REMEMBER AYN RAND? WELL, WELCOME TO HER WORLD

I’ve been boning up on writer and philosopher Ayn Rand. For even tentative, play-it-by-ear intellectuals of my generation—and I consider myself part of that demographic—her name is very familiar. We’ve been hearing quotes by Rand since we were in junior high. She was a popular author during the Red Scare era in which we were growing up, when the government saw Commies behind every lamp post. During that era, she was an icon of the American right, somebody who had been-there-done-that, since she was born and reared in Russia, and lived the 1917 Revolution and its aftermath in her most formative childhood years.

That experience, and its devastating effects on her family, instilled in Rand a deep hatred of the State and of State control. Her entire philosophy as a writer would turn on an axis comprised of the individual. It is ironic, then, that the place where she first formed the intellectual tools to generate that philosophy was in the Russian State university system, which, under the Czar, prior to the Russian Revolution, was closed to women.

So why my renewed interest? Well, while Rand’s name may have faded from popular view during the post-McCarthyite Protest Era, when liberal thought and critical reasoning were on the rise, it has made a comeback since the advent of Silicon Valley and its self-styled billionaire “tech-libertarians”, who, in the current era of MAGA-fueled oligarchy, are fast becoming tech-fascists.

Born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum into a Jewish bourgeois family in the imperial Russian capital of St. Petersburg, twelve years prior to the Russian Revolution, she would, as an adult, start going by her pen name, Ayn Rand.  From age twelve through her formative teen years, Rand would live through the disruption of her family’s way of life as a result of the 1917 October Revolution and the overthrow of the czarist Russian Empire.

Ayn Rand as a schoolgirl

Rand’s father was a successful St. Petersburg pharmacist and the family had enjoyed a comfortable life under the Russian Empire. But following the Revolution, the Bolsheviks would take over her father’s business and turn it into a State drugstore, plunging the Rosenbaums into financial crisis. They would take refuge in Crimea, which, initially, remained under anti-Communist White Russian control. But after Crimea fell to the Bolsheviks in 1920, Rand’s family returned to St. Petersburg, which the Soviets had renamed Petrograd, in 1921, and Rand graduated from high school there. In Petrograd, her family lived a precarious life of relative poverty

These formative years left Rand with a deep loathing for not only Soviet domination, but also for any sort of State control or oversight. These were the sentiments that would germinate during her intellectual development and eventually lead her to be a radical icon of conservative laissez-faire capitalism, her very specific version of which came to be known as “Objectivism”.

Among the first to enroll when the Russian Revolution opened higher education to women, Rand started attending Petrograd State University at sixteen, majoring in history. She would again find reason to loath the Communist government when she and other young women from the former middle class were removed from the university rolls shortly before graduation in a Bolshevik purge of the bourgeoisie. But complaints regarding the purge filed by a group of foreign scientists later visiting the university led to her reinstatement, and she graduated in 1924 from the now once again renamed Leningrad State University.

After graduation, Rand did postgrad studies in Screen Arts at the State Technicum in Leningrad. It was there that she wrote  a monograph on Polish actress Pola Negri. That monograph was destined to become Rand’s first published literary work. It was from that time that she started going by her pseudonym, Ayn Rand.

At the end of 1925, Rand was granted a US visa to visit relatives in Chicago. Despite having a visitor’s visa, she decided to stay on, and in February of 1926, she relocated to New York City. But her dream at the time was to become a screenwriter, so she only stayed with relatives in New York for a few months—long enough to improve her English—before striking out for Hollywood.

Cecil B. DeMille

Rand’s wasn’t the sad story of the failed writer who follows her dreams to Hollywood, only to be dashed against the rocky cliffs of the Pacific that bathes the shores of LA. It wasn’t, in other words, a tragic story written by Day of the Locust author Nathaniel West.  No, this was the Immigrant Girl Makes Good tale. While trying to break into the Tinsel Town in-crowd, Rand had a chance meeting with blockbuster director Cecil B. DeMille, who, at the time, was working on his King of Kings project. DeMille invited Rand to be an extra in the picture, and that led to her landing a subsequent job as a junior screenwriter. While working on the King of Kings set, Rand met Frank O’Connor, a young actor, and they decided to marry in 1929. Now the wife of an American citizen, Rand was granted a Permanent American Resident visa. And by March of 1931, she had become a naturalized American citizen.

Already the following year, Rand chalked up her first literary success, selling a screenplay entitled Red Pawn to Universal Studios. Despite this early coup, the film project was shelved and the movie was never produced. But in 1934, Rand’s courtroom drama, Night of January 16^th, was staged in a Hollywood theater, and opened on Broadway the following year. It was a unique work in which, at each night’s performance, a jury was chosen from the audience, and, according to its decision, one of two different endings for the play would be performed. It was successful enough that Rand and O’Connor moved from the West Coast back to New York.

Frank O'Connor

Her next big project was a novel entitled We The Living. Set in Soviet Russia, it was quasi-autobiographical. But the main philosophical thrust of the book was what was to become Rand’s recurrent theme, the individual versus the State. Book sales in the US did not do well. The publisher allowed the novel to run out of print. Undaunted, Rand wrote a stage play version for Broadway, but it was an utter flop. It could be argued that the story was ahead of its time. In the post-World War II days of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, anything that poked its finger in the eye of Soviet Russia had a good chance for success.  Rand refloated an edition of We The Living in 1959, which ended up selling more than three million copies.

