Recently, ARI Senior Fellow Ben Bayer was interviewed on the Texas Talks podcast, where he discussed Ayn Rand’s unique approach to philosophy as a practical means for living, the life-promoting philosophy she developed as a result, and how her idealist-realist heroes dramatize it. Bayer contrasted Rand’s approach and views with the dominant ones in today’s culture, focusing specifically on Stoicism and altruism.

Topics include:

• The essence of Rand’s philosophy.

• Why today’s philosophers don’t dramatize their philosophies in stories.

• Why Rand’s heroes resonate with so many people.

• How the philosophy in The Fountainhead compares to that in Atlas Shrugged.

• How Objectivism differs from Stoicism.

• Today’s confused oscillation between Judeo-Christian altruism and pragmatism.

• Bayer’s forthcoming book, Breaking Free from Faith-Based Morality.

Bradley Swail is the host of the Texas Talks podcast, not an employee of the Ayn Rand Institute.

On December 1, ARU Press will publish ARI senior fellow Ben Bayer’s Breaking Free from Faith-Based Morality. The book is a collection of essays published in New Ideal on the theme that the morality of altruism is essentially religious and that a truly scientific ethics must embrace an ethics of rational self-interest. You can pre-order the book through Amazon here. To introduce readers to the book, we’re happy to publish its preface.

Religious belief dies hard. On some level, most atheists know this. But do they know what it really takes to give up all of the holdovers of religious belief?

I first abandoned religion around the age of seventeen. I did it by grappling with skeptical questions from friends and by befriending peers from different faiths, who made me wonder why the Catholicism I’d absorbed from my parents was so special.

But even after consciously rejecting my religious beliefs as unfounded and irrational, their influence endured. It took the better part of a year to get over the disappointment of no longer believing in eternal life. And in one memorable experience, I was terrified at my first viewing of The Exorcist because, even though I was nearly an atheist, I hadn’t fully shaken the idea that demons might still be real.

The power of the remnants of religious cosmology paled in comparison to those of religious morality. Part of how I came to reject religion was by taking religious sexual morality very seriously, but realizing how it came at the expense of personal relationships and happiness. So it would take years if not a decade to shake the Catholic guilt I’d come to associate with sex.

Leaving the church was easier than breaking free from its morality. I’m sure I’m not the only one to experience or recognize this.

This book is about how Western secular culture remains in the grip of religious morality. That’s especially so because religious morality is broader than just sexual prudishness and misogyny. And its greater scope of concerns is just as destructive.

The reason to note this predicament is not merely sociological. It’s to urge that we break this grip. Even as I first began to doubt my religion, I never lost sight of the urgent need for rational norms to guide my choices. This book clears the ground of religious relics to show how we can build a new, secular morality.

What drives the culture-wide religious fervor?

In this preface to my fuller argument, I want to point briefly to just the tip of the religious iceberg that still keeps secular culture’s moral progress frozen in time. We see the tip in some recent political controversies. I explore the rest of the iceberg in the book.

Everyone knows that the American conservative movement is awash in Christian religiosity, with the result that Roe v. Wade was overturned and the Ten Commandments are back up in classrooms. But the religious upheaval is not just on the American “right.”

In the 2026 midterm elections, two “progressive” Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate wore their Christianity on their sleeve: the incumbent Raphael Warnock of Georgia and James Talarico of Texas. Both went to divinity school. Warnock is still a practicing minister.

And the “religious left” is broader than the overtly Christian Democrats. We see another kind of religiosity in the practices of the “woke” egalitarian movement, which many have likened to a new religion. Describing the irrational dogmatism of this movement, John McWhorter notes their articles of faith: Racism is the indelible original sin driving every social problem, anyone who offers evidence of progress in combating racism is “fragile” or a heretic, and an anointed “elect” of “woke” saints should instead lead us in service to racism’s victims.1

Jason Arday, the late Cambridge sociology professor, leveraged his (largely fabricated) status as a victim to become one of the “elect” saints. But what’s most revealing about his case isn’t what got him hired, but the reaction within academic culture once the evidence of his fraud became overwhelming. It was not taken as a “teaching moment” to reflect on whether university DEI missions incentivized this behavior at the expense of academic rigor. Instead, far too many refused to consider the evidence, defended Arday without real grounds, smeared all of his critics as racists, and even tried to elevate him into a kind of martyr to the cause of the “woke” articles of faith.2

We see the same religiosity in the green activists like the members of Extinction Rebellion who embrace faith in an imminent environmental apocalypse and anathematize every high-tech form of alternative energy like carbon-free nuclear power.3,4 Their saint is Greta Thunberg — who became a child prophet at fifteen in spite of lacking any expertise. Indeed, having gone on strike against her own education was part of her appeal. She regularly effaces herself by refusing to travel by plane and by submitting to arrest at green protests. And her movement urges imitation of the green saints, shaming anyone unwilling to give up modern standards of living.

And then there is the recent upsurge in support for democratic socialism. Its followers twist definitions to maintain their article of faith, that real socialism has never been tried, that their group of saints will somehow have better luck this time avoiding economic destruction, political oppression, and mass death. Instead they’ll lead us to a magical heaven on earth in which each of us puts in minimal time at work, lives without debt or insurance, and enjoys abundant leisure time.5

What drives this religious fervor among activists who are not known for their church attendance? It’s here that we can see how religious morality exerts its pull.

In his account of the religiosity of the “woke” movement, McWhorter brushed up against the central issue. “Elect ideology stipulates that one’s central moral duty is to battle racism and the racist” (my emphasis).6 Our moral duty, in their view, is to submit not only by “taking a knee” to victims of racism (real or alleged). Job candidates are to give up jobs for which they are qualified, and hiring committees are to give up their intellectual standards for the sake of elevating the Jason Arday equivalents of the world. McWhorter notes that all of this submission — especially submitting our minds to the “woke” articles of faith — “is all very Abrahamic as religion goes.”7

Each of the other activist movements demands similar Abrahamic submission. Whether we are to sacrifice economic prosperity to Gaia’s pristine wilderness or economic freedom and property rights to the classless society of the future, the activists demand we surrender ourselves and our values on the altar of the allegedly “higher” end of serving some Other. This moral outlook enjoins the virtue of humble self-sacrifice, and condemns heretics who commit the sin of prideful self-esteem. Even though many of the modern activists think of themselves as secular, they draw these core doctrines from none other than Judeo-Christian religion — whether they know it or not.

More rational thinkers in the secular camp may agree there is something wrong with the religious fervor that motivates these activists, but concede that there is something noble about their (professed) ends. They may say that the Bible verses quoted by Talarico and Warnock are from a primitive mindset, but they motivate people to uplift the poor (etc.). But how do these thinkers know that their conception of the noble end is noble and not itself a product of that same primitive, religious mindset?

I think secular altruism — the doctrine that morality consists in selfless service to others — is in fact such a product, a holdover from Christianity’s two-millennia monopoly over our thinking about right and wrong, good and evil.

How the book diagnoses the fervor, and its antidote

This book demonstrates how not only the activist left but the broader secular camp in American culture has uncritically absorbed the essence of Judeo-Christian morality, and never seriously considered a rational alternative. This runs the gamut from secular philosophers to the atheist and effective altruist movements. And it shows how this altruistic morality is responsible for the irrational fervor in American political culture, and for even many rational people’s unwillingness to stand up against it.

The most rational, pro-science secular thinkers, when commenting on questions of morality, are eager to point to the moral theories developed by nominally secular philosophers as alternatives to religious morality. In the first part of the book, I examine a cross section of these theorists, philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Henry Sidgwick, John Rawls, Derek Parfit, and Peter Singer, who posit one or another view about how morality demands impartial, disinterested action. I examine their approach to how we know ethical principles (chapter 1) and the nature of moral value (chapter 2), and identify the Judeo-Christian religious core of these approaches (a faith-based epistemology with its attendant supernaturalistic metaphysics).

The implication is not that religious morality is unavoidable or that morality is dispensable. On the contrary, I show that Christianity derailed the first non-religious attempt in history to offer rational guidance for living, and that it has monopolized the conscience of moral thinkers ever since (chapter 3). The first attempt — the project of classical Greek philosophy — was also notably unconcerned with selfless service to the needy. This history helps demonstrate not only Christianity’s unique role in crafting modern altruism, but that the origin of altruism is infused with all the worst forms of irrationality and resentment of worldly knowledge and happiness that animates religious mysticism (chapter 4).

In the second part of the book, I show how the monopoly of religious morality is so extensive that it has penetrated even the most secular sectors of our culture: the atheist movement (chapter 5), the leading secular defenders of science (chapter 6), and the effective altruist movement that influences so much of the technology industry today (chapter 7). In each case, the influence of religious morality undermines the advocates of science and reason in their efforts to win the “culture war” and imperils their optimism in the power of science to solve the world’s technological problems.

In the final part of the book, I return to questions of ethical theory with a view to building a positive, rational alternative. I first show (in chapter 8) how a healthy approach to ethics needs to focus on answering everyday life questions faced by ordinary people, not niche puzzles about artificial dilemmas between people. I then argue (in chapter 9) that this destructive approach has been encouraged by an overly narrow conception of the subject of ethics that confines it to questions about interpersonal obligations versus questions of basic choices of value and virtue that guide the big questions about how to live life, whether they concern other people or not.

In the ultimate chapter (chapter 10), I show how — once we clear the ground of confusions instilled by religious approaches to morality — we can build a fully secular ethical theory, using the values of science itself as our basic building blocks. This chapter in particular draws on the moral philosophy of Ayn Rand, who I take to be the leading defender of Enlightenment values. Her critique of altruism and her positive alternative are behind the scenes of every chapter in the book.

Together, the essays collected here demonstrate the book’s theme, though they were not all originally drafted with the present sequence in mind. They were originally written as separate articles, mostly for New Ideal, the journal of the Ayn Rand Institute. (Chapter 4 was originally published in Free Inquiry, and subsequently republished in New Ideal.) To integrate them into the structure of this book, I have revised them all to some extent to make them read better. (Chapters 7 and 9 in particular have been significantly revised from the originals.)

Rejecting the final god

I’ve mentioned that after I abandoned religion, religious sexual morality still kept its claws in my psychology for years. The same was true of Christian altruism, even after Rand’s influence led me to disavow it as well. Even thirty years after abandoning religion, I still at times fear the disapproval of altruists and feel distant twinges of guilt for being selfish. But when I reflect more consciously these feelings disappear.

Consider that if even I, a vocal advocate for Ayn Rand’s conception of rational selfishness, occasionally feel these distant twinges, what must be true for other secular people who’ve never scrutinized the origin of their moral beliefs? No matter their atheist credentials, they are likely to feel in spades the fear and guilt induced by altruism. That’s because they’ve never faced the fact that while they’ve rejected so many other doctrines of their childhood preachers, altruism is the one they’ve never been willing to let go.

Richard Dawkins has popularized the idea that most people have no trouble denying the existence of gods for which there is no evidence. Most reject the existence of a plethora of polytheistic gods. He urges them to go “just go one god further.”8 This book directs a similar challenge to atheists to reject a final baseless posit of religion: the worship of self-sacrifice.

It’s time for the secular world to fully grow up and break free from the bonds of religious morality. This is the only path to self-conscious, rational progress in the field of morality, and to the civilizational progress it will enable.

Recently, ARI senior fellow Ben Bayer participated in the Texas Tribune Festival, Austin’s largest annual policy and culture conference. The festival regularly hosts events featuring state governors, U.S. congressmen, professors, journalists, and thousands of attendees. This year, it invited ARI to appear on a panel discussing the construction of the Ayn Rand Center in Austin.

Alongside Bayer, the panel “Free Markets, Free Ideas: Austin and Heterodox Thinking” featured the president of the University of Austin, Carlos Carvalho, and the director of government affairs at the Cicero Institute, Nick James. The three discussed the educational or political activities of their respective institutions and how those activities fit into the Texan political environment.

In his remarks, Bayer differentiated Ayn Rand’s pro-reason, pro-individualist philosophy from both “libertarianism” and “conservatism.” Against “libertarianism,” he emphasized Rand’s view of the necessity of a government that protects individual rights. Against “conservatism,” he emphasized Rand’s rejection of religion and altruism. He also discussed how her conception of freedom is all-encompassing, covering not only economic freedom but also intellectual freedom and, for instance, the personal freedom of a woman to have an abortion. Bayer also observed that today’s Republicans have abandoned any support for economic freedom in favor of supporting the tribal, fascist-leaning MAGA movement.

We hope the opening of the Ayn Rand Center in Austin will create more opportunities to present Rand’s ideas and participate in intellectual discussions in the Austin community — and beyond.

In NI Weekly, we gather together all the articles and videos published over the previous week. All you need to do is read the short summaries and decide what interests you. Here’s what we featured between September 26 and October 2. Enjoy!

• An episode of ARI Bookshelf, our book review and discussion series, analyzes The Mattering Instinct by philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. Greg Salmieri, Ben Bayer, Mike Mazza and Sam Weaver discuss Goldstein’s account of why questions of meaning and purpose are so important in people’s lives, and her method of evaluating answers to such questions by how they help us fight “entropy.” They also correct the book’s brief but imprecise mention of Ayn Rand view of heroic people.

• A short report on our recent student conference, AynRandCon-US, in Austin, Texas, surveys the program and spotlights feedback from students and faculty. Senior fellow and speaker Ben Bayer characterized the conference as “probably the most exciting student-oriented Objectivist conference I’ve attended.”

• An article by Robertas Bakula defends the “Most Hated Company in America.” Bakula argues that the moral and economic accusations against Live Nation Entertainment about “gouging” concertgoers are smears that scapegoat a competent, successful company.

• An interview with Greg Salmieri was featured on the Texas Talks podcast about Rand’s ideas and their relation to other philosophies and political movements. Among others, Salmieri discussed Aristotle, Marx, and “libertarians.” He also discussed his own work and interest in philosophy.

