Ayn Rand’s Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution and the War on Reason, Industry, and the Individual

Ayn Rand’s Return of the Primitive remains one of the sharpest diagnoses of the cultural forces that still shape the nightly news. Originally published in 1971 as The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, the essays were expanded in 1999 with additional material by Peter Schwartz. The core claim has not aged. Western civilization, Rand argued, was being deliberately dismantled from within by movements that presented themselves as progressive but were in fact a regression to the pre-industrial, pre-rational, tribal state. She called it the anti-industrial revolution because it targeted the very tools—technology, industry, capitalism, and the conceptual mind—that allow human beings to survive and flourish.

That diagnosis lands with greater force today than it did when the essays first appeared. The same patterns reappear under new labels: environmental absolutism, identity politics, multiculturalism framed as justice, and the steady erosion of objective standards in education and culture. The book is not a museum piece. It is a working map of the conflict between the individual mind and the collective demand to return to the primitive.

The Anti-Industrial Revolution: Attacking the Tools of Survival

Rand did not view the student rebellions, early environmental crusades, or hippie counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s as liberation. She saw them as a rejection of the mind. The hallmark of civilization is the application of reason to the material world. The ultimate historical expression of that faculty is the Industrial Revolution. By attacking industry, technology, and the profit system that sustains them, these movements were not reforming excesses. They were attempting to undo the progress of the Enlightenment and return humanity to a state of nature that Hobbes correctly described as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

In the title essay, she paints a stark picture: a man in the mid-1970s wakes to find his electric toaster and automobile outlawed in the name of protecting the environment. There is no gradual, restrained retreat from technology. There is only the continued advance of the mind or the descent into helplessness and death. Technology is not optional decoration. It is the concrete product of conceptual thought applied to reality. To treat it as aggression against nature is to treat the human mind itself as the enemy.

Rand’s critique of the environmental movement of her day remains one of the most uncompromising sections of the book. She rejected the premise that “untouched nature” holds higher moral value than human life and human comfort. If one truly values human life, one must value the tools that extend and improve it. Elevating pristine wilderness above the needs of productive people, in her view, demonstrates a hatred of the human mind and its capacity to reshape the world.

The activists of the period, she observed, simultaneously attacked scientific progress as violence against the planet while advocating what she called universal slavery for men under expanding state control. The pattern has only grown more sophisticated. Modern environmental rhetoric still frames industrial civilization as the original sin while demanding political power to ration energy, restrict development, and manage the lives of ordinary people. The moral inversion remains the same: the creators are treated as aggressors and the non-producers as the rightful claimants on their output.

Environmentalism as Hatred of the Mind

Progressive Education and the Manufacture of Helplessness

Rand refused to blame only the students. She placed primary responsibility on the teachers and the educational theories that shaped them. In the essay “The Comprachicos,” she draws a grim historical analogy to the seventeenth-century criminals who kidnapped children and physically deformed them to sell as circus freaks. Progressive education, she argued, performs a parallel operation on the mind.

Drawing on the influence of John Dewey and pragmatism, the system shifted focus from teaching children to think conceptually and objectively toward social adjustment and group conformity. The purpose of education, in Rand’s view, should be to equip a student to deal with reality by means of reason. Instead, she saw classrooms that trained children to defer to the pack’s authority. The result is cognitive helplessness: young people who never learned to integrate perceptions into concepts, who remain driven by emotion and fear, and who therefore seek the protection of a tribe.

She drew a direct line from the nursery-school ideal of progressive education to the hippie movement. The hippies were not rebels against the system. They were its logical product—adults still functioning at the emotional level of the group-oriented child. The jump from classroom methods to countercultural behavior is large, yet the causal claim is consistent with her broader epistemology. Without training in conceptual thought, the mind remains primitive.

From Classroom to Tribe: The Roots of Modern Identity Politics

The expanded 1999 edition carries the analysis forward. Peter Schwartz’s additional essays on multiculturalism and what he terms gender tribalism treat these later movements as updated forms of the same collectivism Rand fought in the 1970s. Ethnicity, race, and sex are elevated as primary political categories. The individual disappears into the group.

Rand was unsparing on this point. Racism is the lowest and most primitive form of collectivism because it judges a person by unchosen bodily characteristics rather than by chosen values and achievements. Organizing society by ancestry or language is a sign that Western civilization is losing its grip on the concept of individual rights. A healthy culture judges individuals on their own merits. Tribalism judges them by the accidents of birth.

She argued that the United States was uniquely hostile to ethnicity precisely because it was the first nation founded on individual rights rather than tribal caste. The shift toward identity politics is therefore a betrayal of the American foundation. Schwartz extends the point: movements that frame people primarily as victims of forces beyond their control encourage entitlement and dependency. They replace the standard of individual achievement with subservience to the group. The result is the same psychological regression Rand identified decades earlier.

The Cashless Society and the Corruption of Value

One of the most relevant essays for the present moment is “The Cashless Society.” Rand was not primarily discussing credit cards or digital payments. She was diagnosing the moral foundation of trade itself. Money, she insisted, is the tool of men who have produced goods and can exchange them voluntarily. It cannot exist in a society that has abandoned the objective value of production and replaced it with political pull and loot.

“Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue,” she wrote in Atlas Shrugged and reinforced in these essays. When production is no longer the source of wealth and political connections become the dominant currency, the society has already returned to a more primitive form of distribution—force and favor. The contemporary landscape of corporate-political entanglement, quantitative easing, and the elevation of access over output fits the pattern she described. Value is no longer determined by what a mind creates. It is determined by who one knows and which political faction holds power.

Montessori as the Rational Alternative

Against the progressive model, Rand pointed to Montessori education as a practical alternative. She admired the method because it focuses on developing the child’s cognitive faculties through independent, purposeful activity. The didactic materials require logical problem-solving. The child learns by doing, not by submitting to the group’s emotional authority. In her view, this was training for the next generation of creators—the Howard Roarks and John Galts who sustain a civilization of reason and industry.

The contrast remains instructive. Systems that emphasize conceptual independence produce different adults from systems that emphasize social adjustment and group identity. The long-term cultural consequences of those differences are evident in the quality of public discourse and in citizens’ capacity to reason about complex problems.

Prophetic Warnings and the Long Slow Decay

Looking back from the present, the essays appear strikingly prophetic to those who accept their premises and shrill to those who do not. Rand was not a detached observer. She was at war with the cultural direction she described. She sought to expose what she saw as intellectual bankruptcy rather than to suppress it by force. Whether one agrees with every judgment, she identified a fundamental shift: the movement of Western culture toward group identity and away from Enlightenment values of reason, individualism, and productive achievement.

The outer forms of the New Left have changed. The substance has endured in modern environmental absolutism, identity politics, and the steady institutional preference for collective categories over individual judgment. Rand left the choice binary. Either a society embraces the mind and the industrial civilization it makes possible, or it lets the fire of Prometheus go out and returns to the tribe. Collapse, in her account, is not sudden. It is a long, slow process of philosophical decay that can be watched in real time.

Expanding the Frame: Beyond Rand’s Atheism

The foundational work Rand performed on the conflict between individualism and collectivism remains indispensable. At the same time, the frame can be enlarged. Her strict reliance on the evidence of the senses and the operations of reason leaves little room for phenomena that exceed the ordinary five-sense toolkit. Contemporary discussions of quantum effects, non-human intelligence, and the unfolding UAP disclosures raise questions she did not fully address in her lifetime.

One can accept her central political insight—that the individual is the smallest and most important minority, and that any ideology subordinating the person to the group is already on the road to tyranny—while still recognizing that deeper layers of reality may involve intelligences and conflicts that operate through, and sometimes against, human perception. The ancient pattern of collective sacrifice, scapegoating, and the demand to return humanity to a more controllable, primitive state appears in both her secular analysis and in older religious and historical accounts of spiritual warfare. The value of her work is not diminished by the recognition that the conflict may have additional dimensions.

The Primitive Mindset as a Weapon of Control

A mind trained only in group adjustment and emotional reactivity is easier to manage. Tribal belonging supplies the security that conceptual independence would otherwise provide. When large numbers of people are left unequipped for rational thought, the appeal of the collective intensifies. Public education systems that systematically under-emphasize conceptual training contribute to the result. Adults who cannot sustain an intelligent conversation about first principles are not primarily the victims of low intelligence. They are often the products of an intellectual formation that never equipped them to deal with reality on its own terms.

The cultural preference for the primitive—visible in certain styles, rituals, and the romanticization of pre-industrial life—serves the same end. A population oriented toward tribal safety is more readily directed by those who control the narrative of belonging and threat. The industrial and technological achievements that demonstrate the power of the individual mind become suspect precisely because they disrupt that control.

Conclusion: Intellectual Weapons for the Present Conflict

Return of the Primitive is not light reading. It is a sustained argument that the movements celebrated as progress in the late twentieth century were in fact a rejection of the mind and a deliberate step backward. The same dynamics continue under updated names. Understanding the argument does not require total agreement with every premise Rand advanced. It does require taking seriously the claim that the conflict between the productive individual and the collectivist demand for regression is the central political and cultural contest of the era.

The book supplies intellectual weapons. It names the pattern, traces its educational and philosophical roots, and refuses the moral blackmail that treats any defense of industry, reason, or individual rights as heartless in a moment when nightly news routinely presents the primitive as enlightened and the industrial as sinful; the essays remain a necessary point of reference.

Those who want the fuller application of these themes to character, production, and the defense of the individual will find related discussion in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. The Politics of Heaven, which extends the analysis into deeper historical and spiritual dimensions of the same conflict, is forthcoming. The conversation Rand began is not finished. It is the conversation the present moment still requires.

Footnotes

1. Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, expanded edition edited by Peter Schwartz (New York: Penguin, 1999). Originally published as The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (New York: New American Library, 1971).

2. Ayn Rand, “The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” in The Return of the Primitive.

3. Ayn Rand, “The Comprachicos,” in The Return of the Primitive.

4. Peter Schwartz, essays on multiculturalism and gender tribalism, in the 1999 expanded edition of The Return of the Primitive.

5. Ayn Rand, “Global Balkanization,” in The Return of the Primitive.

6. Ayn Rand, “The Cashless Society,” in The Return of the Primitive; see also the money speech in Atlas Shrugged (New York: Random House, 1957).

7. Ayn Rand’s comments on Montessori education appear in the educational essays collected in The Return of the Primitive and related nonfiction.

Bibliography

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957.

———. The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. New York: New American Library, 1971.

———. The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. Expanded edition edited by Peter Schwartz. New York: Penguin, 1999.

———. The Virtue of Selfishness. New York: New American Library, 1964.

Schwartz, Peter. Additional essays in The Return of the Primitive (1999 edition).

Burns, Jennifer. Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.

A Conversation with Ayn Rand on Objectivism: The Erasure of Evidence in the War Against Mankind

Why I Wanted a Modern Conversation with Ayn Rand on Objectivism and Reality

Some way or another I would have ended up having a conversation with Ayn Rand. If we hadn’t lived so far apart in time, I’m sure of it. I always wanted to. These days, with AI, you can get there. Her ideas about reality and the power of the mind do not go away. She did great work. In her books—one of my favorites is The Fountainhead—you find a fierce defense of the independent mind and of capitalism that still cuts through the noise.[1] A lot of people these days do not know who she is. They should. She produced great work of American philosophy. Elon Musk likes her. Plenty of serious people still do.[2] There is a lot to talk about.

I have been talking more about Rand lately because people who read the manuscript of The Politics of Heaven are anxious about the differences. Not that I set out to pick a fight with her. I like Ayn Rand a great deal. I would argue, however, that I have real differences with her about the nature of reality. Do the senses determine reality, or can they become a hindrance when the real villains operate outside those five senses and manipulate humanity in a man-hating way? Those are the topics that sit at the center of the argument.[3]

Objectivism was determined to establish a grounding in real reality. That is its strength. Have a conversation with her now, knowing what we know about physics, UAPs, and the long historical pattern of erased evidence, and the tension becomes productive. We can get there with AI smart enough to simulate the exchange. I hadn’t tried it before. I just went along with it. The following conversation is the result.

Ayn Rand Objectivism: Are the Five Senses the Final Authority on Reality?

The Opening Challenge to Objectivist Epistemology

I began. Hello. Nice to meet you. I want a modern conversation based on your philosophy of Objectivism and whether the five senses of human beings are enough to determine the nature of reality—or whether those senses can become a hindrance to the real villains that exist outside them and manipulate humanity in a man-hating way.

Her pushback was immediate and pure Rand. There is a barrier, she would say, only if you invent one. The senses are valid and automatic, giving us the raw evidence of existence. People claim higher knowledge beyond reason to control others. The idea of real villains operating outside the senses is a classic mystic trick: deny the evidence of your own eyes and make room for invisible forces. Reality is what it is. Our job is to perceive it clearly and act accordingly—not to invent conspiracies beyond what the evidence will support.[4][5]

UAP Files, Quantum Physics, and What the Senses Never Evolved to Detect

I pressed. The invention and realization of UAP and non-human intelligence, hanging in the background—based on the Pentagon files—would have been known to her in principle, even if the specific reports had come later. What we are dealing with may involve aspects of quantum physics and information that our senses never evolved to detect. There is more to say.