By then, however, Rand was already a successful author. At the end of 1935 she began writing what was to become her first highly acclaimed book, The Fountainhead. It was what would become a trademark Rand story, the main lessons of which focused on Rand’s belief that independent thought and personal integrity are the ultimate sources of human progress. That personal integrity trumps conformity—true creators need to remain authentic and true to themselves in the face of society’s demand for collective approval and, thus, for mediocrity. And that the true creator will always be faced with the disapproval of a society bent on the conformity of the masses and that resents individual greatness.

But midway through the writing of The Fountainhead, Rand put the project aside to write a novella called Anthem. This dystopian book too depicted a grim future in which totalitarian collectivism reigned. So fundamentalist was this world that the personal pronoun “I” was banned from use, and was completely replaced by “we”. However, the main characters in this story eventually make their escape from the collectivist world and, in the new world that they found, rediscover “I”, and, as such, the power of individualism.

Rand couldn’t get a single publisher in the US to touch that book with a ten-foot pole. But she was able to sell it in England. In Britain it would remain in print. And, as in the case of We The Living, the story would come into its own in the US in the mid-1940s, when a revised version was finally printed and ended up selling three-and-a-half million copies.

But before that, in 1943, The Fountainhead handed Rand her first really smashing success.  The novel was about Howard Roark, a fictional architect with an uncompromising attitude toward creativity. He struggles against “second-handers”, the name he gives to those who steal ideas, attempting to live through the creativity of others while placing themselves and their interests above those of the true creators.

In the book, the protagonist fails to succeed because he won’t conform. He prefers poverty and obscurity to mediocrity, refusing to change his unique architectural style or to compromise his integrity. He ends up being expelled from the school of architecture for refusing to adopt traditional rules of design. He eventually takes up a one-man crusade against his critics and the professional establishment who insist on conformity.

The Fountainhead reaches a climax when Roark dynamites a housing project that he was hired to design because the construction firm introduces alterations that he never approved. The dramatic trial that ensues is where Rand is able to expand on her radically individualistic stance regarding what she viewed as the sacred heroism of the individual and the pernicious effects of societies bent on conformity.

 A dozen publishers rejected the book project before it was finally accepted by Bobbs-Merrill Company, thanks to respected editor Archibald Ogden, who read the advance on the manuscript, fell in love with it, and told management that if they didn’t publish it, he would resign.  The deadline that the publisher imposed, however, was so brutal that Rand started taking benzedrine in order to work the long hours necessary to finish and turn in the book on deadline. She would remain hooked on benzos for the rest of her life.

The book was an instant success and an eventual bestseller. The same year that it was published, Warner Bros. picked up the film rights and made the movie version starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal. The sale of the book to Hollywood also landed Rand regular work as a screenwriter.

Gary Cooper in a scene from
The Fountainhead

In Hollywood, she became heavily involved in politics and the infamous investigations into alleged communist activities in the movie business. She formed part of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, an anti-communist organization—in which John Wayne, Ronald Reagan and Hedda Hopper were also prominent members—that worked in tandem with the McCarthyite US House Committee on Un-American Activities, which was conducting an anti-Red witch-hunt throughout the country but with particularly zealous focus on the movie industry. She would testify as a “friendly witness” against the film entitled Song of Russia, which she depicted as soft on Soviet communism and as portraying life as much better in Russia than it really was.

In her contribution to the committee’s hearings, she also lashed out at the popular picture The Best Years of Our Lives, which she accused of painting an unflattering portrait of American business, but, in the end, the committee refused to allow her arguments regarding the film to enter into the official record. Clearly, her stance against leftist ideals was even more radical than that of the nefariously paranoid House committee.

And this is where the Silicon Valley billionaires embrace the ideas of Ayn Rand—in her ardent defense of business and her skepticism regarding democratic rule. For Rand, business was where all progress lay, and as such, she felt government should get out of the way and let business lead the world.  In her day, it would have been a lot harder to predict where that sort of “leadership” might lead, but ultimately, those who opposed her views had a much more prudent read of the future, and could foresee exactly what we are witnessing today: a world in which a felonious, psychopathic narcissist like Donald Trump is president of the United States, in which the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, is starving the world’s poorest children, in which empathy is considered a fatal weakness, and in which the upper one percent of the population has accumulated fifty percent of the world’s wealth and is hell bent on continuing to further impoverish the common people.

The success of The Fountainhead suddenly made Rand part of the New York right’s intelligentsia. She was swamped with reader correspondence telling her how much the book had influenced their thinking. Some of these admirers were right-wing influencers in their own spheres. In the early fifties many of them gathered on the weekends at Rand’s New York apartment.

Rand with Alan Greenspan during
 the Gerald Ford administration

Among bright young minds who were regulars for those weekend philosophical and political discussions was a thirty-plus Alan Greenspan. Greenspan, up to that time, had been a successful jazz musician, who had studied at Julliard and would later play sax and clarinet with the swing band of jazz great Stan Getz. But he had lately begun following in his economist father’s footsteps and delved into serious university studies of economic sciences. Greenspan would eventually be known as a leading conservative American economist and would serve as the highly influential chairman of the Fed, America’s central bank. 

