In an article earlier this month marking the one-year anniversary of the election of Donald Trump, Obleftivist Onkar Ghate, Senior Fellow and Chief Content Officer with the Ayn Rand Institute, began:
No one can speak for the dead. But as an expert on Ayn Rand’s philosophy, I’m often asked what Rand would have thought of President Trump, especially now, on the one-year anniversary of his election and in light of stories in the Washington Post and elsewhere trying to link Trump to Rand.
In fact, Ghate had already presumed to speak for the dead in the title of this exercise in Trump Derangement Syndrome, "The Anti-Intellectuality of Donald Trump: Why Ayn Rand Would Have Despised a President Trump." The self-proclaimed "expert on Ayn Rand's philosophy" proceeded to carry right on doing so:
My wager is that were Ayn Rand alive today, she would condemn the whole Trump phenomenon. Far from seeing him or his administration’s actions as even partially influenced by her ideas, she would see Donald Trump as the kind of political figure whose rise she had foreseen and warned us against.
When Trump was elected, Ghate had opined:
On November 8, 2016, the United States took its first step towards dictatorship. … the Republican control of the presidency, the House and the Senate should give anyone pause who is concerned about, say, the campaign’s demonization of immigrants and of trade or the attempt to impose a Christian variant of Sharia law.
Ghate doubled down on this hysterical mendacity in his anniversary article:
Trump demonized Hispanics, immigrants, journalists, free traders and elites [in the 2016 campaign].
We need merely remind ourselves that Trump "demonised"only those Hispanics and immigrants generally who were in the US illegally, especially those who committed additional crimes; he "demonised" only dishonest journalists (whom he accurately called Fake News); he "demonised" only free traders (so-called) who supported lopsided deals with totalitarian regimes ... we need merely remind ourselves of these things to see that Ghate is egregiously distorting the truth. As for "the attempt to impose a Christian variant of Sharia Law" ... aside from the on-its-face absurdity of such a claim, why would Obleftivists be bothered by a Christian variant when they are so unbothered by the real deal? "Stop being afraid" [of Islam], the ARI's Yaron Brook has said. "Islam is not a threat. Islam is a mosquito bite.""The real threat to Western Civilisation is Donald Trump."
Thus do Obleftivists become enablers of Islam—which is why I call them ARISIS.
Ghate continues:
A few months before her death, Rand told an audience of her fans, no doubt to the surprise of many, that she didn’t vote for Ronald Reagan against Jimmy Carter, whom she regarded as a small-town power luster. “There is a limit,” she told them, “to the notion of voting for the lesser of two evils.”
Rand did welcome Reagan’s strong language toward Soviet Russia and his promises to cut spending and taxes. But she warned that his invitation of the so-called Moral Majority to the halls of power would be a long-range disaster. By tying the (supposed) advocacy of freedom and capitalism to, in Rand’s words, the anti-intellectuality of “militant mystics,” who proclaim that aborting an embryo is murder and creationism is science, Reagan’s presidency would discredit the intellectual case for freedom and capitalism and embolden the anti-intellectual, authoritarian mentalities in the country.
Rand had a bee in her bonnet about Reagan's anti-abortion stance. Otherwise it's hard to imagine her not following her own original lesser-of-two-evils advice, as in the case of Nixon vs McGovern. Leonard Peikoff certainly did. He voted for Reagan. I suspect that had she been alive in 1984, by which time Reagan had enacted his tax cuts and stood up to the Soviet Union, and the dire fears of a Christian theocracy were not materialising, Rand might have too. Certainly it's very hard to imagine Rand, who notoriously thought no woman should ever be President, let alone pure evil such as Hillary Clinton, voting for that trash in 2016—but that's what Brook effectively enjoined Objectivists to do when he put it out that Trump "needs to be defeated heavily." (Brook, too, has subsequently doubled down on his Trump Derangement Syndrome, recently calling him a "cancer.")
Trump’s salient characteristic as a political figure is anti-intellectuality. Because Rand saw this mentality as on the rise (she called it the anti-conceptual mentality), she had a lot to say about it, and it’s illuminating how much of it fits Trump.
In Rand’s terms, to be intellectual is to sustain through life the conviction that ideas matter. This means that knowledge, abstract principles, justice and truth are of personal importance to you, embedded in everything you value and informing your every action. “To take ideas seriously,” Rand says, “means that you intend to live by, to practice, any idea you accept as true.”
This is a demanding responsibility. To be intellectual requires real independence of judgment and enduring honesty and integrity.
It’s not just that Trump lacks these virtues; in comparison to, say, Jefferson, Washington or Madison, most of today’s politicians do. It’s that Trump projects disdain for these virtues.
On cable news, it’s now a regular feature for reporters like CNN’s Anderson Cooper to catalog Trump’s latest lies. But to call them lies misses the point.
Anderson Cooper calls out Donald Trump for lying?! That would be akin to Adolf Hitler calling out someone for anti-Semitism. Cooper, Lemon, Tapper, Cuomo and the other vermin at Fake News couldn't lie straight in their beds. Fake News has run with the Trump/Russia collusion story for a year now while ignoring the Clinton/Russia collusion, Obama's and Clinton's Uranium One treason, Hillary's Benghazi lies, her Pay-for-Play rackets, her illegal deck-stacking against Bernie, etc. Unsurprising that Obleftivists like Ghate find the Clinton News Network credible. Next thing they'll be treating James Comey as credible also.