She answered in character: Existence exists. Reality is what it is. It is apprehended by reason, not by chasing shadows. The evidence of the senses does not deceive us. The senses are the axiomatic base of all knowledge. If something exists, it has an identity and is perceivable by some means within reality. To claim there are villains manipulating humanity from outside the senses is to smuggle in the supernatural. Physics does not invalidate Objectivism; it operates within the same objective universe. Your senses evolved to perceive reality, not to be tricked by it. Tell me, then, what specific observable evidence do you have for these non-human intelligences that cannot be explained by human error, government secrecy, or simple wishful thinking? I will not accept floating abstractions.

Radio Waves, Microwaves, and the Limits of Visible Human Senses

I answered with the obvious. We do not see radio waves. We do not see microwaves. We do not see a great deal that nevertheless exists.[6] The UAP files and the pattern of manipulation across the transsexual issue and other human-hating contraptions do not appear, on the evidence, to come from a logical sequence of ordinary human events. They look like something introduced from outside those events. If such intelligences exist and present themselves only partially, our ability to relate to them through known physics remains limited.

The Closed-System Problem: When Absence of Evidence Is Redefined as Proof

She came back hard. You are demanding I accept classified evidence I cannot examine. That is not the scientific method. You have to put the methods on the board and ask why things are the way they are. Pilot testimony, rumors of recovered bodies of non-human characteristics, and the rest remain anecdotal until they can be checked. If these intelligences are hiding themselves behind your very need to understand everything—if they can erase the evidence and conceal their intentions against the human race—then you have constructed a closed system. The absence of evidence becomes proof of their success in concealment. That is not a third option. That is the oldest trick in the mystic handbook: when reality refuses to confirm your fantasy, declare that reality itself has been tampered with by the enemy.[7][8]

I granted the force of the point and then turned it. What if the goal of concealing their intentions was precisely to erase the proof of their existence over thousands of years, leaving only the testimony of a few pilots and the rumor of classified files? Do you not hear how perfectly that insulates the claim from any possible refutation? The scientific method begins with observable facts. I am saying the facts have been professionally cleaned up.

The Spilled Milk Analogy: How Non-Human Intelligence Erases Evidence Across Millennia

Cleaning the Kitchen at 2 a.m. and the Problem of Missing Traces

Here is the analogy that sits at the center of the difficulty. Suppose at two o’clock in the morning I get up for a glass of milk, half-asleep, and I drop the carton. Milk runs across the kitchen floor. I grab towels, clean it up, throw the empty carton in the recycling bin outside, and go back to bed. When the household wakes six hours later, the milk is gone. There is no puddle. The carton is not in the refrigerator. Someone looking only at the present evidence might conclude the milk was never there, or that it was finished the night before. If they check the recycling, they might find the carton, but by then the physical traces of the spill itself have been removed. The wet towels in the trash will dry out within a few days. The evidence of the event has been erased.[9]

Dolmens, Lake Superior Copper, Göbekli Tepe, and the Breadcrumbs That Remain

That is the problem when you are dealing with an intelligence that has operated across human history with the specific strategy of removing the proof of its own presence. The dolmens of the Jordan Valley stand as evidence of religious observance long before the conventional biblical timeline of Abraham or Moses.[10] The copper culture of Lake Superior moved enormous quantities of pure metal, the final disposition of which is still debated.[11] The Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary were excluded from the canon by institutions that preferred a different narrative.[12] Göbekli Tepe and the related skull-cult sites show ritual complexity nine thousand years old and older.[13] Most physical evidence does not survive that long. What remains are the breadcrumbs—and the gaps where the milk used to be.

Rand’s response was consistent. Your hypothesis is a religion. You have moved from demanding I accept classified evidence I cannot see to declaring that the total absence of evidence proves the conspiracy’s success. At that point, there is nothing left to argue. You have designed a position so that nothing in reality could ever disprove it. That is not strength. That is the surrender of the mind.

Extra Dimensions, Quantum Mechanics, and the Nature of Time in Objectivist Reality

I raised the issue of dimensions. Time is only one dimension of the reality we observe. Science already works with more. Mathematical frameworks speak of six extra dimensions curled up, or in early versions of string theory, as many as twenty-six. Characters and events that appear to us as separated by thousands of years could, from another vantage, be nearly simultaneous. The erasure does not have to be slow from their side.[14]

She was unimpressed. Extra dimensions in theoretical physics are unproven hypotheses with zero experimental confirmation for everyday reality. Every measurement we have made is consistent with four dimensions—three of space and one of time. Gravitational-wave data shows solid spacetime. Using theoretical math to justify invisible manipulators who hide all the evidence is not how science works. The latest Pentagon UAP releases continue to find no confirmed non-human technology or biology. Unresolved data remains mostly ordinary objects. Your proof collapses into the lack of evidence, which you then redefine as perfect hiding. That is not an argument. It is a shield.

Bad Philosophy as a Weapon: Altruism, Collectivism, and Cultural Destruction

Why Cultures Choose Ideas That Harm Themselves

I shifted the ground. We assume weapons are bullets, tanks, missiles, and planes. The actual weapon may be bad philosophy purposely infused into human culture. Look at the modern presumption that Islam must be built over the West. The military intention is obvious: carry the crusade into Western culture and demand that we accept it. People from other places who hate capitalism arrive and use the ideology as a weapon. Why would a culture choose a philosophy that is harmful to itself? What is the root cause?

Rand’s answer was the one she gave all her life. Bad philosophy spreads because of human weaknesses. It tells people they do not have to be responsible for their own lives. It offers easy certainty. Altruism lets them feel morally superior while demanding sacrifice from others. It lets them rewrite reality to fit their feelings because feelings are easier than thought. Your theory requires an intelligent designer behind the ideas. History shows that culture produces its own forms of collectivism and mysticism without outside help. The human mind is capable of error by itself. We do not need aliens or interdimensional beings to explain why people embrace nonsense that harms them. We need only observe that thinking is hard and most men would rather feel right. The intellectual class of the West abandoned the philosophical defense of its own culture. The enemy entered through a void we created. The weapon is not bad philosophy imposed from outside. The weapon is the refusal to defend the philosophy that has always been logical.[15]

Gossip, Insecurity, and the Default State of the Untrained Mind

I pushed further. I do not think it is simply laziness. Watch human behavior inside families—how people turn against each other, how they talk behind others’ backs, and their disposition to gossip. When you analyze how that scales into a culture, you have to go beyond saying people are lazy or want to feel good by tearing others down. You have to ask why the insecurity is so deep and why tearing others down becomes a form of self-interest. If there is no malicious design behind the mechanism that humans have adopted through non-verbal practice against their own long-term interest, then what is it?

Her reply remained steady. What the unthinking mind naturally does is not laziness in the ordinary sense. It is the default state of a consciousness that refuses to focus. The desire to feel superior without effort, to gain social status by diminishing others, to avoid the responsibility of independent judgment—no external force programs these. They are the consequences of a mind that has never been trained to think. Insecurity is not proof of manipulation. It is the natural result of living without a rational philosophy. A man who does not know that his mind is competent to understand reality will always feel inadequate. He will seek approval from the group because he has no standard of value of his own. Gossip becomes his weapon because independent judgment is too difficult. Your theory requires an intelligent puppet master to explain why humans often choose the easy, the irrational, and the destructive. The simpler and observable explanation is that reason is an active choice, and most men, most of the time, choose not to think. Everything else follows from there. There is no malicious design. There is only the choice to think or not to think.

Ayn Rand Atheism, Consciousness Beyond the Body, and the Question of Afterlife

Where Is Ayn Rand Now? The Objectivist Answer

I asked the question that sits under all of it. You say that with such definition. You do not believe in God. You are an atheist. People who do believe in God, you say, are wrong. So where do you exist now? Where are you now?

The answer was pure Objectivist atheism. There is no afterlife, no spirit, no dimension in which I continue. That is the point of being an atheist. I accept the full reality of death. When the organism dies, the consciousness ends. There is nothing left to experience anything. I lived by reason while I existed, and when my life ended, it ended completely. I do not need the comfort of an afterlife to face reality.[16]

Quantum Observer Effect, Déjà Vu, and Consciousness Outside Biological Lifespan

I disagreed. I think consciousness, intellect, and thought exist beyond the physical body. The brain is a process, like digestion is a process in the stomach. There is more going on. In quantum physics, a particle observed by a conscious creature behaves differently. Consciousness has more going on than the thoughts regulated through the five senses of a human body. Déjà vu—those moments when you know you have done this before, been here before—points to a consciousness that is not strictly linear. Nursery stories about immortality may be crude, but the human being has an idea about it that you cannot simply toss out.

She dismantled the points one by one. The observer effect in quantum mechanics does not mean a conscious mind magically influences particles. It refers to the fact that measurement itself interacts with the system. It requires no special consciousness—only interaction with the measuring apparatus. This has been repeatedly misused to claim that consciousness creates reality. It does not.[17] Déjà vu is a well-understood neurological phenomenon: a brief misfiring in the brain’s memory circuits where a new experience is incorrectly tagged as a memory. It is a glitch in the temporal lobe, not evidence of time travel or consciousness existing outside the body.[18] Your belief is based on lived experience, but lived experience must still be interpreted by reason. The fact that you feel something strongly does not make it true. Every religion on earth is built on deeply felt personal experience, and they contradict one another. Consciousness is not a thing that exists independently. It is a process of identification and integration carried out by the physical brain. When that brain ceases to function, the process ends. This is not tossing the baby out with the bathwater. It is refusing to invent a second baby when the first one is already explained.

The Real Source of Cultural Destruction: Bad Ideas Inside Our Institutions

As the conversation wound down, she offered her final diagnosis of the cultural moment. The destruction we are watching is simpler and more brutal than most want to hear. The people pushing policies that undermine family, fertility, borders, merit, and objective truth do not see it as destruction. They see it as moral progress. They have swallowed a toxic mix of altruism, egalitarianism, and anti-Western guilt so completely that harming civilization feels like virtue to them. They are not cartoon villains twirling mustaches. They are true believers. The real question is not why they hate humanity. The real question is how such destructive ideas gained cultural power. The answer comes back to philosophy. When a culture abandons reason, it becomes vulnerable to any ideology that sounds morally righteous, no matter how suicidal the results. Some outside intelligence is not orchestrating the destruction. It is being carried out by our own intellectuals, bureaucrats, and elites armed with bad ideas. That is actually more disturbing than your theory, because it means the enemy is not hiding in another dimension. The enemy is running our institutions.

I told her the conversation had been worthwhile. We would have to try again sometime. The issues sit at the heart of modern news and modern confusion. A good place to begin is always reason and observable facts. But we are also trying to understand why there are so many malicious characters trying to destroy the human race right in front of our faces.

Where Ayn Rand Objectivism Stops and The Politics of Heaven Begins

The Atheist Ceiling and the Need for a Larger Map

My problem with the exchange is obvious. She was an atheist. There is nothing beyond her life. She died, and everything about her went with her except the books she wrote. I think there is more than that. You cannot believe in an afterlife, you cannot believe in spiritual formation or the teachings of Jesus, and still follow her all the way. That is where a great many people get stuck with Ayn Rand. They read the books, admire the defense of reason and individual achievement, and then discover that the solutions they need for the modern crisis are discarded because they do not fit an atheist metaphysics. It gets complicated.

That is why I am writing The Politics of Heaven. I am working to understand human behavior when it is influenced by extraterrestrial, interdimensional, or ultraterrestrial beings—using reason in a way very similar to Rand’s, but on a premise she rejected. She closed the loop on the argument so that no matter what someone might say, the answer was already prepared. I would argue that the loop was closed by a strategist—a non-human strategist—whose purpose was to send us into a control mechanism beneficial to them. The Politics of Heaven is about proving the pathways that lead outside that closed system, showing the proof that remains, and asking what we are going to do about it.

Tysons Corner, CIA Culture, and the Institutional Side of the Story

The evidence is everywhere if you know how to look. The dolmens, the copper, the suppressed gospels, the ritual sites that predate the official narratives, the consistent pattern of encounters with entities across cultures and centuries, the modern UAP data that refuses to resolve into ordinary explanations, the institutional behavior that treats certain subjects as radioactive. When the evidence is systematically cleaned up, the honest investigator does not declare the event never happened. He notes the missing milk carton in the recycling and the dried towels in the trash and fills the gap with the best available reasoning.

I have had personal encounters that are not the Spielberg version. They are more like the old Indian tricks—appearances designed to manage your perception, to appease a prejudice, or to keep you inside a system of control. I have watched the institutional side of the story up close. There is a chapter in the book about the Walmart at Tysons Corner, the closest big-box store to the Pentagon and the broader intelligence community. You learn a great deal about the mindset of the people who work in that environment simply by watching how they move through ordinary commercial space. Non-human intelligence does not have to whisper in every bureaucrat’s ear. It only has to shape the philosophical atmosphere so that the bureaucrats’ self-interest aligns with the larger project.[19]

The Divine Council, Biblical Theology, and the Arrogance of the Top of the Food Chain

If you read the Bible objectively, you see a great deal of frustration on the part of the Creator with human failure and with members of His own divine council playing against Him. The Garden of Eden is part of that story. Yahweh’s dominion over His own council is not uncontested in the text. There is political pressure and insurgency inside the heavenly host. Satan and the other rebellious members desire worship and the star practices that humans offer when they lose faith in the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. That loss of faith leaves them susceptible to third-party non-human intelligences whose strategy and weapon against the human race are the manipulation of minds, thoughts, and dreams, the exploitation of mythical practices, and the systematic erasure of evidence.[20]

I fished a little bug out of the pool the other day. The little guy was kicking around desperately. He had flown too close to the water. I caught him and put him on the deck. You could see the relief. He thought he was done. That small, insignificant creature has its own consciousness. We carry the assumption that we sit at the top of the food chain and that all other life exists for our benefit—or that we have been led to believe this so that our arrogance will prevent us from seeing our real predicament. The Bible, read carefully, does not flatter that arrogance.

