Ayn Rand's Admiration of a Serial Killer

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Marc Ames in AlterNet writes about Ayn Rand and the sociopath superhero of her writings who was based on the "notorious serial murderer-dismemberer" who she worshiped. According to Ames, we should all be aware that Ayn Rand is the " guru to the Republican/Tea Party right-wing" and we should all beware!

Her works are treated as gospel by right-wing powerhouses like Alan Greenspan and Clarence Thomas, but Ayn Rand found early inspiration in 1920's murderer William Hickman.

There's something deeply unsettling about living in a country where millions of people froth at the mouth at the idea of giving health care to the tens of millions of Americans who don't have it, or who take pleasure at the thought of privatizing and slashing bedrock social programs like Social Security or Medicare. It might not be so hard to stomach if other Western countries also had a large, vocal chunk of the population that thought like this, but the U.S. is seemingly the only place where right-wing elites can openly share their distaste for the working poor. Where do they find their philosophical justification for this kind of attitude?

It turns out, you can trace much of this thinking back to Ayn Rand, a popular cult-philosopher who exerts a huge influence over much of the right-wing and libertarian crowd, but whose influence is only starting to spread out of the U.S.

One reason most countries don't find the time to embrace Ayn Rand's thinking is that she is a textbook sociopath. In her notebooks Ayn Rand worshiped a notorious serial murderer-dismemberer, and used this killer as an early model for the type of "ideal man" she promoted in her more famous books. These ideas were later picked up on and put into play by major right-wing figures of the past half decade, including the key architects of America's most recent economic catastrophe -- former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and SEC Commissioner Chris Cox -- along with other notable right-wing Republicans such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.

The loudest of all the Republicans, right-wing attack-dog pundits and the Teabagger mobs fighting to kill health care reform and eviscerate "entitlement programs" increasingly hold up Ayn Rand as their guru. Sales of her books have soared in the past couple of years; one poll ranked Atlas Shrugged as the second most influential book of the 20th century, after the Bible.

The best way to get to the bottom of Ayn Rand's beliefs is to take a look at how she developed the superhero of her novel, Atlas Shrugged, John Galt. Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market, Rand was so smitten with Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation -- Danny Renahan, the protagonist of her unfinished first novel, The Little Street -- on him.

What did Rand admire so much about Hickman? His sociopathic qualities: "Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should," she wrote, gushing that Hickman had "no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel 'other people.'"

This echoes almost word for word Rand's later description of her character Howard Roark, the hero of her novel The Fountainhead: "He was born without the ability to consider others." (The Fountainhead is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' favorite book -- he even requires his clerks to read it.) [...]

As much as Ayn Rand detested human "parasites," there is one thing she strongly believed in: creating conditions that increase the productivity of her supermen -- the William Hickmans who rule her idealized America: "If [people] place such things as friendship and family ties above their own productive work, yes, then they are immoral. Friendship, family life and human relationships are not primary in a man's life. A man who places others first, above his own creative work, is an emotional parasite."

Republican faithful like GOP Congressman Paul Ryan read Ayn Rand and declare, with pride, "Rand makes the best case for the morality of democratic capitalism." Indeed. Except that Rand also despised democracy, writing that, "Democracy, in short, is a form of collectivism, which denies individual rights: the majority can do whatever it wants with no restrictions. In principle, the democratic government is all-powerful. Democracy is a totalitarian manifestation; it is not a form of freedom."

"Collectivism" is another one of those Randian epithets popular among her followers. Here is another Republican member of Congress, Michelle Bachman, parroting the Ayn Rand ideological line, to explain her reasoning for wanting to kill social programs:

"As much as the collectivist says to each according to his ability to each according to his need, that's not how mankind is wired. They want to make the best possible deal for themselves."

Whenever you hear politicians or Tea Partiers dividing up the world between "producers" and "collectivism," just know that those ideas and words more likely than not are derived from the deranged mind of a serial-killer groupie. When you hear them saying, "Go John Galt," hide your daughters and tell them not to talk to any strangers -- or Tea Party Republicans. And when you see them taking their razor blades to the last remaining programs protecting the middle class from total abject destitution -- Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- and bragging about how they are slashing these programs for "moral" reasons, just remember Ayn's morality and who inspired her.

Too many critics of Ayn Rand -- until recently I was one of them -- would rather dismiss her books and ideas as laughable, childish, and hackneyed. But she can't be dismissed because Rand is the name that keeps bubbling up from the Tea Party crowd and the elite conservative circuit in Washington as the Big Inspiration. The only way to protect ourselves from this thinking is the way you protect yourself from serial killers: smoke the Rand followers out, make them answer for following the crazed ideology of a serial-killer-groupie, and run them the hell out of town and out of our hemisphere.

The complete article can be read HERE.

Expensive Tea Bags

It is interesting to hear how the media and the talking heads have characterized the Tea Party movement as a grassroots movement predominately made up of folks who are really feeling the economic crunch.

Here's what Karl Rove had to say:

The movement arose spontaneously as ordinary Americas reacted to a rising tide of federal spending and debt, growing federal power, and the too-cozy relationship between Washington and corporate America.

While organizers of the this movement have lauded its grassroots connections others are seeing changes toward the elitism that it disdains.

The Tea Party convention in Nashville, Tenn. - the first ever annual convening symposium- is going forth within a conflict which calls into question the very future of the movement.

Once a grassroots movement of rugged individuals, it has become a celebrity laden top-down structure, which illuminates the GOP and major profit-making speakers, at the expense of its origins, some think.