It was during this period that Rand wrote and published her seminal work, Atlas Shrugged. Riding on the wave of The Fountainhead, this new book, though brutally panned by literary critics and intellectuals alike, would also become an international bestseller. The negative reaction of intellectuals discouraged Rand, who never wrote another work of fiction and devoted her time to her philosophical school of Objectivism. She was aided in this task by her erstwhile lover and right-wing intellectual Nathaniel Branden. Branden created the Nathiel Branden Institute (NBI) basically to espouse Rand’s Objectivism, and NBI became an outlet for many of Rand’s articles and studies.

As with the radical laissez-faire trend of today’s Silicon Valley tech-billionaires, traditional intellectuals found Rand’s Objectivism lacking in rigor and objectivity and they saw NBI as a narrowly-focused organization with an excessive reverence for Rand. They saw it more as a cult than a thinktank, with Rand as its goddess. But despite Rand’s mixed feelings regarding her rejection by much of the New York intelligentsia, and her decision to give up her successful career as a novelist, Atlas Shrugged basically and succinctly encompassed the tenets of her Objectivist philosophy.

Elon Musk

The book posits that rational thought is man's sole survival tool. It promotes the need to comprehend objective reality, and it rejects mysticism, emotion and religious faith. A philosophy that has, sadly, come of age in the Trump/Silicon Valley era, it also champions “rational self-interest” (read: egoism), meaning that people should pursue their own personal interests, and that individuals should never live to serve others. This clearly aligns with the ideas and actions of tech-billionaires like Peter Thiel and—particularly—Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who says that empathy is the "fundamental weakness of Western civilization," and who, as the head of Donald Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—the main purpose of which was to strip funds from the State in order to fund billionaire tax cuts—gutted USAID, which had for decades saved lives worldwide through the provision of food, medical supplies and coverage of other human needs to millions of the world’s poorest people—a move that basically condemned hundreds of thousands of, especially, women and children to certain death.

Atlas Shrugged also celebrates “the virtue of productivity” and portrays industrialists and innovators (a posthumous shout-out to the tech-bros of Silicon Valley) as “heroic producers” who drive human progress and thus create both material and “spiritual” value. The book rejects altruism, positing that self-sacrifice is a destructive force that employs guilt as a means of penalizing competent achievement. As such, it proposed that the ideal society should be built on laissez-faire capitalism, in which voluntary trade transpires with no government coercion, taxation or regulation. This is precisely the argument of tech-billionaires and their lackeys (like House Speaker Mike Johnson) in Congress who believe Silicon Valley tech-bros should self-regulate the development of artificial intelligence (AI), even as credible AI experts warn that this advanced technology could kill everyone on earth by the end of the decade if urgent safeguards are not introduced.

Finally, Atlas Shrugged breaks society down into "makers" (creators of wealth) versus "moochers and looters" (those who rely on force or government mandates to confiscate wealth). Taken to today’s dystopian, but very real extremes, this plays to the argument of the upper one percent which is convinced that it deserves to accumulate the vast bulk of the world’s wealth with no obligation to return anything at all to society. And as AI continues to destroy jobs and to render labor increasingly obsolete, the tacit message is that only the wealthy deserve to survive, while the irrelevant poor are condemned to perish in a rich elite’s world.

Although Rand has long endured as an icon of the right—she was known as the “novelist laureate” of the Reagan White House—the    most consequential legacy she has bequeathed may not be to conventional conservative politics, but to the “techno-fascists” of Silicon Valley. That said, it would be completely unfair to call Ayn Rand the mother of techno-fascism. But at the same time, Rand has supplied Silicon Valley “libertarians” with a pseudo-ethical and, indeed, an heroic mythology that they have twisted into a scenario in which billionaire technology founders are “entitled” to operate above democratic constraint.

It is easy to understand, then, why there has been such renewed interest since the turn of the century in Rand’s work. Not, clearly, among the serious intellectuals of the American intelligentsia, but definitely among the tech-cultists of Silicon Valley extraction. By all accounts, the Rand revival has been formidable over the course of the past twenty years, even despite political science heavyweight Alan Wolfe’s having expressed what is seen as "the traditional academic view" of Rand, by declaring her a "nonperson among academics.”

Rand’s popularity among techno-authoritarian billionaires is due to her having posthumously provided them with something far more powerful than economic theory. What she has bequeathed them is her portrayal of “the morality of the exceptional individual.” In both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, the “great creator” is portrayed as an heroic individual whose genius is continually obstructed by mediocre bureaucrats, collectivists and a society that demands that the exceptional serve the ordinary. Atlas Shrugged takes this idea to its extreme, since in that book, productive industrialists withdraw completely from society, leaving the collectivist system to collapse without them.

What is different about the techno-fascist billionaires of today is that they are not withdrawing in order to test the theory of whether democratic society will collapse without them. Instead, they have gone on the offensive, and with the help of their shill, Donald Trump, they are infiltrating the State and, indeed, the democratic society of the United States with the aim of destroying it from within. Not standing back and allowing democracy to collapse, as in Rand’s book, but rather, taking over in what is basically a techno-fascist coup, and forcing the system to collapse.

It is ironic that Rand had nothing but disdain for libertarians of any stripe, given that the techno-authoritarians continue to depict themselves as techno-libertarians—even though they long ago crossed the line from libertarianism to a new form of fascism. Rand dismissed libertarians as “the hippies of the right” and accused them of “anarchism”. Still, Rand’s industrial-creator-hero  mythology has been a veritable aphrodisiac for the Silicon Valley elite.