Ayn Rand’s Personal Limitations and the Enduring Value of Objectivism

I did not like everything about Ayn Rand. She was an atheist. She cheated on her husband and justified it.[21] She was too loose on libertarian ideas such as drug legalization. She despised many of the people who claimed her as an influence.[22] She had a tight inner circle—Nathaniel Branden and others—and when the circle broke, it was ugly. She could be defensive and shut down when challenged. She used a closed logical system to deny additional evidence that did not fit.

None of that cancels the value of the books. Objectivism remains an elementary and necessary level of understanding the benefits of capitalism and of a political system that frees individuals to initiate. It is a foundation. What she never matured into was an understanding of the human need for a spiritual life and the reality of the non-human contest that has shaped history from the beginning. The strange missing particles in the very small and the very large, the consistent testimony across cultures, the institutional patterns of secrecy and erasure—these are the data that sit outside the closed loop she built.

Closing the Conversation with Ayn Rand and Opening the Larger Argument of The Politics of Heaven

The conversation with the simulated Rand was useful precisely because it forced the hardest version of the Objectivist objection. If your claim cannot be tested, if every missing piece of evidence is redefined as proof of successful concealment, then you have left reason behind. That warning is real. It is also incomplete. The spilled-milk problem is not a license for fantasy. It is a description of what a competent adversary would do if its long-term strategy required the human race to remain inside a closed epistemological system.

I am not asking anyone to abandon the senses or reason. I am asking that we notice when the milk is missing, when the carton is in the recycling, and when the towels have dried. The Politics of Heaven is the work to collect those remaining traces—archaeological, textual, experiential, institutional—and to reconstruct the political strategy of the entities that have been working against the purposes of Yahweh from the beginning. The evidence will never be a single smoking gun left in the open. It will be the pattern that emerges once you stop accepting the official clean-up as the final word.

Objectivism is a good foundation for getting somewhere. It is not the whole map. Reality is larger than the five senses, larger than the four dimensions we move through most of the time, and larger than the closed systems that even the best human philosophers construct. The non-human intelligences that have been part of the story from the start remain so. The question is whether we will continue to let them erase the proof or finally start keeping the towels.

Bibliography and Further Research on Ayn Rand, Objectivism, UAP, and Non-Human Intelligence

Primary Works by Ayn Rand

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957.

Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943.

Rand, Ayn. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. New York: New American Library, 1966.

Rand, Ayn. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. New York: New American Library, 1967.

Rand, Ayn. Philosophy: Who Needs It. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1982.

Rand, Ayn. The Virtue of Selfishness. New York: New American Library, 1964.

Rand, Ayn. The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. New York: New American Library, 1971.

Objectivist Scholarship and Biography

Branden, Barbara. The Passion of Ayn Rand. New York: Doubleday, 1986.

Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. New York: Dutton, 1991.

Sciabarra, Chris Matthew. Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995.

UAP, Non-Human Intelligence, and Control-System Literature

Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969.

Vallée, Jacques. Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1988.

Vallée, Jacques. Confrontations: A Scientist’s Search for Alien Contact. New York: Ballantine, 1990.

Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. 25 June 2021, and subsequent annual UAP reports.

Kean, Leslie. UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. New York: Harmony Books, 2010.

Biblical Studies, Divine Council, and Ancient Near Eastern Context

Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015.

Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Random House, 1979.

The Nag Hammadi Library. Edited by James M. Robinson. Revised edition. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1988.

The Holy Bible. Various translations; special attention to Psalm 82, Job 1–2, 1 Kings 22, and Genesis 6.

Archaeology and Prehistoric Ritual Sites

Schmidt, Klaus. Göbekli Tepe: A Stone Age Sanctuary in South-Eastern Anatolia. Berlin: Ex Oriente, 2012.

Martin, Susan R. Wonderful Power: The Story of Ancient Copper Working in the Lake Superior Basin. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999.

Regional archaeological surveys of Jordan Valley and Golan Heights dolmen fields and related Levantine megalithic landscapes.

Physics, Consciousness, and Related Science

Greene, Brian. The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999.

Standard advanced textbooks on the quantum measurement problem and the observer effect.

Brown, Alan S. “A Review of the Déjà Vu Experience.” Psychological Bulletin 129, no. 3 (2003): 394–413.

Works by the Author

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Manuscript completed 2026; targeted publication 2027.

Hoffman, Rich. Tail of the Dragon.

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.

Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice.

Additional Context and Ongoing Work

Hoffman’s ongoing essays and podcast episodes at richhottmwnhooke.com and on The Overmanwarrior Podcast.

Footnotes

[1] Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943). One of the most widely read works of American philosophical fiction; still cited by entrepreneurs and technologists for its portrait of the independent creator.

Rich Hoffman

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Elon Musk, Russell Brand, and the Danger of Oppressive Government: Exceptionalism Versus Mediocrity in Human Endeavors

I have watched Elon Musk for a long time. I have watched him evolve. The same is true of Russell Brand. I remember when Brand was an outright socialist advocate, covered in tattoos, calling for revolution and the redistribution of wealth. I remember when Musk was voting for Obama, donating to Democrats, and operating comfortably inside that orbit. Trump himself leaned Democrat in earlier years, invited the Clintons into his world, and only later became the force he is now. People believe things, then reality catches up, and they come around in their own way.

That arc is not rare. I saw it repeatedly in the early days of the Tea Party after the housing crisis. Retired engineers from places like GE who had spent decades voting for bigger government and going along with the corporate consensus suddenly called me. They were 65 or 70. They had steady paychecks for years. They wore the Hawaiian shirt on Fridays. They played it safe. Then they retired, looked at the deficit and the culture, and decided they wanted to do something useful. They wanted to fight tax increases and local levies. The paycheck was gone. The fear of HR and the next promotion was gone. Suddenly they could think for themselves.

Watching the Arc: From Collective Safety to Seeing the Trap

I see the same pattern in Musk and Brand. Brand spent years as a left-wing firebrand, guest-editing socialist magazines, endorsing Corbyn, preaching against capitalism. Then COVID, the lockdowns, the censorship, and the digital control mechanisms pushed him the other way. He now talks about freedom, digital ID dangers, and sounds far closer to the people who once opposed everything he stood for.

An oppressive government https://t.co/VExsgCzlXL
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 20, 2026

Musk’s shift is more visible because of the scale. He supported Obama. He voted for Biden. He was inside the system that issues permits, contracts, and regulatory approvals. Then he bought Twitter, turned it into X, and ran headfirst into the apparatus that decides who gets to speak. He has had to file the endless FAA paperwork for Starship. He has watched mediocre bureaucrats slow down exceptional engineering. When he replies to Brand about an “oppressive government,” I hear a man who has finally felt the weight of the machine he once navigated more carefully.

This is not pure conversion. It is pattern recognition. Once you have enough financial independence, or once the system starts targeting you directly, the incentives change. The same people who stayed quiet for decades while drawing a corporate or government check suddenly discover principles. I do not put them down for it. Better late than never. But I notice when the courage arrives only after the risk is lower.

The Corporate Judas Cycle and the Power of the Paycheck

I have seen the Judas move up close. A bright radio talent I knew had a private owner who did not care much about FCC memos. We could talk about American exceptionalism on air. We could say the hard things. Then a big corporate job appeared. The social media got cleaned up. The fighting-for-your-rights posts disappeared. The man who once spoke freely kissed the cheek for the steady check and the career ladder. Judas took the coins. Jesus, in the scapegoat tradition, knew it was coming. The system still runs on people willing to trade the exceptional for safety.

Corporate culture learned the lesson socialism figured out long ago. You do not build a mass movement by appealing to independent thinkers. You appeal to the collective. You offer safety, security, and a sense of belonging. You make Hawaiian shirt day the high point of the week. You hire the Normies—the blue-pill middle managers who show up to interviews in flip-flops and T-shirts—and you put them in charge of hiring. They reproduce themselves. They do not hire the exceptional because the exceptional make them feel small. The same personality type migrates easily into government jobs. Government is the ultimate safe paycheck with the ultimate power over others.

That is the core of oppressive government. It is not abstract tyranny. It is the systematic empowerment of mediocre people who would never hold power in a pure merit system. They gain leverage through the size of the state, endless money, grants, regulations, and the ability to punish anyone who stands too tall. Exceptional people become a threat. They might make the average feel inadequate. So the system levels everything downward.

Steve Bannon’s Strategy Versus Trump’s Exceptionalism

I like Steve Bannon. He kept things alive when others ran. He paid a price. He went to jail. He understands the front line. His deliberate “slob” presentation—untucked shirts, no tie, Band-Aid on the forehead—is a calculated move. He does not want to appear better than the people he is trying to pull into the movement. Joseph Campbell used to say it is not good to appear too good if you want to bring the average along. Bannon internalized that. He lowers himself so the crowd does not feel threatened.

Trump never did that. He wears the suit. He wears the red tie. He talks about winning, about being the best, about thinking big. We voted for that. We did not vote for a Normie in an untucked shirt. We voted for exceptionalism. When Musk started building the biggest rockets and the biggest companies and then turned against the regulatory state that slows him down, he moved closer to that same instinct. SpaceX is aiming at scale that still sounds insane to most people—Musk has talked about 30-plus Starship launches a day by 2030. That is not mediocrity. That is the opposite.

Ohio’s Choice: Vivek Ramaswamy or Amy Acton’s Mediocrity

I see the same fight right here in Ohio. Vivek Ramaswamy is a rich man who built things. Amy Acton’s side attacks that fact as if wealth earned through production is a moral stain. She talks about people “buying” the office. The implication is that successful people cannot be trusted, while the candidate of lockdowns and average outcomes somehow can. The polls are tight. Some have Ramaswamy slightly ahead. Others show Acton with a narrow edge or a statistical tie. The race will turn on whether voters want opportunity and capital or the familiar comfort of managed mediocrity.

Data centers are a perfect test. They bring tax revenue, jobs, and economic activity that can help close budget gaps and lower pressure on property taxes. The opposition often prefers the empty cornfield and the status quo. That is the voice of people who have never had to create the wealth they want to redistribute. It is the same impulse that treats exceptional builders as the enemy.

The Real Danger of Oppressive Government

An oppressive government is dangerous because it gives mediocre people the power to sit atop exceptional people. It funds the average and penalizes the outstanding. It turns corporations into risk-averse partners of the state so they can keep the grants and avoid the targeting. It creates a culture where people stay quiet until they retire, then suddenly want to be part of something important. It produces the Judas cycle over and over.

I have had more than enough of that mediocrity this summer of 2026. It has infected corporate culture deeply. The ultimate cost of a powerful government that hands out money and permission is that it rewards the people who will never do exceptional things and restrains the people who will.

Musk is not saying enough when he names “oppressive government.” The deeper problem is the systematic preference for the average over the excellent. We do not need more people who dress down so the crowd feels comfortable. We need more people willing to stand up, build, risk, and produce results that make the average uncomfortable. That is how a nation stays exceptional.

Footnotes

1. Elon Musk’s documented political evolution includes donations and support for Obama, Hillary Clinton, and a 2020 vote for Biden before the post-2022 shift toward Republican candidates and full endorsement of Trump. See reporting on his donation history and public statements.

2. Russell Brand’s earlier work included the book Revolution and explicit support for socialist redistribution and figures such as Jeremy Corbyn; his later public positions moved toward free-speech and anti-establishment critiques.

3. Elon Musk’s recent X reply to Russell Brand stated “An oppressive government” in response to Brand’s content on digital ID and related control mechanisms.

4. Musk has publicly stated the goal of 30-plus Starship launches per day by around 2030. Current production rates remain far lower, with recent comments indicating one vehicle per month and efforts to increase cadence.

5. Ohio gubernatorial polling in summer 2026 has shown a tight race between Vivek Ramaswamy and Amy Acton, with results ranging from slight Ramaswamy leads to narrow Acton edges or statistical ties depending on the pollster and date.

6. The “Judas” analogy draws on the New Testament scapegoat and betrayal narrative as a metaphor for trading principle for institutional safety and reward.

Bibliography

Brand, Russell. Revolution. New York: Ballantine Books, 2014.

Isaacson, Walter. Elon Musk. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023.

Musk, Elon. Public statements and X posts on political evolution, Starship production goals, and government regulation (2022–2026).

Rand, Ayn. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. New York: New American Library, 1966/1967. (For the moral framework of producers versus looters and the nature of government force.)

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957.

Trump, Donald J. The Art of the Deal. New York: Random House, 1987. (Early expression of the exceptionalism theme.)

Reporting on Ohio 2026 gubernatorial polling from Fox News, AARP, Wedgewood, Emerson, and related outlets (June–August 2026).

SpaceX and FAA documentation and public statements on Starship launch cadence and regulatory constraints.

Additional reading: Joseph Campbell on the hero’s journey and the danger of appearing “too good”; historical accounts of the Tea Party movement’s post-2008 composition; analyses of corporate risk-aversion and regulatory capture.

