Heidi: Raniere Discovered Ayn Rand Through My Mother

In General
Heidi Hutchinson

By Heidi Hutchinson

There was a huge cult around Ayn Rand and the Rand Institute, established long before Keith Alan Raniere discovered Ayn Rand’s brilliance.  The Rand Institute hosts a “think tank”’ centered in liberal Los Angeles where conservative intellects gather to plot world salvation around her philosophy. Or their interpretation of her philosophy.

Rand’s background is interesting. Her family wealth was drained by the Nazis take on “eminent domain” — the policy that gives the government the right [and power] to appropriate and redistribute property for the “greater good.” KAR put paying taxes on that list.

The Nazis helped themselves to Rand’s family wealth in Germany before she fled, wrote her embittered fictions such as Atlas Shrugged and the Fountainhead and became a sort of spokesperson touting anti-socialist views on talk shows like Mike Douglas, Phil Donohue, and Johnny Carson .

Rand also has a lot of titillating things to say about a woman’s sexual sway over men, though she’s not terribly attractive. Things like, “Tell me a man’s philosophy and I’ll tell you his sexual pleasures” — to that effect. That was edgy talk from a lady for TV in those days.

And, no, I didn’t catch those shows live any more than I was ever in a hippie commune. And my sister, Gina Hutchinson, and Pam Cafritz never poisoned girls from Libya — as Crazy Days and Nights reported as a rumor – when they were being fed misinformation from who I suppose were NXIVM insiders.

I’ve researched Ayn Rand beyond the cliff notes. KAR discovered Rand through book report assignments meted out or taken on by one of his first students, my sister, Gina, whose family was mesmerized into letting his first acolyte drop out of school, just like Dani did, to receive his tutoring and imbibe his teachings.

Image result for ayn rand

Our mother was a Rand fan mostly because the US government absconded with a third of our land in Clifton Park, NY to build a highway under “eminent domain.” And she loved her afternoon talk shows and Rand’s sass – that she would never dare repeat herself.

But, in the end, she was a bleeding heart liberal, wanna-be feminist housewife, part-time social worker distributing blankets to the homeless on bitter cold Albany, NY nights before becoming a military museum curator.

Rand’s talk show interviews are far more interesting than her books. In some, Rand completely contradicts the most popular interpretation of her fictional works — end welfare and let the stupid, lazy poor folks fend for themselves while robbing them.

I don’t see anyone striving to end eminent domain or taxes on the poor and middle-class. Although the filthy rich conservatives and liberals in combined power did recently end inheritance tax without a fight, not a peep of opposition to that pesky tax relief for the ultra rich who want to keep all that loot in the family after all the tax hoops and loopholes they had to jump through to get it.

Justice for Gina, free Ally Mack, free the NX slaves from their mental prisons. Let India and Dani and Frank Report lead the way!

 

Ayn Rand
First published in 1957, Atlas Shrugged remained on The New York Times Bestseller List for 21 weeks, peaking at number four. Sales of Atlas Shrugged averaged 74,000 copies per year in the 1980s; 95,300 copies per year in the 1990s; 167,098 copies per year in the 2000s, and 303,523 copies in the 2010s. In 2011 Atlas Shrugged sold 415,000 copies.  Atlas Shrugged has made numerous “best of” lists. In 1991 the Book of the Month Club and Library of Congress asked readers to name the most influential book in their lives: Atlas Shrugged came in second only to the Bible.  The novel made the New York Public Library’s list of Best Books of the Century in 1996, and Radcliffe Publishing ranked it 92 out of the top 100 novels of the 20th century. In 1999, Atlas Shrugged was number 37 in the list of 100 Favorite Novels of Librarians. A Harris poll placed Atlas Shrugged on America’s Top 10 Favorite Book List in 2008, and The Modern Library ranked it the number one best novel published in the English language in 2009. The novel is listed as number six on Boston Library’s list of 100 Most Influential Books of the Century, and it ranks number five on the list of the 20 Most Inspirational Books ever written. Atlas Shrugged has been translated into 14 languages, including Chinese (2007).  All told it has sold around 7 million copies.

