The graph web apps are currently hosted here and on WhoNeeds.It.

Context

A year ago next week, this stack published one of its first Substack articles in an attempt to find other Substack blogs that had been publishing on Ayn Rand or her philosophy of moral objectivism. The motivation was to learn about the “landscape” of a topic of interest on this platform, using data science techniques. To that end, RSS feeds were used in data crawling and scraping this data.

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The results were incomplete and noisy, but it was a mildly useful first attempt. They were published within the article as a list of titles, authors, and hyperlinks.

Although a follow-up article did not soon materialize, a database of people, entities, and facts related to objectivism was created on CloudFlare D1 SQLite for the purpose of self-education. The scope of that project has grown large enough to bring us full circle to updating data on objectivism-related Substack publications as well.

The Database

The data behind the graphs consists of information on objectivists, their organizations, related Substacks, and trivia. Initial data sourcing involved reading and “data scraping” of the websites of the Ayn Rand Institute, the Objectivist Standard Institute, and The Atlas Society, in addition to blogs from the “Objectivism on Substack” article.

The programmatically collected data was very messy, i.e., it had lots of mistakes and inconsistently typed proper names, but it has been cleaned and reviewed manually. The process is ongoing, and some organizations are still missing records showing connected individuals. Corrections and contributions are welcome.

The trivia component of the website followed a similar pattern. Originally, a Python script was being used to batch process large chunks of raw text from all of Rand’s works, which in turn were used to generate multiple-choice questions and store them in the database. It generated 8,000 questions.

Unsatisfied with the quality of too high a proportion of those questions, a decision was made to limit the quiz to only manually reviewed questions. At present, only 200 of the questions have been reviewed, which are available in the quizzes on WhoNeeds.it, but hopefully this number will increase over time.

The Updated Objectivist Substack List

Last year’s article included a directory of objectivist and Rand-related substacks, but it was based on an overly simplistic keyword search strategy that utilized Substack’s publication/note search and RSS feed scraping. This year it was expanded by manually searching the names of individuals in our D1 database on Substack’s profile search.

Although many new blogs were discovered, the list is still likely incomplete. Please report any omissions.

• • Ayn Rand Institute (Fellow?)

  • PhD, philosophy

• • Ayn Rand Institute

• Ason Peikoff (Rand)

  • Author of Postsocialist Capitalism (book) and Postsocialist Press

  • Course designer of “Moral Philosophy: A Survey of Ethics from Ancient to Modern Times”

• Audra Hilse

  • Archivist, Ayn Rand Institute

• Ayn Rand Institute

  • “Exploring ideas from the perspective of Objectivism”

• • The Ayn Rand Society, affiliated with the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division

• • Archivist

  • Ayn Rand Archives

• • Prof. of Political Philosophy. Executive Director of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism.

  • “The Redneck Intellectual”

• • Prometheus Foundation

  • Professor of Philosophy

• • Weekly Wonderings

  • PhD, philosophy

• • Author of Loving Life, Rational Egoism, and host of the Under Standing podcast

  • Executive Director, Objective Standard Institute

  • Editor in Chief, The Objective Standard (journal)

• • Chairman, Ayn Rand Institute

  • Books include: What Justice Demands, Failing to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism, and Illuminating Ayn Rand

• • I teach philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin, where I’m a senior fellow at the Civitas Institute

  • Co-editor: A Companion to Ayn Rand (Wiley, 2016), Foundations of a Free Society (UPP, 2019) and Two Philosophers (UPP, 2026)

• • PhD in Philosophy, Columbia U.

  • Latest books: How We Know and Ayn Rand’s Philosophic Achievement

  • Taught: U. Texas/Austin, Hunter College (CUNY), New School for Social Research, the Ayn Rand Institute

• • Senior fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University 💪

  • Distinguished visiting fellow at Arizona State University

  • Author of the bestselling books Dereliction of Duty, Battlegrounds, and At War With Ourselves

• • Professor emeritus of History and Philosophy of Science

• • Reinterpreting Ayn Rand through the lens of “The Living Ego”

• • VP of Education and Senior Fellow of the Ayn Rand Institute

• Klaus Norby

• • Ex-christian sharing his journey from religion to rational philosophy

• • Author of The Moneyball Method

• Marshall Quinn

• • Author of Rational Optimist Society

• Mike Mazza

  • Associate Fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute

• ()