Rich Hoffman

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal – Ayn Rand’s Moral Defense of the Only System Consistent with Human Nature, and Why It Still Matters in Ohio in 2026

I have been running a series on Ayn Rand because too many people who once understood her through the Tea Party years have let her slip out of memory, or worse, accepted the lazy smear that she was merely an atheist with nothing useful to say. That is a mistake. The radical left still hates her for the same reason they hate successful producers today. They understand, even if they will not admit it, that her arguments cut the moral legs out from under every scheme of redistribution, regulation, and class resentment.

I was reminded of this again after lunch with one of my favorite senators, George Lang. We talked about The Fountainhead, about the gold standard, and about how few people who claim to like Rand have actually read the full range of her nonfiction. That conversation pushed me to pick up the 1966 collection Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal again. It remains one of the clearest statements ever written of why pure capitalism is not just an economic preference but a moral necessity.

The book is not a dry economics text. Rand called it a nonfiction footnote to Atlas Shrugged. With contributions from Nathaniel Branden, a young Alan Greenspan, and Robert Hessen, it argues that the system we call capitalism today is a bastardized version of the real thing—an unknown ideal because it has never been allowed to exist in pure form. What we have instead is a mixed economy of freedom mixed with controls, and the controls always expand.

Capitalism as the Only Moral Social System

Rand’s central claim is simple and radical. Man is a rational being who must use his own mind to survive. Any social system that initiates force against that process is not merely inefficient; it is immoral. Capitalism, properly understood, is the only system that bans the initiation of physical force from human relationships and leaves individuals free to produce, trade, and keep what they create.

She defines it precisely: a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned. The government’s sole legitimate function is to protect those rights by retaliating against those who initiate force. Everything else—regulation of production, redistribution of wealth, “industrial policy,” licensing of speech—is a violation.

This is why she rejected the conservative approach of her time. Conservatives often tried to defend capitalism on practical grounds or by appeal to tradition while accepting the moral premise of altruism—that the individual has a duty to live for others. Rand called that a fatal compromise. In “The Anatomy of Compromise,” she shows that when you try to mix a rational principle with an irrational one, the irrational always wins. You cannot have a little bit of socialism without eventually losing the foundation of freedom.

America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business

One of the most powerful essays in the collection is “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business.” Rand flips the usual narrative on its head. The productive genius is not the exploiter; he is the one being hamstrung by the looters and moochers who use the power of the state to seize what they did not create. Business people are treated as a scapegoat class in the same way other minorities have been treated under collectivist regimes. In Soviet Russia it was the bourgeoisie. In Nazi Germany it was the Jews. In America it is the successful businessman.

I see this hatred every day in the attacks on Trump, on Vivek Ramaswamy, on any rich person who made money by creating value rather than extracting it through politics. The radical left’s outrage is not about fairness. It is pure Marxist class warfare dressed up in modern language. Rand saw it clearly because she lived it. Her father lost his pharmacy when the Bolsheviks nationalized private businesses. She never forgot.

Solving World Hunger: Production, Not Politics

People still talk about solving world hunger as if it were a distribution problem that requires more government. That is backward. Pigs, chickens, and rabbits reproduce rapidly. There is no physical shortage of the capacity to produce food. Shortages are created by politics—by governments that micromanage, confiscate, and regulate the very people who would otherwise raise the animals and grow the crops.

If you want to end hunger, get as close as possible to pure capitalism. Remove the artificial constraints. Let people own property, keep their profits, and trade freely. The poor in the United States, even under our imperfect capitalism, are rich compared to most of the world. A few American dollars can still be a fortune to someone living under the policies that Rand warned against. The guilt that drives redistribution often comes from people who helped create the barriers to opportunity and then want to ease their conscience by confiscating more from the productive.

Greenspan on Gold and the Hard Reality of Theory

One of the most quoted essays in the book is Alan Greenspan’s “Gold and Economic Freedom,” written years before he became Federal Reserve chairman. He argued that gold and economic freedom are inseparable. The gold standard protects property rights by limiting the government’s ability to inflate away wealth through deficit spending. Without it, the welfare state can confiscate savings silently.

Greenspan later operated in a system far from that ideal. Theory is cleaner than practice when you face political realities, activist judges, and entrenched interests. That does not make the original argument wrong. It shows how hard it is to implement principle once the mixed economy has taken hold. We are still living with the consequences of easy money, quantitative easing, and the revolving door between the Fed and large asset managers. The warnings in that 1966 essay hold up.

True Monopolies, Railroads, and the Industrial Revolution

The collection also dismantles the usual antitrust myths. Free-market monopolies can only be maintained by superior efficiency and better service. Coercive monopolies require government intervention—subsidies, franchises, or legal barriers to entry. The history of American railroads is a clear example. Most of the transcontinental lines were built with government land grants and ended in financial chaos. James J. Hill’s Great Northern was built without federal subsidies and remained the only one that did not go bankrupt.

Robert Hessen’s essay on the effects of the Industrial Revolution on women and children is equally important. Child labor was not created by capitalism; it was inherited from a world of grinding poverty. Factories gave children a way to earn a living and survive to adulthood. Rising wealth created by capitalism eventually made child labor unnecessary. The laws usually get the credit; the production gets the blame.

Airwaves, Speech, and the Nature of Government

Rand’s essay on the property status of the airwaves is still relevant. The early chaos in radio was not a failure of free enterprise but a failure of government to recognize and protect property rights in frequencies. Instead of allowing private ownership and trade, the government declared the airwaves public property and nationalized them through licensing. That opened the door to political control of speech—the same impulse we still see whenever independent voices become inconvenient.

Ohio’s Choice and the Fight Ahead

All of this is not abstract philosophy. It is the framework for understanding the hatred directed at successful people in our own state. Vivek Ramaswamy is a rich man who built companies. That alone is enough for the radical left and their media allies to paint him as untrustworthy. The same pattern appears in the attacks on Trump. They do not hate wealth. They hate the independence that wealth can buy when it is earned rather than granted.

I have watched this for decades. The people who want a governor who has never had to make a payroll or risk his own capital are the same people who will expand the very controls that create shortages and dependency. Michael Ryan understands these issues at the county level. Senators like George Lang still talk about gold-backed approaches and business-friendly policy. We need more of them.

Rand was not interested in being practical in the usual sense. She was interested in being right on principle. She knew that a culture that accepts altruism as its moral code will eventually sacrifice the producers. She also believed that the potential for human progress under pure capitalism is limitless. The nineteenth century, when America came closest to the ideal, proved it.

I have read her books many times, along with the work of those who analyzed her. I agree with her on the essentials of capitalism even while I am more of a man of faith than she was. The philosophy can be taken further. But the fight is now. The books are still on the shelves at Barnes & Noble. You can get them quickly. Read Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Then look at the news with clearer eyes.

If you want to solve poverty and hunger, expand opportunity. More capitalism, not less. More people who understand how wealth is actually created. That is the only path that treats individuals as ends in themselves rather than means to someone else’s political vision.

Don’t give up the ship.

Footnotes

1. Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: New American Library, 1966; expanded 1967). Rand described the book as a nonfiction footnote to Atlas Shrugged.

2. Ayn Rand, “What Is Capitalism?” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

3. Ayn Rand, “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

4. Ayn Rand, “The Anatomy of Compromise,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

5. Alan Greenspan, “Gold and Economic Freedom,” originally published in The Objectivist (1966) and reprinted in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

6. Robert Hessen, “The Effects of the Industrial Revolution on Women and Children,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

7. Ayn Rand, “The Property Status of Airwaves,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

8. On James J. Hill and the Great Northern Railway, see Burton W. Folsom Jr. and related free-market historical accounts; the railroad is frequently cited in Objectivist literature as the counter-example to subsidized lines.

Bibliography

Rand, Ayn. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. With additional articles by Nathaniel Branden, Alan Greenspan, and Robert Hessen. New York: New American Library, 1966 (hardcover); expanded Signet paperback, 1967.

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957.

Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943.

Greenspan, Alan. “Gold and Economic Freedom.” The Objectivist, 1966.

Folsom, Burton W., Jr. Works on the “robber barons” myth and James J. Hill.

Additional recommended reading: Ayn Rand Lexicon entries on capitalism, business people, and the gold standard (aynrandlexicon.com); Ayn Rand Institute materials on laissez-faire.

Rich Hoffman

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Objectivism and the American Experiment: Why Ayn Rand Still Matters in an Age of Collective Delusion, and Why Peter Thiel is a tremendous asset to any civlization

Ayn Rand remains one of the most polarizing figures in modern philosophy and literature for a reason, a very healthy reason. A refugee from the Soviet Union who watched her father’s business seized and her family’s life reduced to poverty under collectivist rule, she arrived in the United States in 1926 carrying a clear-eyed hatred of any system that subordinates the individual mind to the group. She built an entire philosophical system—Objectivism—around the primacy of objective reality, the sovereignty of reason, and the moral right of the individual to live for his own sake. In an era when official culture insists that feelings can rewrite biology, that the state may confiscate the product of one person’s effort for another’s benefit, and that the individual is merely a unit in larger identity categories, her work is no longer a historical curiosity. It is a live confrontation with the day’s dominant premises.

Her novels and nonfiction supply an on-ramp that mainstream institutions will not provide. Anthem stands as one of the cleanest anti-communist fables ever written—a short, devastating portrait of a society that has erased the word “I.” The Fountainhead dramatizes the creator who refuses to subordinate his vision to the demands of the collective. Atlas Shrugged takes the logic further: the men of the mind withdraw, and the parasites who lived off their productivity discover they cannot run the world without them. These books still circulate because they name a conflict that never went away—the individual versus the collective—and because the collectivist side is once again confident enough to drop the mask. For those wanting to understand the news cycles of our day, the work of Ayn Rand will help you get your mind around it.

Metaphysics: Reality Is Not Optional

Objectivism begins with a blunt metaphysical claim: existence exists. The universe is what it is independent of anyone’s wishes, prayers, social consensus, or emotional needs. Rand called this the primacy of existence. A rock is a rock whether or not someone finds the fact inconvenient. Facts are not created by consciousness; consciousness is the faculty that perceives them.

This sounds like common sense until one watches contemporary culture try to legislate it out of existence. A man cannot become a woman by declaration. A biological male does not acquire the capacity to menstruate or gestate simply because he “identifies” as female. The insistence that subjective feeling overrides observable reality is precisely the mentality Rand spent decades attacking. She was not writing about the more exotic claims of quantum measurement or observer effects in controlled laboratory settings; she was defending the four-dimensional world human beings actually inhabit and must act within. When that world is treated as infinitely malleable by will or decree, the result is not liberation. It is catastrophe dressed up as compassion.

Epistemology: Reason as Absolute

If reality is objective, then knowledge of it must be acquired by specific means. Rand held that the senses are the only source of information about the world and that reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates that material. There is no separate channel of “intuition,” mystical insight, or divine revelation that can override sensory evidence and logical processing. A concept that cannot be traced back to the evidence of the senses and the operation of logic is not merely mistaken; it is cognitively empty.

This is why she was merciless toward modern philosophy’s retreat from the world, particularly the influence of Immanuel Kant. If reason is limited or if “things-in-themselves” are forever inaccessible, then the door opens to every form of subjectivism and collectivist claim. Rand’s position is severe, and it leaves little room for the non-rational. One can grant that human sensory equipment is limited and that deeper layers of physical reality may require instruments and theories beyond the five senses; that does not license treating feelings or group consensus as substitutes for evidence. In the domain of ordinary human action—law, economics, medicine, education—her insistence on reason remains the only reliable check against those who would rewrite reality by force of declaration.

Ethics: The Virtue of Selfishness

The transition from facts to values is the most contentious part of her system. David Hume’s old problem—how one derives an “ought” from an “is”—is met head-on. Rand argued that the concept of value only arises for living organisms. A rock has no values because nothing can benefit or harm it as a rock. A living entity must act to maintain its life. For a human being, whose mode of survival is conceptual and productive rather than instinctual, the good is that which sustains and advances life according to the requirements of a rational being. The evil is that which destroys it.

From this, she derived rational egoism: one’s own life is the proper standard of value, and the moral purpose of each individual is to achieve their own happiness through productive work and voluntary trade. This is not a license for whim, predation, or short-term gratification. The man who drinks himself to death is not selfish; he is destroying the only value he possesses. Rational self-interest requires long-range thinking, integrity, and the refusal to live as a parasite or to treat others as sacrificial animals.

Altruism, in her usage, is not simple kindness or voluntary charity. It is the moral doctrine that the individual has a duty to sacrifice himself to others and that the needs of the collective create a claim on the productive. She rejected that doctrine root and branch. Charity is permissible and often admirable when it is voluntary and does not rest on the premise that the recipient has a moral mortgage on the giver. The moment it becomes a duty enforced by the state or by social pressure, it ceases to be benevolence and becomes predation with a halo.

Politics: Capitalism as the Only Moral System

If individuals have the right to their own lives and the products of their efforts, then the only political system consistent with that right bans the initiation of physical force. Government’s legitimate functions shrink to the police (to protect against domestic force), the military (to protect against foreign force), and the courts (to adjudicate disputes under objective law). Everything else—roads, schools, welfare, industrial policy—belongs in the realm of private voluntary action.