The place that loyalty to abstract standards occupies in a moral person’s mind, Rand argues, is typically replaced in an anti-intellectual mentality by “loyalty to the group.” Observe Trump’s special focus on this. Loyalty is desirable — if it has been earned. But Trump demands it up-front. As former FBI Director James Comey and others have remarked, a pledge of loyalty was among the first things Trump asked of them.
Bingo!
A liar retains some respect for the truth: he tries to conceal his lies, weave a web of deception and make it difficult for his victims to discover the facts. Trump does none of this.
He states, for instance, that his inauguration crowd was the largest ever — when photos of his and past inaugurations are easily accessible.
This is important?! More important than tax cuts, the regulation-slashing, the booming economy, the military revival, the assault on ISIS, the drastically diminishing number of cultural aliens entering America illegally? Ghate wants to play "Gotcha" with crowd sizes? I'm pretty sure the point was made that given the numbers watching live on television or the Internet all over the world those numbers were a record, but does it matter?!
He declares to a national audience that “nobody has more respect for women than I do, nobody” — when the Billy Bush tape of him boasting that he grabs women “by the pussy” is fresh in everyone’s mind.
Well, no Obleftivist would ever speak that way in private, would he? Anaemic, effete elitists just don't say such things, do they?! Mind you, their fellow-leftists in the Democratic Party, Hollywood and the media haven't exactly emerged unscathed from the recent avalanche of actual sex scandals, now have they?!
In defense of his Saturday Charlottesville statement, he says that unlike others he waits for the facts to come in before making judgments — when his Twitter outbursts are read by millions.
Most of the people wanting confederate statues to remain were good people, not neo-Nazis. Ghate is flat-out lying here, and touting Antifa's narrative as he does so.
The wider phenomenon this demand for loyalty represents is a profound tribalism, a world divided into the loyal and the disloyal, insiders and outsiders, us versus them. To get a flavor, listen to any Trump rally.
Oh, those smelly Deplorables! Patriots and other Irredeemables!
Rand argued that in a period of intellectual and cultural bankruptcy, if the anti-intellectual mentality is on the rise, tribalism will be ascending culturally and, politically, a country will drift toward authoritarianism and ultimately dictatorship.
You mean Onkar, the kind of tribalism one sees at ARISIS, on a national scale? The unthinking obedience to the party line, the refusal to debate dissenters without ridiculous pre-conditions such as "no sweeping criticism of Yaron"? The kind of tribalism that doesn't allow for comments on articles on its websites? More lemming-like behaviour such as we saw during Peikoff's original Vote-Democrat-across-the-Board fatwa? Yes, Onkar, it would be a shame to see the USA become a macrocosm of ARISIS.
During the 2007–8 financial crisis, sales of Atlas Shrugged soared, in part because people wondered how Rand could have foreseen America’s economic collapse. Sales should be soaring again — because the book is not primarily about economic collapse, but about cultural and intellectual bankruptcy.
At the novel’s start, we witness a crumbling world, with posturing intellectuals who have long ago abandoned the intellect but who continue to preach irrational, shopworn ideas, which everyone mouths but no one fully believes — or dares challenge. Part of the point of the story is that these pseudo-intellectuals will eventually be replaced by their progeny: people who more openly dispense with the intellect and who are more explicitly boorish, brutish and tribal, i.e., by anti-intellectual mentalities.
This is best symbolized by the appearance on the political scene, late in the novel, of Cuffy Meigs. Although I suspect we are only at the beginnings of a similar political descent, the parallels, unfortunately, exist. Meigs is a short-range amoralist uninterested in arguments or reasons or facts, who carries a gun in one pocket and a rabbit’s foot in the other. President Trump carries the nuclear codes in one pocket and Infowars in the other.
Oh my, we can't have that! Not Infowars! More smelly Deplorables! Shudder! Please, switch back to CNN! (Though I could have sworn it was the savages to whom Onkar and Yaron wanted to keep the borders open who were "explicitly boorish, brutal and tribal"!)
Now here's a funny thing. Van Jones, far-Left commentator for CNN, was one of the attendees at what was supposed to be a secret gathering of leftie low-lifes calling themselves the Democracy Alliance in Carlsbad, California, a couple of weeks ago. Jannel Ross, a "reporter" for the Washington Post (a publication avidly devoured by Yaron and Onkar, no doubt) was another attendee. The unspeakably evil Nancy Pelosi and George Soros were the most famous of the elite who were present. The agenda, of course, was how to stop Trump. There's a cluster of Obleftivists in and near Carlsbad—wonder if Onkar was tempted to send any of these surrogates along to help out? There'd have been nothing incongruous in their being there. Trump is "the villain of our time," according to Brook—and ARISIS luminaries, from the safety of their Ghated communities, seemingly will carry water for any scum out to thwart or remove him. Obleftivists have become the elite's bit-players.
Unless we are ready to radically rethink our culture’s fundamental ideas, with the same intensity of thought our Founding Fathers exerted in rethinking government, our long-term trajectory is set and will play out. But the choice is ours — this is the message of Atlas Shrugged.
On that we can agree! Helping to "radically rethink our culture's fundamental ideas" is the job ARI should be getting on with. It doesn't achieve that by attacking Donald Trump on the grounds he's not a card-carrying Objectivist, especially when the alternatives are pure evil. Lining up with Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Democrats, Nasty Wimmen, Social Justice Warriors, Islam, Academia, Fake News and all the rest of The Filth, as the Obleftivists do, serves no cause but those ones. Obleftivism is Fake Objectivism.
#MOGA!