The Right-Wing American Love Affair With One of the Most Disturbing Serial Killers [View all]

[Cetacea]

All roads lead to Russia...


"...in Rand’s universe, the producers had no obligations to the looters. Providing welfare or sacrificing one nickel of your own money to help a “looter” on welfare, unemployment, or Social Security—particularly if it was “taken at the barrel of a gun” (taxes)—was morally reprehensible.

Like Trump saying, “My whole life I’ve been greedy,” for Rand looking out for numero uno was the singular name of the game—selfishness is next to godliness.

Later in Rand’s life, in 1959, as she gained more notoriety for the moral philosophy of selfishness that she named “Objectivism” and that is today at the core of libertarianism and the GOP, she sat down for an interview with CBS reporter Mike Wallace.

Suggesting that selfishness undermines most American values, Wallace bluntly challenged Rand.

“You are out to destroy almost every edifice in the contemporary American way of life,” Wallace said to Rand. “Our Judeo-Christian religion, our modified government-regulated capitalism, our rule by the majority will… you scorn churches, and the concept of God… are these accurate criticisms?”

As Wallace was reciting the public criticisms of (Ayn) Rand, the CBS television cameras zoomed in closely on her face, as her eyes darted back and forth between the ground and Wallace’s fingers. But the question, with its implied condemnation, didn’t faze her at all. Rand said with confidence in a matter-of-fact tone, “Yes.”

“We’re taught to feel concerned for our fellow man,” Wallace challenged, “to feel responsible for his welfare, to feel that we are, as religious people might put it, children under God and responsible one for the other—now why do you rebel?”

“That is what in fact makes man a sacrificial animal,” Rand answered. She added, “[man’s] highest moral purpose is the achievement of his own happiness.”

Rand’s philosophy, though growing in popularity on college campuses, never did—in her lifetime—achieve the sort of mass appeal she had hoped. It was confined to college coffee shops, intellectual conferences, and true-believer journals, but never hit the halls of Congress, the mainstream television airwaves, or water-cooler political debates. There were the handful of “true believers,” but that was it… until today.

Now, Ayn Rand’s philosophy is a central tenet of today’s Republican Party and the moral code proudly cited and followed by high-profile billionaires and the president of the United States.

Ironically, when she was finally beginning to be taken seriously, Ayn Rand became ill with lung cancer, and went on Social Security and Medicare to make it through her last days. She died a “looter” in 1982, unaware that her sociopathic worldview would one day validate an entire political party’s embrace of a sociopathic narcissist president."

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/08/13/right-wing-american-love-affair-one-most-disturbing-serial-killers