The book [and its author] has one other, lesser known and perhaps somewhat dubious distinction – his interpretation of it was the inspiration [or justification] of many of Keith Alan Raniere’s ideas on government, freedom, seeking one’s own happiness and operating a cult.

Keith Raniere strikes his ‘Thinker’ pose.

The Mayor of Escobedo, Nuevo Leon, Mexico, Clara Luz Flores Carrales, who is a Nxivm coach, poses for a photograph at Nxivm’s Monterrey Center. Note on the wall behind her are large photographs of Einstein, and Gandi and in between them is Ayn Rand.

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34 commentsOn Heidi: Raniere Discovered Ayn Rand Through My Mother

  • Ayn Rand was an interesting character.
    In some ways she was almost like a female Keith Raniere.

    Her writings are turgid and ponderous.
    Almost like “Chloroform in print” to borrow a phrase from Mark Twain.

    Her characters are rigid and two dimensional.

    Teenagers like her because she is a bit of an anti-establishment rebel, in spite of the fact that as an anti-Communist she supported the Vietnam War.
    Teenagers also like Ayn Rand because she mixes sex scenes in with the political polemics but Rand’s sex scenes are somewhat unbelievable.
    In college I had a girl friend who was into Ayn Rand.
    Like Ayn Rand this girl friend was Jewish.

    Ayn Rand was a bit of a nymphomaniac in her personal life.
    If she saw a man in her cult who was attractive she did not hesitate to try to seduce him, even if he was married.

    Ayn Rand has had an influence far in excess of the number of followers she possessed.
    One of her most prominent followers was the economist Alan Greenspan who was Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board for about twenty years.
    Greenspan was basically in charge of America’s economy for two decades.

    Ayn Rand’s personal hero in history was the mythical Greek character Prometheus who brought fire to mankind.
    To worship Prometheus Rand would smoke multiple packs of cigarettes per day.
    Ayn Rand ended up dying of lung cancer.
    At Ayn Rand’s funeral the only religious symbol was a giant gold dollar sign.

    “Cigarettes with Gold Dollar Sign
    Cigarettes stamped with a golden dollar symbol $ (instead of a brand name) turn up from time to time in the story. Rand used cigarettes as a metaphor for humanity’s conquest of fire. To Rand, cigarettes are a symbol of humanity’s first great technological achievement. In Atlas Shrugged,

    He produced a package of cigarettes and extended it to her […] It was a plain white package that bore, as a single imprint, the sign of the dollar […] There was no printing on the package, no trade name, no address, only the dollar sign stamped in gold. The cigarettes bore the same sign.

    Ayn Rand chose a cigarette to represent money and capitalism partially because of its connotation of fire, and the significance of that to themes of Atlas Shrugged.

    In the early 1970s Rand’s health began to give way. An enthusiastic smoker, she was diagnosed with lung cancer. For Rand, smoking was a Promethean symbol of creativity, inventiveness, profit-making, all she most admired: “When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind – and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression,” one of the goodies explains in Atlas Shrugged. [After her death] a six-foot-high floral dollar sign was erected by her open coffin in the funeral home.
    https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged/Things

  • Eminent Domain is a fair and just law.

    It gives the government the right to take possession of land for the common good.

    You were given fair market value for the land. It was not stolen from you. Your family profited from that sale.

    Why the fuck would anybody want to end the government’s right to Eminent Domain?

    If that happened, greedy land owners (who possess land that would benefit public transportation, farming, housing or other public needs) would able to deny the poorer citizens use of that valuable land.

    Private ownership of land has limits, and eminent domain is one of those limits.

    So fuck your views on Eminent Domain, Mistress Heidi. Nobody here is with you.

    I’m glad the government forced your family to sell their fucken land. You deserved it cuz the public needed that land for something other than enriching your own fucken family. The public comes first. Stop being greedy.

