....
Ooh boy now you've started it because I can utterly ruin the Objectivist "movement" for any neophyte with a list of links.
Go out and rent/
buy/find Jeff Walker's The Ayn Rand Cult, which came out in the late-'90s....it's not perfect (Walker is a Libertarian, so he isn't snarky enough) but it goes though all the massive defects with the Nathaniel Branden Institute; how Rand and Branden met and their decade-plus affair, plus how it ruined Rand's husband Frank O'Connor and infuriated Branden's wife Barbara to the point where she later wrote an exposé of the whole cruddy experience;
Ellen Plasil's 1985 book Therapist about her sexual abuse by Dr. Lonnie Leonard (Plasil and Leonard were Objectivists - if an Objectivist was seeing a shrink, they had to be "approved" by the NBI or the later Ayn Rand Institute); how Leonard Peikoff was nitpicked to death by Rand over his book
The Ominous Parallels which was supposed to come out in 1968-69 as a jab at what was going on during the Presidential election on the Democratic Party side, but was held back for
twelve years because Ayn was an unholy control freak and would have cut him off had he published on his original deadline.
I've linked to these guys before elsewhere, but
Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature tears apart Rand's philosophy on classical philosophical grounds while also being snarky about Founder's College, John Aglialoro's insane-but-"successful" attempt at bringing an
Atlas Shrugged film to movie theaters and DVD (Aglialoro being a gym equipment manufacturer (!) and neophyte film producer), and the Ayn Rand Institute's pointless-endless promotion of
Atlas Shrugged because that novel (which has been read by more than 18 million people!) supposedly creates Objectivists, not
The Fountainhead, and not
We The Living (definitely not her Zamyatin's
We-ripoff
Anthem.) Because Objectivism is going nowhere fast, the blog doesn't update that often, but read it as a book, going back into the criticism from years ago because those posts are still factually accurate. They also nail Austrian Economics because it's somewhat interrelated.
There was this insane cult Neo-Tech/Zonpower that combined elements of Scientology with Objectivism; it was founded by Frank R. Wallace, who wrote books on how to play Poker, then books on how to
cheat at Poker, then the "Neo-Tech" of Zonpower began. He was a boring chemist at DuPont before; maybe the beakergunk got to him. Here is
an ex-cult.org rundown of the I&O group behind Zonpower, here is the
long Neo-Tech FAQ; they were Usenet spammers in the 1990s and they earned the ire of the first cadre of Internet people. Wallace dropped dead jogging allegedly, and the cult moved to
weird door-to-door and mail scams.
(more to follow)
Still "Globally Banned" on Wikipedia for the high crime of journalism.