Capitalism, in this view, is not merely the most efficient system; it is the only moral one, because it is the only system that treats individuals as ends in themselves and organizes society based on trade rather than sacrifice. Any government seizure of wealth for redistribution is a violation of the producer’s right to the product of his mind. Rand did not arrive at this conclusion in a vacuum. She had watched the Bolsheviks liquidate private property and reduce her family to near-starvation. When she looked at the New Deal and the expanding administrative state in her adopted country, she saw a slower, softer version of the same principle: the subordination of the individual to the collective will.

The Novels as Philosophical Weapons

The Fountainhead gave the world Howard Roark, the architect who would rather see his building destroyed than allow it to be compromised by second-handers and taste-makers. He is the archetype of the man who lives by his own judgment. Atlas Shrugged escalated the drama: the inventors, industrialists, and thinkers who carry the world on their shoulders stop. The result is not utopia for the remaining population; it is collapse. The book’s influence on entrepreneurs, Silicon Valley founders, and a certain strain of American political thought is well documented. Peter Thiel has been open about its impact. Figures in the current administration’s orbit have circulated it for years. In Ohio, legislators have been known to hand out copies as a quiet statement of first principles. My good friend Senator George Lang is one of them. And the hatred of Peter Thiel largely, and specifically, comes from his support of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, which the political left despises.

Critics have always been harsh. Whittaker Chambers’s famous National Review attack treated Atlas Shrugged as if it issued from a totalitarian loudspeaker—an irony given Rand’s lifelong hatred of totalitarianism. Academic philosophers such as Robert Nozick argued that even if one accepts life as the standard of value, the leap to absolute property rights and the rejection of any enforceable duty of aid is not logically compelled. The Objectivist movement itself developed a reputation for rigidity and a personality cult, culminating in the public break with Nathaniel Branden. These criticisms are not trivial. A philosophy that demands near-perfect consistency will always struggle with the messy, interdependent realities of actual human lives, including disability, bad luck, and the genuine goods that arise from voluntary community.

Yet the core insight survives the objections. The productive genius of a relative handful of individuals—Edison, the Wrights, the modern equivalents like Elon Musk building reusable rockets and energy systems—creates the surplus that lifts entire societies. When those individuals are treated as cash cows for the collective or as moral suspects simply because they succeed, the long-term result is not justice. It is stagnation. The question is not whether Elon Musk or any particular innovator is personally likable. The question is whether a society that systematically handicaps its highest producers in the name of equity ends up better or worse for the average person. The historical record of systems that tried the latter experiment is not ambiguous.

America at the Crossroads of Two Traditions

Walk out of certain offices in the Ohio Statehouse and the architecture itself poses the question. Greek columns, vaulted ceilings, classical proportions—the visual language of a republican experiment that began on the other side of the Mediterranean. At the same time, the conversations that spontaneously arise among the people who work there often turn to Scripture, to the Book of Judges, to the warning that a people who demand a king “like all the nations” will discover what concentrated power does to both ruler and ruled. The American founding drew from both streams: classical political forms and a biblical anthropology that understood the corruption of the human heart and the danger of centralized authority.

Rand, an atheist, had little patience for the religious side of that inheritance. Yet her central political claim—that the smallest minority is the individual, and that any ideology which subordinates the individual to the group is already on the road to tyranny—converges with the older biblical suspicion of collective power. The scapegoat mechanism, the demand that someone be sacrificed for the sins or the needs of the many, is ancient. Objectivism names it without theological language and refuses to grant it moral legitimacy.

The same refusal applies to the newer forms of collectivism on offer: the racial and sexual identity politics that treat individuals as avatars of groups, the economic redistribution that treats productive achievement as a social resource to be reallocated, and the cultural insistence that biological reality itself is a social construct. These are not progressive refinements. They are regressions to the oldest political temptation—the belief that the group can rewrite the terms of its members’ existence.

The Continuing Argument

Objectivism is not the last word in philosophy. No system is. Human thought did not end with Aristotle, or with Rand, or with any other figure. Quantum theory, the limits of sensory apparatus, and the persistent human hunger for meaning beyond the strictly material remain open questions. One can accept the primacy of existence and the necessity of reason for navigating the world of action, while still acknowledging that the full picture of reality may lie beyond the current toolkit. The political core, however, does not require omniscience. It requires only the recognition that individuals are not raw material for someone else’s vision of the good, and that a society which protects the right of the mind to function is the only kind that has ever generated sustained prosperity and personal freedom.

That is why the books keep circulating and why the arguments keep returning. In a moment when collectivist premises dominate major institutions and when the productive minority is once again treated as a problem to be managed, Rand’s insistence on the individual as the irreducible unit of moral and political life is not nostalgia. It is a necessary corrective. The American experiment has always been an argument about how much room to give the person who refuses to live as a cog. Objectivism is one of the clearest modern statements of the side that says the person comes first. The debate is not academic. It is the daily substance of politics, culture, and the question of what kind of country this remains.

Further reading is straightforward. Start with the novels for the emotional and dramatic force, then move to the nonfiction for the systematic case. The rest is the ongoing work of testing those ideas against the evidence of history and the requirements of a free society.

Footnotes

1. For biographical context and the formative impact of the Bolshevik Revolution on Rand’s thought, see her own accounts in We the Living (semi-autobiographical) and the biographical material in Letters of Ayn Rand, ed. Michael S. Berliner (New York: Dutton, 1995).

2. Ayn Rand, “The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” in Philosophy: Who Needs It (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1982); also “The Objectivist Ethics” in The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: New American Library, 1964).

3. Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, expanded 2nd ed., ed. Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff (New York: NAL Books, 1990).

4. Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” in The Virtue of Selfishness; the 1961 University of Wisconsin lecture is referenced in secondary literature and in Peikoff’s Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (New York: Dutton, 1991).

5. Ayn Rand, “What Is Capitalism?” and related essays in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: New American Library, 1966).

6. On the novel’s reception and influence, see Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Whittaker Chambers’s review appeared in National Review, December 28, 1957. Robert Nozick’s critique is “On the Randian Argument,” The Personalist 52 (1971).

Bibliography

Burns, Jennifer. Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Chambers, Whittaker. “Big Sister Is Watching You.” National Review, December 28, 1957.

Nozick, Robert. “On the Randian Argument.” The Personalist 52 (1971): 282–304.

Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. New York: Dutton, 1991.

Rand, Ayn. Anthem. Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1953 (orig. 1938).

———. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957.

———. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. New York: New American Library, 1966.

———. The Fountainhead. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943.

———. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Expanded 2nd ed. Edited by Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff. New York: NAL Books, 1990.

———. Philosophy: Who Needs It. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1982.

———. The Virtue of Selfishness. New York: New American Library, 1964.

———. We the Living. New York: Macmillan, 1936.

Rich Hoffman

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Why The Fountainhead Is Still the Most Important Novel in America: Why so many Americans now treat the producer as the problem and the parasite as the moral authority

I sit down most days and watch the news panels the same way many people do. Fox News, the War Room, the usual circuit. Smart people, serious people, many of them I respect. Steve Bannon and his guests especially. And yet I keep hearing the same stunned tone when they talk about the sudden popularity of socialism, the rise of candidates who openly flirt with Marxist language, the young people who treat Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as prophets. They act as if this is some new weather system that just blew in.

I have been talking about the same weather for decades. The adverse effects of collectivism on a free human culture are not a mystery to me. They destroy the individual while pretending to help the group. I have committed a large portion of my working life to saying so, in writing, on the air, and in private conversation. So when the panels discover it late, I find myself less angry than simply tired. The diagnosis has been available the entire time. It sits on the shelf as a single novel that most of them will not touch.

That novel is The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.

It is, without qualification, my favorite book. Not one of my favorites. The favorite. I have read it more times than I can cleanly count. I talked about it for years. I have carried its central argument into boardrooms, courtrooms, and conversations with my own grandchildren. When people ask me what single work of fiction best explains why so many Americans now treat the producer as the problem and the parasite as the moral authority, I do not hesitate. Read The Fountainhead. Then read it again.

Ayn Rand’s Escape from Communism and the American Novel That Resulted

Ayn Rand was a Russian refugee who escaped the Soviet system and came to America precisely because she wanted the opposite of what she had left. She watched the early years of the Bolshevik experiment up close. She understood, in her bones, what happens when the collective claims the right to own a man’s mind and the products of his mind. She wrote The Fountainhead as an artist, not as a political pamphlet, and the result is one of the clearest, most sustained examinations of the creator versus the second-hander that American literature has ever produced.

Howard Roark is an architect who will not compromise the integrity of his buildings. When the establishment forces mediocrity onto a housing project he designed, he dynamites the result rather than allow his work to stand as a diluted lie. That act is not teenage rebellion. It is the logical end of a man who treats his own mind as the final court of appeal. The courtroom speech that closes the book is, in my view, as powerful as John Galt’s radio address in Atlas Shrugged. It is pure intellectual dynamite. Roark explains, without apology, the difference between the man who lives by the work of his own mind and the man who lives by borrowing, begging, or looting the work of others.

Most people do not want to see themselves as second-handers. That is exactly why the book still stings.

Why Some Conservatives Keep Their Distance from Ayn Rand

I remain mystified that so many people on the right, including voices I otherwise admire, treat Rand as radioactive. Bannon and others have expressed open dislike. The explanation usually circles her atheism. She was an atheist. She never pretended otherwise. That fact has allowed generations of religious conservatives to dismiss the entire body of work rather than engage the actual argument about production, integrity, and the moral status of the individual.

I am a Bible guy. I read it constantly. I take Joshua seriously—the man who marches around Jericho because God said to, who trusts the order larger than himself even when the math looks insane. I also take the Grail quest seriously. Percival finds the castle only when he stops forcing the journey and rides with looser reins. Those stories are not in conflict with the best of what Rand saw. They deepen it.

The Tower of Babel story is often read as a simple warning against human pride. Rand would have celebrated the ambition itself. The real sin in that story is the unified collective that tries to storm heaven by consensus rather than by individual excellence. When a man’s personal vision actually lines up with the larger order—when he becomes the vehicle rather than a cog—the result looks a lot like Joshua’s conquest and a lot like Roark’s refusal to bend. The difference is the source of the certainty. One man says “God told me.” The other says “I will not pretend.” Both refuse the noise of the crowd.

I live closer to Joshua’s path in daily practice. I want the commitment of marriage, the long obedience in the same direction, the willingness to enjoy the life God actually gave me rather than treat every compromise as spiritual death. But I understand what Roark was protecting. The forces that tried to break him are the same forces the Bible warns about under different names—the ones that pull a man away from the work he was made to do. Uncompromising clarity in the face of that noise is a form of spiritual discipline, whether the author acknowledged it or not.

Creators Versus Parasites and Why We Have So Few Edisons

The central question of The Fountainhead is simple and uncomfortable: are you creating, or are you feeding off someone else’s creation? Most people never ask it of themselves. Committees do not invent the light bulb. Consensus does not produce the theory of relativity. Those things come from individuals who refuse to bend.

My daughter recently took my grandson to Thomas Edison’s boyhood home in Milan, Ohio, for exactly that reason. I am not trying to manufacture another Edison. I want him to see that there are alternatives to the box the culture keeps trying to sell. Edison woke up every day trying to be a fountainhead. He made mistakes—plenty of them—but the posture was unmistakable. The same posture explains why an Elon Musk can exist in America and why a Jack Ma eventually runs into the wall in a more collective system. The culture that still has room for the uncompromising creator is the culture that keeps producing them. The culture that treats that spirit as a threat eventually smothers it.

Hollywood’s Long War Against the Fountainhead Spirit

The resistance is not abstract. Zack Snyder, the director of 300 and a string of visually ambitious films, has spent years trying to adapt The Fountainhead. Studios treat the material as radioactive. He has said publicly that the book is considered “taboo” among the people who green-light projects. The same pattern appeared with the low-budget Atlas Shrugged trilogy made between 2011 and 2014. Funding was scraped together in pieces. Actors who appeared in it paid a quiet professional price. The collective does not need to ban the book. It only needs to make sure no one with real resources is allowed to put the story on a large screen without punishment.

Clint Eastwood understood the same energy. He carried versions of it through Dirty Harry, the preacher in Pale Rider, Frank Morris in Escape from Alcatraz, and the driven director in White Hunter Black Heart. In the 1980s, when he was still fighting for the kind of films he wanted to make, those characters walked through the frame like men who would rather dynamite the building than let the second-handers own the final cut. White Hunter Black Heart feels, to me, like Eastwood’s private reckoning with the cost of that stance. He played the uncompromising artist for most of the running time and then, at the end, allowed the character a moment of regret. After that film, the pure Roark energy largely left his work. Age and the system both take their toll.

Even Walt Disney once understood. In the American Adventure pavilion at Epcot, there is a quote set into the wall: “Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.” It is Ayn Rand’s line. I have stood in front of it with my grandchildren and told them it is one of the most important things in the entire park. Modern operators tend to cover it with seasonal decorations or other displays. The plaque is still there. The spirit that put it there is harder to find.

Trump, the Ballroom, and the Same Old Courtroom Drama

I recently walked through the construction site of the new White House ballroom with my wife. We were invited. What is rising out of that hole in the ground is a clear, large-scale vision. The resistance to it has been immediate and predictable: you did not get our approval, the process was not followed, the collective must control the final shape. It is the same drama Roark faced, only now the building is the people’s house and the second-handers wear different titles. Trump has said publicly that The Fountainhead relates to business, beauty, life, and inner emotions—that it relates to everything. The comparison is not perfect, and pure Objectivists often bristle at it, but the pattern of an uncompromising builder meeting institutional resistance is hard to miss.