    Eminent domain is not evil. You are simply too greedy to see that others are less fortunate than you.

    It ain’t socialism. It’s just fairness. 🙂

  • Ayn Rand had nothing to do with the Nazis. She was a Russian Jew who was 12 years old at the time of the October Revolution. She came to the USA in 1926, long before the rise of Hitler.

    • Yes, you beat me to that post. Rand was critiquing Marxism, totalitarianism, Stalinism. She was Russian, through and through.

      • I’d say that Rand was one of those confused thinkers who dislike and critique a particular type of totalitarianism with which they have personal issues, but then seem to have an affinity for totalitarianism if it is more to their liking. The little cult she formed around herself was an authoritarian one that ended up operating in ways very reminiscent of Stalinism. I almost wonder if there is any direct connection between that group and Raniere’s, because both had rather similar means of ideological control, and though reform including the threat or use of shunning and banishment.

    • True. Her family’s business was lost to the Bolshevik revolution, which made her a fanatical anti-communist, which in turn made her the darling of 1950s American corporate media. Her so-called philosophy is bowdlerized Nietzsche, which means that Raniere’s watered-down version is doubly derivative.

      Eminent domain law does not allow the government to “abscond”, “redistribute”, or “appropriate” land; property owners are compensated, and there’s an appeals process if the owner thinks he has not received fair market value.

    • Thank you for correcting those facts. I couldn’t research it properly on the go transporting my son with constant REAL tech woes, car troubles beyond belief, believe it or not. I relied on faded memories. Thanks for filling in the blanks, FR. W/O bashing me over the head as to my “idiotic” ways. Long TRUE story.

      Please consider banning the J-dubs from FR if you want to keep hearing from me.

      My ex-husband and SLIM are seriously gaslighting me — trying to make me look incapable of anything but, perhaps, unpaid servitude and, again, some whom I’ve reached out to prefer to see it “his” way to their own advantage.

      Reminds me of something Gina said to me in India about Tai Situ. We were at “his” Monestary and an old woman was turning a giant prayer wheel for our tourist pleasure.

      Gina and I were stunned —most American tourists already are due to culture shock — but what a cruel sight to behold at a sacred place. This was a tiny, frail little old Asian lady and when we offered to help we were intervene on like we shouldn’t even be talking to her. It’s a silent, sacred thing. Later, Gina and I were talking about it. Gina said, “It’s probably Tai Situ’s own mother.” I remember it distinctly bc Gina was laughing and crying at the same time. Kinda going into a “disintegrated, Luciferian (whatever lingo KAR was using those days) state of mind. Most of the NX lingo I use may be from a different timeframe but it’s so similar, nonetheless, to what’s still being used.

      Gina (our whole family) was most definitely one of the early prototypes under the Albany, NY franchise.

      • Girl Scout Cookies

        Heidi, thanks for contributing here. Much appreciated and always look forward to your comments.

      • Don’t worry about it Heidi, we know what you meant. And you are correct that many people misinterpret Rand to suit their own agendas, to give themselves a free pass to behave as transactional savages in their own lives. How could Raniere lay any claim to Rand, when her primary thesis is that no one has the right to demand the labor or the fruits of that labor from any one else? Good grief, he did the exact opposite! He demanded that he be given the Bronfman’s wealth that he did not earn, he demanded the labor and lives of other people completely unearned. The one Rand quote all should know is, “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” Raniere is the least self-sufficient man I’ve ever seen. Hobos and hermits are more self-sufficient than he is. Even now, he needs others to defend him and still others to pay for that defense. One of my favorite TV appearances is Ayn talking about love with Mike Wallace: “And in love the currency is virtue. You love people not for what you do for them, or what they do for you. You love them for their values, their virtues, which they have achieved in their own character. If a man wants love he should correct his weaknesses, or his flaws, and he may deserve it. But he cannot expect the unearned, neither in love, nor in money, neither in matter, nor spirit.” In other words, love yourself before you can claim to love someone else, that is accepted as conventional wisdom for the emotionally healthy person today. Raniere demanded devotion calling it love absent any notion of virtue for himself or them. He felt himself entitled to ownership of women through enslavement, servitude, humiliation, degradation of those women, reducing them to sex toys and nothing else. He can lay no claim to any philosophy of any sort, he simply threw around names and terms he stole from others to appear to be well-read, when in fact he couldn’t bother to even read books himself, he ordered his slaves to do the reading and write book reports for him. Ayn Rand would have stubbed out her cigarette on his forehead and kept on walking, in her clunky but sensible shoes.