• An article by Ben Bayer was published as the cover story for Free Inquiry, a secular magazine published by the Center for Inquiry, one of the leading atheist-agnostic organizations in the U.S. Bayer reviewed Bart Ehrman’s book Love Thy Stranger, which traces today’s dominant morality of self-sacrificial altruism to the teachings of Jesus. Bayer argues that Ehrman’s scholarship should cause skeptics of religion to doubt the rationality of altruism.

Last month, Ayn Rand fans from across the world gathered in Austin, Texas for AynRandCon US, ARI’s annual US student conference. Among them were 67 scholarship students from 16 countries. For many of them, it was their first encounter with Ayn Rand’s ideas beyond her novels — and their first chance to meet Objectivist intellectuals and fellow Ayn Rand fans. Across three days, the program combined lectures and Q&A sessions with long breaks for mingling with faculty and other attendees, as well as an evening reception and a social event.

The conference kicked off on the evening marking 25 years since 9/11, with Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo examining America’s failures before and after the attacks. Their talks drew on more than two decades of expertise in the subject and were livestreamed on YouTube.

Ben Bayer opened the second day of the conference with a lecture on the morality of capitalism. He argued that industrial and commercial activities demand the same exalted dedication to truth and integrity as intellectual pursuits protected by the First Amendment — and thus they also deserve to be protected by right. Onkar Ghate followed with a talk focused on reason vs. faith, explaining why people follow religion and why only a philosophy of reason can provide the values that the better minds among them are searching for. Then, a panel discussion with Ghate, Bayer, Journo, and Tal Tsfany explored the value of intellectual careers, encouraged students to consider them, and promoted study at ARU and training at ARI’s Intellectual Incubator.

On the final day of the conference, Greg Salmieri explored how Ayn Rand’s ethics of selfishness helps us build a life of reason, purpose, and self-esteem, allowing one to grow up philosophically and move beyond faith-based moral codes. Tal Tsfany followed him and offered practical tools for self-discovery and the creation of a passionate, individualized life. Sealing the conference, Harry Binswanger presented the Objectivist view of free will, explaining how it works and why it is at the root of Objectivism’s approach to reason, individualism, political freedom, and romanticism.

Following the conference, one of the students wrote that she now knows “that there are interesting, intelligent, wonderful students and professors of Objectivism and that that community exists and has myriad opportunities to engage in as a student, attendee, professional, etc.” Another commented that “more than anything, I left the conference with a clearer sense of direction and a renewed desire to make the most out of my life.” Both enrolled at ARU after the conference, as a number of other students did. Other students said they are interested in engaging more with ARI through the Institute’s online content, while considering or preparing to apply to ARU.

Faculty members were enthusiastic as well. Bayer, who has spoken at many ARI conferences, said that “this is probably the most exciting student-oriented Objectivist conference I’ve attended. Our engagement team worked overtime to select the most curious and intellectually serious students to attend ARU. The conversations I had with them — both in Q&A sessions and between sessions — showed the fruit of their efforts. I was peppered with questions on a huge range of topics, both theoretical and applied. And I’ve been encouraged to learn that many of these students are now applying to ARU. I can’t wait for our conversations to continue into the fall and spring in our new Intensive seminar.”

Reflecting on the conference success, Brian Alspach, ARI’s director of engagement, said that “looking forward, AynRandCon will continue to play a central role in ARI’s strategy as we work to attract and engage students with future intellectual potential.”

If you wish to attend a future AynRandCon, registration and scholarship applications are now open for AynRandCon Europe, which will take place in Vienna on April 16–18, 2027.

In her recent book The Mattering Instinct, philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein argues that much of what human beings do is driven by a universal need to matter — to prove to ourselves that we are worthy of consideration. She argues that efforts to fulfill this need are responsible for a wide range of human projects, from the greatest achievements of scientific discovery and artistic creation, to the worst atrocities of murder and genocide.

On this episode of ARI Bookshelf, Greg Salmieri, Ben Bayer, Mike Mazza and Sam Weaver discuss Goldstein’s book. The episode includes discussions of the merits and limitations of Goldstein’s account of mattering and her emphasis on the idea that life involves resisting entropy. They also comment on the book’s brief mention of Ayn Rand and relate her ideas to Goldstein’s.

Topics include:

• Goldstein’s basic account of why people have a need to matter

• Her conception of what constitutes objective mattering

• The absence of businessmen and entrepreneurs from her categories

• The book’s quotation of Ayn Rand in a section about intolerance

• How Goldstein uses the concept of entropy in her account of mattering

• Her apparent unwillingness to radically rethink conventional ideas about morality

This episode was recorded on September 19, 2026.

We are pleased to announce that “Stranger Danger: How Bart Ehrman’s Latest Unmasks the History of Altruism,” Ben Bayer’s review of Bart Ehrman’s Love Thy Stranger, has been published as the cover story of the October/November 2026 issue of Free Inquiry. You can read the opening paragraph below and the full essay at Free Inquiry.

Anyone today who cites the Bible to make moral objections to homosexuality or premarital sex becomes an easy target for a certain critical question: Why follow those passages but not the Old Testament rules permitting the sale of one’s children into slavery and condemning the act of touching pigskin?

Read the full article at Free Inquiry.

Topics include:

• How Salmieri became interested in Ayn Rand

• Rand’s view of “libertarianism”

• Rand’s admiration of Aristotle and her improvements to his philosophy

• What Objectivism as “an ordinary, high-powered philosophy” means

• The Ayn Rand Center and Austin’s intellectual scene

• Rand’s view of religion

Resources mentioned in the interview:

• James G. Lennox and Gregory Salmieri, Two Philosophers: Aristotle and Ayn Rand

• Allan Gotthelf and Gregory Salmieri, A Companion to Ayn Rand

Bradley Swail is the host of the Texas Talks podcast, not an employee of the Ayn Rand Institute.

I can’t afford a Rolex, but I don’t accuse the watchmaker of robbing me. If I wince at a bill in a fancy restaurant, I don’t sue the owner. Similarly, if a Taylor Swift ticket is too expensive, I close the Ticketmaster tab and move on, looking for entertainment I can afford. I don’t fume at the concert organizer.

I’m shocked how many don’t share my attitude and instead demand live entertainment on a silver platter at a discount price — or else.

Many concert-goers feel “robbed” by high ticket prices and fees. They rejoiced when a Manhattan jury found Live Nation Entertainment (LNE) and its subsidiary Ticketmaster liable for monopolization under federal antitrust law (the “or else”).1 Finally, they imagine, the “greedy” corporation that “skins” music fans will get what it deserves and the fantasy of premium seats at top-tier live music tours at bar-band prices will become reality.

A fantasy, because Live Nation’s dominance did not cause prices to rise.

Especially after Covid, demand for live shows has exploded.2 An increasingly prosperous worldwide audience is willing to pay for a night out. But top-tier artists don’t grow on trees. No one has a monopoly on Bad Bunny’s performances like Bad Bunny himself. Where fans outnumber seats, prices rise.

Ticket prices also likely rose to replace the falling recorded-music revenue. Today, we stream all music for a small monthly price, but pay more to attend concerts that artists rely on. Artists and their teams set the face value of the ticket, and retain 80 to 90 percent of the final ticket price (a figure no one disputes). Concert prices went up because tours have to fund careers, not because LNE runs the industry.3

In this new music economy, Live Nation learned to put as many fans in front of as many artists as the calendar and logistics allow. Reliably managing venues, ticketing, routing, staging, security, and the rest of a modern tour’s machinery is a Herculean feat. LNE also carries the risk of the tour, often paying artists an upfront guarantee, absorbing the loss if the tour underperforms, and carrying insurance to recover costs in the event of cancellation. It’s no scandal that a firm like this ends up with more business. It is what competence looks like.

Does Ticketmaster “gouge” concertgoers? The resale market suggests otherwise. If Ticketmaster charged outrageous prices, scalpers couldn’t keep earning a windfall. Highly profitable resale is evidence that, if anything, Ticketmaster is undercharging.

What sparked popular outrage against LNE is more evidence that prices were not “too high.” In 2022, Ticketmaster buckled under the enormous opening-day demand for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. Had prices been unaffordable to many, an onslaught of fans and scalpers wouldn’t have crashed the system the moment tickets dropped.4

What about steep fees for premium seats and parking, which even some Live Nation employees privately said were “robbing them blind baby”?5 Such language helped plaintiffs inflame the jury. But it proves only that a few employees — like many of LNE’s critics who object to ticket prices — tragically misunderstand the value of premium services to fans. It’s not robbery; it’s high-value trade.

What about Live Nation’s exclusive long-term contracts with major concert venues, or their allegedly “monopolistic” business model?6 The scary “flywheel” is actually the strategy that keeps prices from rising further (though they probably should). Concert staging, logistics, advertising, and accounting earns little money, but feeds volume into highly profitable ticketing (Ticketmaster) and sponsorships (brand placement and vendors). Without exclusive contracts ensuring that the staging and promotion business is supported by ticketing and ad revenue, the business might not be sustainable. If LNE were broken up, prices at separated concert promotion venture would likely have to rise, or artists’ share would have to fall.

In short, Live Nation built a good business in a complex and changing economic reality. Antitrust prosecutors are trying to scapegoat them for high prices.

State plaintiffs had to display mental gymnastics to concoct “evidence” against LNE. The best they could muster was to compare LNE’s average price to that of AXS, the closest rival. But AXS itself acknowledged its services were not comparable in value to LNE’s.7 Even so, the price gap was a mere $1.72. Using this cooked-up pocket change, the government is hounding a company that brings you the shows you value. As LNE is asking in its latest motions, the judge should toss the groundless verdict.8

What to do about rising concert prices? The answer is plain: don’t buy the ticket.9 Whenever I skip a show I find too expensive, I remember that no one has a right to luxury entertainment and turn to my essentially free library of unlimited music in my pocket. Neither fans who pay for a night out nor those who cannot afford to are victims.

For over 40 years, ARI has preserved Rand’s legacy through archival and educational activities. Two years ago, ARI announced it would cement that legacy in actual concrete by building the Ayn Rand Center in Austin, Texas. Earlier this month, the Institute broke ground on the building. The Center will house the Ayn Rand Archives, classrooms, event spaces, studios, public gathering areas, a state-of-the-art immersive educational experience, and the home campus of ARI’s education program, ARU. It will play a vital role in preserving Objectivism and in spreading it to ever-larger audiences. To learn more about the groundbreaking event, the Center’s inspiring vision, and the founders behind it, watch our special Ayn Rand Institute Podcast episode with CEO Tal Tsfany and Senior VP Elan Journo. In addition to the discussion, the episode includes building simulations and video clips from the groundbreaking event.

Topics include:

• The plan for the Ayn Rand Center and the strategic vision behind it

• The architect and architecture of the Center

• Inspiring anecdotes on the building process and the Center

• Mailchimp founder Ben Chestnut’s donations and vision

• Tal Tsfany’s remarks at the groundbreaking event

Resources:

• Website of the Ayn Rand Center

In its lawsuit against the FCC, Disney, the parent company of ABC alleges that Chairman Brendan Carr violated the First Amendment by using unprecedented early license renewals for all ABC-owned stations in retaliation for content decisions President Trump disliked. The FCC responds that early renewal is a tool to get Disney to cooperate in the FCC’s equal-employment/DEI investigation. But Disney argues that numerous threats by President Trump and Carr to revoke licenses in response to content decisions prove that investigations are pretextual. The real harm here is the self-censorship of broadcasters: a threat left hanging forces every editorial decision to be weighed against the possibility of losing the license.

In this episode, Robertas Bakula and Onkar Ghate commend Disney for making their case on fundamental constitutional grounds rather than settling behind closed doors. Too few of Disney’s defenders ever dare to challenge the FCC’s underlying licensing authority or the employment mandates that also violate freedom of association. They warn that Carr is trying to reinvigorate and expand the FCC’s power over speech and argue that no depoliticized FCC is possible. The only real solution is privatizing the spectrum.

Topics Include:

• Disney’s lawsuit against the FCC for violating the First Amendment

• How self-censorship works in practice

• Broadcaster’s historical complicity in creating the FCC

• Brendan Carr’s goal to expand the FCC’s power

• Why defenders of free speech do not challenge the FCC and its DEI policies as violating intellectual freedom

• The only way to remove the FCC’s ability to chill speech is to privatize the broadcast spectrum

Resources:

• Ayn Rand, “Choose Your Issues,” The Objectivist Newsletter, 1962

• Ayn Rand, “Have Gun, Will Nudge,” The Objectivist Newsletter, 1962

• Ayn Rand, “Vast Quicksands,” The Objectivist Newsletter, 1963

• Ayn Rand, “The Property Status of Airwaves,” The Objectivist Newsletter, 1964

• Ayn Rand Institute Podcast episode “Trump vs. CBS: How Government Pressures Companies to Self-Censor”, Jul 31, 2025

• Ayn Rand Institute Podcast episode, Trump vs. Kimmel: The Tribal Weaponization of the FCC against Free Speech, Sep. 25, 2025

Image credit: Potjanan Surirug / iStock / via Getty Images.

Recently, ARI senior fellow Onkar Ghate had an essay published in an undergraduate philosophy textbook, Problems in Applied Ethics (Bloomsbury Press, 2026). The original essay was invited by the editor Steven B. Cowan, in particular to comment on whether or not hate speech laws were legitimate exceptions to the principle of free speech. In the essay, Ghate challenges the very idea of exceptions to free speech.

The full textbook has now been published, and we are pleased to have received permission from Bloomsbury Press to reprint Ghate’s essay in two parts.

Read Part 1 here.

What the Right to Freedom of Expression Means and Protects

I’ve now briefly discussed the individualist justification for the right to freedom of speech or freedom of expression.1 Now let’s consider in a bit more detail what the content of this right is, what the right encompasses, and what it does not.

