“I think you can see something equally apocalyptic in Leonard Peikoff’s The Ominous Parallels. I think if you want to read a book that takes elements in history that led to the rise of Naziism and then compares them to the same intellectual movements in America. I think we see in Trump and the Nationalist Right the beginnings of the reaction to the radical skeptics on the left, which went through their versions in Germany too. Let’s not forget, Hitler was a beatnik; he was a bohemian artist. I think we’re seeing those reactions here.
And in Atlas Shrugged as well, which you should read, I think Rand very well illustrates the narrative that civilizations go the way their ideas are, the way they tell them to go. And I think you can point to most civilizations as dying on the sword of their ideas or flourishing because of their ideas. So those books are prescient as well.”
Mark Pellegrino, Unsafe Space