And so too has her narrative as a whole. In Rand’s tech-elitist world, the “logic” goes like this:

“I am a creator and an innovator. Government is inefficient. Democratic majorities do not understand innovation. Regulation constrains genius. I am exceptionally productive. Therefore, interference with me is interference with human progress itself.”

Atlas Shrugged depicted businessmen as “heroic, productive thinkers.” And it defined laissez-faire capitalism as the only moral economic system. Rand regarded even unlimited democracy as a form of “statism” incompatible with the independent rational individual. Her philosophy was clearly elitist and almost Darwinian in its concept. And this is what has appealed to tech-billionaires. But while in the philosophy of Rand the idea is that government should get out of the way of creators and allow them free rein to innovate, techno-fascists have reinterpreted this to mean “government has no moral or legal authority over me.” And that is the message being transmitted to the public by techno-shill Donald Trump, who has repeatedly violated laws and the rules of business first, and then let his opponents get tied up in the courts seeking to sue him.

Ayn Rand’s novels and philosophy were much more naïve and theoretical than the way in which they are being interpreted today. Just as each individual or segment of society has their own interpretation of philosophical works like the Bible, the Torah or the Koran, the techno-cultists of the far-right have pressed Rand’s writings into the service of their cause and interpreted them without nuance to suit their own radically anti-democratic take.

Classical libertarianism argues for limited government and individual freedom. There is nothing fascist about that idea, and true libertarians have a long history of anti-authoritarian traditions. But something much darker takes place when that philosophy is fused with extraordinary concentrations of private wealth, technological power and political influence.

In this case, the question ceases to be, “How much power should government have?” It becomes, instead, “Why should anyone or anything have the power to restrain me?”

And that question turns highly elitist and, hence, fascist when it goes still further and asks, “Why should democratic government have authority over people who are smarter, richer and more technologically capable than the government itself?”

This is where the rubber meets the road between simple techno-libertarianism and tech-fascism. And there is ever-increasing evidence that this is no longer a merely academic concern. This is real, and it is a clear and present threat to democracy, not only in the US, but worldwide as well. It is as if an arguably tentative and experimental idea has turned to cancer and metastasized throughout society, in the form of a rogue, lawless government, generously backed by equally rogue and lawless tech-billionaires.

Peter Thiel

Vice-President JD Vance’s mentor Peter Thiel is the clearest example. A major Silicon Valley investor, early Facebook investor, and one of the most influential figures in the tech-libertarian movement, he has openly rejected democracy. And his political philosophy has helped inspire a generation of techno-entrepreneurs and high-rolling investors. Le Monde has described Thiel as a libertarian billionaire whose skepticism toward democracy and hostility toward the state have helped make him an important bridge between Silicon Valley and Trumpism. But considering himself too restricted by government even in Trump’s Washington, Thiel recently took his billions elsewhere, setting up shop in Argentina, where Trump lapdog and president Javier Milei is likely to be even more forgiving, and indeed supportive, of his lawless power.

Herein lies another contradiction to Rand’s theories. While techno-fascists claim to represent libertarianism and to despise government, they actively seek to impose enormous influence on the State—as in the near co-presidency that Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, exercised during the early days of Trump’s second term, and which he only gave up when it started affecting his bottom line at Tesla. Nor did he give it up completely, still acting today as an ideological Rasputin behind the scenes.

None of this is unintentional or spontaneous. It is a techno-authoritarian strategy. If you can weaken democratic institutions by backing Trojan horses like the Trump regime, privatize functions traditionally performed by the state, make governments dependent on your technology, and accumulate enough wealth to influence elections and public policy, you don't have to abolish government. You simply have to make government increasingly dependent on you, which is a completely different proposition from that of traditional libertarians. And so it is that Rand’s mythology surrounding the lone-wolf genius morphs into a false justification for the accumulation of unprecedented power and wealth. 

Suffice it to say that Elon Musk’s nearly one trillion-dollar net worth is greater than the GDPs of any of 174 countries worldwide, since there are only 25 nations on the planet whose GDPs get anywhere close to a trillion dollars. Musk could literally buy and sell any of a large number of countries like properties on a monopoly board. That includes his own native South Africa, which, as the largest economy on the African continent, has a GDP of less than half a trillion dollars.  

The creative titans of industry that Rand celebrated in her works were the so-called “robber barons” of the 19^th century—the Rockefellers, the Carnegies and the Vanderbilts, as well as innovators like Henry Ford, Walter Chrysler and Howard Hughes. Greedy and aggressive though they may have been, and ruthless in their quest for money and power, these were all tycoons who believed in improving the society in which they did their business, and who, through their foundations, reinvested part of the money they accumulated in that society. They supported the arts, built schools and hospitals, funded scholarships and became deeply involved in international relief efforts.

These were not today’s tech-billionaires who subscribe fully to the school of egoism and to the Simon Legree mentality of the ruthless plantation owner whose cruelty and moral emptiness define him as the ultimate antagonist in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom's Cabin.

That said, then as now, the robber barons, like the tech-authoritarians, hoarded the lion’s share of society’s wealth. In that, nothing has changed. The upper one percent then and the upper one percent now have controlled more than half of all wealth. Nor did they pay their fair share in taxes—despite Rand’s lamenting of how put-upon they were. In fact, they paid next to nothing, just as do the tech-fascists of today. And that is why society is in the trouble it is. Not because of any “unfair treatment” of billionaires by the government.

