Carl Barney had been the Ayn Rand Institute’s largest donor by far when in 2018 he suddenly stopped donating. The following year, at the behest of Yaron Brook, he was voted off the board of directors and he departed ARI along with his cash. Since then he has focused on his Prometheus Foundation.

On 1 May 2020 Barney announced:

The announcement, titled “Dr. Leonard Peikoff’s Courses and Lectures,” was headed by a photograph of Peikoff and Barney standing side by side, one arm of each around the shoulders of the other. [1]

Barney’s associate, Carl Biddle, made the same announcement the same day in a mass-emailing from The Objective Standard.  Biddle begins with a bit of autobiography:

You need a program to follow the fluid loyalties of organized Objectivism.  When in 2010 the fickle Leonard Peikoff forced John McCaskey out of ARI, [3]  Biddle defended McCaskey on his personal website, calling Peikoff’s behavior “nonobjective and unjust.” [4]  In 2014, soon after Barney started the Objectivist Venture Fund, which later became Prometheus Foundation, Biddle took down his personal website. He restored it in 2021, both actions perhaps indicating a back-and-forth shift in ARI-TOS relations.

Richard Salsman, who eventually became a contributing editor of TOS, has a long history with ARI. When he was a graduate student ARI loaned him money for his studies. Later ARI helped raise the money that made possible his current academic position at Duke University.  He was a frequent speaker at ARI events.  Then the weather changed. In a Facebook post of 29 April 2020 he called Onkar Ghate, ARI’s Chief Content Officer, a  “wholly unqualified charlatan ... venerated by the likes of YB [Yaron Brook], TS [Tara Smith], HB [Harry Binswanger] and a host of other sycophants ... .”  He described Ghate’s performance in a recent ARI webinar as  “dishonest and pathetic,” “wholly lacking in rational content,” “devoid of any coherent argument,” etc.

In another Facebook post, a reply to someone who had mentioned Yaron Brook’s podcast, Salsman wrote:  “The Yaron Brook Show? ... it’s garbage. Second-hand trash. Unoriginal. Borrowed. Filched. ... Worse, it’s uninformed. ... Pathetic.”  Brook has left “the life of principle and integrity” and consequently detests “those who retain those virtues.”  (The following should be singular instead of plural because Brook is the only one at ARI who has moved to Puerto Rico to avoid paying income taxes.)  “Sunshine patriots, they cravenly flee to and podcast from the decadence of places like Starnseville – aka Puerto Rico. Real heroes. To Hell with them ...”

Salsman may have gone too far in the eyes of his associates at The Objective Standard because soon afterwards his name disappeared that magazine’s masthead..  Then on May 6th Biddle mass-emailed an announcement titled “Richard Salsman is no longer with TOS,”  saying that Salsman’s behavior was “non-objective and unprofessional” and affirming his removal from the masthead.

Later the same day Salsman deleted the Facebook post of April 29th (the second had been deleted earlier, either by him or by the person to whom it was a reply). He then issued a back-handed apology which began:  “In two recent posts I harshly criticized a handful of people who I know to have misused ARI to besmirch solid Objectivists and Objectivist organizations whom they oppose and in consequence have risked devaluing Ayn Rand’s reputation.”  He says posting as he did was a mistake because  “FB isn’t the forum for that, since the matter requires lots of information, background, context, and judgment that most readers don’t have.”

The previous month Carl Barney had announced in his blog that Salsman would co-host a “Rand Camp” in May under the auspices of Prometheus Foundation. The event had to be canceled when the venue closed due to the coronavirus panic. Barney never commented publicly on Salsman’s conduct.

Much of what Salsman said about ARI is true, expressed in intemperate language, but look who’s talking. In some respects TOS is even worse than ARI and at the time of his outburst he had been a contributing editor of TOS for nine years. [5]  And speaking of sycophancy, how to explain Salsman defending Carl Barney’s Scientology career? [6]  Would that there were an insider critic to root for but Salsman does not deserve our applause.

As noted in our introduction, when Barney announced that he had permission to republish Peikoff’s courses and lectures he said,  “I do not intend to start another ARI or to compete with ARI. I don’t intend to establish a new organization of any kind.”  Yet only a few days later, on 22 May 2020, he announced the creation of a non-profit educational organization called Objective Standard Institute (OSI)  “related to but distinct from The Objective Standard (TOS).”  OSI’s mission statement reads like ARI’s, with the teaching of  “related ideas for living fully” added.  And indeed there is a self-help, Tony Robbins aspect to the organization, reminiscent of the Scientology claims of yesteryear. [7]  Some course titles:  “Your Supersystem for Flourishing,”  “Thinking for Thriving,”  “Entrepreneurial Living: How to Profit in Business and Life,”  “The Art of Finding and Creating Opportunity,”  etc.  The pricing is designed to obscure the cost, for example $297 instead of $300.  Then there are the LevelUp (no space) conferences featuring OSI members and guest speakers. Barney himself spoke at LevelUp 2024 in June. The title of his presentation was “How to Develop Your Happiness Plan.”  Biddle advertised another talk via a mass email with the subject “Level up your love life!” (the exclamation point is his).

