).

That’s a very carefully worded oath that has persisted for a very long time. Note that the oath is quite specific about what military members swear or affirm to support and defend: the Constitution of the United States. They do not swear or affirm to “protect our nation.” That’s not precisely within their purview. Furthermore, they swear or affirm that they will obey the orders of the President and appointed officers, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Both in terms of the UCMJ itself and a host of precedents, there are many orders that a military member might choose to disobey if a reasonable person could conclude that they are illegal. Obviously. From the Manual for Courts-Martial (MCM), Rule for Courts-Martial 916(d) regarding valid defenses in a court-martial proceeding:

An order is presumed lawful. This presumption continues until the accused proves, by a preponderance of the evidence, that the order was manifestly illegal — i.e., that a person of ordinary sense and understanding would know it to be illegal.

Imagine that a soldier is told to fire on American protestors. I suspect that many of them would consider such an order to be illegal. In fact, I would sincerely hope that they all do so, down to the last man.

When I swore that oath upon enlisting in the US Army, I took it seriously. I knew what it meant. I knew that my oath was to support and protect the Constitution, that is, the supreme law of the land. So when Senator Blackburn says that “People want to see respect to the rule of law,” I would say, so should US military members. And the law that they should respect is the Constitution, followed closely by the USMJ.

Right after I saw this clip, my wife and I were talking about some things and I wanted to mention this to her. That’s when I started to say, “I can’t believe a United State Senator can so egregiously misconstrue the oath that military members take and say it means that they should follow illegal orders…”

Before I could get all of the words out, it struck me: of course, I can believe it. I can believe anything today. There was a time when I expected Senators to understand the law, including something so basic as military law given their responsibility for committing the United States to war. They should know how the military works, what is its legitimate role is, and how their decisions affect military actions.

But why would I find Senator Blackburn’s ignorance (or, worse, deliberate deception) at all surprising? In fact, today, a MAGA Republican Senator — or any other MAGA-aligned politician or government official — expressing an honest, knowledgeable, rational sentiment about the law, or their role, or even basic morality is what would be surprising. Of course, it starts at the very top of the MAGA movement, with Donald Trump himself. (I could, of course, say the same about various Democrats, and those not aligned with MAGA. But it would be so different a matter of degree today as to be a completely different thing.)

For example, I can’t believe that the President of the United States would host Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud (commonly referred to as MBS) in the Oval Office to discuss Saudi investments. MBS was found by Trump’s own CIA in 2018, with high confidence, to have known about or been directly involved with the assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi on October 2, 2018. Trump disputed that assessment and sanctioned 76 Saudis other than MBS (citing head-of-state immunity).

Already, I couldn’t believe that Trump recently hosted Ahmed al-Sharaa, the Syrian leader who was previously a member of Al Qaida in Iraq and fought against American troops, and who until recently had a $10 million bounty on his head as a terrorist. Foreign relations with Syria did not require, nor warrant, a visit to the Oval Office.

Back to MBS, however. In addition to Trump approving the sale of F-35 fighters to Saudi Arabia (in spite of concerns that technical information might be passed to China, along with the shift of power in the Middle East that it represents), he boasted about up to $1 trillion of Saudi “investments” in the United States. He spoke kindly and warmly of MBS as he did so. But his response to a reporter asking about Trump’s family businesses while Trump is President and about MBS prompted this very different response:

Here’s the transcript, up to the point where MBS starts talking. You can listen to the entire video if you want. Personally, I don’t care to spend time here responding to the talking points from the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia regarding things like 9/11.

Here’s the transcript, up to that point:

Reporter: Is it appropriate, Mister President, for your family to be doing business in Saudi Arabia while you’re president? Is that a conflict of interest? And your royal highness, the US intelligence concluded that you orchestrated the brutal murder of a journalist. 9/11 families are furious that you are here in the Oval Office. And the same to you, mister president.

