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All We Need Is Self-Confidence

Home invasion !

... AUGH !!!  My happy home is being invaded !!!

Never fear, Froggy.  Yaron Brook, head of the  “Ayn Rand Institute,”  knows what to do.

Tell the intruder how self-confident you are. Then the man will behave himself. No murder and mayhem for him, he will be a model guest. Well, not a guest exactly, a co-owner, you and he smiling arm-in-arm.  You two’s  happy home.

At least that’s what Mr. Brook wants you to believe, metaphorically speaking, about migrants. He refuses to acknowledge that he and his ilk promote the Third World colonization of America, the UK and Europe – and the natives get the short end of the stick.

When a Tunisian migrant to France willfully steered a 19 ton cargo truck into a crowd of natives celebrating Bastille Day and kept on driving for several blocks – crushing 85 people to death, maiming and crippling hundreds more – Mr. Brook made brief verbal noises about how horrible it all was, then spoke of the ease with which the perpetrator had been “radicalized” – phraseology suggesting the perpetrator himself was not responsible. Then in an extended oration Mr. Brook blamed the victims for the massacre.

Only extended quotation can do his crapulous utterance justice. The following is Mr. Brook word for word on his BlogTalkRadio show of 16 July 2016, two days after the above Nice (pronounced “neese”) attack. [1]  He begins by asking “why it’s so easy to radicalize these people,” that is, Muslims.

“I know that many of you out there think, well if you’re a Muslim it’s just a matter of flipping a switch because all of Islam, as somebody said on the chat, is a cult, it’s relatively easy to ... turn a cultist into a murderer. And all Muslims are like this and it’s just a matter of time. I disagree with this.”

“... the primary reason that it has become so easy to radicalize these Muslims in the West, is a failure of the West, it’s our failure. It’s a failure, particularly in places like France, where ... they [the French] have nothing to offer. They have no values. They have no purpose that they can grant these immigrants who come in.

“Most of these immigrants, most of the Muslim immigrants, are coming in to work. They’re coming in to improve their quality of life and their standard of living. And they’re open to being assimilated, to being influenced, to being changed. And yet Europeans don’t want [them] to assimilate. Multiculturalism is very very powerful, both in Europe and in the United States, and what we tell them when they come is not [to] assimilate, ... [that] your [that is, their] culture is just as good as our culture and you [they] shouldn’t change ... . ... So here they are in the West, they’re gonna be poor, and most of these young men accept the fact that they’re poor. They’re not expected to assimilate. They’re expected to live in neighborhoods with other Muslims, they’re expected to maintain their culture, and they have nothing and they’re offered nothing culturally.”
These sensitive souls starving for values look out upon French culture and what do they see?
“... it just seems [to them] like hedonism out there or it seems like complete moral subjectivism out there and nobody judges, there are no standards, there’s — nothing, for them. And this emptiness, this lack of values, this lack of a civilization, this indeed rejection of civilization by the West, rejection of their [the West’s] superiority, rejection of their values and reason and individualism, leaves a massive opportunity for religion to step in, in this case Islam to step in, and provide them [the Muslims] with those values, to provide them with a purpose, to provide them with something to live for, which they have not had, which the West does not provide them.”
If only it had been otherwise:
“And if the West stood for something, if it really stood for the values of reason, individualism, if it really stood for success and happiness and prosperity and everything like that, if it was really willing to fight for those, then these people would not be radicalized, these people would be converted, to Western values.”
So Western civilization is superior and empty, superior and valueless, superior and uncivilized, and if it weren’t empty and valueless and — anyway, the Nice attack was our fault.

Mr. Brook goes on to say that the West’s response to terrorism has been pathetically weak (instead of, as we shall see, lecturing Muslim immigrants about Objectivism). He says France’s response to the Nice attack was to increase welfare spending and pretend to fight ISIS. Because of that weakness Muslims  have no choice but to turn violent.