The upscale lobster dinner is the greatest contradiction of the rugged individualist origins which the movement could undergo. The price is $549 to get into the convention, and $349 to hear Palin speak: The message is clearly that the rugged masses are not needed here.

Looking more and more like a GOP Trojan horse to earn millions, the idea of the grassroots energy of the yeomen - the rugged heartland farmer who would also be constitutional scholar - of the Jeffersonian imagination has given way to the cult of personality, earning six figures for the likes of Sarah Palin, and ignoring the yeoman all together.

Despite the Tea Partier disdain for the Obama elitism and cult of personality which dominated 2008, their own movement has fallen into the same snare.

So it is not surprising that a new CNN poll (via TPM) shows the true color of this movement.

A majority of respondents who had donated to a Tea Party group or participated in a Tea Party event were male, white, and identified as Protestant/Other Christian groups.

Also, most went to college. 40 percent are college grads, compared to just 28 percent of total poll respondents, and 34 percent have some college. They make a ton more money than the other people interviewed for the study: 34 percent make over $75,000, while 32 make between $50,000 and $75,000. That’s way more than half pulling in over $50,000. So real, genuine Americans seem to be doing pretty well for themselves

None of this should be especially surprising. Most poor people scraping by in terrible, lowpaying jobs — or with no jobs — probably don’t have the time to don three-cornered hats and scream about communism.

But there has been an MSM tendency to trumpet the movement as an eruption of populist rage by those crushed in the financial crisis.

Conspiracists and Kooks

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Tea Party activist William Temple at a December rally in Washington, D.C.

Jonathan Kay at Newsweek went to Nashville to attend the Tea Party National Convention. What he found was that most of the media was focused on Sarah Palin. What surprised Kay was that the tea party movement and the conference was dominated by "conspiracist kooks."

The tea-party movement has no leader. But it does have a face: William Temple of Brunswick, Ga. For months, the amiable middle-aged activist has been criss-crossing America, appearing at tea-party events dressed in his trademark three-cornered hat and Revolutionary garb. When journalists interview him (which is often—his outfit draws them in like a magnet), he presents himself as a human bridge between the founders' era and our own. "We fought the British over a 3 percent tea tax. We might as well bring the British back," he told NPR during a recent protest outside the Capitol. It's a charming act, which makes the tea-party movement seem no more unnerving than the people who spend their weekends reenacting the Civil War. But the 18th-century getups mask something disturbing. After I spent the weekend at the Tea Party National Convention in Nashville, Tenn., it has become clear to me that the movement is dominated by people whose vision of the government is conspiratorial and dangerously detached from reality. It's more John Birch than John Adams.

Like all populists, tea partiers are suspicious of power and influence, and anyone who wields them.

Fear and loathing set the tone.

Steve Malloy, author of Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Ruin Your Life, kicked off the first full day of conference proceedings by warning that Obama and his minions are conspiring to control every aspect of Americans' lives—the colors of their cars, the kind of toilet paper they use, how much time they spend in the shower, the temperature of their homes—all under the guise of U.N. greenhouse-gas-reduction schemes. "Obama isn't a U.S. socialist," Malloy thundered. "He's an international socialist. He envisions a one-world government."

Even Kay, a conservative was shocked at the amount of fringe rhetoric at the conference.

I consider myself a conservative and arrived at this conference as a paid-up, rank-and-file attendee, not one of the bemused New York Times types with a media pass. But I also happen to be writing a book for HarperCollins that focuses on 9/11 conspiracy theories, so I have a pretty good idea where the various screws and nuts can be found in the great toolbox of American political life.

Within a few hours in Nashville, I could tell that what I was hearing wasn't just random rhetorical mortar fire being launched at Obama and his political allies: the salvos followed the established script of New World Order conspiracy theories, which have suffused the dubious right-wing fringes of American politics since the days of the John Birch Society.

That doesn't say much for the state of the right in America. The tea partiers' tricornered hat is supposed to be a symbol of patriotism and constitutional first principles. But when you take a closer look, all you find is a helmet made of tin foil.

Some of the kooky theories include:

1. The documentary, The Obama Deception, claims Obama's candidacy was a plot by the leaders of the New World Order to "con the Amercican people into accepting global slavery"

2. America's 21st-century traumas signal the coming of a great political cataclysm, in which a false prophet such as Barack Obama will upend American sovereignty and render the country into a godless, one-world socialist dictatorship run by the United Nations from its offices in Manhattan.

3."A U.N. guard stationed in every house."

4. Obama was seeking to destroy America's place in the world and sell Israel out to the Arabs for some undefined nefarious purpose.

5. The "birther" claim that America's president might actually be an illegal alien who's constitutionally ineligible to occupy the White House.

Last week Rep Michelle Bachmann insisted that America is 'cursed' if it doesn't stand by Israel. It now makes sense that she believes in these conspiracy theories.

At a Republican Jewish Coalition event in Los Angeles last week, Rep. Michele Bachmann offered a candid view of her positions on Israel: Support for Israel is handed down by God and if the United States pulls back its support, America will cease to exist.

I am convinced in my heart and in my mind that if the United States fails to stand with Israel, that is the end of the United States . . . [W]e have to show that we are inextricably entwined, that as a nation we have been blessed because of our relationship with Israel, and if we reject Israel, then there is a curse that comes into play.

You might call them nut-cakes, fruit-jobs or just plan kooks. But because of right-wing blogs, talking heads and politicians like Bachmann and Palin, these fringe elements of the conservative party are gaining undeserved recognition.