Has anyone ever published a seafood cookbook titled The Virtue of Shellfish-ness? Because I would buy that book in a second.
  • Has anyone ever published a seafood cookbook titled The Virtue of Shellfish-ness? Because I would buy that book in a second.

If Ayn Rand were still alive, she'd be 110 years old today. And though she died more than 30 years ago, she's tremendously influential—you can draw a straight line from Atlas Shrugged to the Koch brothers, who only recently declared war on the minuscule amount of federal funding that goes toward bicycling, pedestrian, and public transit infrastructure. Modern Republicans forget Rand was an avowed atheist who loathed Ronald Reagan. Instead, they remember her as a champion of small government and personal responsibility. And they don't certainly don't remember that Rand's philosophy grew in part out of her idolization of an infamous serial killer.

Last week, Mark Ames at Raw Story wrote:

Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation... What did Rand admire so much about Hickman? His sociopathic qualities: “Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should,” she wrote, gushing that Hickman had “no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel ‘other people.’”

Rand even used Hickman as the model for the hero of an early, unfinished novel. (You can read more about Rand's adulation of Hickman at Michael Prescott's blog.) So let's be clear: When Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, and Ted Cruz—along with all the other Republicans people toss around as potential presidential candidates—claim to be big fans of Ayn Rand, they're basically labeling themselves the ideological grandchildren of a serial killer.