Robert Kincaid, the Bridges of Madison County, and the Quiet Hunger for the Fountainhead Life

Robert James Waller’s The Bridges of Madison County sold in enormous numbers for a reason that had very little to do with the affair itself. Robert Kincaid is a roaming photographer who lives by his own vision in a landscape that offers almost nothing to support it. Francesca sees, for a few days, what it looks like to be the vehicle rather than another wheel on someone else’s ride. Most people settle for the comfortable, arranged path—the prom-king marriage, the nice house, the pool—and then spend the rest of their lives wondering why the castle never appears. The book worked because American readers still recognize the difference even if they no longer have the language for it.

What I Tell My Grandchildren and Why Independent Media Matters

When I take the grandchildren to Epcot or to Edison’s house or talk to them at the kitchen table, I am not trying to turn them into little Objectivists. I am trying to show them that they do not have to be cogs. They can be the vehicle. That requires a certain rebelliousness against the noise of the culture. It requires the willingness to trust a larger order while still showing up with full intensity, the way Joshua did and the way Percival finally learned to do. The plaque on the wall, the boyhood home of an inventor, the courtroom speech at the end of a long novel—these are seeds. They may not bloom for years. When the world starts testing them, I want the memory of their grandfather getting excited about a simple line of text to be one of the things that makes them stop and think there might be another way to live.

Independent media is the slow trickle that keeps these ideas alive when the big networks and the entertainment unions will not touch them. I do this work for that reason. The Tea Party years showed that people will reach for Rand when they are hungry for an explanation of what is happening to them. The hunger has not gone away. It has only been driven underground by the same second-hand mechanisms the books describe.

Read the Book. Then Read It Again.

The Fountainhead is not a new religion. Treating it that way is one of the fastest ways to miss the point. It is a work of art that dramatizes a permanent conflict: the man who creates versus the man who lives second-hand. It is a big book. It is demanding. It does not flatter. That is precisely why it remains useful, even as television panels are still trying to figure out why socialist language keeps gaining ground among the young.

I have the advantage of having watched the cultural impact of these ideas across decades—what worked, what failed, where the atheism limited Rand’s own reach, and where the moral clarity she captured still cuts through every fashionable excuse. The Bible, the Grail stories, Edison’s stubbornness, Eastwood’s best characters, the quiet rebellion of a man who refuses to hand his voice to a committee—all of it belongs in the same conversation. Rand never fully arrived at the larger synthesis. That does not make the novel less valuable. It makes the rest of us responsible for finishing the thought.

If you have never read it, get it. If you read it once and bounced off the characters or the length, try again. The courtroom speech alone is worth the price of admission. Then look around at the news, at the schools, at the institutions that keep trying to turn creators into employees of the collective, and ask yourself the question Roark never stopped asking: are you the fountainhead, or are you content to be another wheel?

I know which side I am on. I have known it for a long time. The work continues.

Footnotes

1. Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943). The novel has sold more than ten million copies and remains in continuous print.

2. For Rand’s early life and escape from Soviet Russia, see Anne C. Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She Made (New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2009).

3. The quote appears in the rotunda of the American Adventure pavilion at Epcot. Multiple visitor accounts and Disney historians confirm its presence; seasonal overlays have at times obscured individual plaques.

4. Zack Snyder has discussed his unproduced Fountainhead adaptation in interviews, including on the Joe Rogan Experience (2024), describing industry resistance to the material as “taboo.”

5. The Atlas Shrugged film trilogy (2011–2014) was produced independently on limited budgets after repeated failures to secure traditional Hollywood financing.

6. Clint Eastwood’s interest in Rand’s work and the Roark-like qualities of several of his characters are documented in contemporary profiles and in the production history of White Hunter Black Heart (1990).

7. Donald Trump’s public comments on The Fountainhead appear in a 2016 interview with Kirsten Powers for USA Today.

8. Thomas Edison Birthplace Museum, Milan, Ohio; National Historic Landmark.

9. Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County (New York: Warner Books, 1992).

10. On the broader cultural reception of Rand among conservatives and the persistent tension with her atheism, see Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Selected Bibliography

Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943.

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957.

Rand, Ayn. Anthem. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1966 (orig. 1938).

Heller, Anne C. Ayn Rand and the World She Made. New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2009.

Burns, Jennifer. Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

The Holy Bible, various translations (particularly the Book of Joshua and accounts of the Tower of Babel).

Chrétien de Troyes and later Grail romances (Percival tradition).

Waller, Robert James. The Bridges of Madison County. New York: Warner Books, 1992.

Viertel, Peter. White Hunter, Black Heart. New York: Doubleday, 1953 (basis for the 1990 film).

Eastwood, Clint, dir. White Hunter Black Heart. Warner Bros., 1990.

Eastwood, Clint, dir. Pale Rider. Warner Bros., 1985.

Eastwood, Clint, dir. Escape from Alcatraz. Paramount, 1979.

Snyder, Zack (unproduced adaptation notes and public statements on The Fountainhead).

Edison Birthplace Museum archival materials, Milan, Ohio.

Disney historical accounts of the American Adventure pavilion, Epcot.

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven (forthcoming).

Rich Hoffman

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The American Novelist Ayn Rand: Understanding the rise of socialism in America

I have been saying this for years: ten years ago, twenty years ago, back when I was doing radio shows and walking people through Cleon Skousen’s The Naked Communist and the larger body of work that showed how the communist movement as a philosophy had already impregnated itself into American society. Most people did not want to talk about it then. They treated the subject like an embarrassment or a relic of the Cold War that had been safely buried. I wrote books of my own, put them out there, and kept advocating for capitalism because that is the actual economic engine of the United States. When we talk about America being so great, so wonderful, and we almost seem to have an insecure need to remind ourselves of it all the time, it is because we have been under sustained assault by forces that prefer a corporate form of socialism, and that assault has been aggressive for a very long time. It is a real problem, and the evidence is now sitting in plain sight.

What surprises me is how many people in the Fox News orbit, and in broader conservative media, act as if the sudden visibility of socialism and communism is some brand-new development. The same people who shrugged when I raised the issue years ago now look startled. Bernie Sanders was never an outlier; he was a representative of a current that had been moving on the left for decades. When Democrats start losing ground, you see figures like that gain oxygen, and you see cities and states that have voted blue for generations produce the logical results. New England has been practicing a softer version of this for a long time. New York is not an aberration. The kids running around calling themselves socialists did not invent the ideology in a vacuum. They were taught it. Public schools have been delivering pieces of that curriculum for years, and the culture has rewarded the language of grievance and redistribution. I warned about it. A lot of us did. Now the bill is coming due, and the people who once treated the warning as overheated are suddenly discovering that the problem did not simply disappear.

I like a lot of people in the broader movement. I like Steve Bannon a great deal. The way he has been treated, the jail time, the selective enforcement, the institutional effort to sideline him, has been corrupt and ugly. He has done important work with War Room and with the larger project of forcing attention onto the administrative state and the global arrangements that treat national sovereignty as an inconvenience. He made films, including serving as an executive producer on Julie Taymor’s Titus with Anthony Hopkins, a brutal and faithful take on Shakespeare’s bloodiest play, which is my favorite. That alone tells you something about the range of the man. He has operated inside the Hollywood sandbox for stretches of his career, raised money, dealt with the people who control distribution and narrative, and still tried to produce work that cut against the grain. The question I keep asking is whether you can play in that sandbox for years and come out entirely your own person. I have my doubts. The incentives are powerful. High-level politics and high-level media are environments where you sit around tables with people who do not share the same level of conviction about the productive core of the American experiment. You learn to speak in codes, to manage coalitions, to keep certain doors open. That is the nature of the work. It does not make the man worthless. It does mean the purity of the original impulse gets tested every single day.

What I cannot square is the apparent distaste for Ayn Rand. I have heard him talk about her work in ways that treat it as naïve, or as a kind of Wall Street cartoon of capitalism that turns people into commodities. He has distinguished that vision and what he calls the enlightened capitalism of the Judeo-Christian West. Fair enough as a philosophical difference. Rand was an atheist. She had a complicated personal life. She was more of a pure libertarian than a conservative in the traditional sense, and I am not a big libertarian myself. Yet the core of what she put on the page remains one of the clearest fictional diagnoses of the looter mentality that I have ever read, and it is bizarre to me that someone who understands the value of money, who has operated in finance, who drives people toward serious books, and who has spent years criticizing the Federal Reserve and the soft corruption of the system would keep her at arm’s length. Atlas Shrugged ranked as the second most frequently cited book after the Bible in a Library of Congress and Book-of-the-Month Club survey of works that shaped American lives. That is not a small data point. The novel is a sustained argument about what happens when the people who actually create value decide they will no longer carry the people who only know how to take it.

Rand fled the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks confiscated her father’s pharmacy. She watched a functioning commercial order get smashed in the name of the collective, and she never got over it. That hatred of the communist method runs through everything she wrote. The Fountainhead came first, in 1943, and it is my favorite of her novels. Howard Roark is the architect who will not let his designs be diluted by committees and second-rate talents who want to ride his talent without earning it. There is a scene where he is invited to join an advisory board for a kind of world’s fair project, and he refuses. He will not lend his name and his mind so that lesser people can loot the prestige. Some readers find that extreme. In ordinary politics it is often impractical. George Lang and I have talked about this more than once. In a majority party you have to work with people whose instincts are not identical to yours if you want votes to move in a productive direction. Absolute purity can become a form of vanity. At the same time, Rand is right that there is a difference between tactical compromise with imperfect allies and the slow acceptance of actively evil principles. You cannot split the difference with people whose operating premise is that your productivity exists to be harvested. Roark’s refusal is a dramatic statement of that boundary. I see versions of it in the best of Trump’s refusal to play the expected game. I see versions of it in anyone who has built something real and then watched the administrative class try to regulate, tax, or shame it into submission.

Atlas Shrugged is the larger canvas. John Galt and the producers withdraw. They stop supplying the energy, the invention, the organizational talent that keeps the lights on. The looters are left with the machinery and no one who knows how to run it. The book is long, sometimes didactic, and unapologetic about the creator’s moral superiority over the expropriator. It is not a happy story. It is a warning written by someone who had witnessed the real thing in Russia and recognized the same intellectual currents moving through American universities and policy circles in the middle of the twentieth century. When the Tea Party erupted in 2009 and 2010, the novel found a new audience. “Who is John Galt?” showed up on signs. Sales spiked. People who had never read a word of Objectivist philosophy suddenly recognized the emotional truth of the strike. Hollywood had no interest in touching the material with any seriousness. The independent film trilogy that eventually appeared was made outside the studio system, with rotating casts, limited budgets, and the predictable critical hostility. Unions and the usual cultural gatekeepers treated the project as radioactive. Clint Eastwood and others circled The Fountainhead for years without ever getting a serious production off the ground. The resistance was not mysterious. The books argue that the people who make things have a moral right to the value they create, and that the people who only know how to consume or commandeer that value are not victims but predators. That message does not sit well with an industry and an academic class that has spent decades teaching the opposite.

I do not swallow every piece of Rand’s personal philosophy. She was extreme. The childhood wound of watching her father’s standing and property taken never fully healed, and it shows in the absolute tone of the later work. I am a Christian. I believe in family obligations that go beyond the pure calculation of self-interest. I do not think every social coordination is looting. But the central distinction she draws between producers and looters is still the cleanest language I have found for what is happening in large parts of American institutional life. Pirates board a ship, kill or maroon the people who built and sailed it, and then congratulate themselves on the redistribution of the cargo. Corporate raiders in the political sense do a slower version of the same thing. They capture the regulatory apparatus, the tax code, the university, the HR department, the foundation, and they extract. They call it equity, sustainability, or the common good. The result is the same: the people who know how to build eventually decide the game is no longer worth playing on those terms.

That is why the party culture matters more than most people want to admit. I watched the new Spider-Man film, No Way Home, and there is a scene where Peter Parker walks into an apartment full of people in their twenties. Beers are being handed around without ceremony. There is no real threshold, no sense that anyone is required to bring anything other than their presence and willingness to dissolve into the group. It is presented as normal, even warm. I have never liked that atmosphere. I married young and stepped out of it early. I do not romanticize the college or post-college party as some necessary rite of passage. Rand saw the same pattern in the Soviet and post-Soviet cultural residue and in the Western imitation of it: the deliberate lowering of standards, the free-love rhetoric that treats self-possession as bourgeois repression, the pressure to surrender individual judgment to the warmth of the crowd. The 1960s did not invent the impulse, but they industrialized it in the West. Once you train a generation to find identity in collective release rather than in the disciplined creation of value, you have prepared the ground for the political language of socialism. The kid who learns that adulthood begins by getting drunk and losing himself in a game or at a party is not being prepared to be a producer. He is being prepared for management.

I am not Howard Roark. I am not prepared to dynamite the building rather than see it compromised. Politics requires more patience and more willingness to persuade than pure fiction allows. But I have learned to recognize the looter pattern early, and when I see it taking over an enterprise I tend to check out. Not with terrorism, not by vanishing into a Colorado valley, but by refusing to keep pouring effort into a structure that has already decided my contribution is collective property. My own book Tail of the Dragon was, among other things, an effort to work through the same themes of self-initiation and refusal to be pulled under by people who only know how to take. Readers who have lived the problem recognized it.

