I was very tempted to quit reading at "sub-Dan Brown potboilers." What hyperbolic crap. Hard to believe this guy's doing anything other than recycling other hit jobs here.

For example, there's a character in The Fountainhead who is an explicit repudiation of her earlier Nietzschean phase, and yet he somehow totally misses that point (and I have to think it was mentioned in the biographies he claims to be reviewing).

Donald Trump and Bernie Madoff are offered up as cartoons of her businessman heroes, when those sorts of people (respectively, a chronic bankrupt and a Ponzi schemer) are exactly the kind of "looter" businessmen she eviscerates in Atlas Shrugged.... Read More

He says one of the strikers in Atlas Shrugged deliberately causes the tunnel crash, which is flatly wrong. "Both she and the Soviets insisted a small revolutionary elite in possession of absolute rationality must seize power and impose its vision on a malleable, imbecilic mass." Seriously, you could not more utterly fail to understand the message of Atlas Shrugged than by writing this passage. Why does John Galt turn down the offer to be made dictator of the country, if the idea is to "seize power"?

Practically the whole column is one unbroken string of fallacies and absurd leaps of logic, but this is the capper: "its ideas and its impulses have, by drilling into the basest human instincts, captured one of America's major political parties." Yeah, those prohibitionist, Bible-thumping, anti-immigrant, bank bailing, center-appeasing Republicans, they've been reading way too much Rand!

There are legitimate criticisms that can be made of Rand's philosophy (not that I agree with them, but they're legitimate), and this guy somehow manages to miss every single one of them.

A lot Rand's critics would do themselves a huge favor if they would actually bother to read and understand the philosophy and the novels they claim are so abhorrent.