What is clearly different is the scope of power between tycoons past and present. While a robber baron might arguably have dominated an industry or sector, the tech-fascists of today have far more diverse and invasive interests. While a robber baron might have had vast power in steel, oil or the railways, tech-billionaires have the potential and, indeed the means, to control social-media platforms, enormous information and entertainment networks, satellite communications, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, financial infrastructure, private aerospace technology, defense technology, massive databases, political advertising and information distribution, and the list goes on. They have the potential, in other words, to control practically everything.  

Gil Durán, author of the best-selling book The Nerd Reich, argues that Silicon Valley billionaires are actively seeking to replace democratic government with a corporate authoritarian order. That is not libertarianism. It is oligarchic fascism. It previews a post-Orwellian scenario in which it will not be a super-State Big Brother controlling everything, but rather, a society in which a handful of extraordinarily wealthy private individuals possess so much technological and economic power that they can intervene in every phase of society, and in which democratic government is utterly incapable of controlling them, and, as such, is rendered moot.

The one person, one vote ideal of democracy is anathema to the tech-billionaires, Already they have bastardized that tenet through laws like Citizens United that equate corporations with individuals and provide them with the “right” (as sanctified by a corrupt US Supreme Court) to donate “generously” to political campaigns. In point of fact, what laws like this have done is to permit techno-fascists to literally buy politicians and, indeed, entire administrations, as witnessed by the current one in the US.

This is, then, the point at which Ayn Rand's celebration of the “heroic individual” mutates into something she herself might well not have recognized: a veritable political theology in which technological wealth becomes evidence of superior merit, superior judgment and, ultimately, superior entitlement to rule.

The overriding idea here, then, is not that Ayn Rand fostered tech fascism. It is, instead, that Rand helped provide tech-fascism with an intellectual mythology to hang its hat on.

She supplied the “heroic entrepreneur” with self-righteous contempt for bureaucratic constraint, suspicion of democratic collectivism, the “moral” elevation of self-interest, and the conviction that society ultimately depends on its exceptional creators to the point that they are practically gods.

Silicon Valley, for its part, supplied the technology. Billionaires supplied the unprecedented wealth. And paid-off politicians supplied the opportunity for what amounts to a corporate coup d’etat. That isn't freedom. It is private sovereignty.

Put those three things together and the danger is no longer merely that technology will change democracy, but that it will massacre it, and make techno-fascism the force that will enslave rather than free the individual, and that will ultimately rule the world.

 

IN HOMAGE TO GLORIA STEINEM – ICONIC ‘GOOD TROUBLE’ LEADER OF WOMEN’S LIB SECOND-WAVE FEMINISM

 The hope of a once shining era died this past week with Gloria Steinem, the iconic leader of the second-wave feminist movement, better known to those of us who embraced the sixties and seventies protest era as “women’s lib”. Born in 1934, in the city of Toledo, in my home state of Ohio, Steinem passed away quietly at her Manhattan home on September 2^nd, aged 92, surrounded by loved ones.

But quiet wasn’t how Steinem rolled throughout most of her lifetime. As late as this year, she was interviewed by The New York Times, on the subject of what it felt like to reach eighty. It may have seemed a bit belated, considering that she was already well past ninety, but there was a social issue at work—with her you could bet there was always a social issue at work—since the piece was timed to coincide with Donald Trump’s eightieth birthday on June 14^th.   

From a personal standpoint, Steinem said the worst part about reaching eighty (and above) was that you kept “losing the people you love.” But when the subject turned to Trump’s birthday, Steinem was asked what advice she had for the newly octogenarian president. Her one-word response? “Resign.”

A graduate of the famed women’s liberal arts institution, Smith College, she would have a varied and storied career that required a kind of adventurous inspiration and courage that few women of her generation had possessed. She would be one of the primary leaders who empowered other women to rise up and embrace that same courage. That adventurous and pioneering spirit led her to reinvent herself again and again in iterations that included stints as a CIA asset, as a bunny at Hugh Hefner’s famous (or infamous depending on how you look at it) Playboy Mansion, as a free-lance writer and journalist for major periodicals, as a columnist for New York Magazine, and as the founder and editor of Ms Magazine, a publication that embodied the spirit and essence of the emerging women’s lib movement, of which Steinem was a unique pop icon.

It was a New York Magazine article that launched Steinem to national recognition as a feminist leader. Published in 1969, at the height of the protest era, the piece was entitled After Black Power, Women's Liberation, and was a clarion call to American women to stand up and fight for their civil rights in the same way the African Americans had done throughout the Civil Rights Era.  Three years later, as the pop culture influence of Steinem and other feminist leaders burgeoned, the combative spirit of that article and ‘call to arms’ would be embodied in a controversial John Lennon and Yoko Ono song entitled Woman Is the Nigger of the World, included in their Some Time in New York City album.

Gloria Steinem seemed to thrive on protest and activism and to have the kind of boundless energy to always have time for one more activist organization. She was a co-founder in 1971 for the National Women’s Political Caucus. This was an organization designed to provide support and vital training for women seeking both elected and appointed office. That same year, she co-founded the Women’s Action Alliance, which, for the next quarter-century, would back a network of feminist activists working to advance causes and legislation aimed at empowering women and defending their civil and human rights.