  • Memes, Quotes, Comics, and Opinions promoting Objectivism

• • Author of The Tyranny of Need and Libertarianism: The Perversion of Liberty

  • Founding Editor & Publisher of The Intellectual Activist (1979-1990)

  • Former Chairman of the Board, and now Distinguished Fellow, Ayn Rand Institute

• Postsocialist Press

• • Sr. Fellow, The Atlas Society

• • Prof. of (ancient) Philosophy

  • Retired

• Robert Tracinski

  • A new perspective on Ayn Rand’s philosophy, focusing on the law of cause and effect

  • “Prophet of Causation” Substack blog author

• • Associate Fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute

• Sam Weaver

• • Autonomia

  • Former intern on Leonard Peikoff’s “Keeping It Real” podcast

• • Commentary from a filmmaker and Objectivist

• • CEO, Ayn Rand Institute

• • Leverages Ayn Rand’s moral framework to help business leaders tackle ideological challenges

• The Objective Standard ()

  • Commentary from an Objectivist perspective

• • Alex Bleier and Kevin Osborne

  • Funded by the Prometheus Foundation

• • 17 years at Ayn Rand Institute

  • Retired civil litigator

• • CEO of Alexa Real Estate

• • Ayn Rand Institute’s Chairman of the Board and former CEO

General political blogs and culturally linked off-topic stacks (i.e., Daniel Donnelley, Don’t Let It Go, The Applied Libertarian, etc.) are currently excluded but can be at added by request.

What’s Available

At the time of writing, you can access the Python-based network graphs of substacks on WhoNeeds.it. That site was built using a GitHub account that has been locked for nearly a week. For that reason, a separate, enhanced version of the graph widget was written using the R language. The newer graph is available here.

For those with an interest in AI code generation, note that the Python version was created using GitHub Co-pilot with the human (me) prompting, testing, and correcting errors. The R version is completely human-written, on the other hand. Surprisingly, they both took about the same amount of time. Let me know if you find quality differences.

The newer graph supports scrolling, zooming, filtering, images, and external links. It does not (yet) have a separate tag for Substack.

Nolan’s Chart has been forked by other projects such as The Political Compass and iSideWith.com, where the axes remain the same but with a slightly different visualization or alternative question lists. In this brief article, a potentially more relevant, if somewhat arbitrary, version of the chart is proposed and a live, interactive implementation of the quiz is provided for your entertainment.

One of the major criticisms of the chart is that it uses terms from politics and political philosophy like “liberal” and “conservative,” which are not perfectly aligned with greater or…

Read more

Reason, even when being suppressed in action by addiction or fear, tells us that belief in ancient supernatural claims or chronic use of an expensive and fatal poison is absurd. Accepting unvalidated and questionably motivated claims on faith, if sustained, would quickly lead to one’s own demise. What if a street corner fentanyl dealer told you that a lethal dose of the drug was a safe amount to combat dental pain?

So why has religion been so popular and widespread? Religion has played an important stopgap role historically, granting early access to ethics and its benefits. Even today religion remains widespread and offers the most accepted solution to our ultimate and seemingly insurmountable problem of mortality, yet scientific objectivity has yielded us better alternatives, reducing or eliminating the need for religion. Meanwhile, the costs of faith include hatred, wars, and self-sacrifice.

The atheist American philosopher Ayn Rand frequently identified religion as “a primitive form of philosophy,” which, while once a justification, is now a reason for deprecation1. In ancient times, the most philosophically enlightened leaders might’ve established that murder and robbery are wrong, but lacked the ability to argue it rationally with their tribes. Saying that it was the will of god and is being demanded by that god under threat of eternal damnation probably served as a quick path to civility. That practical value of the leading philosophical thought of the age, combined with sincerely held supernatural beliefs, could account for most religion’s popularity. Given the smaller size of human brains at the time, a lack of scientific knowledge, and widespread superstitious beliefs, the seminal authors of the religions may have thought that they were in some kind of divine communication when feeling inspired.

Although this helps to explain religion as well as to appreciate its role in history, it also means that the development of ethical thought remains frozen for many at the beginning. Although religious scholars emerge, the basic tenets are fixed and scrutiny is largely replaced with mindless subservience. Since faith means acceptance of beliefs without proof, and those beliefs were set in stone (literally, in some cases) millennia ago, the dogma can’t truly be updated to include the enlightenment of mankind from our entire history of scientific and philosophical thought.