      • Heidi: "please consider banning the J dubbs if you want to continue hearing from me"

        Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha

        You crack me up

        a) I doubt anything would end your diatribes
        2) only heidi gets to bring up groups other than NXIVM

        oh that’s right, because heidi, gina, and now their mother are some of keith’s sources for his madness

        I am encouraged that you seem to have selective empathy, that’s at least something. You must have been Scientology public. You know, a dilettante.

        • And if I am wrong and you were not referring to me, then I deeply apologize. I am obviously triggered with poor impulse control. Either way, I now feel bad for my shitty response.

  • “Though she’s not terribly attractive.”
    In that pic she looks like a guy in drag.

  • The Ayn Rand Institute is completely different that the Rand Corporation.

    The Rand Corporation is a conservative think-tank, founded by Douglas Aircraft Co., precursor to McDonnell Douglas, to offer research and analysis to the U.S. Govt.

    The Ayn Rand Institute is a group developed after Ayn Rand’s death to promote her ideals.

    Get back on your meds Heidi. Stop being so gullible.

    • Pyriel,
      There are stories out that pedophiles use not just Tinder but also Snapchat and Instagram to trawl for victims.

      Is Snapchat pushing pedophilia?
      The Atlantic reported, a network of users on the platform has allegedly been using the hashtag #dropboxlinks to find and share explicit photos of underage children. Once these users connect, they are thought to trade the illicit material via links shared through Instagram direct messages.

      Even CNN reported recently that “Instagram is leading social media platform for child grooming.”
      https://metrovoicenews.com/is-snapchat-pushing-pedophilia/

      And Dropbox is the service that Allison Mack used to store nude photos and videos of the NXIVM DOS slaves.

    • Go to tinder looking for a virgin? Why not just go down to the local whore-house?

  • Ayn Rand on his mind a long time...

    Pretty sure his interest in Ayn Rand predates you and Gina. I was before your time with KAR and he was already onto Ayn Rand then. Tried to get me to read it. It was probably another way to look for avenues in with Gina. I’m appalled at all the testimony and how many parallels I see from my time with him.

    • Thanks for illuminating bit of background.

      When I was in grad school I had friends in a circle that seems to have been very much like Raniere’s in Clifton Park – interest in NLP and hypnosis, human potential groups and MLMs, even Illuminati conspiracies. Given what I knew of that very similar group, I couldn’t imagine that Raniere wouldn’t have had a fair bit of familiarity with Rand’s ideas, if he hadn’t read (or tried to read) any of her works himself.

      Raniere seems to have relied on followers’ “book reports” for a lot of his knowledge of others’ works, and it wouldn’t surprise that if he wanted to know more about Rand’s philosophy, that he would have assigned the reading to someone else. I had long puzzled over Scientology’s L. Ron Hubbard, another serial plagiarist – and one from whom Raniere in turn plagiarized – who seemed to have familiarity with a lot of subjects but a lack of depth in ones that I had enough background to judge, and I ultimately found references from contemporaries confirming that he relied on second-hand knowledge of almost everything, and lacked to patience to tackle and study others’ works himself.

    • Yes, me too. It’s eerie how the same pattern repeats itself over and over. I’ve come to believe NXIVM predates KAR in spirit and in actuality.

      I didn’t write that headline, btw. That’s Frank’s slant. And I don’t like to be typecast.

  • Ayn Rand was being taught in universities starting back in the 60’s.