Even as the Women’s Action Alliance continued with its important work, Gloria Steinem helped establish “Take Our Daughters to Work Day”. This was a day set aside as an occasion for girls to share in the workdays of career women in all walks of life, and to learn about future vocational opportunities.

In 2005, Steinem was joined by actor and veteran peace and women’s activist Jane Fonda, and by former child actor, poet, writer, journalist and lecturer Robin Morgan—who, from the early sixties onward had been a major, radical voice for feminism through the American Women’s Movement—in founding the Women’s Media Center, an organization that continues to work to provide women with higher visibility and power in the media.

Steinem came by her activism honestly. Her paternal grandmother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, was a Suffragette, and chaired the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). In 1908, Pauline was also an American delegate to the International Council of Women. She would later go on to be the first woman ever elected to the Toledo Board of Education and was to become a leader in the vocational education movement. In the years leading up to World War II and during the war,  Pauline Steinem would become a fervent anti-Nazi activist, and would manage to save many members of her family from the Holocaust.

Gloria, for her part, became one of the highest-profile leaders of what would come to be known as second-wave feminism in the 1960s and ‘70s and she would remain publicly synonymous with the women’s rights movement in the US well into the 1990s.

Second-wave feminism differed from the early twentieth-century women’s movement in that the original Suffragettes were focused almost entirely on winning the vote for women in the US—a feat they finally achieved in 1920. The second-wave feminists were bent on equal rights at all levels, and were universal and transcultural in their ambitions.  This feminist movement began in the early 1960s and lasted through the 1980s. It delved into all aspects of women’s lives from sexuality and reproductive rights to work and family.

The second-wave feminism that much of Steinem’s writing and activism helped fuel concerned the widespread isolation and silent frustrations of women enslaved by the post-World War II domesticity of the late-forties and the fifties. Major early influences for the growth of this  movement included Simone de Beauvoir’s pioneering 1949 book, The Second Sex, and a 1963 work by early second-wave feminist leader Betty Freidan entitled The Feminine Mystique. This was the standard that Gloria Steinem would take up and vastly expand as of the late 1960s. All of these feminist pioneers centered the thrust of their literature on challenging traditional societal roles and on asking why women should be treated as secondary to males.

Taking their cue from the Civil Rights Movement, Steinem and other second-wave feminists fought wage and job discrimination, seeking to tear down labor barriers and to break through the glass ceiling at the top of the pyramid. They vigorously campaigned for access to birth control pills and to abortion on demand, emphasizing the right of women to control their own bodies and for the State to stay out of their bedrooms. They also posited that “the personal is political” and underscored the fact that private household roles and domestic inequalities were not the exclusive province of husbands and fathers, but systemic political issues that required immediate change.

The work of Steinem and other feminists of her era led to an expansion of the women’s movement to include areas that had been totally marginalized previously. So it was that spinoff groups like COYOTE were born.

COYOTE was an acronym for Call Off Your Tired Old Ethics. It was founded in San Francisco in 1973, by sex worker Margo St. James, in defense of sex-workers’ civil and human rights. But in carrying out its activist work, it also ended up shaping yet another movement dedicated to sex-positive feminism. Its core goal was to inspire society to treat “the world’s oldest profession” as a valid source of work.

COYOTE argued that selling sex was equivalent to any other job in the service and hospitality sectors. It called for sex workers to not only not be punished for plying their trade, but also to be accorded the full rights and protections under the law that were guaranteed to other service professionals. It thus demanded fair pay, access to proper health care and standard workplace protections to ensure safety and freedom from illicit exploitation. Through educational tools, interviews and sectorial newsletters COYOTE sought to end society’s stigmatization of prostitution, and the legalization of the profession.

These were the highly varied issues that Gloria Steinem dealt with and wrote about throughout her long and illustrious career as an author, journalist, speaker and radical activist.

Steinem was a pop icon of the protest era and well beyond, and someone young people would do well to emulate today unless they want to end up living The Handmaid's Tale "live" and direct from fiction to fact. She was, in fact one of the most influential cultural icons of the twentieth century, and made an extraordinary contribution to a positive and progressive age that is all but forgotten by anyone but those of my own generation.

I am daily devastated to see how all of the advancements that the extraordinary leaders of the Civil Rights and Women’s Lib eras fought for are being systematically dismantled in this age of neo-fascism that is gripping the US and infecting much of the rest of the world. Those who are propagating it are bent on not only returning society to the unequal and unfair world of a century ago, but also on further deepening the repression of the rights won over the course of half a century, and of oppressing the groups, individuals and ethnicities that fought the noble fight to obtain those rights.

To tell Gloria Steinem to rest in peace is an impossible demand. If there is, indeed, an afterlife, wherever she is, in whatever dimension she is now manifesting herself, Gloria Steinem is bound to be making “good trouble” in service to positive and progressive change.

 

THE TOXIC FIDGET QUEEN VILLIFIES DR. FAUCI

Dr. Lillian Glass

 One of the latest additions to the MAGA Fauci pile-on is bestselling psychological spin doctor Lillian Glass. You might recall Glass as the “self-help” pundit who allegedly invented the term “toxic people”—the title of her first worldwide bestseller back in the nineties—and as the self-styled “Queen of Communications” whose claim to fame is supposedly being able to tell you everything there is to know about a person just by how they blink their eyes, cross their legs, smile, frown, sweat or scratch their…whatever.

