For the Theological Masochists in My Audience

…here is a link to Ayn Rand’s marginalia in her copy of C.S. Lewis The Abolition of Man.  Painful, awful stuff from a shrill harridan ignoramus.

Recall, as you read the “thoughts” of this deeply evil and demented enemy of God that she was, according to the man nominated by the Thing that Used to be Conservatism to be a heartbeat away from the presidency, the principle driving force in his intellectual development.

• “I just want to speak to you a little bit about Ayn Rand and what she meant to me in my life and [in] the fight we’re engaged here in Congress. I grew up on Ayn Rand, that’s what I tell people.”
• “I grew up reading Ayn Rand and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are.”
• “It’s inspired me so much that it’s required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff. We start with Atlas Shrugged. People tell me I need to start with The Fountainhead then go to Atlas Shrugged [laughter]. There’s a big debate about that. We go to Fountainhead, but then we move on, and we require Mises and Hayek as well.”
• “But the reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.”
• “And when you look at the twentieth-century experiment with collectivism—that Ayn Rand, more than anybody else, did such a good job of articulating the pitfalls of statism and collectivism—you can’t find another thinker or writer who did a better job of describing and laying out the moral case for capitalism than Ayn Rand.”
• “It’s so important that we go back to our roots to look at Ayn Rand’s vision, her writings, to see what our girding, under-grounding [sic] principles are.”
• “Because there is no better place to find the moral case for capitalism and individualism than through Ayn Rand’s writings and works.”

Recall that this man, as a Catholic Randian, obligated Catholic supporters, in my comboxes, to attempt to portray this enemy of God Rand as “Aristotle” to Paul Ryan’s Aquinas. Recall how much effort there was to pound the square peg of his completely Randian division of humanity into “Makers and Takers” into the round hole of Catholic social teaching.  Recall the sheer and utter contempt for the weak and poor that animates Rand and that nobody in their five wits could possibly square with “Blessed are you the poor”.

Now: contemplate how much *less* likely it is that this bowdlerized and third rate “thinker’s”  influence is going to be squarable with *this* Pope.