Thread by @cameronkgvi

Why, Americans wonder, would the GOP embrace [] anti-American and nakedly brutal politics and policies?

Americans Must Repudiate the Connection Between a Child-Murderer, Reaganism and Trumpism, by @Thom_Hartmann open.substack.com/pub/thomhartma…

Why would they try so hard to destroy Medicare and Social Security? Why would they mourn the loss of Trump’s program to tear children from their families and throw them into cages?

Why are they so enthusiastic about efforts to make it harder to vote that Ron DeSantis would delight in parading 15 Black voters before the cameras in chains?

Why did they continue to support Trump after he lost the House, Senate, and White House and continues to rant his racist, anti-American, anti-democratic strongman rhetoric?
@Thom_Hartmann open.substack.com/pub/thomhartma…

But, it turns out, it’s not just all about politics; the roots of this brutal movement in today’s GOP run from a 1927 child murderer, through a real-estate lobbying group, to Ronald Reagan putting both of their philosophies into actual practice and

bringing a number of right-wing billionaires into the fold.

As a result, Republican policies over the past 42 years not only gutted America’s middle class, but led straight to the Trump presidency and the attack on the Capitol on January 6th that he led @Thom_Hartmann

The Libertarians

Reporter Mark Ames documents how, back in the 1940s, a real estate lobbying group came up with the idea of creating a new political party to justify deregulating the real estate and finance industries so they could make more money.

This new Libertarian Party would give an ideological and political cover to their goal of becoming government-free, and they developed an elaborate pretense of governing philosophy around it.

Their principal argument was that if everybody acted separately & independently, in all cases w/ maximum selfishness, such behavior would actually benefit society. There would be no gov't needed beyond an army & a police force,...

and a court system to defend the rights of property owners. It was a bizarre twisting of Adam Smith’s reference to the “invisible hand” that regulated trade among nations.

In 1980, billionaire David Koch ran for vice president on the newly formed Libertarian Party ticket. His platform included calls to privatize the Post Office,close public schools, give Medicare and Medicaid to big insurance companies, end food and housing support

and all other forms of “welfare,” deregulate all corporate oversight while shutting down the EPA and FDA, and selling off much of the federal government’s land and other assets to billionaires and big corporations.

Reagan, who won that 1980 election, embraced this view in his inaugural address, saying, “[G]overnment is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

Reagan then doubled down on the idea by beginning the systematic process of gutting crippling governmental institutions that historically had supported working people and the middle class.

@Thom_Hartmann open.substack.com/pub/thomhartma…

The child-killer who inspired a movement

Reagan wasn’t just echoing the Libertarian vision; he was also endorsing Ayn Rand’s “objectivist” view of the world, which traces its roots to a murderous sociopath in 1927.@Thom_Hartmann
open.substack.com/pub/thomhartma…

Back in 2015, Donald Trump told USA Today’s Kirsten Powers that his favorite book was Ayn Rand’s raped-girl-decides-she-likes-it novel, “The Fountainhead.”

“It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions,” he told Powers. “That book relates to … everything.”

Ayn Rand’s novels have animated libertarian Republicans like former Speaker of the House of Representatives and current Fox News board member Paul Ryan, who required interns to read her books when they joined his staff.

[Ayn Rand is dead and still wrong
aynrandisdead.org]

Powers added, “He [Trump],” told her that he “identified with Howard Roark, the novel’s idealistic protagonist who designs skyscrapers and rages against the establishment.” @Thom_Hartmann
open.substack.com/pub/thomhartma…

Rand’s hero Roark, in fact, “raged” so much in her novel that he blew up a public housing project with dynamite just to get what he wanted. Sort of like the plans of the person who planted bombs at the RNC and DNC headquarters the night before January 6th.
@Thom_Hartmann

Rand, in her Journals, explained where she got her inspiration for Howard Roark and so many of her other novels. She writes that the theme of The Fountainhead, for example, is, “One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one’s way to get the best for oneself.”

On Trump’s hero Howard Roark, she wrote thathe “has learned long ago, [] two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world. He knows what he wants and what he thinks. He needs no other reasons, [...]

His complete selfishness is as natural to him as breathing.”
It turns out that Roark and many of her other characters were based on a real person. The man who so inspired Ayn Rand’s fictional heroes was named William Edward Hickman, and he lived in LA during the Roaring Twenties.

