 What do you make of the argument? Commonly employed by conservatives, originally employed by Bill Buckley and Whitaker Chambers during their Thieberwein-Ram, but without God, without a greater purpose to serve, objectivism, freedom essentially can only lead to a sort of corrosive libertinism or an unfeeling system of materialism which is not viable for a society. Well, I think they were, I mean, particularly Buckley and Whitaker Chambers, I think they were both dishonest and unthinking because I think that's absurd, right? I think it's the exact opposite. Once you have a higher purpose, which somebody else dictates, not you, by definition, because it's a higher purpose, then that's authoritarianism. Whether it's a higher purpose of God and God is the authority or whether the higher purpose is the state, and the state is the authority, or the higher purpose is the race and the furor is the authority, or the higher purpose is a class and the the authoritarian is the authority, a higher purpose always leads to authority and because that's the whole point of a higher purpose and indeed every authoritarian in history has not, no, not a single authoritarian in history has said, follow your own values, use your own mind to judge what is true and what is not, and morality is the achievement of your personal happiness, exact opposite. Every dictator in human history has said, here's a higher purpose, and you must adhere to this higher purpose, and here's how you do it, and if you don't, I will force you to. And that goes back to the Catholic Church, it goes back to every religion in history, it goes back to the Jewish religion in the Old Testament, just try not to be, not, you know, to worship a golden calf and see what happens to you, usually get slaughtered, right? That's a higher purpose, right? The higher purpose of believing in one God versus believing in multiple gods. So a higher purpose always leads to coercion, always leads to force, always leads to authoritarianism and certainly Buckley and Whitaker chambers were educated enough to know that, right? So there's a certain element of dishonesty. The other aspect of it is that Ayn Rand was not a materialist, and not in the sense that they mean it, not, and again, they knew this because Whitaker chamber, of course, comes from, came from a true materialist background, right? He was a Marxist. So he knew what materialism was, and Ayn Rand was not a materialist. Ayn Rand, you know, recognized the fact that there was something called the human consciousness, the human spirit, in that sense, that doesn't mean there's something beyond you, it just means that you embody a certain thing that is your consciousness, that is your spirit, and which is important. She talks a lot about happiness, she talks about the importance of art, she talks about the importance of the experience of art, the emotional experience of art, she talks about love, she talks about what love is and how it plays in. So this idea that Ayn Rand was just some kind of cold materialist, you know, equivalent to Marx that just waves a hand to some utopia is just wrong. And of course Whitaker chamber's review of Atlas Shrug was the most dishonest, the most offensive, the most negative review of anybody's review. So the conservatives, and I think guided by Bill Buckley, clearly determined to kick Ayn Rand out of the conservative movement to the extent that there was one. They clearly wanted her influence out. They wanted it to be a movement that was guided by religion, and she was an obstacle to that. She had a lot of influence, people reading Atlas Shrug, and they purposefully, in my view, wrote an article, wrote a review of the book, to try to say, you want to, if you like Atlas Shrug, you're not part of our movement, and you're not part of this club. What's ironic about the whole thing is when Ayn Rand died, Buckley wrote this article basically saying, with her, dies the philosophy, she is nothing, she is gone, she will be not remembered. And I am willing to put my entire wealth on the table to argue that Ayn Rand will be remembered long after Buckley is. Her influence will be profoundly greater than William F. Buckley's influence. I mean, barely anybody young remembers William F. Buckley even today. His books are nowhere near as well read as Ayn Rand's books. Atlas Shrug sells many, many more copies than all of Buckley's books combined. And she is an artist, her books stand on their own in terms of art, but also she is a profound philosopher, griot disagree with her, her ideas will be debated well into the future, whereas Buckley was not an original thinker. I mean, he was a conservative. So he wanted to consider what existed. He wasn't about new, he wasn't about difference, and he was a, he was a pretentious pompous, you know, commentator who, who I think inhibited the ability of the conservative movement actually to develop and to manifest itself into something interesting and valuable, which I think it could have, there was a, there was an opportunity there where it could have been influenced by people like, like von Mises and others on economics could have taken a much more stringent free market perspective. It could have really embraced the kind of goldwater thinking, which was far better, I think, than many of them, but it didn't. It evolved into what is today in America called nationalist conservatives. It evolved into the religious rights in America. It has evolved into statism. And, and you know, I think the conservative movement in the US is now broken completely. If you look at conservatism, the infighting going on right now within the conservatives, and it was inevitable. I mean, this fusion that Buckley tried to create was never really possible, right, was never really sustainable. And now you're getting the libertarian conservatives versus the religious conservatives versus the nationalist conservatives, all kind of fighting among each other. We'll see who benefits from that. I, I think the nationalists are going to win this out, unfortunately. Unfortunately, indeed. What we need today, what I called a new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think, meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, wins or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence, and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist roads. All right. Before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now. 30 likes. That should be at least 100. I think at least 100 of you actually like the show. Maybe they're like 60 of the Matthews out there who hate it, but at least the people who are liking it, you know, I want to see, I want to see a thumbs up. There you go. Start liking it. I want to see that go to 100. All it takes is a click of a click of a thing, whether you're looking at this. And you know, the likes matter. It's not an issue of my ego. It's an issue of the algorithm. The more you like something, the more the algorithm likes it. So, you know, and if you don't like the show, give it a thumbs down. Let's see your actual views being reflected in the likes. 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