Trump: Now who are you with? (ABC) Fake news. ABC Fake News. One of the worst one of the worst in the business but I’ll answer your question. Okay. I have nothing to do with the family business. I have left. And when I, I’ve devoted 100% of my energy to what my family does. It’s fine. It’s fine. They do business all over. They’ve done very little with little with Saudi Arabia, actually. They could I’m sure they could do a lot. And anything they’ve done has been very good.

That’s what we’ve done. We’ve built a tremendous business for a long time. I’ve been very successful. I decided to leave that success be behind to make America very successful. I’ve made America more successful by far than it ever was. And that it ever could have been no matter who was President. There would be nobody bringing in $21 trillion, that I can tell you right now. As far as this gentleman is concerned, he’s done a phenomenal job. You’re mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial, lot a lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about. Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen. But he knew nothing about it. We can leave it at that. You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that.

Trump starts by stating a falsehood, that his family isn’t doing business with Saudi Arabia. Of course, they are doing considerable business with Saudi Arabia, both currently and in the recent past. I’ll set aside the question of whether Trump himself has done so (wink wink). But to hear him complain that a reporter asking a difficult question “embarrasses” the man who very likely ordered the brutal murder of a journalist is, of course, what’s actually embarrassing — or, more appropriately, shameful.

But just as hard to believe was Trump’s response to a reporter’s question about the Epstein files during the meeting:

Here’s the transcript:

Reporter: Why wait for congress to release the FBI files? Why not just do it now?

Trump: You now? It’s not the question that I mind. Your attitude. I think you are a terrible reporter. It’s the way you ask these questions. You start off with a man who is highly respected asking him a horrible insubordinate, and just a terrible question. And you could even ask that same exact question nicely. You’re all psyched up. Somebody psyched you over at ABC. You’re gonna psych it. You’re a terrible person and a terrible reporter.

As far as the Epstein files is I have nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein. I threw him out of my club many years ago because I thought he was a sick pervert. But I guess I turned out to be right. But you know who does have? Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, who ran Harvard, was with him every single night, every single weekend. They lived together. They went to his island many times, I never did.

Andrew Weissman. All these guys were friends of his. You don’t even you don’t even talk about those people. You just keep going on the Epstein files. And what the Epstein is a Democrat hoax to try and get me not to be able to talk about the $21 trillion that I talked about today. It’s a hoax. Now I just got a little report and I put it in my pocket. Of all the money that he’s given to Democrats.

He gave me none. Zero. No money to me. But he gave money to Democrats And people are wise to y’all, and ABC’s is your your company, your crappy company is one of the the perpetrators. And I’ll tell you something. I’ll tell you something. I think the license should be taken away from ABC.

Because your news is so fake. And it’s so wrong And we have a great commissioner. Chairman. Who should look at that because think when you come in, you come in, and when you’re 97% negative to Trump, and then Trump wins the election in a landslide, that means, obviously, your news is not credible. And you’re not credible as a reporter.

So I’ve answered your question. You should go and look at the Democrats who received money from Epstein, who spent their time… Larry Summers was with him all the time. That creep, or the fund guy was with him all the time. What’s his name? Reid. Reid Hoffman. I don’t know Reid Hoffman. But I know he spends a lot of money on the radical left. Reid Hoffman, in my opinion, should be under investigation. He’s a sleazebag. And those are the people but they don’t get any press, they don’t get any news. And you’re not after the radical left because you’re a radical left network. But I think the way you ask a question with the anger and the meanness is terrible. You have to go back and learn how to be a reporter. No more questions from you.

Once again, Trump (a Democrat from 2001 to 2009, it should be noted) attacks a reporter for asking a pointed question and once again threatens to revoke the license of a media organization for reporting news that’s negative toward him. He calls that reporter “insubordinate.” No President in my lifetime has ever had a more antagonistic relationship with the press, or who in spirit and action has more egregiously violated the 1st Amendment. (Incidentally, Trump also repeated the most inflated foreign “investment” number we’ve seen to date, $21 trillion.)

Neither of these exchanges is appropriate. Neither is rational, nor even sane. Both are a stain on the office of the President of the United States, and on the American people for having elected him. Rational people wouldn’t believe it could happen.