The right to freedom of expression, like all rights, sanctions and protects an individual’s freedom to take certain actions. As the philosopher Ayn Rand formulates the point in a seminal essay, “The concept of a ‘right’ pertains only to action — specifically, to freedom of action. It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men.”2 The right to property, for instance, “is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or earning that object. It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it. It is the right to gain, to keep, to use and to dispose of material values.”3

No right guarantees a specific outcome. Just as the right to property protects your freedom of action to, for instance, pan for gold on your land and to own any gold you discover, but does not guarantee that you will discover any gold — so the right to the pursuit of happiness protects your freedom of action to try to build a happy life, but doesn’t guarantee that you will succeed. Similarly, the right to freedom of speech “does not mean that others must provide a man with a printing press, a publishing house, a newspaper, a theater or a television studio through which to express his views.”4 It sanctions and protects only a certain form of action: “the freedom to advocate one’s views and to bear the possible consequences, including disagreement with others, opposition, unpopularity and lack of support.”5

For something to be an individual right, it must be co-possible, which means every individual must enjoy the same freedom of action, and no individual can legitimately interfere with the sphere of action protected by another’s right. Your rights entail that other people refrain from trespassing on your rights, just as their similar rights entail that you refrain from trespassing on their rights. But rights do not require that other people perform any particular action: that requires their voluntary, uncoerced consent.

The right to freedom of association, for example, means that you can try to associate with whomever you choose — and that other people can refuse to associate with you and go their separate way. The right to freedom of trade means that you can buy and sell with whomever you choose — and that other people can refuse to buy from you if, say, they think the price you’re asking is too high, or refuse to sell to you if they think the price you’re offering is too low. The same goes for freedom of speech. Important in understanding this right is understanding that “Freedom of speech includes the freedom not to agree, not to listen and not to support one’s own antagonists.”6

It is important to understand, in the context of hate speech laws and other proposed abridgments of the right to freedom of expression, that the exercise by an individual of any of her rights can and often will affect other people in ways they judge both positively and negatively. But neither are grounds to abridge the right — not so long as those other people retain the same rights, that is, the same freedom of action. This means in particular that the fact that one person’s exercise of her rights “harms” (i.e., in some way negatively affects) another person is not sufficient grounds to outlaw the action.

For example, I may paint the front door of my house red, a color my neighbor dislikes, or plant a maple tree in my backyard, a type of tree that unfortunately evokes for my neighbor memories of home and a difficult childhood. But these negatives experienced by my neighbor, though real, don’t give her veto power over the color I paint my front door or the trees I plant in my backyard, not so long as she retains the same freedom of action: She can paint her front door green and plant birch trees in her yard.

Or: I may open a new office building for a thousand employees, and the increased lunchtime foot traffic may help make nearby restaurants more profitable. But though this positive effect on the restaurants is real, it doesn’t entitle me to veto their increased sales unless they share with me a portion of their increased profits. If I wanted to try to take advantage of the increase in foot traffic, I retain the same freedom of action as those restaurant owners: I could open and run my own restaurant.

Or: smartphone manufacturers like Apple may make the cameras on iPhones so good that most people stop buying film or digital cameras, and companies like Canon lose sales. But this negative, though real, does not give Canon veto power over the smartphones Apple can design and sell, not so long as Canon retains the same freedom of action: Like Apple, Canon is free to try to design and sell its own smartphones.

The same goes for the right to freedom of expression. Consider first the commercial realm. If Apple advertises the cameras on its latest iPhones — a form of expression Apple of course regularly engages in — and those advertisements persuade customers to buy an iPhone over a Canon PowerShot camera, Apple’s expression does result in a negative for Canon. But this negative does not give Canon the right to demand that Apple’s advertising be silenced, not so long as Canon retains the same freedom of action: the freedom to advertise its own cameras and try to persuade people to buy them.

Consider now the intellectual and ideological realms. Atheists may persuade people to abandon their religion, and churches may see a drop in attendance. Though a real, negative effect, it does not give priests the right to demand that atheists be censored, not so long as the priests retain the same freedom of action, the freedom to try to persuade people that they should not abandon but embrace religion. Even if the priests are scandalized and upset by the atheists’ views, which they regard as blasphemous, this does not give them the right to demand that atheists be silenced.

Or: a socialist or white nationalist may persuade people of their collectivistic doctrines, and in the process teach people to hate and despise large swaths of other people, be it profit-seeking businessmen in the case of socialism or darker-skinned individuals and immigrants in the case of white nationalism. This may lead to a social atmosphere that is less benevolent, less welcoming, less American, and to demands for the passage of anti-business or anti-immigration laws, which are certainly experienced as real negatives by the individuals being demeaned.7 But in neither case do the opponents of socialism or of white nationalism have the right to demand that socialists or white nationalists be censored, not so long as they possess the same freedom of action: The opponents are free to try to persuade people of the irrationality of socialism and of white nationalism (and I hope they exercise this freedom).

It may surprise you that I list socialism as an irrational doctrine that foments hatred against innocent people, but that is part of the point. Though this is my actual evaluation of socialism, I’m not trying to convince you of the truth of that evaluation.8 Rather, the example illustrates that what constitutes irrational doctrines that foment unjust hatred against whole groups of people is a contentious matter. As in today’s world, historically this has been an issue over which there has been heated disagreement. Catholics have regarded Protestant doctrines in this way, and Protestants likewise have regarded Catholic doctrines in this way, similarly for Sunni and Shiite Muslims, for some Enlightenment thinkers toward Christian doctrines and for some Christians toward Enlightenment doctrines, for abolitionists toward proslavery doctrines and for enslavers toward abolitionist doctrines, for capitalists toward the doctrines of socialism and for socialists toward the doctrines of capitalism. Whose speech should hate speech laws ban — and by what right? These examples from history help showcase, from another angle, the danger of claiming that your neighbors have the right to veto your freedom of expression if they consider what you say irrational, hateful, or demonizing of large groups of people.

As an individual, the only right you possess to oppose expression which you regard as evil is to ignore the speaker and walk away or to engage in counterspeech. To the government we delegate the power to enforce our rights, but it is not within my rights to silence my neighbor, even when I abhor what she is saying, and it’s not within her rights to silence me, even when she abhors what I’m saying. Just as her expression, however objectionable to me, does not interfere with or trespass on my freedom of action, so my expression, however objectionable to her, does not interfere with or trespass on her freedom of action.

What the Right to Freedom of Speech Does Not Protect

If the individual’s right to freedom of expression is indeed a right, then, like all rights, it is absolute: It permits no breaches or exceptions. Many defenders of free speech deny this. They contend that the right to freedom of expression is compatible with some exceptions, such as legal prohibitions against threats, incitements to violence, and harassment. For the legitimacy of hate speech laws in particular, then, the question becomes whether or not they too should be considered allowable exceptions to the right to freedom of expression.

Nadine Strossen, for example, in her book HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship, writes approvingly that

government may punish speech when necessary to avert serious harm that cannot be averted through non-censorial measures — notably, law enforcement and counterspeech. Accordingly, government may punish “hate speech” (or speech conveying any other message) when, in context, it directly, demonstrably, and imminently causes certain specific, objectively ascertainable serious harms. The Supreme Court has identified several kinds of situations in which speech satisfies this general emergency standard, specifying particular criteria for each. These criteria are appropriately strict, to circumscribe officials’ opportunity to assert the potential harm as a pretext for suppressing speech merely because its message is disfavored, disturbing, or feared.9

She goes on to discuss, among a few others, such emergency exceptions as “True Threats,” “Punishable Incitement,” and “Harassment.”10

But this conceptualization in terms of emergencies and exceptions is misguided. Many types of actions involve, or at least often involve, speech or other forms of expression and communication. This does not mean that all such actions are protected by the right to freedom of expression or that a legal system, in order to prohibit these actions, must carve out exceptions to the right to freedom of expression. Properly understood, threats, incitement, and harassment are not exceptions to the right to freedom of expression; they are actions that fall outside the protection of this right in the first place. Why? Because these acts are, in essence, not acts of expression or communication to a willing audience, which is free to walk away (and engage in counterspeech), but acts of coercion, which seek to override other people’s voluntary choices and consent.

To see this, let’s briefly consider the nature of threats, incitement, and harassment.

Threats

If I walk into a bank and declare, “This is a stick up. Hand over all your cash!” — and the police come to arrest me, it’s absurd for me to protest that the police are interfering with my right to freedom of expression, since, after all, I was just having a conversation with the teller. Why is my protest absurd? Because I have introduced into the situation physical coercion. I have changed my relationship with the bank from the voluntary to the coercive. If, say, I don’t like the interest rate the bank is offering, I’m free to go elsewhere; if the bank considers my initial deposit to be below its minimum threshold for that particular kind of savings account, it can refuse to open an account for me. Each of us is free to walk away if we don’t consent to the particular terms the other is offering. But this is no longer true after my threat. The teller cannot just walk away — not without the worry that I might put a bullet in his back if he does.

It does not matter if I actually have a gun with me or not, or if I do, whether I intend to start shooting if the teller refuses my demand. As long as it is reasonable for the teller to think I might carry out my threat, his decision-making should no longer be seen as fully voluntary but as coerced, as occurring under physical duress. This is why such threats are prohibited by law. The verbal threat that I may resort to physical coercion if I don’t get my way is the introduction of coercion into the relationship. It is my declaration that I will not let the other party walk away, that I will deny them that freedom of action, that is, deny them that right. The police do not have to wait until I start shooting before they arrest me.

The essence of a threat is that it is not an act of persuasion, rational or irrational, in which the other party is free to walk away if they disagree, but an attempt to bypass the need for persuasion. What a court must decide, therefore, is whether an actual threat has been made; if it decides that a threat has been made, there is no legitimate objection that prohibiting the threat violates the right to freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment.

Incitement

Perhaps the easiest way to grasp the essential nature of incitement is to see its similarity to plotting a crime, which properly is held to be an illegal activity on the part of the co-conspirators. Like many other forms of criminal activity, plotting a crime involves speech or expression. A crew of four who are planning to rob a bank will be communicating with one another. Which bank are they targeting? What kind of security system does it have? Where will they get the explosives to blast off the safe’s door? Who will drive the getaway car? And how will they split the money afterward? This is what they are discussing. But for the law to treat the plotting of a crime as itself a crime is not an interference with the plotters’ freedom of speech, for the same basic reason as in the case of threats: The plotters are introducing physical coercion into human affairs.

The plotters are not planning to make the bank an offer — “We want to buy all your deposits on hand for a thousand dollars, do you accept?” — an offer the bank is free to refuse. The plotters are planning to physically seize the bank’s deposits without the bank’s consent. In such a situation, the police do not have to wait until the plotters enter the bank, or blow off the safe’s door, or start driving away with the money, before they can arrest the plotters. The attempt to rob the bank begins with the active plotting and becomes criminal at that point for all who are actively involved. Even if the mastermind of the plot plans to stay home and to send only his henchmen to enter the bank and seize the money, all are guilty of a crime.

Incitement can be regarded as hatching a criminal plot in the moment. It is more spontaneous, less considered or deliberative than, say, plotting to rob a bank, but no less criminal. For instance, if a group of people is protesting an election result outside a government building, and someone in the group starts to egg the crowd on, to declare that they will never get justice, that they will lose their country if they don’t do something now, and that maybe they should take the law into their own hands, maybe some government officials need to be hanged, and these words help rile up the crowd, and the crowd storms into the government building, the person who helped rile up the crowd is guilty of incitement, as if he helped plot the crime. In other words, he is part of the action of breaking into the government building, even if he, like the mastermind who plotted a bank robbery, never entered the bank. Of course, the individuals breaking into the government building are also guilty of a crime, like the henchmen who break into the bank, but the point is that so is the inciter, who actively helped launch the action.

And again, the fact that the action of incitement, like the action of plotting, involves speech does not mean that in legally prohibiting it, the government is interfering with freedom of speech or carving out some exception to the right to freedom of speech. Just as plots to initiate the use of physical coercion are not essentially acts of expression, so inciting others to initiate the use of physical coercion is not essentially an act of expression. Both are attempts to coerce others, to bypass their voluntary participation and consent, and their freedom to walk away.

Harassment and Disturbances of the Peace

Like threats and incitement, certain forms of harassment and certain forms of disturbances of the peace are also often categorized as permissible exceptions to the right to freedom of speech, but should not be. If I follow a man or woman through the subway system of New York City, commenting on their appearance and attractiveness, or if every morning I ring the doorbells of all the houses on my street, trying to convince their occupants to convert to Christianity, I’m guilty of harassment. And it is not a legitimate defense for me to say that I’m expressing my views, so my action is protected by the First Amendment. Precisely because I am not allowing the other person to consent to the activity — to decide if they want to listen and engage or not — I cannot claim that my action is part of the freedom of action protected by the right to freedom of expression.

Similarly, if in the backyard of my house, I play my speaker system so loud that it disturbs my neighbors, I am guilty of disturbing the peace. The freedom of action encompassed by my freedom of speech never included the freedom to blare my speaker system outdoors at 110 decibels. Individual rights, as I indicated above, must be co-possible. I have the right to listen to what I want to listen to, but so do my neighbors. That in blaring my speaker system, I’m disturbing the peace really means that I’m depriving my neighbors of their freedom of action to decide what they want and don’t want to listen to. My music is so loud that even if they don’t want to listen to it, the sound nevertheless intrudes upon them. There is no right to trespass on the rights of others, in this case, on their right to freedom of expression. I never had the right to force my neighbors to listen to the music I like, and in prohibiting me from doing so, the government is not carving out an exception to freedom of expression but is rather protecting my neighbor’s right to freedom of expression.

In short, threats, incitements, and verbal harassment and disturbances of the peace are not exceptions to the right to freedom of speech. They are not essentially acts of expression and should not be classified as such. If a legal system prohibits these actions — and when these actions are properly defined and delimited, it should — it is not carving out exceptions to freedom of expression.