“As a consequence of that [response] these guys [Muslims] are being radicalized, and there really is, they have, no alternative.  They can just live a life with nothing, [a life] that is meaningless;  but everybody wants to have meaning, and the radicals are the only ones who are providing any meaning.  The West provides  nothing.”
Emphasis his.  The barbarian who rented the truck didn’t have a chance; Westerners ought to be ashamed of themselves.

The next sentence Mr. Brook utters does not mean what it might appear to mean. As is abundantly clear by now, keeping Mohammedans out of your country is not his idea of self-defense. In his philosophy you have  no country (see the other ARIwatch articles in this series).

“Until we’re willing to defend ourselves, until we’re willing to stand up for what values we have, for what our values represent, for what our lives represent, this is gonna get worse and worse and worse.”

Mr. Brook then uses the dead and crippled of Nice to promote his own agenda, the Israeli agenda: puff ISIS (the new Al Qaeda, remember it?) as a threat to the West. [2]  Note that in the following “them” has no referent.

“The only way to do that [that is, defend ourselves] is to stand up to them by first crushing ISIS, by eliminating ISIS as a threat in the Middle East.”
He continues pushing the  pity-poor-Mohammed  line:
“And then by advocating for positive values, advocating for reason and rationality above all, advocating for a purpose – your [that is, a Muslim’s] own individual happiness is a purpose – not a purpose that’s related to your religion, not a purpose that’s related to your state, but your own life, that should be the purpose. Until we start converting Muslims and everybody else to the ideas of individualism based on reason, we’re gonna lose more and more of these young men, particularly the young women as well, to the radicals, to radicalization, and ultimately, potentially, to murder and to terrorism.”

After this exhibition of self-sacrificial ore salted with Objectivist jargon one gets the impression that the men, women and children of Nice – those uncivilized, empty and mean people – got what they deserved.  The sensitive Tunisian in whom worked the wheels of poetic justice just couldn’t stand their empty French culture any longer.

Why he migrated to France in the first place, and in the second place stayed there — are questions Mr. Brook never considers.

Can you imagine Ayn Rand saying anything remotely like what Mr. Brook has just said?  What she did say is


“Pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent.”
    — Ayn Rand

Never was an organization more Orwellianly named than the “Ayn Rand” Institute. [3]

-oOo-

Not all Muslims may be violent at heart but per capita far more of them are than whites. They possess other negative attributes as well, as a higher percentage or universally. Yaron Brook has little conception of statistics, history, anthropology, or psychology. Europe ought to exclude all Muslims – indeed all would-be migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

It cannot be pointed out often enough:  There is no right to immigrate. The French can exclude a foreigner for any reason or no reason. Their country is their country, something Mr. Brook refuses to understand – with France or any other country.  I mean, except Israel.  The Jews are different.

-oOo-

Mr. Brook promotes Western open borders in many online and media venues, perforce most succinctly on Twitter;  for example this, dated 21 July 2016:

“Walls are a reflection of lack of confidence.  A confident America does not fear immigrants.”
Self-confidence, that’s the ticket !  Then you can be surrounded by Third Worlders  ten to your one  with impunity.

In “Does Immigration Actually Threaten American Culture?” (Forbes magazine, 12 November 2012) sometime ARI guest writer Amit Ghate breathlessly writes (as always when we quote, emphasis his):

“Let’s not succumb to the specious idea of demographic determinism to radically limit immigration. Instead let’s demonstrate the moral confidence, and intellectual rigor, to bid welcome to all; by offering them a proud and rational exposition of our nation’s principles and ideals. We, they – and our culture at large – will be immeasurably better off as a result.”
Enriched by Somalis, Nigerians, Pakistanis, Eurasians like Amit Ghate and other vibrant exotics.

Mr. Brook speaking on Amy Peikoff's BlogTalkRadio show, 10 February 2017:

“The reason that Muslims and immigrants have such a high potential impact on our culture is because we're so rotten from within. So my whole focus is let’s fix the rot from within and in my view immigrants can help us fix the rot from within if we take the right perspective. So if we take the perspective of when an immigrant comes in we tell them how wonderful this country is and how they should adopt its values and do that.”
Again, any problem with immigrants is our fault.  We are rotten. But if we tell them we are wonderful everything will be all right.