But of course, it did.

Just like Trump’s response to a reporter on Air Force One, when asked about Epstein:

Here’s the transcript:

Quiet. Quiet, piggy!

I can’t believe this was the President. But it was. (And yes, this was a female reporter and yes, this is yet another example of Trump’s deep misogyny.)

It’s right there in the video.

Update: I just came across this video that presents only a subset of Trump’s misogyny over the years. It’s worth watching, and you might find yourself tempted to say you can’t believe this man is President. I suppose, though, as Senator Blackburn alleges, I must have stage four Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Update: This is from today. Here, Trump is saying he would bomb Mexico and Columbia to stop the flow of drugs. Watch this before reading what I posted this morning. I’m feeling even better about my title. America is a rogue state.

It’s Monday, November 17, 2025, and we’re heading into a week where the United States is on the verge of starting an illegal war against Venezuela. Meanwhile, the most prominent political question of the day is whether files regarding a pedophile sex trafficking ring will be released to the public. Following along on social media, I find that the latter dominates the conversation over the former, given that the files in question are suspected by many to implicate the President of the United States in egregious wrongdoing. The other media — legacy media, corporate media, whatever you want to call it — is a more mixed on what they cover, and how, to the extent that it’s hard to know from the news alone what’s actually important.

As a nation, we should be talking about how to stop our President from starting that illegal war. We should be talking about how to stop his administration from engaging in extrajudicial executions on the high seas using the United States military. After all, ours is a “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” as Lincoln so famously stated. Ultimately, we Americans are responsible. That should matter to us.

And yet, the Epstein files remain the most talked-about topic. It’s the one thing that some people suspect — maybe, most people — to be Trump’s potential undoing. It’s the one reason that most people believe he could be impeached and removed from office (setting aside the question of a prison sentence).

It’s not his mass deportation scheme by which he is violating the rights of thousands of people with the ongoing threat of violating the rights of millions. It’s not his economic policy that he wields as a cudgel against his enemies and as a carrot for his cronies, and which continues to cause the American people great economic harm. It’s not his blatant corruption and graft, or his pardoning of bad people who show him loyalty or pay him money, or his welcoming into the Oval Office former Al Qaida in Iraq leader Ahmed al-Sharaa while he and Republicans simultaneously attack the election of Zohran Mamdani in New York City as treason against the memory of 9/11 merely because Mamdani is a Muslim.

It’s not his imperialist foreign policy, and his capriciousness and vacillations around Ukraine and Russia, and his desire to displace Palestinians from Gaza so he can turn it into a resort, and his egregious lies about stopping wars that never existed or conflicts that he had no real part in ending. It’s not his destroying America’s standing in the world and among our allies, and turning this country into a laughing stock.

It’s not even his demolishing the East Wing of the White House to put up his egregiously ostentatious ballroom paid for by cronies and sycophants (if not the American people). He had no authority to destroy that piece of American history, but destroying American history is what he does best.

I could go on, of course. The list of grievances against this malignant narcissist demagogue who wants to be a king is very long. Mainly, I’m reflecting on the fact that if anything can stop him, it will be the possibility that he took part in a child sex trafficking ring where he raped and assaulted young girls. And the files that could implicate him might be released soon.

Or, they might not be. The Trump administration has fought the release, after promising to release them. They have subjected the files to scrutiny by thousands of FBI agents who were tasked with identifying references to Trump — and doing what with them? — rather than performing their duties as federal law enforcement agents. Attorney General Pam Bondi has said that the files are on her desk, including thousands of child pornography photos and videos, and then that there are no files. There’s nothing to see here.