We shouldn’t pretend that the needs being addressed by religiosity aren’t valid or important. As with all living beings, human beings have a survival instinct to serve as their most fundamental and vital form of selfishness—a desire to preserve one’s own life. The intellectual development of our species clashes devastatingly with that instinct, because we have foreknowledge of the inevitability and irreversibility of our deaths. The worst possible outcome, the greatest fear of any mentally healthy adult, is inevitable and by definition involves the destruction of the mind (arguably invalidating any purpose or accomplishments as futile and ultimately meaningless).

Religion promises us a sorely needed solution, but without evidence and at great cost. By offering faith, however, individuals give up control of their minds. The immediate intellectual price is clear, given that the only working epistemological methods of understanding reality must be given up systematically in order for faith to fulfill its purpose as an anesthetic. The true price of religion is much higher because those who simply seek to control and manipulate others are able to take advantage of the believer’s irrationality.

Socialism demands mindless acceptance and obedience as well, but calls theirs “indoctrination” or “doctrine” rather than “faith” or “dogma”. The surprising number of similarities between religion and socialism is largely due to their mutual underlying collectivism. Collectivism views groups as having rights superior to those of individuals—and even supposed rights of groups to individuals. The resulting ‘values’ stemming from such a worldview typically involve self-sacrifice and subservience to an unquestioned authority.

In religion, a god or gods are presented as the ultimate source of authority—an all-knowing, powerful, infallible creator who stands ready to hand out negative reinforcement to any heretics. Proponents of the religion are quick to point out that god, as an authority, is no longer directly accessible; thus control flows to god’s alleged Earthly representatives in the church or whoever in the larger society most effectively claims association with the spiritual realm.

For centuries, sultans, kings, warlords, messiahs, and priests have all laid their claim to that role, extracting obedience and esteem when successful. How many have died because their geopolitical leader told them god needed them to invade a neighboring state and take its land?

“Opportunity cost” is an economic term that refers to the value of the best alternative. The opportunity costs of religion are quite high. Throughout history, everyone who’s ever deluded or distracted themself to avoid thinking about death objectively could’ve contributed to finding a way to prevent or better delay it. Consider the following hypothetical exchange between a believer (B) and skeptic (S):

B: Even if faith isn’t based on logic, that’s OK because it’s not harmful.
S: Doesn’t giving up reason make life harder? How can we work to avoid death if we’re accepting it as a great ascension into an unknowable paradise of heaven or another afterlife?
B: I’m not abandoning reason because I have faith. I don’t worry that this is distracting people like me from finding scientific solutions to the problem of mortality because we have a thriving healthcare sector.
S: Do you believe that your consciousness can somehow exist beyond death?
B: Yes, I believe that if you open your heart to (Jesus / Allah / G-d), that your name is written in the Book of Life, which means you’ll live forever in a paradise after your so-called death.
S: When you think about death, does this belief give you any comfort?
B: Of course, but I still have health insurance and I own stock in biotech companies because my religion says this life is also important.
S: Are you a member of a human cryonics institution, so that you can try to prolong life with cryostasis?
B: No, I want to have a religious funeral with an open casket and I’ll be in heaven when the hospital pronounces me dead.

The point is, of course, that the believer gives up opportunities to work against a real-world problem by finding a real-world solution because of the effects of faith on rationality. The example is also quite timely, because in 2024 researchers at Fudan University published their seminal experiment with a new human cryonics (cryostasis) procedure called MEDY, wherein they successfully froze part of a human brain and later reanimated it without tissue damage.

If the vast wealth spent on religion and religiously-influenced activities worldwide annually had been devoted to this sort of research, we might’ve had this technology 50 years earlier and developed it to the point of widespread, reliable use, with patients being revived regularly as new life-extending treatments they need are developed.

Opportunity costs are only the ‘glass is half empty’ perspective, though. The “half full” perspective is that more and more opportunities to advance our struggle against death are emerging. As AI continues to rapidly fuel new drug discovery and cryonics has had its breakthrough, philosophy and science are yielding more and more hope.

Contemplations of virtual reality and AI have led mainstream philosophers studying philosophy of mind, like Chalmers and Clarke, to believe that we may exist inside of (or as) AI in a virtual world—a trending idea in recent years among intellectuals.