To nearly everyone, Hickman was a monster. The year of the murder, the Los Angeles Timescalled it “the most horrible crime of the 1920s.” Hickman was America’s most despicable villain at the time.@Thom_Hartmann
open.substack.com/pub/thomhartma…

Ayn Rand falls in love with a “superman”

But to Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, a 21-year-old Russian political science student who’d arrived in America just two years earlier, Hickman was a hero.

@Thom_Hartmann
open.substack.com/pub/thomhartma…

She had just departed Leninist Russia where, [] there was a harsh backlash against the Russian property owners by the Bolsheviks. Alissa’s own family was targeted, and at the age of 12 she watched as Bolshevik soldiers burst into her father’s pharmacy, looted the store, and

plastered on her Dad’s doors the red emblem of the state, indicating that his private business now belonged to “the people.”
That incident left such a deep []wound in young Alissa’s mind [&]vowed one day she’d become a famous writer to warn the world of the dangers of Bolshevism

Starting afresh in Hollywood, she anglicized her name to Ayn Rand, [a] screenwriter/novelist, basing the heroes of several of her stories on a man she was reading about in the newspapers at the time. A man she wrote effusively about in her diaries. A man she hero-worshipped.

William Edward Hickman was the most notorious man in American in 1928, having achieved the level of national fame that [Ayn Rand] craved.

@Thom_Hartmann
open.substack.com/pub/thomhartma…

Young Ayn Rand saw in Hickman the “ideal man” she based The Fountainhead on, and used to ground her philosophy and her life’s work.
His greatest quality, she believed, was his unfeeling, pitiless selfishness. @Thom_Hartmann
open.substack.com/pub/thomhartma…

[TFG identified w/ Fountainhead's hero Howard Roark, based on👇]
Hickman’s words [which] were carefully recounted by Rand in her Journals. His statement that:
“I am like the state: what is good for me is right,”
resonated deeply with her.

open.substack.com/pub/thomhartma…

[Hickman's unfeeling cruel & murderous selfishness] was the perfect articulation of [Rand's] belief that if people pursued their own interests above all else — even above friends, family, or nation — the result would be utopian.
open.substack.com/pub/thomhartma…

[Rand] wrote in her diary that those words of Hickman’s were, “the best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I ever heard.”

Hickman—the monster who boasted about how he had hacked up a 12-year-old girl—had Rand’s ear, as well as her heart.
open.substack.com/pub/thomhartma…

[Rand] saw a strongman archetype in [Hickman the murder], the way that people wearing red MAGA hats see a strongman savior in Donald Trump.
As Hickman’s murder trial unfolded, Rand grew increasingly enraged at how the “mediocre” American masses had rushed to condemn her Superman.

Astounded that Americans didn’t recognize the heroism Hickman showed when he proudly rose above simply conforming to society’s rules, Rand wrote, “It is not the crime alone that has raised the fury of public hatred. It is the case of a daring challenge to society

[TFG acts like Ayn Rand's hero]
Rand wrote, "... It is the case of a daring challenge to society. … It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, with a consciousness all his own.”
open.substack.com/pub/thomhartma…

The protagonist of the book[] Rand was writing around that time was a boy named Danny Renahan. In her notes for the book, she wrote, “The model for the boy [Renahan] is Hickman.” He would be her ideal man,& the archetype for a philosophical movement that would transform a nation.

“He is born with the spirit of Argon and the nature of a medieval feudal lord,” Rand wrote in her notes describing Renahan.
“Imperious. Impatient. Uncompromising. Untamable. Intolerant. Unadaptable. Passionate. Intensely proud. Superior to the mob… an extreme ‘extremist.’

[TFG like Rand's protagonist has ]
… No respect for anything or anyone.”

Rand wanted capitalism in its most raw form, uncheck by any government that could control the rules of the market or promote the benefits of society.
[Just like TFG & Republicans]
open.substack.com/pub/thomhartma…

Ayn Rand, [] found peace & justification in the extremes of her economic, political, & moral philosophy. Forget about democratic institutions, forget about regulating markets, & forget about pursuing any policies that benefit the majority at the expense of the very rich ...

Libertarianism and Ayn Rand set the stage for Trumpism

Only billionaires should rule the world, Trump has suggested.

@Thom_Hartmann open.substack.com/pub/thomhartma…

And [Trump] tried to put it into place, installing a billionaire advocate of destroying public schools in charge of public schools, a coal lobbyist representing billionaires in charge of the EPA, an billionaire-funded oil lobbyist in charge of our public lands, and ...