Of course, there’s always this oldie but goodie, which I’ll post for no particular reason other than it certainly illustrates where we’re at:

And Trump has called the whole thing a Democrat hoax, and said that the files don’t exist, and that only Democrats are in the files, and that the country should let it go because it’s all so boring, but Republicans who support the release of the files are traitors to the country, but Republicans in Congress should vote to release the files, but that Trump himself, who has the power to release the files with a mere memo to Bondi, won’t release them himself. And Trump has told Bondi to open an investigation into the files — that are a Democrat hoax — to identify the Democrats who he says are the only people who are implicated by the files, making the whole thing the stupidest hoax ever committed. Of course, those investigations could stop the release of the files, just as the legitimate prosecution of Ghislaine Maxwell stopped their release during the Biden administration.

Meanwhile, Ghislaine Maxwell is enjoying her time in a minimum security prison with special treatment, after being moved there from the prison she was sentenced to for her part in the very real child sex trafficking ring following her interview with Trump’s lawyer, where she said that Trump did nothing wrong. That, too, barely moves the needle in this country.

You get the point, right? Calling this insane doesn’t cover it. Calling it dishonest and a stain on the republic doesn’t cover it. Calling it treason is getting closer, perhaps. And if the files are released and if Trump is implicated, he’ll say that it’s all fabricated by the Democrats and the lunatic leftists and maybe the globalists. Millions of his MAGA cult followers will accept his word. None of us will know the truth.

Or, MAGA will say it’s not that bad, as influencer Megyn Kelly said, because 15-year-old girls aren’t 5-year-olds and so it’s not really pedophilia. I’ve seen MAGA accounts on X argue that they just don’t care, because the girls knew what they were doing and Trump is a man. Men will be men. And he’s too busy saving the country to worry about whether or not he rape young girls. Even if it was their own daughters.

Meanwhile, various foreign entities are suspected by reasonable people (and plenty of crazies) of possessing some or all of the most incriminating information. That fact is used by some people to explain some of Trump’s inexplicable foreign policy decisions. Most suspicious is Putin, with the notion that Trump has been compromised by Russia for decades due either to Epstein, Trump’s finances, or some combination of both, being frighteningly plausible. It’s all very speculative, but the fact that it’s at least halfway believable that the President of the United States could be so compromised is very deeply disturbing.

I’d rather consider such speculation to be just more conspiracy theory, but I can’t. Just as I can’t completely dismiss the claim, which has been growing in volume lately, that the Trump assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania was staged. Crazy stuff, I know. But a part of me can’t dismiss it, because when I watch the videos of the incident there’s so much there that’s just not right. It’s not like Reagan’s assassination attempt, that was also caught on film. That looked like real life. Trump’s assassination attempt does not.

Overall, there’s too much smoke everywhere you look. And it remains possible that no matter what Trump does, or Congress, or his DOJ, some incriminating Epstein information might still be released. And then what?

And if the files aren’t released, or if there’s nothing there to implicate Trump, we’ll continue on as we are, with a President that continues to violate the Constitution and international laws and norms with impunity. And nobody seems to care enough to do anything more than say “we’ll get him at the midterms!” If there are any midterms.

I have no idea what will happen this week. A significant part of me doesn’t want to think about it. I don’t even know the point of writing this piece, other than to get it all off my chest. Because ultimately it all just drives home the point that America has gone stark, raving mad. In many ways, it’s now a rogue state led by a government that can’t be trusted to do the right things. If we were a wild animal, there’s a non-zero chance that we’d be put down for fear of a rabies infection.

And that makes me interminably sad.

One of the things that’s been most shocking to me in the course of Trump’s second term has been the extent to which various government social media accounts have broadcast obvious white nationalist messaging. And I’ve been shocked not just by the content itself, but also by the complete lack of a response from the corporate media and American society at large.

How the hell isn’t this a bigger deal?

I don’t have many subscribers here on Substack, but I’ve also been a little surprised at the lack of response to the items I’ve posted. Even though each post has had over 100 views, they’ve only received a few likes and a couple of comments.

My post about the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) post with the caption “Which Way, American Man?”, an obvious reference to the book “Which Way Western Man?” by virulent white supremacist William Gayley Simpson, was viewed 192 times but received just three likes. The only comments were that the DHS post was just fine and MAGA isn’t fascist because they haven’t exterminated anyone (yet).