Conclusion

The right to freedom of speech is an absolute. Any individual who values his own pursuit of the true and the good should claim the right to freedom of thought and to freedom of expression. She should never relinquish these rights, never cede to government the power to censor any form of expression, to infringe in any way on the individual’s right to think and speak freely. But in embracing freedom of expression as an absolute, one is not thereby forced to tolerate threats, incitement, harassment, and the like as the supposed price one must pay for a free society, because such acts are not essentially expressive acts. They are acts that introduce physical coercion into human relationships, acts that seek to bypass other people’s voluntary consent and participation, and the legal prohibition of these acts is compatible with, indeed often part of protecting, the right to freedom of expression.

^[1] “Expression” is the better term, encompassing as it does both verbal and nonverbal content, such as that of a symphony or ballet.

^[2] Ayn Rand, “Man’s Rights,” in The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: New American Library, 1964), 110 (https://courses.aynrand.org/works/mans-rights/).

^[3] Ibid., 110–11.

^[4] Ayn Rand, “Freedom of Speech,” in The Ayn Rand Column, rev. 2nd ed. (New Milford: Second Renaissance Books, 1998), 71.

^[5] Rand, “Man’s Rights,” 114.

^[6] Ayn Rand, “The Fascist New Frontier,” in The Ayn Rand Column, 106.

^[7] If anti-business or anti-immigration laws are actually passed in the United States, I contend that they should often be declared unconstitutional by the courts because the laws abridge the third fundamental right explicitly mentioned in the Declaration and featured prominently in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution: the right to liberty. But that, of course, is an argument for another time.

^[8] But for a bit more on this evaluation of socialism, see the entry on socialism in The Ayn Rand Lexicon (New York: Penguin, 1998), 463–66 (https://courses.aynrand.org/lexicon/socialism/); and Rand’s essay, “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 44–62.

^[9] Nadine Strossen, HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 59. As the title of her book should make clear, Strossen does not regard hate speech laws as legitimate exceptions to freedom of speech.

^[10] Ibid., 59–68.

In 1947, Ayn Rand published Screen Guide for Americans. Her analysis of how collectivist ideas can penetrate American art and culture remains as relevant today as when she published it seventy-nine years ago. Rand wrote the original twelve-page guide while she was working as a contract screenwriter in Hollywood. At the time, she was actively engaged in efforts to oppose communist influence in the motion-picture industry. The guide was, in part, a response to those Americans (and especially American filmmakers) who believed that ideological and philosophical issues were irrelevant to their work.

Rand believed that because the defenders of Americanism had abdicated the realm of ideas, that this vacuum was filled by collectivist intellectuals. They did not necessarily spread their ideas onscreen through explicit political slogans, but built-in moral assumptions, such as portraying the pursuit of wealth as evil.

In this discussion, Elan Journo and Brandon Lisi explore the historical circumstances that led Rand to write the essay, the deeper philosophical ideas behind her analysis, and the significance of ARI Press’s new authoritative edition. They also discuss Michael Berliner’s new afterword and the archival materials that illuminate Rand’s work in Hollywood, including additional documents now available through the Ayn Rand Archives.

Topics include:

• What’s new in ARI Press’s authoritative edition of Screen Guide for Americans

• Why Ayn Rand wrote Screen Guide for Americans in 1947

• Communist influence in 1940s Hollywood

• How propaganda can influence a culture without explicit political slogans

• How to access additional archival materials related to the “Screen Guide” online

Resources:

• Ayn Rand, Screen Guide for Americans

• Archival Supplement: Screen Guide for Americans archival supplement

Recorded on August 25, 2026.

A previous version of this article stated that Screen Guide for Americans was published in 1946 and was seven pages long. The correct year is 1947, and the original pamphlet was 12 pages long. The seven-page count referred to a condensed version published in Plain Talk magazine. We regret these errors and apologize for the oversight.

Thumbnail image: Bettmann via Getty Images

9/11 was one of the most consequential events of the 21st century. Yet twenty-five years later, the attacks and their aftermath are still widely misunderstood. In two consecutive talks at our student conference in Austin, Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo analyzed America’s failures before and after 9/11, drawing on more than two decades of work on the subject. They show how the self-abasing morality of altruism shaped American policy, leading the US to betray its ideals, appease its enemies, sacrifice its soldiers, and lose its wars. This double lecture is a must-watch for anyone who cares about America and wants to make it secure.

Among the topics covered are:

• How 9/11 was experienced and perceived in the immediate aftermath

• The religious, modernity-hating motivation behind 9/11

• America’s emboldening of Islamists in the decades before 9/11

• America’s abject, craven response to the Danish cartoons of Muhammad

• The intellectual rot 9/11 exposed and Objectivism’s potential to change it

• How American altruism crippled its troops’ ability to fight

• How America refused to recognize or defeat its enemies

• The devastating consequences of our altruistic approach to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars

• Q&A

Resources:

• Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo, Failing to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism: What Went Wrong After 9/11.

The livestream was recorded on September 11, 2026 at the Ayn Rand Con event for students in Austin, Texas.

Recently, ARI senior fellow Onkar Ghate had an essay published in an undergraduate philosophy textbook, Problems in Applied Ethics (Bloomsbury Press, 2026). The original essay was invited by the editor Steven B. Cowan, in particular to comment on whether or not hate speech laws were legitimate exceptions to the principle of free speech. In the essay, Ghate challenges the very idea of exceptions to free speech.

The full textbook has now been published, and we are pleased to have received permission from Bloomsbury Press to reprint Ghate’s essay in two parts. (The textbook also contains a counterpoint essay by the philosopher Andrei Bespalov, along with a pair of responses by both Ghate and Bespalov to each other.) This piece represents the latest work in Ghate’s ongoing project of defending free speech. You can read more in Defending Free Speech (Steve Simpson (ed)., ARI Press, 2016) and The First Amendment: Essays on the Imperative of Intellectual Freedom (Tara Smith (ed.), ARI Press, 2024).

Free Speech Absolutism (Part 1)

With the exception of the United States, hate speech laws prevail throughout the Westernized world. In my native country, Canada, for example, “Everyone who, by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, willfully promotes hatred against any identifiable group is guilty of (a) an indictable offence and is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years; or (b) an offence punishable on summary conviction.”1 Canadian law puts special emphasis on denial of the Holocaust: “Everyone who, by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, willfully promotes antisemitism by condoning, denying or downplaying the Holocaust (a) is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years; or (b) is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.”2

As these sections of Canadian law should make clear, what is being legally prohibited is speech. The government has the power to censor the expression of certain ideas or viewpoints. In the United States, by virtue of the First Amendment, hate speech laws such as these would (or at least should) be declared unconstitutional. “Congress shall make no law,” the First Amendment reads in part, “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”3 No matter how irrational or abhorrent the content of a person’s speech, no law means no law.

The US Constitution, in other words, deprives the government of the power to censor; it treats the right to freedom of speech as absolute, permitting no legal abridgement, no carving out of exceptions. This, I will argue, is the correct approach to freedom of speech. Or at least if the fundamentally new form of government that the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution brought into existence is the correct form of government, which I believe it is, then freedom of speech should be regarded as an individual, absolute, inviolable right.

The New, American Form of Government

The radicalism of the American Revolution consists in rooting proper government, not in the theories of collectivism but of individualism. Previous forms of government regarded the individual as subordinate to the state and its goals or ends. The individual was a subject, the quasi property or possession of the nation as a whole and its representatives or spokesmen, be it the king or the pope or the aristocracy or the majority, who were responsible for upholding the collective will. On this conception of government, a collective good — the glory of our nation, the propagation of our religion, the advancement of the public interest — transcends the interests and life of the individual. The individual is subordinate to this collectivist goal, a mere means to an end.

In principle, though certainly not in full practice given the continuation of slavery, the Declaration and Constitution broke with this long-standing view. The individual was no longer viewed as subordinate to some higher goal or end embodied by the state. The individual was the end, the state the means. That the individual has a right to the pursuit of her own happiness, a moral right to live her own life, preexists government.4 Government, properly, is created solely to secure and protect these rights: a proper government protects the freedom of every individual to pursue her own happiness. On this new conception of government, we as individuals are no longer subjects but citizens. As citizens, we are not subordinate to government; government is subordinate to each of us. As the Declaration famously states these points,

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.5

Thus, representative, constitutionally limited government came into existence. The government is the representative of the individual: each individual delegates to government the power to secure and protect her rights, her legitimate freedom of action. That is the only enforcement power she can delegate to government. And that delegation establishes the only legitimate function of government: to secure and protect the rights of each and every individual within its jurisdiction, including, as the First Amendment makes clear, the right to freedom of speech.

Freedom of Speech under Collectivist Forms of Government

Under collectivist forms of government, the ruling authorities have the power to censor the speech of individuals in order to further the specific collectivist goal that the state is thought to embody or secure. If, for instance, the glory of our nation or the propagation of our religion is thought best served by silencing a particular individual, the authorities lawfully can silence that individual. The Church’s censoring of Galileo by the charge of heresy to prevent him from expounding the heliocentric theory of the solar system is an important historical case in point, one with which the creators of America’s new form of government were certainly familiar.6

Today, we can see this same collectivist approach in Canadian hate speech laws. At first glance, Canada seems to recognize the individual’s absolute right to freedom of expression in terms similar to those of the First Amendment. Section 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms states that “Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms: (a) freedom of conscience and religion; (b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication; (c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and (d) freedom of association.”7

But in reality, these supposed guarantees of the individual’s freedom of thought and expression are not held by right. They are held by permission of the government, as the enforcer of a collectivist goal, in this case, the public interest. Section 1 of the Charter states that “The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”8 In terms of freedom of thought and expression, this means that so long as the individual exercises his thought and expression in a way that the government deems to be in the public interest, the government permits the individual to do so. But if he exercises his thought and expression in a way that is deemed to harm the public interest, the government can censor him. This is precisely what the Canadian hate speech laws do: they outlaw the expression of certain content when expression of that content is deemed incompatible with the so-called public interest.9

Just as the Canadian government can censor speech, it can permit speech with the very same content when it deems that speech to be in the public interest. A valid defense against the charge of hate speech, as mentioned in an earlier endnote, is to show that one’s “statements were relevant to any subject of public interest [emphasis mine], the discussion of which was for the public benefit [emphasis mine], and if on reasonable grounds he believed them to be true.”

In Canada, as in other countries with hate speech laws, freedom of speech is not an absolute; it is not an individual right, but a permission granted by the state in the name of a collectivist goal, a permission that can be and sometimes is rescinded in the name of that collectivist goal.

Freedom of Speech under the New American Form of Government

The US approach is fundamentally different because it is individualistic, not collectivistic. Neither the Declaration nor the US Constitution charges the government with the task of advancing the public interest when the “public interest” is conceived to, at least sometimes, transcend the interests and rights of specific individuals. The task of the government is to secure the rights of each and every individual, not to abridge any individual’s rights in the name of some collectivist goal or cause. And in the American approach, the rights to freedom of thought and speech are regarded as integral to the rights listed in the Declaration: the individual’s rights to life and the pursuit of happiness. Why?

To live my own life and pursue my own happiness, I have to possess the freedom to chart and then travel my own course, to figure out for myself what is true and good and to then follow through on my convictions in action, all the while recognizing and respecting the same freedom of action of every other individual in my society. The authors of the Declaration and Constitution understood that the pursuit of happiness is a difficult endeavor, requiring careful thought and much effort on the part of each individual, but it’s possible to a rational being who is left free to function as a rational being.

To figure out what I think is true and what I think is good requires that I’m free to examine any and every idea, argument, viewpoint, fact, potential lead, and alleged piece of evidence that to me seems relevant, and to express, listen, discuss, argue, and debate with whomever I judge it valuable to do so. The quest for the true and the good is difficult, and no doubt I’ll make false starts and go down wrong alleys. In discussing with others, I’ll find some of what they think and say helpful and illuminating, and some wrongheaded, irrational, even evil. But these are precisely the judgments I must make for myself if I’m to grasp the true and the good.

To cede to government the power to curtail the freedom of thought and expression, to allow government to declare some viewpoints heretical or inimical to the public interest, and so to declare certain books or ideas or arguments off limits to me, on penalty of fines or imprisonment or death, is to abandon my quest for the true and the good. Instead, government officials will decide for me what counts as viewpoints worth entertaining, arguments worth considering, or leads worth investigating — and I’ll content myself with sifting through their blinkered view of reality. To accept such a predicament is to relinquish control of my life and happiness. How can I decide if Galileo’s heliocentric theory or someone’s denial of the Holocaust is well-reasoned or not, rational or perverse, without being able to read their books or listen to their claims?

It does not matter if the government censors viewpoints that are in fact true, like Galileo’s, or false and abhorrent, like the denial of the Holocaust. If I cannot consider any and all viewpoints and arguments that I judge might have some bearing on the truth — even if I later come to think, as will often be the case, that some of these viewpoints are false and even corrupt — I cannot genuinely make up my mind. Instead, someone is trying to make up my mind for me.

To put the same point another way: if I don’t yet know that denial of the Holocaust is false and perverse, I cannot permit government to declare that viewpoint off limits to me, to prevent me from even considering it; if I know that denial of the Holocaust is false and perverse, it’s only because I was free to consider the matter.

This, in short, is the case for freedom of thought and expression on an individualist approach. If government is not the master but the servant of the individual, then it cannot possess the power to censor. As an individual, I don’t have the right to tell other individuals what they can or cannot think or say or listen to, and so could not delegate enforcement of this right to government. And likewise, no other individual has the right to tell me what I can or cannot think or say or listen to, and so could not delegate enforcement of this right to government. In the individualist as against the collectivist approach, government does not have the power to censor any individual. As the First Amendment declares, freedom of speech is an absolute: a proper government must make no law abridging it.

For 17 somber minutes, on a cloudless summer morning, it was imaginable that an airliner crashing into the north tower of the World Trade Center could be an accident. But it was unimaginable when a second plane slammed into the south tower, and then a third, into the Pentagon. I recall news anchors on live broadcasts straining for words to describe the carnage, the horror, the devastation. We heard the phrase an “act of war.” The next morning’s New York Times roared, in a banner headline, “U.S. ATTACKED.”