MAGA has apparently enlisted Dr. Glass (yes, she does have a PhD, but not, as it turns out, in psychology) to do a very public hatchet job on Dr. Fauci. She is doing it in articles and also on podcasts—on Newsmax among other places.

Speaking of Newsmax, I saw an interview she did there. They came to her home. My first impression was that, for a supposed expert on body language, you would think she would be better at controlling her own.

During that apparently uncut interview, at one point a dog comes into the room and starts barking at the strangers. The camera remains on Glass but you hear the dog barking. Glass suddenly grows very tense, seems to lose track of what the interviewer is asking her, tightens her upper lip (wonder what that means?) and shouts “No!” at the dog out the side of her mouth.

The dog keeps yapping and Glass gets increasingly agitated and distracted. At one point she leans forward, upper lip still tight across her front teeth, and appears to pick an item up from an invisible table in front of her—we’re only seeing her from the chest up. Whatever it is—we can’t see her hand—her shoulder shows that she has side-armed at the dog.

Then suddenly, interrupting the interviewer, she shouts at someone else in the house to come get the dog. By then, I’d pretty much lost interest in the interview—the body language (her body language) portion had been fascinating—because from there on it was a litany of  alleged “tells” that she claimed Fauci had, and which she interpreted as proof positive that he was guilty as sin of whatever he was being accused of, and was being deceptive about it. Innocent until proven guilty…unless you fidget.

Perhaps before I engage in any further analysis of Dr. Glass’s “expertise” and motives, I should point out that she is really hard to take seriously, since, while throwing an honorable scientist like Dr. Fauci under the wheels of the MAGA deflection bus, she has described the body language of Donald Trump—arguably one of the most hostile, deceptive and insincere personalities in history—as “expressive, confident and affectionate,” noting that he has non-verbal style shifts from high-energy dominance to rare moments of strict control or vulnerability depending on the context.

Glass has opined that Trump is typically outspoken, open, and emotional in his body language during standard rallies, utilizing a wide range of vocal inflections. She sees this as positive high energy. Fact-checkers would say that it is hard to be “outspoken and open” when you are provably lying to the crowd with nearly every breath you take.

She has also claimed that Trump has “a controlled delivery” with an “evidence-driven demeanor”—perhaps it would seem so if all you are doing is looking at his tics and “tells”, and not listening to the  outrageous things he is saying that have no basis in fact. Dr. Glass has also extensively analyzed Trump’s handshakes, calling them intense signs of warmth, or as “hand hugs.” Other observers have described them as over the top, creepy, and a kind of arm wrestling to see who blinks first.

Where I can only agree with Glass is when she talks about his meetings with authoritarians like Xi Jinping. She interprets a sense of close proximity, back-pats, and smiles, and calls them “a mix of deliberate power moves and genuine mutual affection.” Bingo! Donald Trump does indeed love his autocrats and authoritarians. You won’t see him wasting any effusive love of this kind on democratic leaders.

Dr. Fauci during the Senate hearing

Compare these glowing views of the president’s body language traits with her scathing interpretation of Dr. Fauci’s discomfort before a Senate committee headed up by Rand Paul, a sworn enemy of his, and under hostile examination by other Republican conspiracy theorists. Her bias seemed to be showing when, in an interview, she talked about how open and sincere questioning by Senator Bernie Moreno (R-OH) had been, when, at one point, as you might recall, Moreno disrespectfully asked Dr. Fauci “who the fuck he thought he was.” She might call that being open and sincere. I call it rude and inappropriate.

For her part, Lillian Glass interpreted all of Dr. Fauci’s “tells” as abjectly negative. The main thrust of her interpretation is that Dr. Fauci’s body language suggests “deception.” Glass points to signs of anxiety, facial expressions that she alleges reveal concealed emotions, the frequency of his blinking, swallowing or tightening of facial muscles. She claims Fauci’s posture during questioning became “defensive” (ya think?). That his voice changed under pressure—I keep remembering Glass with the dog. That his eye movements indicated discomfort. (He was, after all, being given the third degree by one of the GOP’s chief conspiracy theorists, who had the authority of the Senate behind him, no matter how outrageous his claims). That his smiles were “forced.” That his gestures signaled “evasiveness.” That his reactions to questions demonstrated “fear of exposure.” And that his exchanges with Rand Paul revealed “guilt rather than confidence.”

Just by looking at Dr. Fauci, Glass decided that he had “something to hide” regarding gain-of-function research, his congressional testimony, NIH funding of research involving the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the true origins of COVID (which, so far, no one serious has been able to establish, but the spin doctor seems to have it all figured out). Graver still, in her media posts, she has explicitly described Dr. Fauci as a “megalomaniacal, narcissistic sociopath” and a “megalomaniac and a narcissist”—terms more often employed by mental health specialists to describe Glass’s preferred Psychopath-in-Chief. 

Speech coach for the rich and famous

Furthermore, she is ill-equipped and hasn’t the credentials to make this call, since she is a body-language and behavioral analyst, not a psychoanalyst, and has never examined Dr. Fauci as a patient—nor could she. Indeed, her original training is more in the field of speech therapy and facial and cranial irregularities, specialties in which she skyrocketed to fame by setting up a Beverly Hills practice where she became the “king’s speech” coach to the rich and famous. So her saying this about Dr. Fauci is pretty much the same as any random person on the street calling him names.