Maybe the lack of interaction is just how Substack works. But making this connection isn’t rocket science.

This is the post I reference here. Combine the signpost imagery and text with the caption and consider its tie to that book and it’s so obvious to me that I can’t imagine anyone thinking it’s innocent. Indeed, if you have the stomach, scan the book and you’ll find the argument that an “invasion” of non-white people causes the “cultural decline” of the “homeland” and the loss of “opportunity,” and combatting it requires “service” and “law and order.” So America, like the West according to Simpson, needs you to save it from what Trump has defined as an “alien invasion.”

It strains credulity to believe that it’s only a coincidence, that DHS didn’t know what it was doing, and so the lack of sheer outrage that that post is hard for me to comprehend. When I compile DHS (and other government) social media posts, it paints a fairly obvious pattern of white nationalism and, in some cases, white Christian nationalism.

Indeed, compare this compilation of Trump administration posts (some of these might be from other accounts, including the Labor Department):

With this compilation of posters:

Granted, the Nazis were more militant, and we in modern society have a visceral reaction to some of the symbolism. But the people being featured share common traits, down to the wholesome and very specific family images. Generally, you’ll find almost as many depictions of non-whites featured on our present government’s social media posts as you will Nazi propaganda posters. You’ll have to pardon me if I laugh out loud at any claim that this is a mere coincidence.

Now, consider this video posted today by DHS, which depicts Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino as he left the Dirksen U.S. Court in Chicago after answering for concerns over the use of excessive force. The choice of Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” as background music is interesting, given its lyrics and its theme of reflecting on the loss of power.

Note the gestures as he interacts with nearby agents. Maybe that wasn’t intended as a Nazi salute, and maybe the military-style signaling wasn’t meaningful. But as you watch the video, pay attention to the almost subliminal selection of still shots. I’ll highlight just one:

Maybe the people running the DHS account don’t recognize the historical allusion here. Just like they maybe wouldn’t have been able to perceive Bonino’s gesture as a Nazi salute. Maybe it’s completely innocent.

Maybe.

What do you think? Am I crazy for seeing disturbing messaging here? Was I wrong when I first wrote about their symbolism, and wrote about more symbolism a week or so later? Or am I correct but overstating the significance?

I’d really love to know. Because as it stands today, in my opinion, we have a white Christian nationalist movement taking over the United States, and too many people either don’t see it, or they simply don’t care.

People sometimes wonder how the Holocaust could happen. How does a modern, civilized nation like Germany deliberately engage in a genocide involving the deliberate, systematic slaughter of millions of people? You could apply the same question to every genocide in modern history, of which there have been far too many.

I think the answer is relatively simple. Or, at least, the most immediate step is easy to identify. You have to engage in a systematic process of demonization, whereby you convince enough people that a certain group of people (the “other”) deserve to be — and indeed, must be — killed if their own lives are to continue unimpeded.

The United States isn’t yet at the level of committing genocide, and may never quite get there. But the process of demonization, whereby non-white immigrants are the “other” whose removal is vital to the nation’s continued existence, is well under way. And so far, the process has been fairly transparent, if you’re willing to look only a little past the surface.

Step 1: convince people that being in the country without authorization is a criminal act.

That’s not true, in most cases. Crossing the border without authorization is a criminal act, specifically a misdemeanor on the first offense and then escalating to a felony with repeated offenses. If someone is caught crossing the border without authorization, they can be arrested and charged with the crime of unlawful entry. However, generally speaking, being in the country without proper authorization is a civil offense.

According to the Trump administration, the border is completely closed. So, by their own assertion, they aren’t arresting people who are in the process of committing the crime of crossing the border without authorization. The majority of the people they are pursuing inside the country, via their mass deportation, must therefore not be criminals but rather civil offenders.

Invariably, though, you will see the administration alleging that they are detaining “criminal illegal aliens.” That’s the core deception. In the vast majority of cases, they are detaining people who are suspected (more recently, not even that) of committing the civil infraction of being in the country without authorization. The result of this relentless narrative is that many if not most people now believe that illegal immigrants (more accurately, undocumented immigrants) are by definition criminals, and so step one is accomplished.