But who had attacked us? The initial answer: the “Bin Laden organization,” or al-Qaeda. This was not fully wrong; the hijackers were al-Qaeda members. They were terrorists, we were told, and they had managed to terrify. This prevailing view of the enemy as a band of terrorists, however, was profoundly wrong. Disastrously wrong.

Who had attacked us? In the aftermath of 9/11, the intellectual and political leadership of the United States failed to understand the enemy. We at ARI demonstrated that America faced an ideological movement, Islamic totalitarianism; that al-Qaeda was one prominent faction of many; and that central to this movement were Islamist regimes that provided inspiration and funding, chiefly Iran and Saudi Arabia.

The wholesale failure to grasp this reality cannot be explained by ignorance. For some, particularly in the George W. Bush administration, it was active self-deception, a desire not to see; for others, it was an inability to believe that anyone could truly be ideologically driven.

Who had attacked us? The deliberate severing of 9/11 from its animating ideology was so acute, that I remember a time when people spoke of the attacks as akin to natural disasters, rather than the vicious deeds of human beings choosing to act on ideas they believed.

Who had attacked us? For the last twenty-five years, in op-eds, essays, blog posts, TV interviews, on radio, in lectures, at college talks, in podcasts, in books — in every channel, venue and forum open to us — my ARI colleagues and I consistently stressed the fundamental need to understand that enemy, we explained its essentially ideological nature, at length, and what was necessary to defeat it.

Today, as our nation marks a quarter century since 9/11, we reprint an in-depth essay from New Ideal, “Jihadists: Understanding the Enemy,” that illuminates a question that so many, for so long, have deliberately clouded and evaded.

* * *

This essay appears in the newly released ARU Press book Failing to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism: What Went Wrong After 9/11. The book, now in its third expanded edition, features ARI analysis spanning the last 25 years.

Finally, my colleague Onkar Ghate and I will be speaking today about the meaning of 9/11 at an ARI conference in Austin, Texas, and I invite you to join the livestream.

— Elan Journo

Jihadists: Understanding the Nature of the Enemy

Originally published April 16, 2018

At the peak of its strength, the Islamic State (or ISIS)1 not only controlled a large swath of territory — an area roughly the size of the United Kingdom — it also proved itself a formidable global menace. It instigated, directed, and inspired attacks from Brussels to San Bernardino, London to Orlando, Paris to Istanbul, Manchester to Barcelona. Now that ISIS has been practically routed from the territory it had once controlled in Iraq and Syria,2 the natural question is: Will this mean a reduced threat of further attacks?

Perhaps yes, in the near term; but beyond that, no, and we have every reason to expect the problem to persist.

Why? The reason is not just that the Islamic State might linger on, rebuild, or morph and re-emerge in the shape of a new, more deadly faction. That’s entirely imaginable. The Islamic State itself began life around 2003 as a member of the Al Qaeda network, later breaking away and eclipsing its former partner in brutality, territorial conquest, and global reach.

Nor is the problem just that future attacks might look different. Al Qaeda made its mark with the intricate September 11 plot to hijack four passenger jets simultaneously and ram them into buildings. But the Islamic State has recruited people to carry out simpler, often unsophisticated, mass murders using knives, guns, and vehicles to mow down their victims.

The reason that we can expect future attacks is that there’s far more to the problem than these attacks; more than the Islamic State; more than Al Qaeda. In some vague way, many of us sense that. While people often talk loosely about the “terrorist” threat, it doesn’t take much to see that terrorism is a tactic — a means, not an end. And it is a tactic commonly deployed by various groups and organizations (think of the Irish Republican Army, the Basque separatists of ETA, or the Ku Klux Klan), so it’s nowhere near a uniquely distinguishing feature of the problem.

What, then, is this cause? Who is the enemy? We should be able to answer these vital questions. Any rational attempt to deal with this threat must begin with a clear conception of the enemy’s nature and goals. That’s a necessary condition of defining an effective plan for ending the menace. The point holds true in every conflict. Can you imagine America achieving victory in World War II if we had viewed the enemy as “Kamikaze” attacks — the tactic of deploying fighter pilots on suicide missions — rather than imperialist Japan? And yet today, nearly seventeen years since 9/11, we have nothing like clarity on the nature of this enemy.

Notice the semantic breakdancing around the issue of what to call the attackers. For example, after the September 11 attacks, George W. Bush launched a “Global War on Terrorism,” referring to our enemy variously as “terrorists,” “haters,” “evil doers,” and “hijackers” of a noble religion. The Bush administration tried out the term “Islamofascism,” but quickly dropped it. Barack Obama’s team whipsawed between the overly narrow — “Al Qaeda”; then “ISIS” — and the hopelessly broad, favoring the worse than meaningless term “violent extremists.” Donald Trump has at times talked of “Radical Islamic terrorism,” suggesting some ideological features of the menace, though the administration’s own view is less than coherent on that point.

What all this betrays is much more than semantic confusion. It reveals an underlying conceptual failure: a major part of the problem is that we haven’t properly defined the problem. We see some of the enemy’s features, if dimly; we fixate on non-essential or derivative aspects; we play down, ignore, or evade others that are fundamental to it.

That leads to a failure to understand the nature of the enemy. It’s a misconception to view the problem as hinging primarily on the most salient faction — whether that’s Al Qaeda, or ISIS, or a successor group — or on its preferred tactics. To view the problem so narrowly is to miss what’s essential to this enemy, why it predates Al Qaeda and has persisted long after Osama bin Laden’s death, why it will outlast the routing of ISIS, what animates it fundamentally — and, thus, what’s needed to end it.

We urgently need a clear understanding of the enemy, what ideas animate it, and why. Such clarity is an indispensable condition for combating it effectively, a point confirmed by the failures of American Mideast policy over the last two decades. Let us then step back, take a wider perspective, and bring into focus the nature of this foe.

Confronting difficult questions

What’s the point of all the slaughter? What’s the enemy’s end goal? The path to reaching the answers we need is crowded with difficult issues — difficult to untangle, but also difficult emotionally. For example, the killers call themselves jihadists (holy warriors) fighting for the supremacy of Allah’s law on earth. While it may be an uncomfortable thought, we must still confront the question: is religion — specifically Islam — the animating force behind the self-identified jihadists?

For many people, particularly our political and intellectual leaders, the answer is a vehement no. The killers, we hear, have nothing to do with any faith, let alone the Muslim faith. We hear that they distort that religion, which is a religion of peace. But is it true that the killers have nothing to do with the religion of Islam? It’s quite obvious that many, many Muslims repudiate the self-styled jihadists, and that they themselves are peaceful, productive individuals. But does it follow that the agenda of such jihadist groups as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State bears no connection to the religion’s commonly recognized teachings?

To ask this question is to risk being accused of prejudice toward Muslims. The worry here is that such a question is meant to imply that the problem is somehow all Muslims. That worry stems from a profound distortion and an actual issue in our culture.

There is real prejudice toward Muslims, often manifesting in the United States as xenophobia. Sometimes it manifests as a kind of racism that considers Muslims — whether from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or Indonesia — as interchangeably non-white and somehow constituting a race. There’s no place for racism, xenophobia, or prejudice in any civilized society.

The distortion is that some people blur together race — which is unchosen — and a religious outlook — which is a chosen set of beliefs. Such blurring leads some to feel an unwarranted, collective hostility toward all Muslims. (Partly reacting to that distortion, other people adopt an uncritically positive view of the religion, regarding any analysis of it and of its followers as taboo.) To make sense of the jihadists, however, we must keep the issues of racial identity and religious/ideological outlook sharply differentiated.

Then there’s another line of thinking that tells us that what really animates jihadists is something non-religious. This view holds that, although these self-styled jihadists quote holy texts and pledge their faith to Allah, fundamentally there are other factors that drive them, notably political or economic grievances. For example, observe that jihadist recruitment videos and talking points hammer on American Mideast policy and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What are we to make of such seemingly non-religious factors?

The answers here are not obvious, but they are attainable.

What I intend to convince you of is that the enemy constitutes an ideological movement rooted in Islam. Let me stress key elements of that claim.

It is an ideological movement: it’s a religious outlook, based on ideas and teachings of Islam, which the followers of the movement choose to embrace. It’s not about anyone’s race, nor is it fundamentally animated by material (political or economic) factors.

It’s crucial to see that it is an ideological movement: despite murderous enmity, sectarian rifts, splintering, and infighting among its constituent regimes, groups, and factions, what unites them — and defines the movement — is their common end. It is the aim of creating a totalitarian society under similar interpretations of Islamic religious law.

It’s an ideological movement deeply rooted in Islam

Let’s start by looking at the evidence of what the jihadists themselves believe and act on. Read the notes left behind by the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, a four-page document with minute guidance on how to prepare for martyrdom. Listen to the courtroom testimony of the man who slaughtered Theo van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker, proudly admitting his crime in the name of Allah. Notice how the Charlie Hebdo attackers — like so many others — screamed “Allahu Akbar!” (God is great!), adding that they were avenging the Prophet Mohammad. Or recall how the shooter at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, described himself as a soldier of Allah, pledging his allegiance to the Islamic State. To these examples we can add many more. The commonality is that they see themselves as fighting in the name of Islam.

These holy warriors have been instructed, inspired, and guided by the intellectual leaders of their movement. Prominent among these intellectual leaders are Abu al-Ala al Mawdudi (1903–1979), Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902–1989). Many differences separate these three. Mawdudi and Qutb came out of the Sunni sect of Islam; Khomeini, from the Shiite sect. Their arguments are colored by their local political context and concerns. Mawdudi was an Indo-Pakistani thinker, Qutb helped shape the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and Khomeini became the founder and first “Supreme Leader” of Iran’s theocracy. Despite these and other differences, several fundamental themes unite them.

First, they see the world around them, and especially the political system, as pervaded with corruption and impiety. Unbelief and godlessness abound across the face of the earth. Islamic religious law, or sharia, no longer governs men’s thought and action. Wherever you look, according to Qutb, people’s ideas, habits, traditions, culture, art, and laws reflect an ignorance of Allah’s will.3

Second, they believe that Islamic law, or sharia, must be universal, shaping every facet of society, politics, and the individual’s life. Qutb argued that it was necessary to ensure “that the obedience of all people be for God alone,” everywhere.4 The faithful must establish an Islamic dominion, under divine authority, with the ultimate goal of carrying their faith “throughout the earth to the whole of mankind, as the object of this religion is all humanity and its sphere of action is the whole earth.”5

Third, they hold that it is time for the righteous to solve these problems — the world’s deviation from the true path — by imposing religious law as an all-encompassing, total political-social system. In the words of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that gave rise to Al Qaeda, Hamas, and many other factions, “Islam is the solution.”6 In Khomeini’s political vision, realized in the Iranian regime, it is a cleric — one deeply knowledgeable about (religious) law and justice — who must hold ultimate power within society.7 While Qutb and Mawdudi had their own views of how to structure government, they agreed with Khomeini on the basic solution to the impiety pervading the world: a sharia regime enveloping the totality of human life and society, where religion and the state are one. It is a political system wherein every individual must submit to Allah’s will. A fitting description for this vision is Islamic totalitarianism.

Qutb, Mawdudi, and Khomeini also share the belief that jihad is a means for bringing about a truly just world. The term “jihad” is seen as having two meanings — referring both to personal struggle and to a holy war.8 But what Qutb, Mawdudi, Khomeini, and kindred thinkers call for — and lionize — is the waging of war to expand the dominion of Islam. The Iranian regime was both an embodiment of that totalitarian vision and a self-declared leader in exporting its revolutionary doctrine beyond its own borders. Indeed, the Iranian regime has been not only a galvanizing force for the Islamist movement globally, but also a major leader of it.9

It is this political-ideological vision that underlies the jihadist bombings, massacres, and random-seeming violence. The ultimate point of the attacks and killing is to punish unbelievers, compel us to submit in obedience to Allah’s law, and enforce sharia law, everywhere. That desire for world domination sounds fanciful and unachievable, but what matters here is that it animates the enemy.

Here’s how the Islamic State explained their outlook. Because the statement is particularly clear and emphatic, it’s worth quoting at length:

We hate you, first and foremost, because you are disbelievers; you reject the oneness of Allah — whether you realize it or not — by making partners for Him in worship, you blaspheme against Him, claiming that He has a son, you fabricate lies against His prophets and messengers, and you indulge in all manner of devilish practices. It is for this reason that we were commanded to openly declare our hatred for you and our enmity towards you. “There has already been for you an excellent example in Abraham and those with him, when they said to their people, ‘Indeed, we are disassociated from you and from whatever you worship other than Allah. We have rejected you, and there has arisen, between us and you, enmity and hatred forever until you believe in Allah alone’” (Al-Mumtahanah 4). Furthermore, just as your disbelief is the primary reason we hate you, your disbelief is the primary reason we fight you, as we have been commanded to fight the disbelievers until they submit to the authority of Islam, either by becoming Muslims, or by paying jizyah — for those afforded this option — and living in humiliation under the rule of the Muslims. Thus, even if you were to stop fighting us, your best-case scenario in a state of war would be that we would suspend our attacks against you — if we deemed it necessary — in order to focus on the closer and more immediate threats, before eventually resuming our campaigns against you. Apart from the option of a temporary truce, this is the only likely scenario that would bring you fleeting respite from our attacks. So in the end, you cannot bring an indefinite halt to our war against you. At most, you could only delay it temporarily. “And fight them until there is no fitnah [paganism] and [until] the religion, all of it, is for Allah” (Al-Baqarah 193).10

When judged by their words and deeds, what motivates the jihadists is their interpretation of Islam.

Nothing to do with Islam?

Nonetheless, many people insist that these killers have nothing to do with the religion of Islam.

Part of what gives that notion some plausibility is that within the global community of more than one billion Muslims, there are indeed differences on how to understand the Koran and the sayings and deeds attributed to Mohammad. There are rival sects within Islam, and there are also multiple schools of thought on the body of laws known as sharia. But does the outlook of jihadists have nothing to do with Islam?