Giving the lie that Barney had no intention of creating a competing organization is that OSI’s website was in a mature state of development the day it was announced. Furthermore, OSI had advertised for a Director of Technology at least two months before. And OSI’s first Form 990 begins 4 November 2019. [8]  Obviously OSI had been planned months before its announcement.  Even as Barney was saying he had no intention of starting another ARI he was helping those who were. [9] [10]

The Ayn Rand Centre UK (funded by Barney’s Prometheus Foundation) hosted a celebration of Leonard Peikoff’s career on 15 October 2020, his 87th birthday, livestreamed on YouTube. Besides Peikoff the following participated:  Carl Barney, Andrew Bernstein, Ellen Kenner, Kira Peikoff, and Lisa VanDamme.  Peikoff had no problem being toasted by Barney and listening to his fulsome praise.  Notable by their absence were Yaron Brook and any other people from ARI. [11]

Carl Barney, Andrew Bernstein, and Peikoff’s daughter made short speeches. Peikoff thanked his daughter for her remarks then said:

In a blogpost of 26 May 2021 Barney complained that ARI cancelled his registration to that year’s OCON, which he had attended “for about the last 40 years (before it was even called OCON).”

The feud between Barney / Biddle and ARI (at first mainly Yaron Brook and Onkar Ghate, then Harry Binswanger and Peter Schwartz) is revealed in several of Barney’s other blog posts. One made quite a splash in Objectivist circles, “ARI Is Failing and Needs Our Help” (3 November 2020).  To those at the time who saw Barney as some kind of hero I wrote:

In a blog entry of 18 November 2020 Barney accuses ARI of not charging enough for their products:

On 17 February 2021 Barney dishes the dirt on Ghate:

All the squabbling suggested a shift of official Objectivism as promoted by Leonard Peikoff, from  ARI-Brook  to  OSI-Barney/Biddle,  but if there was a shift happening it soon got reversed.  The first indication that something had gone wrong came on 3 February 2021. Barney complained (via his blog) that ARI refused to give him copies of Peikoff’s courses and lectures as Peikoff, he says, told them to do. It’s hard to understand. Since ARI offers copies of Peikoff’s courses and lectures to the public (for a fee and in some cases for free), Barney could simply purchase them. Their value is in the content not the medium. Furthermore, why does Barney take this problem to his readers? Surely Peikoff has copies himself he could lend. In any case Peikoff owns the copyrights and ultimately controls ARI (see the McCaskey affair. [3 again] )  He can make them do whatever he wants, though at his advanced age he might want to avoid the strife that would entail.

In any case Barney resigned himself to defeat without a fight, writing,  “I cannot deliver Dr. Peikoff’s courses as I had originally planned.”  This suggests that in fact Peikoff changed his mind about giving Barney permission. Barney ends his complaint with a request to readers:  “perhaps you will speak up and try to persuade Yaron Brook to rethink his position.”  Are we being told the whole story?

What really tore it was ARI’s announcement on 17 January 2022,  titled  “Ayn Rand’s Property After Peikoff?”  It consisted of a letter from Peikoff to ARI dated 23 November 2021 which he requested be made public. He says that his will leaves all copyrights of Rand’s work to the Ayn Rand Institute.  He gives as his reason (emphasis his): [15]

On his radio talk show in the late 1990’s someone once asked Peikoff why Rand chose him as her legal heir. He modestly replied,  “I was the only one left.”  Rand’s fire-sale choice of a legal heir eventually resulted in the creation of the Ayn Rand Institute, something she had said she did not want. [16]  ARI may have begun harmlessly enough but after 2000, the year Peikoff chose Yaron Brook to lead the organization, it went downhill rapidly. Under Brook’s direction ARI substantially became – in its “policy and actions” of which Peikoff so approves – a cultural-leftist, anti-America institution, as documented at length on this website, from promoting open immigration and mail-in ballots to wars for Israel and Israel’s wars.  Now Peikoff has ensured that ARI’s intellectual subversion of Rand’s work, and the treating of her errors as gospel, will go on in perpetuity. [17]

As the two Obleftivist organizations  ARI  and  OSI  squabble over Rand’s intellectual legacy, a plague on both their houses.