Note that if a given undocumented immigrant was actually suspected of committing a crime, then the proper response would be to subject them to the criminal justice system. That is, they would be afforded the full due process of warrant or probable cause leading to arrest, then indictment, then trial, and finally achieving a conviction, with the presumption of innocence throughout. They would not be simply detained and then deported, which is the civil process that the mass deportation is following and that has less strict due process requirements. And even then, the Trump administration is consistently violating due process.

(Of course, the administration is also presently violating the 4th Amendment, with the Supreme Court’s permission, by detaining people on the mere suspicion that they might be in the country unlawfully, that is, because they look or sound Hispanic or a member of some other non-white, non-English-speaking class. That applies whether their offenses are criminal or civil. That’s why, for example, ICE agents are stopping children on their way to school and demanding their identification as proof that they are in the country legally. That’s a per se 4th Amendment violation.)

And note this response on X to a video depicting ICE breaking a woman’s window, detaining her, and then releasing her later on no charges. Apparently, there was no warrant or probable cause involved:

I’ve seen the same basic argument from many people on X, which has convinced me that some significant number of Americans reject the very idea of due process. They believe that the government has the right to demand our identification for any reason, and then to detain us, without a warrant or even probable cause, only to release us later if, in fact, we have done nothing wrong. My question for Mr. Ellis would be whether he is opposed to due process for all people, or only for certain people?

Step 2: conflate “criminal” with illegal aliens”

This is done per the first step, with actual criminals or those suspected of committing crimes and particularly violence crimes — the more egregious, the better. That creates a powerful emotional appeal, and is accomplished via a few tactics.

One way is to highlight undocumented immigrants who are, indeed, suspected of committing violent crimes. DHS does this by periodically posting individuals who fit that description, with the white nationalist twist of every single one being non-white. Sometimes, in another twist, they will post people who are in the country (lawfully or unlawfully) and who have past criminal convictions for which they served their sentences. That’s another conflation — suspected criminals equal convicted criminals, which according to American legal principle is a false equivalence. In America, a person isn’t a criminal until they’ve been duly convicted.

Here is DHS posting about the “worst of the worst.” That’s the final step in this entire conflation, alleging that the mass deportation is about removing “one criminal illegal alien” at a time, and directly implying that they are all the most violent people committing the most egregious crimes. Kristi Noem is well-known for alleging that this is who DHS is targeting — not people who are merely in the country unlawfully, but the worst human beings. So, when ICE commits violence in detaining people, you’ll find MAGA defending it as a good thing because that’s what “they” deserve. And that includes videos showing ICE violence committed against people literally in hallways outside of immigrant courtrooms, which strains credulity. What “worst of the worst” people attend immigration court?

With regard to the former, those who are suspected of violent crimes, the administration explicitly ignores the presumption of innocence and equates mere suspicion with guilt. They try people in the court of public opinion, no matter how they treat them legally (see above). There is no more symbolic an example than the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man who has been the poster child for the Trump administration’s process of demonization from the very beginning.

I’ll skip past the months of legal wrangling that this man has been subjected to, starting with his being sent without due process to the same hellhole El Salvadoran CECOT prison as hundreds of others. The Trump administration paid the Bukele regime millions of dollars to detain people in conditions that would violate the 8th Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment if in the United States — even though Bukele himself had previously stated that he would only take convicted criminals (including American citizens) in an outsourced prison deal that Elon Musk (in February, 2025) said was a “Great idea!!”

Instead, I’ll jump straight to the present, where we have DHS making this public statement:

Here, DHS pronounces Garcia an “MS-13 gang member, human trafficker, domestic abuser, and child predator” and then promises to deport him to “a foreign land.” Three of these allegations — human trafficker, domestic abuser, and child predator — are violent crimes and two of them are rather heinous crimes. Garcia has not been tried or convicted of anything, but then note the next trick: DHS accuses Democrats of supporting “this terrorist gang member” and fighting for “criminal illegal aliens.”