A popular peer-reviewed study claimed mathematical evidence of newly discovered law of the physics of information (Infodynamics) which claims evidence that we exist in a virtual world (simulation) by identifying apparent rounding errors in astronomical phenomena. Hardware advances and improvements to neural networks meanwhile, make it sound more and more plausible that our consciousnesses could extend beyond, and perhaps one day entirely even leave, our physical bodies.

It’s an exciting time to be alive, but far less so than it would be if more attention were diverted from religion and the massacres or wars it has created at any given time to furthering these advances. Fortunately, because of technological and philosophical advances, it’s never been easier to have the intellectual and emotional maturity to accept reality.

Although the President has acknowledged calls for him to run for a third term, thus far, he has indicated he remains focused only on his second term. When a friend first alerted me to the mentions of a potential “third term”, it was presented as being part of the President’s agenda, for which I haven’t found much support. At first, I was highly suspicious, wondering if the President might someday follow Vladimir Putin’s example of continually extending his Presidency, and imagining the paths to dictatorship described in Ominous Parallels, which outlines how American culture might give rise to a dictator, based on parallels with socialist Germany prior to World War II (Peikoff, 1983). Feeling conflicted, I decided to analyze the issue. I asked when, if ever, term limits are appropriate, how to prevent a dictatorship, and what this means for President Trump. To my shock, I kept coming to the same conclusion—the safety and stability of the world demands a path be paved to President Trump’s third term.

The Collective-Individual Paradigm in Term Limits

America is a constitutional republic built on a system of checks and balances of power, helping to safeguard against tyrants, government overreach, coups, and power grabs (Rand, 1984). Currently, members of Congress may be elected to any number of terms on the federal level, and the Supreme Court has rejected state-level attempts to impose term limits in federal elections. Term limits were once also not part of the checks on presidential power.

The status quo of unlimited terms in Congress and a two-term limit (plus two years of another President’s term) for the President has existed for less than half the country’s history. The twenty-second (22nd) Amendment was a reaction to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s four terms, which spanned from 1933 until he died in 1945, understandably casting him as America’s “dictator for life” to some supporters of the Amendment. Roosevelt’s move to pack the Supreme Court, pushed during the Biden Administration and once again revived by Democrats in recent years, contributed to this perception. The all-out ban on third-term Presidents achieved the goal of creating a necessary safeguard, but was it overly restrictive in doing so?

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Checks to abuses of power are important, but the conditions under which a dictator can come to power – censorship, expropriation of property, executions without trial or with mock trials, and one-party rule – can be prevented through oversight, laws, investigations, election commissions, and greater transparency within the Department of Justice. Regardless of how tired opponents may grow of a lawfully and freely elected President, if no undue interference exists, then the will of the American people must be respected.

Individualistic roles, in this case, the President of the United States of America, are optimized by the selection of the best available individual, without pre-filtering the public’s pool of potential candidates. Candidates are already filtered by the intelligence community, opaque socialist networks, and perhaps even secret societies (think ‘Skull and Bones’, whose membership has sometimes included both the Republican and Democratic candidates, as with John Kerry and George W. Bush). Selecting sub-optimal leaders due to limited choice puts the domestic and foreign interests of the United States at risk, so checks and balances preventing the rise of a dictator are better addressed through government transparency, oversight, and free speech, rather than by limiting terms in the executive branch.

Legislative collectives like the House of Representatives and the Senate, on the other hand, serve better as agents of the will of their constituents, elected to pursue their publicly stated platforms. They should write, propose, and vote upon legislation corresponding to those platforms, and not according to unknown, back-room agreements, exchanges of political favors, or other “swamp”-based opaque motivations common to career politicians.

Assuming there is a large pool of potential Congressional candidates and that voters can therefore find many candidates whose platforms sufficiently correspond to their beliefs, members of the legislative branch are comparatively interchangeable, relative to the executive branch. Congressional term limits would serve as an effective tool for ensuring adequate representation of the People and transparency in government. Although they could serve a similar function in the executive branch, the individualistic nature of the role of President means that sub-optimal choices from filtering on term limits will be more impactful. Replacing the 22nd Amendment’s Presidential term limits with more extensive election integrity measures, anti-censorship measures, tools to fight conspiracy, and Congressional term limits could improve the overall quality of American politics.

