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In 2016 I was still teaching. Just after the election one of my students asked me if I voted "for Satan or the orange". I said that actually Satan was Immanuel Kant, not any politician. I overheard him ask some of his fellow students "Who??".

If there's any one thing Rand would've supported, I'm sure it's mob violence in the name of lies at the behest of an authoritarian against democracy...

Not so much as defend them a little Gee, not much of contradiction there. That's certainly how YOU are proposing it to be done. It's neither moral nor widespread. "Likewise"??? And now you're equating taking a handout from an agency that you already paid into vs. using physical violence to get your point across.

Nothing is dead, that's why it isn't time to fight in the violent way. I was saying that if the target of violence is government, then the people attacking the government aren't preserving or defending something they have. They would be fighting to attain something they don't yet have. If these people were fighting for the spirit of America, to preserve that, then they can't attack the government when it uses the Constitution as intended (the Constitution is the spirit of America). Or if they want to say that the country has been taken over by the bogeyman left, then they aren't preserving anything - they would be admitting that the American dream has been murdered by the left. And by the way, Donald Trump literally said the American dream is dead. Fair enough, it's not like anyone in the government should be shocked when a lot of people come and knock down their door. I think of that scene in Atlas Shrugged with the train accident. The victims of the accident were described as getting what they deserve. Some people thought that Rand was suggesting that the victims should have been gathered up and executed. "Deserve" is more like "there are consequences to your actions, what the hell did you expect?" Principles seem so lacking in the legislature these days. Not very much respect for reasoning, more about emotional responses, Republicans and Democrats. So we shouldn't be surprised when a mob of unreasoning emotionalists attack. That's what happens when respect for principles gradually erodes. I disagree, but it depends on if the spirit of the Constitution really included all the founders. I don't think so. I have reverence for some of the founders, and I have complete disdain for other founders. Hamilton was more the spirit of the Constitution, Jefferson not so much. That's why I think slavery would inevitably die anyway, despite the literal wording in the Constitution that partially defended slavery.

This is a (fairly abridged) YouTube playlist adaptation of John Galt's speech. It only takes an hour and a half to listen to and it's full of extremely engaging visual effects that help to concretize all the points being made. Beware that many of the visuals (particularly towards the end) are NOT for small children! It does not pull its punches in how it portrays bad philosophies and if Marilyn Manson should give any of your kids nightmares I will take zero responsibility! I did not make this; I pirated it and burned it onto a DVD several years ago. I don't know who made it. But for the past few years, whenever I found myself feeling vaguely that I wasn't living up to my own ideals or had forgotten some important point, I'd watch this again (and quite often found that I had been forgetting some crucial point that'd suddenly reoccurred to me). If whoever did make it should happen upon this - thank you.

But the congress collective does deserve it, therefore a mob "should" deliver what they deserve ... said the anti-collectivist collectivist.

Well, you've got me there. And I guess I can't think of any other reasons why the Senators didn't deserve what they got on the Sixth. I'm not sure I've ever sat down and contemplated the just how pathetic most of them are before this. I still don't think it was a good idea, even if its intended victims would've deserved it. But I guess they did deserve it.

I'm confident many could articulate a better political ideal than the Founders, whose flawed "ideal" led to civil war.

That's why I mentioned the abusive father comparison. They probably truly believe their behavior is an act of adoration for the country, but their actions amount to hatred for most people looking from the outside. It's not just a comparison, but a version of the same mentality as abusive people. It's hard to point out, because most people see evil as an evasion of truth, or deliberately calling something good which you call evil. This is a case of evil where people are deliberately calling something good which you also call good, but their conception of good is distorted and twisted yet don't care to correct the wrong conception (an abuser may truly think they are doing the right thing and think you're the one who doesn't get it). All they have is false adoration (I'm not saying that they "actually" believe in something antithetical to America, but that they frame things in terms of adoration in a distorted way).