Yaron Brook titled his BlogTalkRadio show of 17 October 2015 “The Immigration Debate.” Onkar Ghate was his co-host. [4]  At one point Onkar addresses Mr. Brook:

“We’re both I think on the view that borders should be open and we should be letting in any peaceful person who wants to work or wants to live here.”
Onkar then says that restricting immigration will hasten the decline of Western civilization. Open immigration is not part of its decline.

Later Mr. Brook employs a technique he uses frequently. He posits a hypothetical libertarian society and draws a conclusion about it, but gives the impression, without quite saying it, that his conclusion also applies to the society we live in today. This fallacy is on top of the fact that his conclusion about a libertarian society is itself false.

“Particularly in a ... free society – I think this is also true in a mixed economy [i.e. America today] but certainly in a free society – the idea that ... a really consistent, Objectivist political system ... would somehow be threatened by people coming in ... that we wouldn’t have the self-esteem, or the ability to convince and persuade, that the immigrants ... would not be convincible within a generation or two, that we would somehow succumb to their ideas, that they wouldn’t succumb to our ideas, given that our ideas are so ... superior to theirs, it strikes me as taking such a position of weakness relative to the rest of the world.

“I would take ten immigrants to every citizen in a completely free society and feel completely confident that we would not lose freedom as a consequence of their coming into the country. Quite the contrary, we would be converting them, or at least their children, to the cause of liberty.”
Somehow  threatened ?  Imagine you live in an ideal society.  One day you realize you are surrounded,  ten-to-one  panoramically surrounded,  by Asians, Africans, Amerindians etc – the prospect ahead of us with our current “mixed economy” society,  ten-to-one  on the way to  a hundred-to-one.  According to Mr. Brook, if we have the self-esteem engendered by a free-society, in just one or two generations – 25 or 50 years – those Asians, Africans etc will be like you and I, all voting for liberty,  except they look like Asians and Africans.  Happy now?



1  Episode 55 titled “Live from FreedomFest Ask Me Anything.”  Mr. Brook’s false starts, pointless repetitions while considering what to say next, extraneous Ands beginning a sentence, uhs and you knows have been silently omitted.

2  Considering Israel’s on again off again alliance with ISIS, and the U.S. government’s reaction to Russia’s bombing, ISIS is likely a creation of U.S.-Israeli “intelligence,” a new Hitler designed to resuscitate the phony War on Terrorism since Al Qaeda was getting old.

3  The quote is from “Bootleg Romanticism”  The Romantic Manifesto (1969).

Three months after the Nice attack there was another massacre in Berlin. A Tunisian illegal migrant – it’s doubtful that listening to Mr. Brook’s radio show had made him conscious of his self-righteous victimhood but not because Mr. Brook didn’t try – hijacked a truck, killing the driver, then drove the truck into a crowded Christmas market (it was 19 December 2016), leaving a total of 12 people dead and about 50 crushed before the truck’s automatic breaking system brought the mayhem to a stop.

4  ARI may be a bit nepotistic. Onkar and wife Debi together drew over $300,000 per year from Payroll, until Debi left ARI. I don’t know Amit’s compensation. Two sons of Yaron Brook have held jobs there at various times; the yearly compensation averaged over fiscal years ending September 30, 2013; and 2014 for one of them (there was only one during those two years) was $18,645 per year. Mr. Brook’s average over the same years was $359,288 per year (see his entry in  Who’s Who  on this website).

The Israel worshiping aspect of ARI could be viewed as a form of nepotism, ethnic nepotism. On their Form 990 for fiscal year ending September 30, 2013 ARI lists under “Grants and Other Assistance to Organizations or Entities Outside the United States” a grant of $100,000 by wire transfer to the “Middle East” region for “Outreach.” (ARI established the Ayn Rand Center Israel in October 2012, which might account for this.) The following year, 2014, the amount to the same region for the same purpose was $74,138. In 2015 it was $74,443 except the region was “M East / N Africa.” (Form 990 instructions restrict the region to a limit number of choices which doesn’t include Israel.)