  • Wow! So many inaccuracies in this article.
    And you want Pimp Mack to go free? Are you just trying to get a reaction from that comment?
    Heidi, I have the utmost sympathy for you, for the loss of your sistet, Gina, but you have seriously lost the plot this time.

    • Heidi Hutchinson

      g — what I’m losing is YOUR, truly vicious, vain plot. Not mine. And I’m sure not losing my son or his property or my life to your Aurealia or Hand-in-Hand program. Or any of “Lisa’s” programs. I’m sorry you wouldn’t listen before but shut me out, and Dylan out, instead.

      You and Jeff and whomever is going along with this NXIVM scheme all the way down to the juror pics had better wake up. Why DID you ask Frank for my email address? As if you don’t already have it? They NIX the rebel ex’s, Kym. If it weren’t for me staying alive, trust me, you’d be next. Or maybe you thought Jeff would go before you and you’d get SLIM’s loot to shoot my movie with?

      Here’s your only alibi Daddy Apple, and it’s the whole truth and nothing but:

      We attended that “Ramtha” retreat in 1992 remember. We foraged for mushrooms that were simmered for us into a delicious broth. We also went to the Hawaiin Film Festival and stayed in those Luxury security suits with a butler packing for us. We toured Lyon at Interpol headquarters. We got a fairy dusting with some special “K” mixed in from the sexy chick Randall and KIki who gave us private Hawaiin dances.

      It’s not a chip in your head. It’s hypnosis.

      Please tell the FBI the real story, the truth and nothing but the truth that you know.

      And ask them to help you with that chip.

      How is Chase Brandon? Why are there so many brands in all these names? Gillibrand? Brandon porter?

      Now tell me again, Shadow, the fairy tale about how evil Allison Mack and Kristin Kruek dreamnt all this up by themselves.

      • It’s Heidi’s and Frank’s business but there is some creepy stuff going on if people want Heidi’s personal email.

        “Why DID you ask Frank for my email address? ”

        How many former Expians are actually current members?

        • g. needs proof she didn’t have my email address, as IF, so that when these clowns are caught, if they haven’t been already, g. can pretend she never knew me.

          You know, I’ve been wondering why Lisa got that “Women in Film” award recently when she hasn’t really worked in film for decades. Except for that break-out hit “Bouncing Back” starring Kym, Lisa and a Holocaust survivor.

          What a sad thing to see a talent like Jeff’s being used to make star-vehicles for his former child star wife and her BFF’s on the board of the program named for her mom.

          Fine by me. Keep my story out of it and keep yours in the can where it belongs (and will stay for decades to come) and off the dangerous streets.

          The cops have better things to do than respond to an emergency call about a dirty diaper.

        • Let the record show I want NOTHING to do with Heidi. She’s the only one on the planet who I’ve invited and then disinvited on my radio show.

  • Why shouldn’t there be taxes on the poor? Half the people in the U.S. don’t pay income taxes already. India shouldn’t be leading anything, ever.

  • Whether you agree with Rand or not, Keith is not smart enough nor integral enough to follow any philosophy other than his own sociopathic ones. He may believe certain things that Rand believes when it suits him, but Keith is not productive nor an achiever of any sort – he is a con man. So saying he believes in Rand’s philosophy is faulty.

  • Most highways and railroads would not exist without eminent domain laws.

    Not to say Heidi’s land was not unjustly taken.

    • Yes, that’s right, Niceguy. Our Mother, executor of the estate years later, got ROYALLY screwed in the sales transaction. Some of our family still believes she was the one doing the schiesting not the attorney repping the sale for the buyers. Who woulda thunk one day one of those sheisters would be sitting at Keith Raniere’s defense table like the sex apostle Paul is right now.

      And guess who’s living on our Clifton Park family land these days in houses built by my Pippino cousins? Rosa Laura Junco, Clare Bronfman, Allison Mack, the whole lot of them. In our case, eminent domain included the Mexican PRI party portal and gravy train.

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