I remain a tremendous fan of Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged, Anthem, The Fountainhead, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal), who contributed enormously to my comprehension of psychology, philosophy, human nature, ethics and government. The people writing in her name today, without any authorization by her since she died over 40 years ago, are peddling as original the precise propaganda you can find on MSNBC or in The New York Times. This post will be of interest to those who follow such topics.

The following is a post by Char Cushman to which I say, Bravo!

For those of you who have read Harry Binswanger’s latest post about ICE. I 100% disagree with him. He completely ignores the entire context.
Culture matters.

Binswanger [of the Ayn Rand Institute] claims we are all tribalists who dislike immigrants because of their color. I wonder what he thinks about Ayn Rand when she called people in the middle east savages.

He defends the rule of law–the aliens broke immigration law. What about that law? Without vetting, immigrants entered here who have harmed American citizens. They have brutally murdered people, raped and murdered women, and have committed massive theft (the Day care fraud and other fraud) from us. And don’t forget that many of them hate our country and wish for our demise i.e. “death to America.” I have heard some say, well, we have criminals too. So? Our criminals should go to jail and criminal immigrants should be deported. Let’s say the rape and murder of Laken Riley was the only crime committed. It was one death too many. It would have never happened if we had protected borders. Tell Laken Riley’s parents, family and close friends that her death by an illegal alien doesn’t matter because we already have criminals here.

The Left is focusing on the rights of the immigrants. Those who commit crimes have given up their rights. Besides, what about our rights? We don’t have any? We work and pay the taxes, but we don’t get a say on who can come here?

There is NO RIGHT to go where ever you want to in the world. To say it is a right means that others have to provide you entrance no matter where you go, no matter who you are. Criminals do not have a right to go where ever they want. That is one reason why borders need to be protected so that the good immigrants can be distinguished from the bad.

Another crucial point is that we are now a welfare state which was not the case in the early years of our country. How many people can we support on welfare before the United States collapses?

Don’t listen to ARI (Ayn Rand Institute). They are traitors to our country.

… I would add to this that the protestors are not peaceful. Blocking traffic, spitting on officers, throwing bricks at them, surrounding their cars, breaking their windows, breaking into their cars, and stealing items such as guns from police cars is not peaceful. Plus, there is evidence that they are paid to protest. My only complaint about them is that they are being too soft. From the get go, they should have been arresting them and putting them in jail or spraying them with pepper spray or cold water.

 

By all means, read and discover the ideas and contributions of Ayn Rand. As for the people peddling leftism and subjectivism at ARI, run for your life.

As a reader commented on Facebook, “I’m totally flabbergasted at the turn ARI has taken in the last ten years — maybe longer, but I didn’t notice it until the 2016 election cycle, when they went off the rails.”

My reply: When you think about it, the people at ARI are making a career living off the work of another person, i.e., Ayn Rand. They’re the very kind of people she wrote about as the mediocrities in her novels. From what I can see, the leadership there hasn’t changed for two decades or more. It seems like this would have to be a symptom of something. The great thing about Ayn Rand’s ideas is that they will matter, and they will always matter somewhere, to somebody; ARI will be forgotten when it eventually runs out of other people’s money.

 

 

The post Ayn Rand Was Not a Woke Leftist appeared first on Michael J. Hurd, Ph.D. | Living Resources Center.

A Vox piece carried by Yahoo! News promises speculation on "four possible reasons" for Trump's waffling on his threat to attack Iran if the Ayatollahs killed any protesters.

The Iranian regime has admitted murdering thousands since then, blaming the "deaths" on the United States and Israel.

Donald Trump's response?

So far, I hear crickets, and the barbaric clerics remain in power.

As I imagine many would do upon seeing such a headline, and hoping there could be legitimate reasons for a delay, I read the piece. Its four reasons are weak sauce, and sound like the usual left-wing excuses to tolerate hostile regimes.

Worse, the results of decades of bad American foreign policy will make these excuses sound more credible than they should, even to people who realize that American foreign policy should be one of self-interest.

The "reasons," as summarized by section headings are below, followed by my brief comments:

• Will the US lose credibility? -- Our leaders have a long history of laying out "red lines" and then either still doing nothing, or not doing enough. Trump doing nothing will certainly damage what little credibility we have left. This regime is so evil that its downfall alone would be an enormous net benefit. It's hard to imagine how Trump doing enough to make this happen could hurt American self-interest, especially if he also unleashes Israel, which he should have done after we hit Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities.
• Will it create new problems? -- This drops the entire context of the decades of worldwide problems the current regime has already caused and will definitely try to cause in the future, if it is left in place.
• Would it accomplish anything? -- As opposed to not acting? Given America's decades of appeasement and half-measures, it's an understandable question, but it's not the right one.
• Will it create false hope? -- If the last question was wrong, this one is obscene. Trump promising aid, and then reneging is what would have created false hope, and led to thousands of people -- who might have waited for more promising circumstances before acting -- to put their lives on the line prematurely. I am dubious about how well-thought-out an Iranian rebellion has been or could be, but it should say something that the people are out there facing bullets.

The piece ends as follows:

This story is still far from over, and intervention is still very much on the table, but the people of Iran would hardly be the first to rise up against an autocratic government with America’s encouragement, only to find that there are limits to how far the US was actually willing to go to support them.

I doubt that anyone expects the United States to do everything for them, and this is true, as far as it goes, but it would be fair to condemn our previous administrations for paying lip service to freedom, without backing those words up meaningfully.

This regime is weak, and it would be short work for us to destroy enough of its military and state police capacity to topple it. That would be in our interest, and it would have been fine for Trump to have communicated such an offer with limits, rather than grandstanding, as I am afraid he has done.

-- CAV

*What follows are a few observations and thoughts from a trip I took last week to give a talk at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. I started writing as events were unfolding in real time.

**The audio version is at the end for paid subscribers.

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Thursday, January 15, 2026:

I’m writing this essay at 36,000 feet on a flight from Atlanta to Kansas City. I had no intention of writing this essay when I boarded the plane, but sometimes life happens.

Something happened to me today that has both shaken me to the core and left me thinking about the nature of joy and suffering. I have nothing profound or important to say other than to share my experience with you and a few thoughts to go with it.

At the Atlanta airport this morning, I watched a middle-aged mother and father board our plane to Kansas City with their severely disabled son. As it was, father, son, and mother sat in the row directly right in front of me. The parents were in their mid-fifties and the son seemed to be in his mid-twenties. As far as I could tell, the son was a quadriplegic, non-verbal, and breathed through oxygen tubes. The mother sat by the window, the father in the aisle seat, and the son in the middle. I was sitting in the aisle seat behind them, so I could partially see the young man through the gap between his seat and his father’s.

Just after we took off, the son’s assisted breathing, which was clearly audible to me, became fast, heavy, and hard. During a moment of particularly turbulent breathing, I saw the mother reach for her son’s hand, and almost immediately his breathing slowed and softened. A simple touch of a mother’s hand lowered the son’s anxiety. Occasionally, the father would take a cloth and gently wipe his son’s brow, which was glistening with perspiration undoubtedly because of the heat generated by his heavy breathing. It seemed as though the son was using all his energy and strength just to breath.

I will admit to you that I was pained—deeply—by the whole scene. Never in my life have I witnessed a scene so tender, loving, and tragic. My sense of the son’s condition is that it was not the result of accident but was congenital. I suspect he has cerebral palsy.

My first thought was that what I had just witnessed as we were boarding and as I was now experiencing on the plane was part of a process that had begun hours earlier in the darkness of the early morning when this family awoke to begin their day’s journey. I imagined what it would have taken for these parents to gently pull their son out of his bed, dress and feed him, put him in their vehicle, drive to the airport, get him to the terminal and through security, get on the plane, fly for two-and-a-half hours constantly caring for his wellbeing, get off the plane, and then reverse the whole process for the rest of the day. Just one day in their lives would exhaust anyone.

It then occurred to me that these two loving parents had done some variation of what they were doing today every single day for the last 25 years or so. In other words, the parents had done some version of today for approximately the last 9,125 days. All this struck me like a thunderbolt. Frankly, the moment was emotionally overwhelming.

I then asked of myself the obvious question: could I do what these parents are doing? Could I do what they have done for 25 years. Could I do what they have done and are now doing for the rest of my life as they will be doing for the rest of their lives? Could I love and care for a child and then an adult child incapable of caring for him- or herself? It would surely mean that all that I have done in my life and loved doing, I almost certainly would not and could not have done. My life would have been radically different. My wife and I would have had to spend every single day of our lives thinking and worrying about and caring for our helpless child. Would my marriage have survived? God forbid, would I have abandoned my child to institutional care as have many parents?

After thinking through what it would mean to have a child with a severe disability, I recalled that moment when each my three (now adult) children were born. I don’t mean to speak for all fathers, but I suspect many have done some version of what I did. Each time a nurse put one of those helpless babies in my arms, I welled up with emotion, my eyes filling with tears, and I whispered to each one my children these words: “I will love you, and I will care for you, and I will protect you every day for the rest of my life.” And when I said it, I meant it. I meant it more than anything I had ever said in my life before. Other than my wedding vows, never have I said words that I meant with such ferocious intensity and commitment. I meant those words so much that they hurt—hard. In each of those three successive moments, I became a different person. Something about me was different and better than before. And now, 30, 28, and 26 years later, I can still feel the remnants of an emotion that will never leave me.

In those three moments and with those simple words, I experienced the obvious emotion of life-altering joy. The joy I felt each time was that all-too-human joy knowing that my wife and I had created new life, that my wife (the one who had once thought she might not want to have children) had carried and brought into the world three beautiful babies. Like all parents, I felt the earth-shattering joy that I was holding in my arms each time the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I felt the joy that I was now a father. I felt the joy that we would now be a family. I felt the joy that we would live and love together for the rest of our lives. Nothing in my life has or ever will be better than the three times I held those babies in my arms for the first time.

But I must also tell you that in that in each of those life-altering moments, I also experienced two other emotions very different from joy: anger and fear.

I felt anger because in an instant, when I made that pledge to each of my babies, I knew that my life would never be the same again. I knew that I had taken on a new role in life. As a father, I was now a protector and everything that entails. I knew that from that point forward my only real job in life was to protect my wife and children. But to be a protector assumes that there are forces in the world from which your children must be protected. As I write these words, I am reminded of that line from Cormack McCarthy’s novel The Road, when the father says to his son (which I paraphrase from memory), “if they touch you, I’ll kill them, because that’s my job.” When I first held each of my children in my arms, I didn’t say exactly those words to them or to myself, but they do express near perfectly what I felt in those three moments, and what I still feel today. (And I’m blessed now to feel the very same thing about my grandchildren.)

Make no mistake about it: that is my job—to protect and care for my children. No human law could stop me from doing whatever it took to keep them safe. I knew that instantaneously when I held each of my babies for the first time. There is something deeply primal that happens when a young man becomes a father (something that is and must be otherwise buried deep in one’s consciousness because of its ferocity), and I’m sure something similarly primal happens (but perhaps in a different way) to a young woman when she becomes a mother. I will also tell you that in that moment when I said those words to each of my babies and then in a millisecond experienced first joy and then anger, I felt something that scared me—something so powerful knowing I could live out McCarthy’s words (without hesitation or remorse) in order to protect my children.

But in each of the three most important moments of my life, I also felt a third emotion: a tinge of fear. The fear that any one of my children could suffer some unexpected malady beyond my ability to protect them that would change the course of their lives and mine. The ominous threat of a life-altering illness or accident is always lurking in the back of a parent’s mind. We fear the hand of fortune and tragedy. Suffering does not define the human condition, but we all know that fortune is a harsh mistress whose presence lurks in the dark corners of life. It’s an omnipresent force that we can never entirely shake. We all know that we will all, at some point in our lives, suffer the loss of loved ones. We can’t escape the pain and suffering that inevitably defines the human condition.

But for the grace of God (idiomatically speaking), I have not faced such tragedy, but I know the possibility is always there. In many ways, the emotion of fear is much more present in a parent’s life. Life is full of unexpected tragedy, and parents live in quiet fear for their children and for themselves. Tragedy is not man’s natural condition, but the possibility is always there, and parents fear it. Our radar is always on high alert with our children, particularly when they are young. We fear a toddler walking onto a busy street, we fear the sixteen-year-old who goes out at night with a car, and we fear the possibility of a child being diagnosed with cancer or some other life-threatening disease.

So, could I be as brave and loving as the two parents sitting in the row in front me?

I don’t know. I’d like to think so. To these two parents whom I don’t know and their son, I say thank you. Thank you for reminding me of the words I whispered to my children on the days they were born. Thank you for filling my eyes today with the same tears of joy, anger, and fear.

Sometimes it’s good to feel alive.

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*** Addendum.

Friday, January 16:

There is a sad addendum to my travels.

On my way home from Kansas, I had a two-hour layover in Atlanta. Sitting directly across from me was a slightly younger family than I had seen the day before: a mother and father in their late thirties, and what looked to be a ten-year-old girl in a wheelchair. The girl seemed to have little control of her arms and legs, and her fingers and wrists were curled and bent toward her forearms. The girl, who didn’t seem to have full control of her neck muscles either, would sit up for a few minutes and then slump over at the waist and her head would fall almost into her lap. She had the body control of a rag doll. The sitting up and then slumping over went on for almost an hour.

During that entire time, her parents, who were sitting to one side of her, said nothing to their daughter; indeed, they didn’t even bother look at her—not once! Instead, their own heads were bowed as they doom scrolled on their phones. Their daughter might as well have been sitting by herself without her parents, without anyone, lost in a sea of strangers. In that moment, I saw a girl with no one to love, care, or protect her. My anger mounted, but I felt helpless to do anything with her parents sitting right there. Eventually, an older woman, probably a grandmother, sat down beside the girl and gently put her granddaughters head on her shoulder to rest. And still the parents do nothing! At that moment, I felt nothing but an overwhelming sadness for this girl and total contempt for her parents.

As if her afflictions weren’t enough, this young girl seemingly does not have parents who love her enough to shoulder her suffering.

Sometimes it feels rotten to be alive!

***Second Addendum:

My last flight was moved to a different gate. I made my way to a new seat. I sat down beside a young man, probably in his late twenties. A few minutes later his equally young wife approached and dropped a beautiful baby boy on dad’s lap. This little baby boy squealed with delight. Dad immediately started bouncing his son on his thighs and Eskimo kissing this little baby boy. This is life as it should be.

Let us all “suffer the little children” to come into our lives with a love that is at once tender and ferocious.

Our children—all children—must know that life is beautiful. They deserve nothing less.

Have a great week!

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We live or die by intellectual honesty: by treating reality as sovereign. That is the standard by which political movements must be judged—and it is precisely the standard Trump’s political method undermines. Trump does not persuade by evidence or principle; he asserts, demands allegiance to his narrative over verifiable fact, treats law as an obstacle to be bent, and trains his supporters to confuse might with right. That approach is corrosive because it attacks the preconditions of objective judgment itself.

Within the Objectivist orbit today, of which I am a part, three broad factions have emerged. The first is the anti-Trump faction, which sees clearly that Trump’s contempt for law, due process, and truth represents a fundamental threat to freedom in America and the larger world. Its strength is moral clarity about the nature of power and the danger of excusing arbitrariness. Its alleged “weakness” is not excess or leftward drift, but refusal to dilute principles for the sake of tactical alliances or emotional comfort.

The second is the pro-Trump or Trump-accommodating faction. Its strength is a genuine concern about the cultural and political threat posed by the modern Left. But its fatal weakness is methodological: it abandons Objectivism’s commitment to judging specific facts and actions and instead treats Trump as a necessary instrument—excusing arbitrary force, evading concrete evidence, and lowering standards of proof in the name of fighting a perceived greater enemy. That is not principled triage, but moral evasion on a grand scale.

The third faction avoids judgment altogether, recasting the issue as one of strategy, temperament, or unity rather than principle. Its appeal lies in preserving harmony and community, but its flaw is decisive: Reality does not permit neutrality when reason, law, and individual rights are under direct attack.

Disagreements like this are sometimes waved away as internal drama or sectarian squabbling. That also misses the point. When the issue is how force, law, and evidence are treated, the dispute is not organizational—it is philosophical, and it has consequences far beyond any movement or label.

I am firmly and proudly in the anti-Trump camp. Regarding the adherents of the pro-Trump camp, I am not asking its members to agree with the Left. I am asking them to apply the standard they claim to hold as Objectivists: the integration of facts, principled consistency, and objective limits on state power. On that standard, Trump is not the “lesser evil.” He is a uniquely corrupting force because he invites people to excuse unreason in the name of fighting unreason.

A free society cannot survive such a bargain.