[TFG's Cabinet]
a billionaire described by Forbes as a “grifter” in charge of the Commerce Department. Trump’s chief of staff said that putting children in cages and billionaire-owned privatized concentration camps (where seven so far have died) would actually be a public good.

As Ayn Rand might say, “Don’t just ignore the rules; destroy them.”

Welfare and other social safety net programs were, as Rand saw it, “the glorification of mediocrity” in society.
@Thom_Hartmann open.substack.com/pub/thomhartma…

Sociopaths of the world, unite!
Rand, like Trump, lived a largely joyless life. She mercilessly manipulated people, particularly her husband and Alan Greenspan (who brought a dollar-sign-shaped floral arrangement to her funeral),
open.substack.com/pub/thomhartma…

and, like Trump, [Rand] surrounded herself with cult-like followers who were only on the inside so long as they gave her total, unhesitating loyalty.

open.substack.com/pub/thomhartma…

Like Trump, McConnell, Stefanik and their billionaire backers, Rand believed that a government working to help out working-class “looters,” instead of solely looking out for rich capitalist “producers,” was throwing its “best people” under the bus.
open.substack.com/pub/thomhartma…

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

open.substack.com/pub/thomhartma…

Later in Rand’s life, in 1959, as she gained more notoriety for the moral philosophy of selfishness that she named “Objectivism” and that is today at the core of libertarianism and the GOP, ...
open.substack.com/pub/thomhartma…

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

“You are out to destroy almost every edifice in the contemporary American way of life,” Wallace said to Rand. open.substack.com/pub/thomhartma…

But the question, with its implied condemnation, didn’t faze her at all. Rand said with confidence in a matter-of-fact tone, “Yes.” (4:20 in the clip)
Ayn Rand Mike Wallace Interview (Part 1) 1959 via @YouTube

“We’re taught to feel concern for our fellow man,” Wallace challenged [Rand], “to feel responsible for his welfare, to feel that we are, as religious people might put it, children under God and responsible one for the other — now why do you rebel?
open.substack.com/pub/thomhartma…

“That is what in fact makes man a sacrificial animal,” Rand answered[] “[Man’s] highest moral purpose is the achievement of his own happiness.”
Rand’s philosophy, though popular in high school and on college campuses, never did [IHL] achieve the sort of mass appeal she had hoped.

But today Ayn Rand’s philosophy is a central tenet of today’s Republican Party and grounds the moral code proudly cited and followed by high-profile billionaires and three former presidents of the [USA]. 👇
ICYMI theguardian.com/books/2017/apr…

Ironically, when she was finally beginning to be taken seriously, Ayn Rand became ill with lung cancer and went on Social Security and Medicare to make it through her last days. She died a “looter” in 1982,

open.substack.com/pub/thomhartma…

[Rand died] unaware that her her promotion of William Edward Hickman’s sociopathic worldview would one day validate an entire political party’s embrace of a similarly sociopathic president. @Thom_Hartmann open.substack.com/pub/thomhartma…

The result [of Trump's & the GOP's embrace of Rand's sociopathic worldview] so far is over a half-million dead Americans, an economy laid waste, and the collapse of this nation’s working class.
open.substack.com/pub/thomhartma…

A return to sanity

In the 1930s and 1940s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower put America back together after the First Republican Great Depression and built the largest and wealthiest middle class in the history of the world at the time.

Today, 40 years of Ayn Rand’s ideas being put into practice by libertarian Republicans from Reagan to Bush to Trump have gutted the middle class, made a handful of oligarchs wealthier than any kings or Pharos in the history of the world,
open.substack.com/pub/thomhartma…

[America must reject the #MAGA_Republicans sociopathic worldview]

When America was still coasting on FDR’s success in rebuilding our government and institutions, nobody took very seriously Rand’s or Koch’s misguided idealist efforts to tear it all down.

open.substack.com/pub/thomhartma…

Now that libertarians and objectivists in the GOP have had 40 years to make their project work, we’re hitting peak libertarianism and it’s tearing our country apart, pitting Americans against each other, and literally killing people every day.
open.substack.com/pub/thomhartma…

If America is to survive as a functioning democratic republic, we must repudiate the “greed is good” ideology of Ayn Rand and libertarianism, get billionaires and their money out of politics, and rebuild our civil institutions. @Thom_Hartmann
open.substack.com/pub/thomhartma…

"Money doesn’t always buy election results, but it emphatically affects policy. Welcome to the second gilded age of money in politics."

Billionaires Provided 15 Percent of Funding for the Midterms brennancenter.org/our-work/analy…