At some point, when everybody who reads your books uses them to justify toxic behavior, negative knee-jerk responses become the proper societal equivalent of an immune response.
At some point, when everybody who reads your books uses them to justify toxic behavior, negative knee-jerk responses become the proper societal equivalent of an immune response.
If a bad actor wants a scapegoat, they will find one.
No, Ayn Rand and Karl Marx are not remotely comparable.
Not until you can point to dozens of countries that tried to put Rand's principles into action, and show how they failed. Can you?
Saying "true communism has never been tried" is to ignore what happened each time. "We'll do better next time" doesn't persuade unless you have a detailed understanding of how someone like Stalin or Pol Pot comes to power, and some plan more detailed than "we won't do it that way."
John Oliver's segment on Ayn Rand (Last Week Tonight, I forget the name of the segment but it was something to the effect of "Why Is This Still A Thing") did an excellent job summarizing the popular case against her, in all of its disingenuousness: without making an effort to view her statements through the lens of the terms she's defined, it sounds bad compared to vulgar neoliberal sensibilities, and because she herself as a human was less than perfect. It, like every mass media analysis of her or her works I've seen, comes from and is marketed towards a pre-established understanding the Objectivism is wrong.
Also, I'd love to see a source on "everyone who reads" Ayn Rand (or Marx, for that matter, or any author of any written work ever) being toxic sociopaths -- it stands to reason that you'd see her closest adherents, like Onkhar Ghate, Harry Binswanger, Yaron Brook, or Leonard Peikoff being known for acting upon bad ideas if that was all that was in their intellectual orbit, not cherrypicked cases of someone claiming to have read Rand before making questionable or unethical decisions.