That’s the strong claim we hear in many of the post-9/11 speeches of George W. Bush (here, here, and here, to give just three examples). Bush went so far as to describe them as “traitors to their own faith.” The view has persisted. In 2014, after the Islamic State slaughtered an American citizen, President Barack Obama stated that the group’s “actions represent no faith, least of all the Muslim faith.”

The claim that some interpretation of Islam (or another religion) is a departure from, a perversion, or a “hijacking” of the one true faith relies on a dubious assumption. It counts on the assumption that religious dogma — by definition lacking objective, empirical foundation — lends itself to one definitive interpretation. Conflicting and warring sects may each hold that view, but from the vantage point of the outsider, we see that there is no way to answer which is the true version of, say, Christianity or Islam.

To evaluate whether the Islamist movement is deeply rooted in Islam’s teachings and ideas, we need to approach the issue differently. We need to look at whether the movement’s views, agenda, and actions constitute an intelligible interpretation of Islamic books and historic doctrines. Put another way, the question to ask is whether the views and injunctions that jihadists take away from their reading of Islamic texts mesh with the religion’s commonly recognized teachings — or fly in the face of those religious teachings by denying, for instance, mankind’s fundamental duty of submission to religious authority.

The answer we find is that what the leaders of the Islamist movement call for connects to commonly recognized teachings of Islam. Let’s compare three key features of the outlook of Islamic totalitarians with commonly identified teachings of the religion of Islam. Take the Islamist demand for (1) submission to Allah’s law; (2) the universal scope of sharia law; and (3) expanding the dominion of Islam. For an account of Islam’s teachings, let’s consult John L. Esposito’s college textbook, Islam: The Straight Path (Oxford University Press, 3rd ed.). Esposito is a noted scholar of Islam at Georgetown University, and his book is a sympathetic account of the religion.

1. Submission

“Despite the rich diversity in Islamic practice,” writes Esposito, “the Five Pillars of Islam remain the core and common denominator, the five essential and obligatory practices all Muslims accept and follow.”11 From Esposito’s discussion of the Five Pillars, we can observe that the sum of these supreme duties is to effect and demonstrate the believer’s complete submission to authority.

The first pillar is the call upon a Muslim (“one who surrenders”) to proclaim: “There is no god but the God [Allah] and Muhammad is the messenger of God.” With this acknowledgement, writes Esposito, “a person professes his or her faith and becomes a Muslim.”12

The second pillar is to reaffirm this commitment through prayer, five times a day.

The third pillar is the obligation of alms-giving (zakat): “All adult Muslims who are able to do so are obliged to pay a wealth tax annually”; Esposito goes on to explain: “This is not regarded as charity since it is not really voluntary but instead owed, by those who have received their wealth as a trust from God’s bounty, to the poor. The Quran (9:60) and Islamic law stipulate that alms are to be used to support the poor, orphans, and widows, to free slaves and debtors, and to assist in the spread of Islam.”13

The fourth pillar is the annual fast of Ramadan, when Muslims refrain from eating, drinking, and sex, from dawn to dusk, for a month.

The fifth pillar is the duty to make a pilgrimage (the Hajj) to Mecca, incumbent on males.14

What do these obligations add up to? We can see that to practice his religion, the believer is duty bound to bow continually before Allah; reaffirm his submission five times a day; cross oceans and continents in pilgrimage to demonstrate unwavering faith; sacrifice worldly values and efface personal desires in the name of devotion to the supernatural master.

All of this hinges on a belief grounded only on faith. To have faith means to believe without evidence (and despite counter-evidence), to suspend one’s own perception and rational judgment. The faithful individual is required to put the dictates of religious authority above his or her own grasp of facts. He must learn that he is not a sovereign individual; Allah alone is sovereign, and man must bow to religious authority. What this moral code offers is guidance on how one can achieve the ideal of becoming a servant of Allah.

Islam demands the individual’s submission to religious authority. Fundamentally, leaders of the Islamist movement also call for mankind to submit to religious authority. Listen, for example, to Sayyid Qutb:

The theoretical foundation of Islam, in every period of history, has been to witness “La ilaha illa Allah” — “There is no deity except God” — which means to bear witness that the only true deity is God, that He is the Sustainer, that He is the Ruler of the universe, and that He is the Real Sovereign; to believe in Him in one’s heart, to worship Him Alone, and to put into practice His laws. Without this complete acceptance of ‘‘La ilaha illa Allah,” which differentiates the one who says he is a Muslim from a non-Muslim, there cannot be any practical significance to this utterance, nor will it have any weight according to Islamic law.

Theoretically, to establish it means that people should devote their entire lives in submission to God, should not decide any affair on their own, but must refer to God’s injunctions concerning it and follow them. We know of God’s guidance through only one source, that is, through the Messenger of God — peace be on him. Thus, in the second part of the Islamic creed, we bear witness “Wa ashhadu anna Muhammadar Rasul Allah” — “And I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of God.”15

If the Five Pillars form the core of Islam, is not Qutb’s one intelligible interpretation of their meaning and application?

2. Universality of Sharia

Islam provides a body of laws, or sharia, derived mainly from the Koran and interpretations of sayings and deeds attributed to Mohammad.16 Esposito explains:

Law in Islam is both universal and egalitarian. The Sharia is believed to be God’s law for the entire Islamic community, indeed for all humankind. In the final analysis, God is the sovereign ruler of the world, head of the human community, and its sole legislator. As a result, Islamic law is as much a system of ethics as it is law, for it is concerned with what a Muslim ought to do or ought not to do. All acts are ethically categorized as: (1) obligatory; (2) recommended; (3) indifferent or permissible; (4) reprehensible but not forbidden; or (5) forbidden. To break the law is a transgression against both society and God, a crime and a sin; the guilty are subject to punishment in this life and the next. The idealism of the law can be seen in the fact that ethical categories such as recommended and reprehensible were not subject to civil penalties. Islamic law is also egalitarian; it transcends regional, family, tribal, and ethnic boundaries. It does not recognize social class or caste differences. All Muslims, Arab and non-Arab, rich and poor, black and white, caliph and craftsman, male and female, are bound by Islamic law as members of a single, transnational community or brotherhood of believers.

The belief that Islamic law was a comprehensive social blueprint was reflected in the organization and content of law.17

Notice in Esposito’s description how morality and political life are united (the breaking of religious law is both a sin and a crime).

The Islamists agree that Islam’s embrace must be universal, and that the Koran answers the needs of mankind. For example, Qutb notes that “The distinctive feature of a Muslim community is this: that in all its affairs it is based on worship of God alone.”18 Islamists argue that Muslims and their rulers have strayed from the requirements of piety by adopting man-made laws, which are morally corrupting, instead of recognizing that sovereignty belongs only to Allah.

For the Islamist movement, the universality of Islam means that it must encompass all of a believer’s existence but also the existence of non-believers. It must span all of Allah’s creations. Mawdudi, for example, argued that a sharia regime cannot be limited in its scope: “Its approach is universal and all-embracing. Its sphere of activity is coexistent with the whole of human life.”19 Qutb echoes that theme: Islam, he writes, “addresses itself to the whole of mankind, and its sphere of work is the whole earth. God is the sustainer not merely of the Arabs, nor is His providence limited to those who believe in the faith of Islam. God is the Sustainer of the whole world.”20

3. Expanding the dominion of Allah’s law

The call to fight unbelievers in order to expand Islam’s earthly dominion flows out of Koranic statements, and it is reflected in the example of the Prophet Mohammad, whose actions are widely seen as embodying the true path. For example, the Koran (9:29) states: “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, [even if they are] of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.”21

And in practice, during the last nine years of his life, Mohammad is “recorded as having participated in at least twenty-seven campaigns and deputized some fifty-nine others — an average of no fewer than nine campaigns annually.”22 Islam’s vast empire grew under the shadow of the sword. Mohammad’s successors marched on.

Fighting unbelievers in order to expand Islam’s earthly dominion is precisely what Islamic totalitarians seek to do. That’s what the Islamic State sought to do, a point evident in the lengthy passage I quoted earlier. Long before the Islamic State eclipsed Al Qaeda, and before both were household names, the Islamist movement’s standard-bearer was, and largely remains, the Iranian regime.

“The Iranian revolution,” declared Ayatollah Khomeini, “is not exclusively that of Iran, because Islam does not belong to any particular people. . . . We will export our revolution throughout the world because it is an Islamic revolution. The struggle will continue until the calls ‘there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah’ are echoed all over the world.”23

Islamists demand total submission to sharia, they believe sharia’s scope to be universal, and their widest aim is to enforce religious tyranny, everywhere. Does that fundamental end, and the idea of fighting to achieve it, fly in the face of Islamic teaching? No. Does the Islamist movement’s interpretation intelligibly flow out of Islam? Yes.

The Islamists constitute an ideological movement deeply rooted in Islam. We should believe jihadists, then, when they tell us that they are Muslims. But while all jihadists are Muslims, it’s plainly false that all Muslims are jihadists. Rather, the Islamist movement is a subset within the community of people who profess the religion of Islam. Clearly, even though all Muslims are expected to accept the Koran, only some — the jihadists — hold and practice their interpretation of Islam as a totalitarian ideological-political cause.

To put this point into even sharper focus, let’s consider two contrasting views which I brought up earlier in this essay. Each in its own way pushes back on the idea that Islamic ideas are fundamental to the nature and aim of this movement. One blurs ideas and race; the other plays down or negates the role of religious ideas and tells us to look to material factors, such as political or economic issues, as fundamental. Let’s take each of these in turn.

It’s not about heredity; it is a chosen religious-political worldview

It’s true and important that many, many jihadists were born into families and communities that are Muslim. That fact, however, is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of becoming a follower of the Islamist movement. It’s not about genetic lineage (an unchosen group membership); it’s about what is being taught and a recruit’s chosen embrace of a religious-political worldview.

You can see that from the cases of individuals who’ve chosen to join — and from some who reject — the movement. For example, Maajid Nawaz was born in the UK to a Pakistani family. Not particularly religious when he encountered the Islamist movement, he became deeply involved in it and worked for some years as a recruiter for the cause. But he eventually turned his back on the movement and renounced it.24

By contrast, John Walker Lindh was raised in Maryland and in Marin County, California; his father is Catholic and his mother, a follower of Buddhism. Having converted to Islam, he went on to read Islamist materials, and made his way to Afghanistan before 9/11, where he trained at an Al Qaeda camp and took up arms alongside the Taliban.

The Islamic State trumpeted the fact that it attracted converts from Christianity who emigrated to live and fight under its black flag. In the July 2016 issue of its magazine Dabiq, for example, the Islamic State featured one former Christian from Trinidad, another from Finland.

Yet many people today fail to understand that the Islamist movement is an ideological phenomenon — that its followers are fundamentally driven by a set of religious ideas about life, the world, and the good.

No one is born a follower of any religion or ideological cause — whether Islam, Christianity, Judaism, or Marxism. These are belief systems that an individual must come to adopt. An individual may well do so passively, conforming with the flow of the people and culture around them; but it remains the case that they can choose to question that ideological outlook and reject it.

Observe an important implication of this point, which relates to the widespread lack of understanding about the Islamist movement.

Clearly it’s essential that we analyze, discuss, criticize and morally judge this ideological movement, just as we must every ideological movement, secular or supernatural. In doing so, we’re evaluating a set of ideas and the people who choose to embrace them. That’s in sharp contrast with racial, tribal, or xenophobic condemnations of groups of people, which is obviously wrong.

If we recognize this critical distinction, then we should reject the increasingly prevalent idea of “Islamophobia.” This deliberately confusing term seeks to shut down critical analysis of the Islamist movement and its ideas by smearing such discussion as inherently prejudiced against Muslims, or worse.

No one seeking to combat prejudice toward Muslims can honestly believe that that problem can be solved by silencing discussion of the Islamist movement and entrenching the cultural ignorance already besetting this issue.

Fundamentally, it’s religious ideas, not political or economic factors, that animate the Islamist movement

Let’s turn now to a contrasting view that would seem to loosen, if not fully sever, the fundamental causal link between jihadists and their religious worldview. The Islamists quote holy texts, but (on this line of thinking) their ideological outlook is not what ultimately motivates them. Instead, we should look to material factors, such as political or economic issues, as fundamental drivers of the movement.25

What makes this perspective plausible? Consider two salient points: (1) Some followers are poor, and the Islamist ideologues themselves invoke political grievances in their manifestos and in recruitment propaganda. (2) Some followers of the movement seemingly lack deep knowledge of religious ideas.

Certainly, some jihadists, in some parts of the world, come from desperate poverty. Note, however, that many other people around the world face similar, if not worse, circumstances, but few of them become holy warriors. You can also find eager jihadists who are well-educated, raised in middle-class homes in some of the world’s freest, most-advanced countries.26

Islamist tracts, recruitment materials, and propaganda videos do invoke various political grievances. For example, bin Laden’s infamous 1996 “Declaration of Jihad” against America decried the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. It also emphasized the issue of “Palestine,”27 which has been all over various jihadist propaganda, for years.28 Islamists have leveraged these claims (along with various others) to recruit for their jihad.

But when we take a closer look, it becomes clear that such grievances are effective precisely because of a fundamental religious narrative that frames them. In that story there is a cosmic struggle for a “just” world, one subservient to religious dogma. The crux of that is the striving of the faithful (Islamists) against the unbelievers (impious Muslims, apostates, infidels, atheists; particularly in the West). Within that framework, a great many issues and conflicts can actuate new recruits, who see themselves as part of a global Muslim community (or, “umma”).

Here are some emotional-ideological “buttons” that the Islamists have pushed in order to galvanize, recruit, and draw people into the movement. The fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, during the 1980s, attracted a significant influx of foreign holy warriors (Osama bin Laden among them). The Bosnia conflict, during the 1990s, was another trigger, because Muslims were targeted.29 In his memoir Maajid Nawaz recounts how seeing videos of Muslims being slaughtered in the Bosnia conflict inflamed him. The victims were all strangers to him, but they belonged to a global Muslim community, and Nawaz felt impelled to fight for the redemption of his co-religionists.30 The bond of collective religious solidarity was that strong. During the mid-2010s, the rise of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria proved an even more powerful magnet for international jihadists; one of its themes was the sectarian hostility toward non-Sunnis.

The common factor here is the specifically Islamist narrative that frames the worldview of recruits, manipulating their emotions. They are primed to feel a powerful solidarity with co-religionists throughout the world and to regard anything short of an all-encompassing Islamist regime as a metaphysical injustice that they must fight to rectify.

For example, in the case of the “Palestine” issue, the basic concern of Islamists is not any political grievance about Israeli borders, land-use policy, or alleged oppression of particular individuals.31 They demand not freedom and prosperity for Palestinians (or anyone else), but submission: Islamists seek to enslave the world — including Palestine — under Allah’s laws. Only conquering Israel and raising the flag of Islamic totalitarianism over Palestine and Jerusalem could satisfy them.32

The same applies to their framing of American foreign policy in the Middle East. The removal of American troops from the region would not pacify the Islamists, nor the cessation of American military strikes in Muslim lands, nor the halting of American backing for some of the region’s dictators. U.S Mideast policy is riddled with serious problems (which I’ve written about at length), but there’s no version of American policy in the region, and no genuine problems we might rectify, that Islamists would regard as unproblematic. Their basic objection is that we’re unbelievers, everything we do is an affront, and, in the end, it is they who should dominate, everywhere, in the name of religious totalitarianism.

Consider how the Islamic State explained this point in its magazine Dabiq. Among the reasons for hating and fighting to overthrow the West’s secular, liberal societies, the article lists American foreign policy, but stresses how that is a derivative factor.

What’s important to understand here is that although some might argue that your foreign policies are the extent of what drives our hatred, this particular reason for hating you is secondary, hence the reason we addressed it at the end of the above list. The fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam. Even if you were to pay jizyah and live under the authority of Islam in humiliation, we would continue to hate you. No doubt, we would stop fighting you then as we would stop fighting any disbelievers who enter into a covenant with us, but we would not stop hating you.

What’s equally if not more important to understand is that we fight you, not simply to punish and deter you, but to bring you true freedom in this life and salvation in the Hereafter, freedom from being enslaved to your whims and desires as well as those of your clergy and legislatures, and salvation by worshiping your Creator alone and following His messenger.33

What, then, are we to make of the fact that some followers of the Islamist movement appear to lack substantive knowledge of religious doctrine? One anecdote that’s taken to illustrate the point: before setting out for the battlefront in Syria, two British would-be jihadists ordered copies of Islam For Dummies and The Koran for Dummies.

Leaving anecdotes to one side, researchers have found that recruits certainly have varied profiles. Peter Neumann and his colleagues at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College, London, found that recruits bound for the Islamic State fell into three broad categories: “defenders” who were devout and seeking to protect co-religionists; “seekers” attracted to the jihadist counterculture, which met their “need for identity, community, power and a feeling of masculinity”; and “hangers-on” who join because the leader of their social circle decided to.34

Should we be surprised if some, many, or most of the tens of thousands of recruits who flocked to join the Islamic State were drawn by the desire for a pseudo self-esteem as heroes for the cause, a source of religiously endorsed self-worth and identity? Should we be surprised that for some the appeal lies in the opportunity to live out a video-game fantasy where they actually get to murder people? None of that should be surprising; it makes sense that such abhorrent specimens of humanity would gravitate to a movement seeking domination.

More broadly, it’s a feature of ideological movements that they tend to attract people of varying levels of understanding, from the ardently committed to those whose understanding of the cause is shallow. Was every last warrior for communism a theoretician, or deeply versed in Marxism, or qualified to interpret the sacred theory of dialectical materialism? Clearly, no. What defines the Islamist movement is its over-arching ideological-political end.

Why it matters that we grasp the enemy’s ideological character

If we are to develop anything like a sensible policy response to the Islamist threat, we need to begin by conceptualizing it as an ideological movement. This has at least two major implications.

First, we need to take a wide-angle perspective. There are many Islamist groups, factions, organizations, regimes. Among them, there are differences over doctrine, sect, tactics, even strategic priorities. And they fight among themselves, a lot, and brutally. For example, Saudi Arabia is hostile to the Islamic State, and both revile Iran. They jockey over who is more pious, and who will dominate where. Yet what unites all of them — along with the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, Hamas, Boko Haram, and still others — is their common ideological goal.

Second, a crucial feature of this movement is that particular regimes — notably Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and above all, Iran — are central to it.35 The Iranian regime has been the movement’s spearhead, galvanizing the Islamist cause.

The Muslim Brotherhood, a foundational group in the movement, started in Egypt in the 1920s, but accomplished little. What supercharged the jihadist cause was the 1979 Iranian revolution. That shockwave brought to power in Tehran an Islamic totalitarian regime determined to export its ideological revolution. Iran was such an inspiration because it made the Islamist cause seem achievable. Iran armed, trained, and funded Lebanese Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It has backed insurgent groups in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, in its own way, the Saudi regime has nourished the Islamist cause. The Saudis invested millions of dollars setting up religious schools, distributing books, and proselytizing across the globe for its preferred strain of Islamic totalitarianism. Saudi money funds various jihadist groups, including the Taliban.

And the Gulf states, for their part, have bankrolled their favored jihadist factions. Qatar, for example, is a backer of Hamas.36

Absent the inspiration and material backing of these regimes; absent the galvanizing spectacle of real-life, functioning Islamist regimes such as in Iran and elsewhere; the jihadist cause would have amounted to little more than a bunch of seething pamphleteers and ineffectual revolutionaries. Such regimes make the ideal actuating the jihadists appear righteous, potent, practical.

With that understanding, we can define a policy response that directs the full range of our diplomatic and military resources toward eliminating these regimes. Without that understanding? Take a look at the confused mess that has been our Mideast policy for upwards of two decades.

Prior to September 11, American policy was prone to a fragmented, myopic outlook. The 9/11 attacks came as a surprise, but they should not have. Islamists had tried to bring down the Twin Towers before, in 1993, using a truck bomb. Nor was that the only jihadist attack prior to 9/11; in my book Winning the Unwinnable War, I describe how the road to 9/11 was punctuated by an escalating sequence of violent attacks. Our policymakers and leaders viewed the threat as a series of crises, to be dealt with in the moment, without wider, ideological context. There were many dots, and we recognized each as a problem, but we failed to connect those many dots to see the bigger picture: the common ideas animating the Islamist movement.

Earlier, I pointed out how George W. Bush continually insisted that jihadists were motivated by something other than religious ideas. Bush’s perspective denied the common denominator uniting the Islamist movement. This was a factor in his evasion of the fundamental centrality of Iran and Saudi Arabia to the movement. Despite some of Bush’s rhetoric about going after those who harbor and support the “terrorists,” recall that Iran and Saudi Arabia were not merely omitted from the “Global War on Terrorism”; Saudi Arabia was affirmed a loyal ally, and, eventually, Bush sought to engage Iran in diplomatic negotiations. After scattering the jihadists in Afghanistan, the focal point of Bush’s response became Iraq — a regime that had little to do with the Islamist cause.37

The Obama administration, vowing to avoid Bush’s failures, reverted to a kind of hyper narrow conception of the threat (our enemy is Al Qaeda! no, it’s ISIS!). This conception was drained of ideological substance; a person becomes a “violent extremist,” we were told, mainly because of political grievances and economic privation.38 By playing down the role of ideas, by viewing the problem as consisting of many disparate groups, factions, regimes, rather than a movement united by an ideological outlook, Obama’s policy saw no contradiction in seeking to combat “terrorists” while also engaging leading regimes within the movement, chiefly Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The Trump administration has no coherent view of the problem. Trump has at times used the term “Radical Islamic terrorism,” but he has also implied that the problem is in some sense all Muslims (for example, recall the openness to creating a Muslim registry). Furthermore, he’s put great emphasis on the fact that certain attackers were “outsiders” — that they did not share his (or, in his view, “our”) Anglo-Saxon identity (notice Trump’s repeated emphasis on the fact that some attackers were immigrants or the American-born children of immigrants).39 This blurring of ideas and racial identity obscures the crucial fact that we’re dealing with an ideological movement, one that individuals must come to embrace by choice (rather than belong to through heredity). Among other things, this means that those who adopt and advance this ideology can — and must — be evaluated morally. But notice that, like his predecessors, Trump is not only willing to (re)negotiate with Iran, but is also friendly with Saudi Arabia.

From these sketches of how we’ve approached the problem, you see that by putting out of focus the nature and goals of the Islamists, we end up with inconsistent, short-term, immoral, and, in the end, ineffectual policy. And it is our persistent failure to confront Islamic totalitarianism that helps explain the durable appeal of this cause. That’s reflected not only in the masses who flocked to live under the Islamic State, but also in the ability of that group and of Al Qaeda to actuate independent, so-called lone-wolf jihadists to carry out attacks on their own initiative. Central to that phenomenon is the appeal of furthering a cause that the jihadists continue to see as viable.

For many years now, our approach to the problem has been deeply flawed. We had no clear idea of the nature of the problem, and we persuaded ourselves of explanations that were worse than superficial, fixating on non-essential features.

But it’s well within our capability to end this menace. Any sensible response to the jihadist threat requires that we confront not only the salient factions but also, and especially, the regimes at its forefront.

To formulate a workable plan for achieving that goal, we must start by grasping clearly the nature of our enemy.

After the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy released its entry on capitalism, critics online slammed it for apparent Marxist bias. However, if there is a scandal here, it is not merely that one entry is lopsided; it is that contemporary academic philosophers are willfully blind to the real-world phenomenon of capitalism, seeing it only through the unquestioned lens of the altruistic morality.

In this episode of the Ayn Rand Institute podcast, Robertas Bakula, Ben Bayer, and Onkar Ghate discuss the entry’s Marxist leaning, Ayn Rand’s absence from the entry, and more broadly the failure of academic philosophy to understand the subject. They argue that Ayn Rand’s view of capitalism should have played a more prominent role in the entry, and how Rand succeeded in defining “capitalism” while the entry does not bother trying. They conclude that the entry should give more serious attention not only to Rand, but also Locke, Smith, and economic scholarship more broadly.

Topics include:

• The Stanford Encyclopedia’s cultural impact

• Marxist dominance in academic philosophy

• Academic philosophy’s economic ignorance

• The failure to define capitalism

• Ayn Rand vs. intellectuals

• Ayn Rand’s definition of capitalism

• How to reform the SEP entry

Resources:

• Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

• Ayn Rand, “What Is Capitalism?” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

• Ayn Rand, “ For the New Intellectual” in For the New Intellectual

• The Ayn Rand Lexicon entry on “Capitalism”

This episode was recorded on August 24, 2026.

Image credit: Getty AI via Getty Images

Marc Andreessen, a legendary venture capitalist, helped shape some of the defining companies of the last two decades — Airbnb, Coinbase, Facebook, Skype — and has assumed the role of thought-leader. When Andreessen speaks about what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur, people listen closely and emulate.

So, naturally, his comments on David Senra’s podcast trashing “introspection” blew up online, with Elon Musk and many others applauding. Andreessen sees “introspection” as a problem, a genuine blocker to success, because it leads us to “feel guilty” and “dwell on the past,” stagnating unproductively in fear and doubt.

For accomplished entrepreneurs like Andreesen and Musk, it seems, constant action is an imperative and “introspection” just slows them down. But do we really have to choose between stagnation induced by introspection and a life of achievement without self-knowledge?

Those who think we face this choice misunderstand introspection. In fact, it is crucial for an action-oriented and productive life to understand oneself deeply.

Introspection is the “examination of one’s own thoughts and emotions.”1 It means identifying what one knows or doesn’t, what evidence one has, what assumptions one is making, etc. It also means identifying one’s emotions and their causes, allowing one to evaluate one’s motives for action. It’s a demanding task that can easily err and must be consistently practiced. Thus, it’s a much broader and more important phenomenon than Andreessen suggests.

Andreesen makes two serious errors in characterizing introspection.

First, the idea that introspection means “dwelling on the past” falsely equates introspection with rumination, i.e., obsessing over distressing thoughts. Rumination is problematic: for instance, one might obsessively dwell on having turned down a promising job at a startup because of fear of failure. In such a case, one might repeatedly think to oneself, “I wish I had chosen differently” or “I gave into failure at that moment.” But such rumination is unhealthy introspection, since it involves dwelling on one’s mistake without a clear purpose. To properly address this mistake, healthy, purposeful introspection is needed, that is, asking if and why one acted from fear, to what extent one’s fear was justified, given what one knew at the time, and so on, in order to improve one’s choices and character going forward.

Second, introspection doesn’t mean “feeling guilty” and not doing anything about it. Some introspection generates guilt one should feel, as in the above example, if one irrationally gave into fear. Here, accepting responsibility for giving into fear helps correct the mistake that generated earned guilt, allowing one to move forward in a productive career — perhaps by seeking ambitious opportunities in the future despite feeling some trepidation at doing so. In such cases, this introspective work is not done at once but requires an ongoing process of identification and revision. If one defaults on that work, one will likely continue to act from fear and miss great opportunities.

However, guilt can be “unearned,” if it results from doing no wrong. For instance, suppose that one feels guilt for pursuing a career as an engineer when one’s parents expected one to pursue medicine. In this case, it’s crucial to examine and revise the premises that generate the unearned guilt. For example, one might identify the false premise that “one should meet one’s parents’ expectations, no matter what,” or identify that one has always had an irrational fear of disappointing one’s parents. Correcting the false premise and overcoming the fear clears the way to take proper pride in one’s career, which is crucial to sustaining it. The introspective work involved here is also crucial for a healthy relationship to one’s parents, one not dictated by fear or guilt. Such work can take years to execute correctly — and many default on this task.

By characterizing introspection as obsessively dwelling on feelings of guilt, there is a danger that what Andreesen wants is to exempt entrepreneurs from judging the morality of their own actions. But no one is exempt from this responsibility. Elon Musk should think about the truth and effect of some of what he posts online. Andreesen should think about his role in the DOJ’s persecution of Microsoft in the 2000s. To do so, and to change course and make amends when necessary, is not to pointlessly dwell on the past.

And when one looks at the careers of great entrepreneurs, one characteristic that stands out is their willingness to constantly question themselves and their ideas, at least in business.

Successful entrepreneurs need to know their purpose. For example, consider Jeff Bezos’s “regret-minimization framework,” in which he projects himself at 80 and reflects on what he would like to have done with his life.2 Bezos employed this framework early on, when he needed to identify whether working at an established hedge fund in New York was more meaningful to him than pursuing a new vision as an entrepreneur. Was his dream of entrepreneurship just a fantasy or something he could really carry out? Did he have the right temperament to deal with the massive uncertainty in entrepreneurship? Could he really be happy staying in the hedge fund world? Answering these questions required identifying his motivations, what he knew, considering what he cared most deeply about, and projecting what kind of person he wanted to become. Ultimately, this introspective work led him to refocus his life to transforming the online customer shopping experience, and channel all his efforts to that one goal.

Billionaire investor Ray Dalio practices what he calls “pain + reflection.” When painful mistakes happen, Dalio uses that pain as an opportunity for active reflection, to understand what happened and how to learn from it.3 For instance, Dalio reflected deeply when he nearly ruined himself in the early 1980s, operating on the flawed assumption that Mexican banks would default on U.S. loans. Instead of simply dwelling in shame or self-doubt, he worked to identify his flawed assumptions and better identify the state of his own knowledge. He realized that although he was right that too much money had been lent to Mexican banks, he was not in a position to predict that the outcome would be the banks defaulting on those loans. Thus, he changed his approach, carefully self-monitoring what he was actually certain of and what he wasn’t — an approach that’s impossible without introspection. His career was forever changed: He credits his masterful awareness of uncertainty in markets over time for much of his success as an investor.4

Few would consider Sam Walton (discussed in the aforementioned podcast) to be an exemplar of introspection. But if introspection is an ongoing and active self-awareness of one’s thoughts and motivations, Walton did it intensively in developing Walmart’s philosophy. He spent years studying what allowed other discount-style supermarkets to succeed or fail, and concluded that a company can lower markup while earning more with increasing volume.5 To reach this conclusion, Walton had to constantly consider whether his assumptions were warranted or not, by asking questions such as: Do I really know whether investing in distribution systems is unimportant? Do I have evidence that stores can only succeed in big cities? Am I sure that high margins are necessary for high profits? None of the answers are obvious or easy to apply. But without this introspective questioning, merely observing market conditions or taking on conventional assumptions would not have led to Walton’s distinctive approach.

There is no escape from the need to introspect. Without introspection, one consigns oneself to a life of ignorance, leaving one’s inner self a mystery. Imagine a Jeff Bezos who never asked himself what he truly wanted, a Ray Dalio who never asked himself what premise led him to his crucial error, or a Sam Walton who never questioned his (or others’) assumptions. Identifying your own knowledge and purposes, analyzing your emotions, and integrating them appropriately with action is crucial not just in business but across life. It’s through introspection that one learns from mistakes, focuses on achieving one’s deepest purposes, and builds character with integrity.

September 11, 2001 — and America’s response to it — shaped the 21st century. Confidence in America’s ability to win wars cracked, trust in leadership and experts went down, and, in response, populism, nihilism, and conspiracism raised their ugly heads. From day one, the Ayn Rand Institute’s experts grasped the meaning of the attacks and the significance of a proper response. They called for war with Iran and opposed Bush’s altruistic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their advice was not followed, but their predictions held.

In this special livestream marking the 25th anniversary of 9/11, Yaron Brook, Elan Journo, and Onkar Ghate — the Institute’s three leading experts on the attacks — trace what went wrong in its lead-up and aftermath, and how Ayn Rand’s philosophy let them foresee what most people still struggle to understand.

Among the topics covered are:

• The events and evasions that led up to 9/11.

• How shocking 9/11 was, given the atmosphere in the 1990s.

• The corrupt failure of intellectuals to warn of and explain 9/11.

• How both the government and academia whitewashed religion and Islam.

• Why and how ARI commented on 9/11 and its aftermath.

• How Objectivism helped ARI’s experts to predict America’s failures.

• The disgraceful Western response to the Danish cartoons of Muhammad.

• The rise of populism and nihilism as a result of 9/11.

Resources recommended in the episode:

• Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo, Failing to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism: What Went Wrong After 9/11.

Livestream recorded on September 2, 2026.

Since September 11, 2001, the Ayn Rand Institute has commented extensively (via articles, books, interviews, lectures, and podcasts) on why the 9/11 attacks happened, how America should have responded, and why — 25 years and three wars later — the United States still fails to confront Islamic totalitarianism.

ARI’s analysis of 9/11 and its aftermath has proven tragically accurate. To mark 25 years since the attacks, we are pleased to announce the publication of the third, expanded edition of Failing to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism, which includes short essays on October 7 and the war in Iran, and we invite you to join us for two special events.

• On September 2, 2026, we will host a live broadcast of the Ayn Rand Institute podcast on the meaning and impact of 9/11 with Yaron Brook, Elan Journo, and Onkar Ghate, the Institute’s three leading experts on these issues.

• On September 11, 2026, we will livestream lectures on 9/11 by Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo from our U.S. student conference in Austin.

To watch these livestreams — and to receive a free digital copy of the new third edition of Failing to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism — please register here.

Below you’ll find the preface to the book’s new edition.

Preface to the Third Edition of Failing to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism: What Went Wrong After 9/11

On August 15, 2021, the Taliban walked into Kabul. While American military planes evacuated from Hamid Karzai International Airport, frantic Afghans ran along the tarmac, clinging desperately to the fuselage and landing gear; as one of the aircraft left the ground, some fell to their deaths. After twenty years of war, trillions of dollars, and thousands of lives, America had let the jihadists return to power, triumphant.

The self-delusion in Washington reached a new nadir. The world’s superpower had failed to defeat a vastly weaker enemy, but President Joe Biden described the humiliating American withdrawal as an “extraordinary success.” Apologists told us that the Taliban, which had hosted the 9/11 planners, had “moderated,” even as they re-imposed religious control and the subjugation of women.

The Afghanistan retreat, echoing the Fall of Saigon in 1975, was another ignominious effect of the fundamental problem subverting American foreign policy. This book exposes that problem: the influence of irrational philosophic ideas, which led to the persistent evasion of the enemy’s nature and the lack of moral clarity America needs to act assertively in its self-defense.

The intellectual-moral weakness of America, and of other free societies, encourages the Islamist movement. At its peak, the Islamic State established a “caliphate,” in parts of Syria and Iraq, that attracted thousands of zealous recruits from North America and Europe. From its stronghold, the Islamic State directly and indirectly inspired attacks in Paris, Orlando, and Manchester. Even after its collapse, jihadists attempted to carry out murderous attacks: the Salman Rushdie stabbing in Chautauqua, New York (2022), the plot targeting Taylor Swift concerts in Vienna, Austria (2024), and the deadly shooting spree at Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia (2025).

But the most significant jihadist attack since this book’s last edition was the air, sea, and land assault from the Hamas-governed Gaza Strip into southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Palestinians loyal to Hamas massacred some 1,200 people in a single day and seized 251 more as hostages. The killers gleefully filmed themselves committing atrocities.

The reaction to October 7 in the United States, Canada, and Europe was itself revealing. During a livestream podcast on October 7, one of us (Elan) predicted that the world’s immediate sympathy would give way to accusations of Israeli war crimes, once the conflict stalemated or otherwise resolved. That prediction was partly wrong; the sympathy lasted not weeks but mere hours.

By the next morning, a statement co-signed by some thirty student groups at Harvard University had gone viral. These students held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Mass rallies soon clogged the streets of major cities and world capitals. Student protests brought universities to a standstill. Demonstrators shut down roads and bridges.

Hamas called its invasion the al Aqsa Flood. Another morally obscene deluge poured into the streets of major cities and the campuses of elite universities in the West, where activists blamed the Israeli victims and whitewashed their Palestinian murderers.

The October 7 backlash affirmed the wider theme of this book: the fundamental role of philosophic ideas in shaping culture (and thus foreign policy). The widespread unwillingness to face Hamas’s Islamist nature has to be understood in the context of two decades of intellectuals and politicians evading that religious ideology and enforcing a taboo on any discussion of it. This evasion was a signature policy of George W. Bush, who insisted that the 9/11 killers had “hijacked” Islam, that it was a religion of “peace.” A second, deeper contributing factor: the anti-freedom, anti-capitalist, anti-individualist ideas that universities have been inculcating for generations. (Here, one positive sign that we wrote about was the decision of prominent donors to withdraw their funding from universities in protest. See Part 7.)

The third major development since the last edition is enormously consequential, but also (at the time of writing) unresolved. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel went to war against the Islamic Republic of Iran.

For reasons identified in Dr. Leonard Peikoff’s essay “End States Who Sponsor Terrorism” and in our writings that follow, we regard an American war with Iran as a retaliatory act: a war of self-defense, decades overdue.

Predictably, however, this war has been fought without a clear objective. The proclaimed goals kept changing. A partial list:

• eliminate “imminent threats” from Iran and prevent it from gaining nuclear weapons (February 28, 2026);

• “destroy the missile threat, destroy the navy, no nukes” (Hegseth; March 2, 2026);

• “unconditional surrender” (Trump; March 6, 2026) to be determined not by the facts, but Trump’s say so;

• victory had occurred already in Trump’s view (March 7, 2026), so “We don’t need people [i.e., NATO allies] that join Wars after we’ve already won”;

• degrade Iran’s missile and nuclear capability, which Trump insisted after a 2025 bombing had been “obliterated”; on March 14, 2026, Trump stated that “We have already destroyed 100% of Iran’s military capability” even as the regime continued fighting back;

• “regime change” was a goal that Trump took credit for, with the killing of key Iranian leaders, but also claimed wasn’t the goal (April 21, 2026);

• a diplomatic bargain to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon (2025; throughout Feb–May 2026) for which Trump was willing to negotiate with the Iranians, granting the regime what the Obama deal had likewise conceded: an undeserved moral legitimacy.

The administration failed to provide a coherent justification for the war and refused to seek congressional approval for it, violating the rule of law. As the president told one audience on March 25, 2026, “I won’t use the word ‘war’ because they say, if you use the word ‘war,’ that’s maybe not a good thing to do,” adding: “They don’t like the word ‘war,’ because you’re supposed to get approval, so I’ll use the word ‘military operation,’ which is really what it is.” Bothered by unfavorable media coverage of the war, Trump’s FCC chairman threatened to revoke the licenses of TV networks, violating the First Amendment.

Early on, Trump told the New York Times, “What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario” for Iran. This was a reference to the forcible U.S. removal of Nicholas Maduro from power, leaving his cowed subordinates to govern under American oversight. Whereas Venezuela is run by thugs and gangsters, Iran is an ideologically driven regime. Failing to recognize that reality has been a central flaw in the Iran war.

The war’s conclusion remains to be seen. Clearly, the elimination of key leaders and the significant degradation of Iranian military capabilities are worthy accomplishments. By the April ceasefire, however, the regime had (predictably) seized the Straits of Hormuz to strangle the flow of cargo ships carrying oil. One major risk is that the war ends in a stalemate, which given our military superiority, would mean an American defeat. For the Iranian regime, surviving this war is a kind of victory.

Moreover, permitting Iran to exact tolls on ships in the Straits of Hormuz means affording it a new revenue source to fund its militant agenda. And a diplomatic agreement fixated on nuclear weapons capability — which appears to be an aim of the Trump administration — would be a regression to the Obama-era evasion of the regime’s Islamist nature, its sponsorship of jihadists, and its manifold other forms of aggression.

Unless Iran’s ideological goal is shown to be a lost cause, unless it and other Islamists are demoralized, unless they lose all hope of realizing their nihilistic agenda, we can expect the Iranian regime (and other jihadists) to seek to resume their holy war. That was one lesson of Israel’s disastrous “mowing the grass” policy in Gaza. A degraded but undefeated Hamas rebuilt and resumed the fight on October 7.

We published the first edition of this book in 2016, and the second, in 2021 during the Afghanistan withdrawal. Now, a quarter-century on from the 9/11 attacks, we issue a third. Our philosophic analysis has been proven correct, and we believe it needs to be heard.

Here briefly is the argument: The fundamental obstacle to defeating Islamic totalitarianism is not a deficit of military capability. The problem is philosophic. The prevailing moral idea of self-sacrifice has negated American self-confidence, and it has crippled the ability of our leaders and intellectuals to conceptualize the enemy and to define and pursue our self-interest. Irrational philosophic ideas have subverted the world’s greatest military force.

But we remain convinced that ending the Islamist menace is achievable — if the United States adopts, understands, and consistently acts on rational moral ideals.

***

Added to this edition are seven short essays on: the Afghanistan retreat; the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests in Iran; the October 7 attacks and their aftermath; and the Iran war’s early phase. Also added as an afterword is an interview about ARI’s response to 9/11, why it was so important for the Institute to engage on this issue, and how our distinctive analysis is informed by the philosophy of Objectivism. Removed from this edition are lists of resources that can be found online.

To keep up with ARI’s ongoing intellectual work — podcasts, essays, books, and more — subscribe to email updates from our journal, New Ideal.

***

Finally, we wish to thank ARI’s donors for their support of the philosophic ideals that we hold in common, and for making possible our work on this crucial issue. We are grateful for their dedication to the Institute’s mission of advancing Objectivism. Special thanks to Jay Snider, for generous funding through his family foundations, and to Larry Berkelhammer, for his encouragement and generous support of our research and writing.

Elan Journo
Onkar Ghate
June 2, 2026