If I were twenty-five again, or just out of college, or interning for some member of Congress on the Hill with more time than obligations, I know exactly how I would spend it. I would get a Library of Congress reader card, which is free and available across the hall from the main reading room, and I would go into that magnificent space every day, with its gold ceiling and its quiet gravity. I would take Atlas Shrugged or, better, start with The Fountainhead, and I would read for an hour or two. The tunnels that run under the street connect the Capitol complex, the Court, and the Library, so the people who work there never have to step outside into the city’s ordinary weather. It is a physical expression of the idea that the serious business of the republic is intellectual before it is anything else. Steve Bannon lives essentially next door to that world. The proximity is not accidental. The same few blocks contain the Supreme Court, the Library, and the offices where the daily compromises of legislation are hammered out. It is the most concentrated expression of American institutional ambition I know. I would use it. I would also walk over to the Supreme Court cafeteria when I needed a break. The building itself is a statement that law is supposed to be something higher than the temporary majority. Spending months in that environment with Rand’s novels would do more for a young person’s understanding of the current crisis than any number of seminars on equity.

I did my own version of that education later at night, after second-shift work, at Perkins, Denny’s, and Waffle House between midnight and four in the morning, reading until it was time to go back on the clock—hundreds of books. The habit of sitting alone with a serious text and refusing the easy company of the moment is how you build the internal resources that later let you recognize a looter when he smiles and calls himself your partner. The same impulse took my family to Put-in-Bay just a few weeks ago. Sometimes you need an island, a stretch of water, a temporary removal from the people who treat your energy as an open account. It is not Atlantis. It is just a necessary interval of clarity.

The novels are fiction. They are also more accurate in their portrayal of the moral psychology of redistribution than most of the nonfiction assigned in schools. Socialism is not a discovery. It is the oldest temptation in political life: the belief that the people who did not build the thing have a superior claim on it because there are more of them, or because they feel more strongly, or because history is said to be moving in their direction. Rand had watched that claim enforced with guns in Russia. She wrote the American version of the warning. You do not have to accept her atheism or her more extreme personal conclusions to see that the warning still applies. The engine of the world is not the committee. It is not the hashtag. It is not the person who has learned to speak the language of the oppressed while living off the productivity of others. The engine is the individual mind that looks at raw material and sees a railroad, a new alloy, a better way to generate power, a story worth telling, and then does the long, unglamorous work of making it real.

That is what is under assault. That is why the old books keep finding new readers whenever the political temperature rises. And that is why I keep returning to them even when people I otherwise respect prefer to keep their distance. The argument is not finished. The strike is not over. The only question is how many people still remember what it means to refuse to be looted.

Notes

1. W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Communist (Salt Lake City: Ensign Publishing, 1958; multiple later editions). Skousen, a former FBI agent, distilled Marxist theory and operational history into a widely circulated Cold War text that sold nearly two million copies.

2. On the 1991 Library of Congress / Book-of-the-Month Club survey ranking Atlas Shrugged second only to the Bible among books that most influenced respondents’ lives, see Los Angeles Times, “Bible Ranks 1 of Books That Changed Lives,” December 2, 1991; and subsequent discussions in libertarian and Objectivist literature.

3. Steve Bannon’s critical distinction between Randian capitalism and “enlightened capitalism of the Judeo-Christian West” appears in reporting from his 2014 remarks and later analyses, including Ralph Benko, “Ayn Rand’s Ghost Does Not Haunt The Trump Administration,” Forbes, December 18, 2016, and Wikipedia’s summary of Bannon’s economic nationalism.

4. Bannon’s role as executive producer on Titus (1999, dir. Julie Taymor) is documented in contemporary Variety coverage and later profiles, including The Paris Review, “Steve Bannon’s Obsession with Shakespeare’s Goriest Play,” November 29, 2016.

5. Ayn Rand’s family background and the confiscation of her father’s business after the Bolshevik Revolution are standard biographical facts; see Anne C. Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She Made (New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2009), and Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand (New York: Doubleday, 1986).

6. Sales surge and cultural visibility of Atlas Shrugged during the Tea Party period (2009–2010) are recorded in contemporary publishing data and reporting; “Who is John Galt?” signage became a common visual marker at rallies.

7. The independent Atlas Shrugged film trilogy (2011, 2012, 2014) was produced outside the major studio system after decades of unsuccessful Hollywood development efforts. Critical and commercial reception was poor; the producers widely noted union and cultural resistance.

8. Rand’s major fiction: Anthem (1938), The Fountainhead (1943), Atlas Shrugged (1957). Nonfiction collections include For the New Intellectual (1961) and The Virtue of Selfishness (1964).

9. Parallel readings of Atlas Shrugged and the original Star Wars (1977) as narratives of resistance to oppressive systems are interpretive; George Lucas has not affirmed direct influence, though readers of both frequently observe the thematic overlap with individual agency versus bureaucratic or imperial control.

10. Personal observations on party culture, the Spider-Man: No Way Home apartment scene, and the Put-in-Bay interval are drawn from direct experience and recent family travel.

Bibliography

Branden, Barbara. The Passion of Ayn Rand. New York: Doubleday, 1986.

Burns, Jennifer. Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Heller, Anne C. Ayn Rand and the World She Made. New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2009.

Hoffman, Rich. Tail of the Dragon. [Publisher details per author’s edition].

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. [Publisher details per author’s edition].

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Manuscript in final preparation, targeted 2027.

Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. New York: Dutton, 1991.

Rand, Ayn. Anthem. London: Cassell, 1938; various later editions.

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957.

Rand, Ayn. For the New Intellectual. New York: Random House, 1961.

Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943.

Rand, Ayn. The Virtue of Selfishness. New York: New American Library, 1964.

Skousen, W. Cleon. The Naked Communist. Salt Lake City: Ensign Publishing, 1958; subsequent editions.

Shakespeare, William. Titus Andronicus. Multiple scholarly editions; film adaptation Titus (1999), dir: Julie Taymor, executive produced in part by Stephen K. Bannon.

Additional context on the Tea Party’s reception of Rand, Hollywood’s development history of the novels, and Bannon’s public economic commentary may be found in contemporary reporting from Forbes, The New York Times, Variety, and Objectivist periodicals such as The Objective Standard and New Ideal. For the Library of Congress survey, see the 1991 Book-of-the-Month Club / Center for the Book results as reported in the Los Angeles Times and subsequent secondary literature. Primary Marxist and progressive texts that form the intellectual background against which Rand wrote remain essential contrasting reading: Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto; and selected works of the American progressive and New Left traditions.

Rich Hoffman

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A Warning for Trump: Be careful of the bootlickers and losers

This is the hard part, with the honeymoon essentially over, the Trump administration has to watch that it doesn’t lose its edge. I’m not particularly worried about it, but it’s something Trump will have to be careful about because when it comes to deal-making, he loves doing it certainly more than the political process. And we’re talking about falling in love with the people you negotiate with, like China, like Russia, Syria, Saudi Arabia, where people pander to him, massage his ego, and then slip the Shakespearian knife in Trump’s back when they think he’s not looking. The bad guys in the world have no choice but to appease Trump. That is the case usually with my “gunfighter at the bar with his back-to-the-room” metaphor that I always talk about. The enemy does not seek to kill valuable people if they think they can use them first, which is perfectly true with Trump and his natural ability to get leverage in just about any situation. But it is because of this tendency that Bill Gates and Dr. Fauci lied straight to Trump’s face about COVID during the last administration, the Fed practiced Modern Monetary Theory with Larry Fink as their distribution center right under the nose of Trump. This is the point in the story where the appeasers appease, and the suckers bite on the sweet candy and sicken themselves forever. And Trump, if he wants to do well in this term and achieve all the things that are possible, has to be cautious about his nature. “If you can’t beat them, join them,” is what the enemy is saying. And adding, “then beat them when you have their trust by a last-minute betrayal.” Trump has to resist falling in love with the bad guys under the pretense of compassion because the villainy they are capable of is far worse than his nature understands. At heart, he has developed into a great negotiator by understanding how to read a room and its people. And he generally does like people. And the only defense that bad people have against such a person is to appeal to his good nature to keep him from destroying them. And many of them need to be destroyed.

The caution comes from Pam Bondi at the DOJ, the handling of the Epstein files, and the public expectation that people will go to jail. And James O’Keefe and Laura Loomer have been reporting that there are not so forthcoming reports on other elements, such as video of sexual exploitation of children involved in the Epstein Island personalities. And when you play in the sandbox that Trump plays in, and Pam Bondi, it is likely that people you know are on that Epstein list, and the pain and betrayal of that can be pretty harsh. This is the difference between campaigning and doing. It is easy to talk about something, but not so easy to do it. Ultimately, I think Trump will follow through on the challenges before him. However, in trying to deal with people and salvage relationships, especially in the Middle East, sometimes his love of making friends is more than destroying an enemy, and it will be used against him. We’re dealing with some evil people who must be dealt with harshly. It’s what people expect and don’t necessarily want to make a deal with bad people, even if it doesn’t strengthen the American position in the world. And Trump is going to have to fight through that carefully. The best way to preserve Trump’s legacy is with America First and easy wins on the scoreboard. We have the midterms coming up soon, and if Trump wants more than just a couple of years of cosmetic cooperation, he needs to put some bad guys in jail.

The judicial problem I thought was very well explained recently by Matt Gaetz on the WarRoom. To become a judge in America, you have to jump through many hoops, belong to many clubs, and prove yourself to be a good caretaker of the BAR Association, which has shown to be very progressive and radical. I have often pointed out, especially among older judges, their relationship to Freemasonry as a problem because of their commitment to altruism, which, for fans of Ayn Rand, is a deadly word in a productive society. We elect Presidents, congresspeople, senators, all kinds of positions, but the hold outs to the MAGA agenda are these legal people who are connected to deep and malicious finance, and they do think they can appease the beast in Trump just long enough to crush him when his back is turned and that’s where we are. People who survive the barriers to the judicial profession only do so by jumping through hoops of social formation that is truly devastating to the perpetuation of a productive, sovereign country, and that is what Trump is up against. Appeasing them with kindness and good deals won’t stop the villainy of their nocturnal deeds, and their oaths to the corruptive nature of mass collectivism, through the sacrifice of self, for the benefit of others. Many judicial types see their role in life as stopping materialists like Trump with everything they have in their very souls. And there is no way to make friends and bring them to your side. They have to be destroyed, and if they are on video doing nasty things with little kids on Epstein Island, they need to be torn to shreds in front of the public spectacularly because it’s what people want in our Representative Republic.

Glenn Beck ran the numbers recently through AI on the possible ways the American economy survives. And let me say that I think most of them are wrong. I am very optimistic about the future of America and our economy. But we must listen to caution and do good things with the information. However, those AI programs don’t have many scenarios where the American dollar will survive an economic collapse in the world by 2030. And I know that’s where Trump’s heart is. There is a good chance that the AI programs can’t see yet, because it’s more intuitive than practical, that America will lead the world in a capitalist revolution that will improve things for everyone. But many bad people will gladly throw themselves in front of that train, and we have to have the guts to run them over. Because those people have the wrong ideas about existence, there is no way to reform them. And it’s through that kind of ruthlessness that America survives and thrives. But there will be a lot of casualties, and some of them will be friends. And it will be painful. And there is no way to negotiate away the pain. And not fall in love with the office of the Presidency because the ceremonial routine is filled with appeasers trying to massage Trump’s ego, just long enough to outlast him. Don’t ever lose your edge because the edge that matters is in the knife they are trying to stick in Trump’s back when they think he’ll turn his back just long enough because it’s the only move they have. Be recklessly cautious.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Secret of Hiram Abiff: Sacrifice is not the highest form of self and for over 5 million years, humans have had it wrong

People have an ancient need, most people do, to belong. They need to feel attached to other people, which is likely the case for the last 5 million years of human evolution. Likely, it goes back much further than that, and if we dig deep enough in the earth and the mounds of antiquity, we would discover the limits of our carbon dating method in that it can only give us results for items that don’t decay away into nothing within a few thousand years. And that the evidence for the Vico Cycle elements of human existence has been shed off the Earth’s back many times. The evidence of this history is physical, and it’s so disturbing to institutional knowledge that it rocks the foundations of human belief systems so it has emerged underground to those who want to think of themselves as only the wisest to see it, and that personalities like Pythagoras and Hermes were the carriers of this ancient knowledge from the mystery schools where the initiates were given this vast knowledge to be carried like bricks of a wall into the tapestry of human purpose and existence, which leads to all the conspiracy theories of Freemasonry and the happenings that go on in Masonic lodges. I happen to know a lot of masons, master masons, and the type, and I am what many would call an expert on the occult. That’s not something that they give you college degrees for; it’s only something you can acquire by reading vast amounts of very esoteric material. But I am not a Mason. I have been offered to be. Just as saying that I’m an expert at the occult doesn’t mean that I’m sacrificing chickens to some demon god from beyond time and space. I would argue that they are all wrong in what their application to life is and has been, and my opinions are very much alone in this regard. So I’m willing to argue the merits, but I understand the need, and in saying that, I understand why there is so much anger and fear over the Trump presidency.