Here’s the problem: The central weakness in Lillian Glass's criticism of Dr. Anthony Fauci is that it attempts to transform inherently subjective observations about facial expressions and posture into proof of dishonesty while simultaneously adopting many of the political narratives promoted by Fauci's congressional critics. Whatever one thinks of Fauci's COVID-era decisions, body-language analysis is not evidence of deception, nor can it establish scientific misconduct. It is only slightly more than a party trick that can be interpreted in numerous ways. Proof of that is the fact that polygraphs—which depend on the body’s reactions to questioning— are inadmissible in courts of law because they are only scientifically considered to be fifty-four percent accurate at best, and open to interpretation depending on who is administering the test. Those odds aren’t much better than a coin toss.

Add to that the fact that Dr. Glass has made repeated public statements criticizing the handling of the COVID crisis by the team headed up by Dr. Fauci during the pandemic—a team, by the way, that received Presidential Commendations from then-President Trump for their “exceptional efforts” in combating the disease—and it is difficult to take her as being an “unbiased” observer.

This doesn’t come as a surprise. While Glass has always insisted that she is apolitical and that her body language interpretations are void of political prejudice, observers point out that her public comments on social media frequently lean into right-wing populist talking points, particularly regarding pandemic restrictions, cultural institutions, and public health officials. Glass has sharply and openly criticized standard public health measures, lockdowns, and Anthony Fauci personally, aligning closely with MAGA critiques of COVID-19 mandates. She has publicly called out celebrities like Julia Roberts for their praise of Fauci, framing it as a failure to recognize “toxic” (her favorite buzzword) institutional behavior.

While she avoids declaring whom she is voting for, her public commentary has frequently praised Trump’s cultural impact, while criticizing efforts to erase his name from historical venues. All of this while, as mentioned before, favorably characterizing Trump’s body language and delivery styles. She has, furthermore, routinely framed pandemic-era school closures, vaccine mandates, and masking rules as severe government overreach that destroyed businesses and personal lives, giving no credence to the idea of seeking to save lives through any means necessary in a once-in-a-century plague that nevertheless killed millions worldwide and a million in the US alone. The COVID pandemic was the kind of exceptional occurrence that, throughout history, has merited seemingly cruel general quarantines and exceptional public safety measures.

Communications experts claim that Glass’s insistence that her critiques are “not a political post” or partisan exercises, but rather objective assessments of human decency, communication, and systemic toxicity, ring hollow, since her choice of targets is predominantly liberal public figures or mainstream public health architects. This reveals no objectivity at all, but a consistently subjective anti-liberal, far-right populist alignment in spirit and practice.

Psychological and behavioral science professionals have long criticized Dr. Lillian Glass and similar high-profile self-help media commentators for promoting unproven body language “tells”. They point out that there is no empirical grounding for the concept of “toxic people”, and indicate that there are standing professional ethics rules that prohibit engaging in unsupported remote psychological analysis.

Many psychological and non-verbal communications researchers have, through their intensive studies, come to classify lie-detection through posture, eye movements, or touching the face as scientific misinformation or “junk science”. In all fairness, there are likely others, like Dr. Glass, who defend their stand with equal certainty. But empirical studies exist that tend to show that there is no single reliable non-verbal indicator or checklist of behaviors (such as micro-expressions or fidgeting—what Glass likes to call the “itchy-scratchies”—that proves a person is lying. Experts conclude that behavior depends on more than the “tells” of the moment, and relies heavily on individual baselines, cultural background, and individual context rather than any sort of universal “dictionary” of physical movement.

Some clinical psychologists have also specifically criticized the “toxic people” concept. These critics point out that terms like “toxic” or “toxicity” have no formal diagnostic utility or foundation in psychological science. They are usually, these experts say, an oversimplification in that they pigeonhole or label people as inherently toxic, which promotes a black-and-white view of human behavior that avoids addressing complex interpersonal dynamics or accountability. It tends to be a “feel-good” self-help gimmick that permits one or both parties in a relationship to lay all blame for the failure of that relationship on the other person by writing him or her off as “toxic”. That said, Dr. Glass’s body language star, Donald Trump, is clearly, in most of the world’s perception, and certainly in mine, for all it’s worth, the most toxic personality to reach global mega-power status since the eve of World War II.

Where Dr. Glass clearly falls through the cracks in professional ethics, however, is in her remote and un-credentialed analysis of Dr. Fauci as a “megalomaniacal, narcissistic sociopath.”  Licensed mental health professionals are bound by ethical rules (such as the American Psychiatric Association's Goldwater Rule) forbidding the public diagnosis or psychological evaluation of public figures they have not personally examined. Media personalities like Dr. Glass who offer allegedly definitive psychological assessments of public figures like Dr. Fauci are in clear violation of this standard of empirical and clinical accountability.

But then again, since Dr. Glass is merely a bestselling, high-profile, self-help pundit rather than a mental health professional, perhaps the gold standard ethics of the psychiatric community do not apply. Instead, she is merely plying her millions of far-right fans with populist red meat that only has the subjective significance that she and her following want to give it, with no empirical evidence to prove it. And no apparent personal need on her part to be incumbered by the facts.