In this single statement, DHS engages in both of the first two steps. They conflate being in the country unlawfully (his “final order of removal stands”) with being a “criminal illegal alien.” But is he a criminal because he is in the country as an “illegal alien,” which is a civil infraction, or is he a criminal because they accuse him of committing three violent crimes, none of which he has been convicted of, let alone indicted or tried? And then DHS is deporting him, in a civil process, not treating him as a suspected criminal should be treated — unlike simply putting him in prison without criminal due process, as they did originally.

Yes, it’s an epistemological spaghetti, trying to navigate this process of demonization. And I’m certain that this is entirely on purpose.

For brevity, I’ll ask that again: In being a “criminal illegal alien,” is he an “illegal alien” and therefore (falsely) a criminal, or is he an “illegal alien” who has committed crimes (of which he’s only been accused)?

In fact, Garcia is neither. But DHS asserts, falsely, that he is both, somehow, at the same time. Now, multiply that by millions and you have the basis of Trump’s “alien invasion” narrative that he’s using to justify his mass deportation.

In equation form, it’s undocumented immigrant = illegal alien = criminal = violent criminal = criminal illegal alien. And that’s precisely the term that they apply to every single person they are detaining and deporting, with or without due process and with complete disregard for the Constitution.

Trump took that to an extreme during his campaign, where he first created that “alien invasion” narrative. At his worst, he equated the alleged inflow of “criminal illegal aliens” with a literal invading, heavily armed military force. That’s not only been his justification for his mass deportation, but it also served as the original foundation for his current terrorism on the high seas and his imminent war with Venezuela. He originally said that the Venezuelan government was complicit in sending violent terrorists into the country, even while his own intelligence agencies told him that was false. He maintains that illusion today.

That false allegation was his justification for originally invoking the Alien Enemies Act so that he could round people up. Almost incidentally, it was also essentially the foundation of his designating drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, by fiat. And it’s that designation that he says allows him to summarily execute people in boats in international waters rather than subject them to the criminal justice system by stopping them, seizing their vessels, and arresting them — which is what the Coast Guard has always done, routinely, in American waters.

Nobody can accuse the Trump administration of single-tasking.

Step 3: leverage the preexisting controversy around illegal immigrations.

I don’t need to spend a lot of time on this one, because it’s long been the case that illegal immigrants are accused of doing the country harm. It’s been both economically, e.g., taking jobs from American citizens. It’s also been the allegation, alluded to here, that illegal immigrants commit an outsized number of violent crimes.

In fact, it’s well documented that undocumented immigrants (I really do dislike calling them “illegal”) commit less crime per capita than American citizens, and that includes violent crimes. People who fear deportation are less likely to commit the crimes that would put them on the radar and increase that likelihood. That’s just common sense. But again, the Trump administration has succeeded in convincing large swaths of people that thousands (or millions) of undocumented immigrants are rampaging through the country murdering and raping American citizens. That’s an element of the first two steps.

I’ll set aside the economic questions around illegal immigration. That includes all of the disinformation that’s been spread about the federal tax money that’s allegedly spent on undocumented immigrants via Social Security and Medicaid. The number is actually basically zero, and right now the Republicans are falsely accusing the Democrats of keeping the government shut down because the latter demands free healthcare for “illegal aliens.” But the only money that’s at stake in that regard is what’s spent on emergency services that hospitals are required by law to provide to all people, citizens and non-citizens alike. And, it’s a paltry sum.

For me, those questions aren’t essential, simply because I’m not a nativist. I don’t judge the value or “rightness” of people based on whether they’re good or bad for American citizens. I’m also not a nationalist, or a white nationalist, or a white Christian nationalist — the latter of which is at the root of this entire topic of demonization. If I had my way, the process of becoming an American citizen would be highly streamlined and rationalized, that is, it would be a lot easier. Legally residing in America, in the meantime, would be a lot easier, as well.