Why We Must Act Now, Before It’s Too Late

Regardless of the potential of Presidential term limits to lead to sub-optimal candidates, American politics has mostly fared well under the 22nd Amendment. Power has been reliably handed off between parties despite contested results from both parties and American voters have been offered meaningfully distinct choices in primaries and general elections. Why is it now so urgent to replace the 22nd Amendment with modernized government, using a lighter touch and smarter approach to prevent the rise of a tyrant?

Beginning with the creation and escape of the COVID-19 virus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the world has experienced great unrest and abnormally high losses of human life. During the Biden Administration, wars broke out in Russia and the Middle East, with the invasion of Ukraine and the Iran-ISIS war against Israel launched with the October 7, 2023 mass invasion of civilian populations, where families were brutally terrorized and murdered in front of one another. President Trump, in office less than half of his second term, has managed to single-handedly de-escalate Russo-Ukrainian tensions, guide Ukrainian recovery efforts1, and not only secured the release of Israeli hostages, but ended the Israel-Iran conflict through combined anti-terror actions and diplomacy.

Iran, as well as Hamas and other ISIS-aligned terror networks, remain clear and present dangers to not only the region, but the world. Although President Trump partnered with Israel to defeat the nuclear weaponization the threat remains and may well re-escalate. In the recent past, Russian government officials and President Putin made countless implied and explicit nuclear threats against the United States. Iran’s next-gen warship and giant drone swarms have plagued the American East Coast while its hackers launched a cyber offensive and China’s espionage, piracy, and military aggressions against Taiwan have grown (Central European Institute of Asian Studies, 2025; Department of Homeland Security, 2025; The Times of Israel Staff, 2025; Wilson Center, 2024).

Although the American President has managed to forge a peace and improve international trade conditions for America, the gains are delicate and highly reliant on President Trump as the specific dealmaker overseeing all major negotiations. His importance is only underscored by the attempts and threats on his life from America’s enemies, some involving American citizens as gunmen, others directly from Iran or terror networks. While America’s strong leader has seemingly counterbalanced those in the world who would rule by force with a heavy hand, he has barely more than two years remaining, while Vladimir Putin may remain in office for life, re-Stalinizing, and rebuilding the USSR, while terrorism rages on for another generation, and the less free world encroaches on freedoms worldwide.

Given a complete vacuum of comparably effective politicians from either of the major parties thus far, there seems to be no reasonable path forward for the United States and the world but to swiftly repeal the 22nd Amendment, clearing a path for President Trump to extend his Presidency to a third term. President Trump’s individual achievements and abilities are so far beyond the alternatives that action is warranted for the national good. Hopefully, a third term will allow time to finally more permanently resolve worldwide hostilities under President Trump’s leadership, and finally moving the world toward a more peaceful and open future without war.

Paths to Free Elections and Congressional Term Limits

Speculation on a third term campaign by the Trump team has resulted in a number of rumors and conspiracy theories regarding how it might be achieved. One notable, but probably unrealistic, option would be for Vice President J.D. Vance to run as President with Trump as his VP. According to the ploy, on the first day of Vance’s presidency he would resign, allowing Trump to be President, at least for the additional two years allowed in the 22nd Amendment. Although clever, the plan undermines the law so severely either the American public or the courts would likely stand in the way.

If we are to repeal the 22nd Amendment, it should be done through the system as laid out by America’s founders and lawmakers. It is essential that reformers and government transparency advocates such as FBI Director Kash Patel build an adequate body of laws, rules, procedures, practices, and offices to ensure free elections, a free press, barriers to shadowy collectivist networks and conspiracies, so that neither a dictator nor a dictatorial collective can over gain control of the U.S. government. The same legislation that repeals the Amendment must ensure these guardrails are in place, including limiting the number of terms in both houses of Congress.

Americans have a right to choose their President. Two is not a magic number for Presidential terms and a two-term limit was an overreaction to one specific President. Given Trump’s historic individual achievements as President, which cannot be reasonably approximated by other potential candidates and which are essential to the world’s stability, citizens, political action committees, lawmakers, and organizers must work together at breakneck speed to prepare American law for the President’s third term.

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REFERENCES

Central European Institute of Asian Studies. (2025, May 19). A threat from within: Chinese espionage in Taiwan. https://ceias.eu/a-threat-from-within-chinese-espionage-in-taiwan/

Department of Homeland Security. (2025, June 22). National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin. https://www.dhs.gov/ntas/advisory/national-terrorism-advisory-system-bulletin-june-22-2025

Peikoff, L. (1983) Ominous Parallels. Penguin.

Rand, A. (1984) Philosophy: Who Needs It. Penguin.

The Times of Israel Staff. (2025, June 23). Liveblog: June 23, 2025. The Times of Israel. https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog-june-23-2025/timesofisrael

Wilson Center. (2024, September 20). US Intel: ISIS, al-Qaeda, Hamas, & Hezbollah. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/us-intel-isis-al-qaeda-hamas-hezbollah

Wrobleski, T. (2025, August 6). Trump gives stunning 2-word answer when asked if he’ll run for a third term. SILive. https://www.silive.com/politics/2025/08/trump-gives-stunning-2-word-answer-when-asked-if-hell-run-for-a-third-term.html

NOTES

See also: Patel, K. P. (2023). Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the truth, and the battle for our democracy. Post Hill Press.

To the credit of the researchers and journalists responsible for the various rankings, there was only a limited correlation between rankings and partisan politics. Although the sample of indices had a slight tilt towards liberal sources, most of the political bias was netted out by the inclusion of “right-wing” sources like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Overall, America’s average freedom ranking dropped from 6th to 43rd this century.

Although the graph depicts a critical period when improvements in technology and capital growth from increasing international trade have been marred by eroding freedom and privacy, the trend began earlier than that. By the early 1960s, college students were already clamoring about limited intellectual freedom. After giving a lecture at MIT in March 1962, Ayn Rand received a letter from one of the students she met, detailing his observations on the pressure to accept the status quo, to imitate, and to adopt the institution’s predominant beliefs without question. Those espousing individualistic values were harassed or disregarded.

Today’s institutions, not only academic but also governmental, and even corporate, have become the all-seeing eyes of Big Brother, not only monitoring individuals’ speech in official capacities but also manipulating their thoughts and behaviors at home, after hours, and across all social contexts. From PRISM data to impromptu phone interviews of everyone you’ve ever met, socialist organizations and their town halls audit the beliefs and opinions of the individuals over whom they have leverage, intervening at will with practically unlimited social and financial pressure to correct any unapproved attitudes. Affected individuals are often told not to discuss their victimization and may face retaliation if they do.

Rand’s response to the letter she received from a student following her lecture at MIT, culminated in the 1966 essay “Altruism as Appeasement” wherein she wrote that acceptance of an altruistic moral code is an intellectual “sellout” that results in a loss of self-esteem. Rand described collectivists’ dogma as “altruism” because altruism is the subjugation of the individual and their self-serving motivations to the group and its well-being. The appeasement she described was giving in to altruistic morality from social or other pressures. The self-esteem allowed to the altruist is not from personal achievement, but the admiration from others for one’s humble self-sacrifice. Rand called this a “secondhanded” self-esteem.

In today’s world, appeasement is no longer enough to satisfy the collectivists. Institutions too often demand conformity under threat, which is to say that they indoctrinate, at least in some way (given whatever leverage they can muster and are willing to exploit, which is usually substantial).

“Indoctrination” is usually used to describe mindless, forcible acceptance of external direction, doctrine, and alleged facts. This term has been increasingly applied to the intellectual climate of American colleges and universities, but it is not limited to scholarly contexts. In cases ranging from the political and philosophical exploitation of mental hospitals in Soviet Russia to the “shops” of California, indoctrination is usually backed up by a threat of overwhelming force. American socialists credit themselves for sometimes including more minor and usually non-physical escalations of the force relative to their foreign predecessors, but the threat or use of force remains integral to indoctrination. Is there any justification for this? How did it come to be?

Emergency conditions are used as excuses to reduce the extent to which individuals’ rights are respected. Poverty and starvation in nations with fast-growing populations are excellent examples of such conditions. The population’s great need for economic success is the excuse used by international socialists to intervene with a centralized command-and-control approach. Since compliance of individuals and organizations with centralized plans can be enforced, productivity and certain levels of economic output, although not innovation or happiness, can be guaranteed. This is not a miracle or a brilliant innovation in workforce development. It's a cheap, shortcut path to economic success, at least along certain metrics, that comes with the cost of lessening the standing of individuals to that of serfs or peasants, with fewer rights and less freedom.

No one wants to have to live under such conditions, unless the alternatives are much worse. When living under them, the last thing you want is to be reminded of what you’ve lost (or never had) by those who are living more freely. That’s one of many reasons for the workers of predominantly socialist countries to immigrate, taking their global socialist brand of collectivism to comparatively more individualistic and free destinations. Starting in the mid-1990s, the US became that destination for many students and labor force participants.

One of the first large-scale unofficial messages sent to the people of the United States from the incoming migrants related to a reduction in freedoms of the press and speech. Rand wrote that no dictatorship has ever survived without censorship and the same is true when the dictating authority is an unelected, shadowy network of collectivists. Emergency conditions that once existed abroad were used as excuses to reduce freedom and assert more control, and that reduction in freedom federated itself to America, where so-called “liberal” domestic socialists were all too eager to take advantage, so that indoctrination is not limited strictly to the practices of the international labor force, but to the left’s political philosophy as well.

America then witnessed the most outrageous series of events in economic history. American socialists hoped to take advantage of rapid technological advances to secure control of American business, news, and culture. The political left, advocates of big government and high taxes, roping in foolish or cowardly Republicans, managed to pass the most monumental tax loophole in America’s history, granting blanket exemptions to sales taxes for online retailers. This is as close as we could’ve come to a law that says “high taxes for everyone except socialists, who are exempt”. Although it highlights one of the many incredible unfairnesses of the so-called ‘business war’, it did not prevent the disastrous impacts of the collectivists’ dot-com bubble, which soon burst, paralyzing the economy.

That moment could’ve been a turning point. It could’ve been a point when America realized its expectations of a globalized workforce didn’t match reality. America could’ve allowed many traditional companies to survive and flourish by giving them equal tax exemptions to their internet competitors’ or by eliminating the exemptions. Instead, they looked to greater partnership with the government and collusion across competitors as a means to recover the broken economy. Then, on September 11, 2001, the unthinkable happened.

In response to the terrorist events, the emergency conditions were, of course, used as an excuse to reduce the extent to which individuals’ rights are respected and liberties granted. Enter PRISM. Enter ubiquitous mass surveillance and the casual hacking of American citizens’ computers and accounts by their government, without significant oversight, rights afforded to the affected, or limitations on the scope of how or by whom spying on citizens can be used to manipulate their lives.

Greater productivity can be extracted from individuals (short term, at least) through greater harassment, violations of their rights, and by allowing their leaders or “stakeholders” to hijack their decision-making. It results in a lower, less enlightened, less just, and less actualized level of existence but in at least some areas, greater productivity can be extracted than under freer alternatives (or so they’d like us to believe – the reality is more complex and variable). With near-perfect surveillance, compliance with limitations on speech, espousal of only permitted opinions, and consistency with prescribed altruistic principles can be enforced nearly perfectly. By disallowing significant privacy, collectivists are able to replace self-determination with social-determination. You are what your group makes you, according to their tastes and needs. The side effects of this approach include a loss of identity, less creativity and innovation, a monoculture, and groupthink. A common collectivist practice is to identify and attack the sources of an individual’s ego so that they might be “broken” with their only self-worth being secondhand self-esteem derived from the approval of one’s socialist master or from those who admire them for their self-sacrifice, as Rand wrote. Instead, individuals should be encouraged to take pride in their accomplishments, embracing their egos, and building their egos up by living according to their values.

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What has not been done to any significant extent, is to cleanly extract the value realized by the international workforce from their approach, without politicizing it or using it to conduct a wider assault on individual rights and freedom. In the short term, for example during an authentic emergency, efficiency may benefit from top-down, unquestioned acceptance of information or adaptation of practices from trusted sources. Individuals would give up their rational capacity, yes, but only during short, well-defined periods, with transparency and accountability around the rationale of the intervention and clear limits to its extent and duration. In the wake of an event like September 11th, even short-term reductions in privacy could be warranted. However, the value is only cleanly extracted without its nightmarish correlates if the intervention is truly temporary. In the case of college classrooms, this could mean, for example, that students are encouraged to soak up their professors’ knowledge and even subjective opinions, imitating them without question, but only during a certain period each term to accelerate their learning, with the unabridged right to question or dissent outside of the classroom and within it by the end of each course.

It’s understandable if other nations have had to give up more to attain an acceptable level of living in their home countries. Individual international migrants certainly cannot be blamed for trying to federate their system. However, it is the responsibility of businesses, citizens, and the government to limit these incursions into personal freedom and self-determination. Differing human rights conditions have a complicating effect on international trade policy. On one hand, free trade – international capitalism – can benefit all involved parties, growing the size of the “economic pies” in both the home nation and for trading partners abroad. On the other hand, if there are worse human rights conditions in nations with whom we trade openly, then each trade increases the momentum of the system with reduced rights. History has shown that it will directly impact rights in the home country, through aforementioned pathways and others. For this reason, a capitalist whose ideal political scenario involves universally respected individual rights and completely free international trade might still support tariffs levied on trade partners whose production is generated from the sweat of workers living under conditions that we ourselves do not wish to endure.

The first step in any such project is gathering data. To get data on active substacks, several keyword searches were conducted with the “publications” filter. URLs were extracted from the search results of the following keywords:

• Atlas Shrugged

• Ayn Rand

• Leonard Peikoff

• Objectivism

• Objectivist

Several more searches were conducted on tangentially related words with higher false positive rates, such as "libertarian", but set aside those results for future use. Next, I wrote an R language script to pull RSS data from the retrieved blogs. This pulled substantial metadata, most usefully the blog and post titles and descriptions. The RSS feeds only provided twenty results per feed, so they are not a complete representation of the blogs in question, but they were enough data to describe those I found.

The initial list included 106 feeds, which I then further filtered to confirm that terms of interest were used in the "item description" field, a snippet from the content of notes and posts. Of the remaining blogs, I did a quick review of each just to make sure they were on topic, removing those that were unrelated or only wrote one or two critique articles. This process distilled the results down to 14 blogs that were used for the data visualization. The RSS data did not reveal any “success metrics” (followers, total articles, etc.) and the exact sorting criteria of the substack.com and RSS search APIs remain opaque, thus they are presented in alphabetical order below.

• Colin’s Substack

• The Prophet of Causation

• Note: Depending on how a Substack has been configured, it may show a title or owner’s name above.

There are undoubtedly many more that weren't revealed in my surface-level scrape of search results.

The process of text mining involves removing uninteresting words or word parts. We call these uninteresting word parts "stop words" and they include things like "and", "if", "the", and, in this case, "substack", "article", and "blog". I say 'word parts' because oftentimes the suffixes of words like "ing" or "'s" can mask commonalities between terms and are therefore removed and disregarded through a process called "stemming". The stemmed word parts are called "grams" and are highly related to the LLM concept of a "token". I analyzed these grams individually (1-grams) and in sequential (bi-grams) and non-sequential (skip-grams) pairs.

Wordclouds are one of the go-to visualizations for getting a quick impression of what's being discussed across a large number of documents. Let's have a look at some. In the wordclouds below, the size of the word is determined by its relative frequency.

Our 1-gram wordcloud:

Skip-grams allow the analyst to find related words that may have a flexible number of words between the first and latter terms, like using the "*" wildcard in a double-quoted Google search term (i.e., "individual * rights"). However, the patterns revealed in our data with skip-grams mostly just reflected the same pairings I saw with bi-grams, which consider only adjacent words. Here are the bi-gram and skip-gram wordclouds for this data set.

Bi-grams are especially useful for catching references to individuals. References to Ayn Rand dominated all versions of the results, however, I was able to notice about a half dozen substacks referencing Donald Trump and several articles discussing the Canadian former politician Jagmeet Singh.

Bi-grams and skip-grams were also useful for noticing references to recent and upcoming events, such as a meeting of The Ayn Rand Society, which is a part of the American Philosophical Association and of course, the official annual Objectivist conference, OCON.

Treemap diagrams show how terms correspond to publications. The algorithm attempts to layer words on top of the substacks that those terms were found in, using color to help make the groupings clearer. Parts of the blogs' titles are sometimes obscured by the words layered on top of them. The size of the rectangles tell us about the frequency of the term in my data set.

As always, the code used in this article is freely available on the Poso Press GitHub.

Substack's official website offers a free 'unofficial' API. They probably call it unofficial because it's so limited that they don't want to put the Substack brand name on it. Limited, but free and potentially useful, that is. They offer snippets for the endpoints in numerous languages, but not R, the statistics-heavy data scientist's language of choice, so I went ahead and created an R library to facilitate its use.

You can install the package via GitHub or CRAN. To use devtools with GitHub:

devtools::github_install("posocap/substackR")

or with pak:

pak::pak("posocap/substackR")

The full code is available here. The package has been …

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