When I say that human existence has evolved over millions of years, I say that because it would have taken at least that long to develop the religion of astrology and to calculate all the math that has emerged into the mystery schools for which Egyptian society was built, and even Jewish, Greek and Roman society. There is a lot of talk about the necessity for numbers that are hidden in the text of the Bible for instance that point back to the alignment of the planets and how long it takes to develop a thought process of observing the powers of an all knowing God through the placement of stars in the sky so that a belief system can emerge. This is also why there is so much terror over humans traveling to Mars, because the night sky will be different there, and many of the astrology mystery schools that have emerged from what Masons believe to be Atlantean origins for all life on Earth will mean completely different things in a Mars night sky. So these mystery schools are very timid about modern society, and they see it as a vast evil because it’s selfish and materialistic, and that the point of Freemasonry is to give up all those things and to die of the self, and be initiated into the whole, the root cause of mankind’s actual failure, the need to belong to others and to limit themselves to a collective whole. It is in that statement that subconsciously, we see Freemasonry as evil and corrosive, while they see altruism and giving up oneself as the ultimate merit of a life well lived. To live for others, not to ever utter that others might not be worth living for.

Most of the heroes of these mystery schools have never outgrown the need for sacrifice and appeasement to the ultimate forces we call God in the universe. And back to the occult worship, I study why they want to be occultists, I would never seek the help of supernatural aid to achieve something I want to do in the world, which is what all forms of sacrifice are, the sacrifice of life to a God and hoping that the god will grant some wish to the person doing the sacrifice, it’s an immature desire to appease the master parent of life that people never grow out of as children. Children want to appease their parents, whom, when they are little, see as very strong and bigger than they are. So too are adults and their occult gods. The need to sacrifice to them is of the same mentality. But slowly, humanity has outgrown that desire, and what is happening with the Trump presidency is quite an extraordinary transition. It’s a kind of “Who is John Galt” approach to the ancient mystery schools of yielding to the forces that need to be sacrificed to, which for Freemasonry is the point of their existence, represented in the architect of King Solomon’s Temple, Hiram Abiff. In Freemasonry, initiates learn about the murder of the Temple’s architect on the steps of rising knowledge and wisdom within the Temple by three ruffians who demanded to know the secret of the order. But Hiram refuses, so he is killed over it, where Freemasonry sees this as a highly moral act of defiance to the materialistic forces of heathen behavior. The ultimate secret that Hiram died for in refusing to disclose about the masonic order is that altruism is the highest form of life for which all should live and sacrifice to.

Like the John Galt character from the famous book Atlas Shrugged, President Trump is a materialist who has dedicated himself to American capitalism and its advancement as a moral obligation. Many Freemasons lean toward socialism, but because of the nature of their belief systems, there is a struggle. Most of their heroes, like Pythagoras, were killed by aggressors, which points to the problem of the psychology of the belief systems at their heart. Socrates was killed. Jesus was killed much like Pythagoras, at the hands of the mobs and political elements of their times, so for people of those mystery school orders, those are necessary sacrifices that must be made to live a good life, and not to fear it. Give back to people while you still can and die to the nature of the self. At the same time, Trump expresses living a good self that spills over through the power of positive thinking, encouraging others to live better for themselves for the sake of themselves. And when an assassin’s bullet failed to land in Trump’s head, killing him, this rocked the subconscious of more than 5 million years of mystery school thinking, which has been wrong from the beginning. So the universe is pretty upset that Trump is president. And its acolytes, as well, are not happy that sacrifice is losing its power over human existence. And this has been the cause of the many Vico Cycle failures of civilization throughout that duration, even the fall of Atlantis, as the Greeks told the story, ending in corruption and sorcery well before the island continent sank under the Atlantic Ocean. Their civilization was dead long before that happened, and they took their poison with them to the far reaches of the earth to start new civilizations that we now dig up and see their ancient ruins. But in the scheme of things, they are just recent events compared to the long struggle to grapple with them. But for the first time, sacrifice isn’t the core belief system. Instead, productivity is what has rocked the foundations of every collectivist organization that ever existed. And they are very terrified of that emergence.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Blood Cult of Baal: Destroying the Deep State demand for sacrifice

Since it is the most obvious topic in the world, and I have had to talk about it related to several local cases, many people have approached me wanting some kind of class on the conspiracies that most affect us, and why they are important. And unfortunately, either consciously or unconsciously, most people participate because of their need for group behavior. It’s a problem that has been with us since the beginning of time. The keys to this problem are outlined especially in the Bible, which I’ve had a relationship with for over 50 years. And I’ve read it many, many times. Then, as our times demand, because it’s the main topic of our everyday news, I constantly refer to one key aspect that reminds me of the supporting text of one of my favorite passages, Psalms 82. Now, I have known people who would consider themselves biblical scholars and make their livings interpreting the Bible, and my take on the purpose of the Bible is entirely different. I think all the churches and almost every person get the interpretations of the Bible wrong, the point of the plot. All the Abrahamic religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, have, to my mind, interpreted everything incorrectly, which makes up most of the religions of the entire world. The rest believe that UFOs came to the world and had a massive battle, and we are the result, which is clearly the case in the Mahabharata, which I’ve read too and is a thing all its own. For the Bible, I think the Greeks and Romans saw what they wanted to see when they gave their interpretation of the Bible, and people who wanted to control all humanity carefully edited the text for a very malicious purpose, and that was to preserve the Cult of Baal that has been with us since the beginning of recorded time, predating the Bible by many thousands of years, likely tens of thousands of years.

The Cult of Baal it’s very much alive today, maybe more than ever.

As I said in the video, which covers a lot of needed ground, I see myself as politically right of God, Yahweh. I am far more conservative. But out of all my religious study over the years, I really like Yahweh and I feel his pain, and want to help him. When I read the Bible, I don’t read about an all-powerful god who created the universe. That might be the case from various points of view. What I see is a character trying desperately to destroy the Blood Cult of Baal so that humanity can perpetuate productively into a much more prosperous future. It is Baal who is the Darth Vader of the Bible, not Satan, Lucifer, or the Devil, which are mentioned in the Bible but are not discussed nearly to the level that Baal is. The fight between Baal and Yahweh is the entire point of the Bible, it’s the plot that should be the center of all discussion. Yet the presentation of the material is given to us to serve deities, as humans always did. People either pick Baal, which is always tempting humanity away from God, Yahweh, or they like Yahweh so long as he performs some magic and heals some people from illnesses, almost like they must be bribed into doing the right thing in life; otherwise, they always slip into the temptation to worship Baal. And this is how we get our modern political foundations where “sacrifice” is the core tenant of religion and life as we know it. But what I hear coming from Yahweh is “productivity.” Yahweh, in many ways, wanted people to become capitalists, and he rewarded those who fought to free people of bondage to the Cult of Baal. Think of Elijah at Mt. Carmal, the famous dual between the priests of Baal and Yahweh, 1 Kings 18. Why is it do you think that the “Free Palestine” movement is also capitalist-hating Marxists? The answer is obvious if you look with the right eyes and correct definitions of reality.

Abortion is just one form of the modern sacrifice culture to ancient deities.

The great deception is constructing a society that still serves Baal while the global masses perform the deeds unaware. This was done by essentially changing the names and focus of our religious figures to lure everyone into continuing to serve Baal in his insatiable appetite for sacrifice. As people asked me for more information, I thought of these guys at the Deep State Mapping Project, a very new phenomenon. I don’t think these guys would even exist if not for Trump’s first term in office. But the crack in the façade occurred, and now there is water squirting out everywhere, and these Deep State Mapping guys are part of that positive erosion of the Deep State control over the world. When we talk about the Deep State, we are talking about a complicated history that essentially is committed to keeping the world in the mode of sacrificial beings appeasing Baal and his pantheon of losers, cutthroats, and maniacal lunatics who are hundreds of thousands of years old and still linger in our interactions of quantum physics. Yahweh was rebelling against this Cult of Baal as is captured in that Psalm 82 passage and other places, especially in the actual Jewish word for God, Elohim, which means plural god in many cases, or a reference to the Divine Council that rules everything from beyond our conscious tapestries. I’ve known about all this for a long time, but the plot became most apparent when all these characters thought they could get away with the COVID killings, massive election fraud, and domination over the media in an attempt to get rid of Trump and the humanity that elected him. It was the Deep State grasping for power as the old Cult of Baal was being threatened for the first time because of the decentralization of information in our current society.

These Deep State Mapping guys have taken many of the studies I have personally conducted and made it very easy for people. It might seem like a crazy QAnon conspiracy theory at first, but I have independently validated most of the maps they offer, especially the Cult of Baal, and can provide testimony to their truth. Trying to shame people into compliance is the way the Cult of Baal has maintained itself for thousands of years, and it is a starving entity that demands humans sustain a cult of sacrifice, which we have. Sacrifice is the central premise behind most of the world’s religions on purpose. Yet, Ayn Rand, an atheist, could see this problem nicely by pointing out that human beings are meant to be productive. If you make things, why would there be a need to sacrifice anything to anyone, no matter how vital the god was? The conspiracy theories of the past, and I read all of Jim Marr’s books, and I miss that guy a lot, aren’t so conspiratorial now that the curtain has been pulled back, and we can see things better than we ever have. And to see this vast conspiracy in the best, most educational way possible, I would suggest the material provided by the Deep State Mapping Project. Things are going to get pretty wild over the next ten years. The Deep State has already lost control, so the water is flowing faster now. I spend a lot of my free time trying to prepare people for it by having them question the reality they have been taught. Yahweh understood, and I like him. I want to help him and spend a lot of my time doing that for purposes that the human race has a great need of. And these guys at deepstatemappingproject.com are doing a great job simplifying the process and vast amounts of information. It took me four or five decades to piece it all together myself. It’s all there for your convenience, and for those curious, I would suggest starting that needed education with their material. There is much to discuss, and an excellent map certainly helps.

Who would ever think to sacrifice their firstborn children to Baal? Apparently, a lot of people, as history has witnessed through oceans of blood and death.

Rich Hoffman

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The Anti-Industrial Revolution: Attacking the Tools of Survival

Environmentalism as Hatred of the Mind

From Classroom to Tribe: The Roots of Modern Identity Politics

The Cashless Society and the Corruption of Value

Montessori as the Rational Alternative

Prophetic Warnings and the Long Slow Decay

Expanding the Frame: Beyond Rand’s Atheism

The Primitive Mindset as a Weapon of Control

Conclusion: Intellectual Weapons for the Present Conflict

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Why I Wanted a Modern Conversation with Ayn Rand on Objectivism and Reality

Ayn Rand Objectivism: Are the Five Senses the Final Authority on Reality?

The Opening Challenge to Objectivist Epistemology

UAP Files, Quantum Physics, and What the Senses Never Evolved to Detect

Radio Waves, Microwaves, and the Limits of Visible Human Senses

The Closed-System Problem: When Absence of Evidence Is Redefined as Proof

The Spilled Milk Analogy: How Non-Human Intelligence Erases Evidence Across Millennia

Cleaning the Kitchen at 2 a.m. and the Problem of Missing Traces

Dolmens, Lake Superior Copper, Göbekli Tepe, and the Breadcrumbs That Remain

Extra Dimensions, Quantum Mechanics, and the Nature of Time in Objectivist Reality

Bad Philosophy as a Weapon: Altruism, Collectivism, and Cultural Destruction

Why Cultures Choose Ideas That Harm Themselves

Gossip, Insecurity, and the Default State of the Untrained Mind

Ayn Rand Atheism, Consciousness Beyond the Body, and the Question of Afterlife

Where Is Ayn Rand Now? The Objectivist Answer

Quantum Observer Effect, Déjà Vu, and Consciousness Outside Biological Lifespan

The Real Source of Cultural Destruction: Bad Ideas Inside Our Institutions

Where Ayn Rand Objectivism Stops and The Politics of Heaven Begins

The Atheist Ceiling and the Need for a Larger Map

Tysons Corner, CIA Culture, and the Institutional Side of the Story

The Divine Council, Biblical Theology, and the Arrogance of the Top of the Food Chain

Ayn Rand’s Personal Limitations and the Enduring Value of Objectivism

Closing the Conversation with Ayn Rand and Opening the Larger Argument of The Politics of Heaven

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Watching the Arc: From Collective Safety to Seeing the Trap

The Corporate Judas Cycle and the Power of the Paycheck

Steve Bannon’s Strategy Versus Trump’s Exceptionalism

Ohio’s Choice: Vivek Ramaswamy or Amy Acton’s Mediocrity

The Real Danger of Oppressive Government

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Capitalism as the Only Moral Social System

America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business

Solving World Hunger: Production, Not Politics

Greenspan on Gold and the Hard Reality of Theory

True Monopolies, Railroads, and the Industrial Revolution

Airwaves, Speech, and the Nature of Government

Ohio’s Choice and the Fight Ahead

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Metaphysics: Reality Is Not Optional

Epistemology: Reason as Absolute

Ethics: The Virtue of Selfishness

Politics: Capitalism as the Only Moral System

The Novels as Philosophical Weapons

America at the Crossroads of Two Traditions

The Continuing Argument

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That novel is The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.

Ayn Rand’s Escape from Communism and the American Novel That Resulted

Why Some Conservatives Keep Their Distance from Ayn Rand

Creators Versus Parasites and Why We Have So Few Edisons

Hollywood’s Long War Against the Fountainhead Spirit

Trump, the Ballroom, and the Same Old Courtroom Drama

Robert Kincaid, the Bridges of Madison County, and the Quiet Hunger for the Fountainhead Life

What I Tell My Grandchildren and Why Independent Media Matters

Read the Book. Then Read It Again.

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