And for anyone who questions whether this process of demonization could ever result in calling for immigrants to be killed outright, remember that it wasn’t long ago that the Trump administration named a detention center in Florida “Alligator Alcatraz,” based on the idea that alligators would kill anyone who tried to escape. And MAGA spent a couple of weeks having a great deal of fun joking about how deadly it was. This post by MAGA influencer Benny Johnson is just one of literally thousands of posts on X.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the point is that the Trump administration has convinced some number of Americans that people who are in the country unlawfully are actually “criminal illegal aliens” who are killing and raping them, taking their jobs, stealing their tax money, and more. They have, on a very basic epistemological level, made it incredibly difficult for many people to even distinguish who are being mass deported.

Are they merely people in the country unlawfully, or are they people who are committing what most people would consider to be important crimes? I think it’s difficult for many people to make the important distinction. The Trump administration has, in essence, made the task of simply and rationally discussing illegal immigration impossible, because it invariably devolves into a discussion of whether it’s okay for violent people to reside in the United States.

Even more quietly but fundamentally, there’s the narrative that immigrants are undoing America as the white Christian nation that the white Christian nationalists say it should be and are trying to turn it into. It’s no coincidence that, quite specifically, those “criminal illegal aliens” almost invariably have non-white skin and can’t trace their ancestry to the Civil War or earlier. They are not the white South Africans the administration explicitly allowed to immigrate, nor are they the white Russian mafia members who are in the country unlawfully and who are doing real crime.

I haven’t touched on how all immigrants are slowly being included in this process of demonization. That is, of course, the white Christian nationalist end goal, to “remigrate” all non-whites out of the country. Note that “remigration” is a specific far-right white nationalist notion of removing all non-whites from a country to combat the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that non-whites are being imported to destroy white cultures. Unsurprisingly, that’s another DHS narrative.

It’s based on a fallacy, of course, that there was a time when America was comprised exclusively of white Christians and that this was when America was the greatest. Creating that narrative is a fairly pedestrian fascist tactic that’s straight out of their handbook. And one need only look at the talk about stripping people of their citizenship if they’re not “American” enough (e.g., Zohran Mamdani) and of eliminating birthright citizenship to identify their end goal.

You see the DHS social media account push that narrative on a fairly consistent basis, and I’ve written about it several times already. Simply put, the DHS narrative is a white Christian nationalist narrative, and they’re not even hiding it. Consider what DHS just posted, which plays on Microsoft’s Halo video game narrative of “the Flood” that is a sentient parasitic alien infestation that seeks to assimilate entire cultures. Defeating the Flood is the central objective in the game.

Here, DHS says that Americans should join ICE to stop “the Flood,” that is, to combat the inflow of immigrants that is taking America over to destroy its proper (white Christian) American culture.

Make no mistake: just as the people running the DHS account certainly knew that “Which Way, American Man?” was an homage to the book “Which Way Western Man?” written by virulent white supremacist William Gayley Simpson, they know what they’re implying with this reference to “the Flood.”

So, in summary, the Trump administration is succeeding in demonizing immigrants of all kinds. ICE is getting away with committing violence on a daily basis, and the administration is getting away with egregiously bad messaging, precisely because — so far — enough people are convinced that we’re being invaded by a horde of “criminal illegal aliens.” And that is in spite of the reality that the vast majority of undocumented immigrants are here peacefully, if unlawfully, are working hard to better their lives and they’re doing no harm to anyone. And immigration in general has long been essential to the American spirit.

We’re not at the point of genocide, then. Perhaps genocide isn’t even the goal, but rather more of a cleansing, a depopulation, or as they say themselves, a remigration. But there’s no doubt, for me, that no matter the goal, the demonization is well under way.

This graphic depicts the 10 steps of genocide, which I think can be equally applied to “lesser” programs, i.e., those that don’t involve outright extermination. I think we’ve gone through a few of these steps already.

UPDATE: Quite often, I’ll complete a piece and then DHS will post something that helps solidify the point. Here’s today’s: