For any Ayn Rand fans:

[surfered]

25. Here's my Letter to the Editor of our local paper in 2017 in response to an Ayn Rand defender.,

Dear Editor:

Ayn Rand was not an economist and not her real name. Born Alissa Rosenbaum, she fled the Russian Revolution, moving to Hollywood to become a novelist and scriptwriter. She was an atheist, addicted to amphetamines, praised serial killers, insisted her followers smoke cigarettes as it symbolized man’s victory over fire, and claimed studies showing it caused lung cancer were Communist propaganda. She would die of the disease, friendless and alone.

Influenced by Nietzsche, she believed the world was divided between a small minority of productive “Supermen" and the rest of us who were just "savages, refuse, lice, and parasites." She thought a small revolutionary elite, i.e. the rich, should seize power and impose their vision on the "imbecilic masses."

She loathed Bolshevik ideals, but admired their methods. Readers of her novels should remember that she once said, “Fiction is a great weapon, because it arouses the public to an emotional, as well as intellectual response to our cause.” Her cause was basically selfishness and that one’s value to society was measured only by one’s income.